Absent a crucial but elusive consensus among the seven Colorado River states, federal authorities are forging ahead with their own ideas on how to divvy up painful water cuts as climate change diminishes flows in the critical river.
The Bureau of Reclamation last week made public a 1,600-page behemoth of a document outlining five potential plans for managing the river after current regulations expire at the end of this year. The agency did not identify which proposal it favors, in hopes that the seven states in the river basin will soon come to a consensus that incorporates parts of the five plans.
But time is running out.
The states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, California, Arizona and Nevada — already blew past a Nov. 11 deadline set by federal authorities to announce the concepts of such a plan. They now have until Feb. 14 to present a detailed proposal for the future of the river that makes modern life possible for 40 million people across the Southwest.
They were set to meet this week in Salt Lake City to continue negotiations. Federal authorities must finalize a plan by Oct. 1.
“The Department of the Interior is moving forward with this process to ensure environmental compliance is in place so operations can continue without interruption when the current guidelines expire,” Andrea Travnicek, the assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior, said in a news release announcing the document. “The river and the 40 million people who depend on it cannot wait. In the face of an ongoing severe drought, inaction is not an option.”
A 45-day public comment period opens Friday on the proposed plans for managing the river system, contained in a document called a draft environmental impact statement.
The current operating guidelines expire at the end of 2026, but authorities need a replacement plan in place prior to the Oct. 1 start to the 2027 water year. The water year follows the water cycle, beginning as winter snowpack starts to accumulate and ending Sept. 30, as irrigation seasons end and water supplies typically reach their lowest levels.
What the final plan looks like will depend on whether the seven basin states can create a consensus plan on how to manage the river that is integral to farming, industry and daily life in their realms.
A spokeswoman for Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, declined an interview request and instead directed questions to federal officials.
“Colorado is committed to protecting our state’s significant rights and interests in the Colorado River and continues to work towards a consensus-based, supply-driven solution for the Post-2026 operations of Lake Powell and Mead,” Mitchell said Tuesday in a statement.
Record-low snowpack in the Colorado River headwaters in central and northern Colorado suggests nature is unlikely to give negotiators breathing room.
As of Jan. 7, the snowpack that feeds Lake Powell downstream in Utah and Arizona was 55% of the median recorded in the last 30 years and the lowest on record, according to the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
Already, Lake Mead — on the Arizona-Nevada border — and Lake Powell are only 33% and 26% full, respectively. Projections from the Bureau of Reclamation show that, in a worst-case scenario, Powell’s waters could fall below the level required to run the dam’s power turbines by October and remain below the minimum power pool until June 2027.
Experts monitoring the yearslong effort to draft new operating guidelines said any plan implemented by Reclamation must consider the reality of a river with far less water than assumed when the original river management agreements were signed more than a century ago.
“Taking a 30,000-foot look, this document underscores that doing nothing or doing the bare minimum really poses a lot of problems for our infrastructure, our ecosystems and our communities along the Colorado River system,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Nevada-based Great Basin Water Network.
Five proposals by the feds
The draft environmental impact statement presents five plans to manage the river and its reservoirs beginning Oct. 1.
The plans — called alternatives — differ in how much water would be released from the river’s reservoirs to the Lower Basin, the methods used to determine that amount, and how cuts to the water supply would be distributed among the Lower Basin states: Arizona, Nevada and California.
While some of the proposals would use reservoir levels at Lakes Powell and Mead to determine how much water flowed downstream, one plan — dubbed the Supply Driven Alternative — instead would use a three-year average of river flows to determine how much water should be released.
The concept is similar to one discussed earlier by the basin state negotiators as a potential way to manage the river in a time of climate change: by matching releases to the amount of water flowing into the reservoirs.
The Colorado River near Dotsero, Colorado, on Sept. 30, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
Several of the alternatives also call for cuts in the Upper Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — though those cuts would be much smaller than the ones required from the Lower Basin. While cuts to the Lower Basin could amount to 4 million acre-feet of water, those required of the Upper Basin would instead be limited to 350,000 acre-feet.
An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover an acre in a foot of water and is generally considered enough to provide for two to four families’ annual water use.
Upper Basin negotiators have fiercely rejected calls for mandatory water cuts in their states — an issue that has remained a major sticking point in negotiations. Without large reservoirs like Lakes Powell and Mead to float them through dry years, the Upper Basin states’ annual water supply is limited by the amount of water trickling into the river system. Water users take cuts every year, negotiators have said, and the basin as a whole has never used its entire legal allotment.
The proposed Upper Basin cuts outlined in the draft document drew criticism from the Colorado River District, an agency created by the Colorado legislature that’s based in Glenwood Springs and advocates for Western Slope water needs.
“We do not see how that is a realistic alternative given the natural availability of water in the Upper Basin, especially in dry years,” the district said Wednesday in a statement.
Climate change threats
Colorado River District leaders also expressed concern that the proposed plans do not adequately consider science that shows the river’s flows could shrink to an average of 9 million to 10 million acre-feet per year. The five-year average flows at Lees Ferry, Arizona — the division between the Upper and Lower basins — were 11.1 million acre-feet in 2025, according to federal authorities.
“The Colorado River Basin has a history of ignoring likely hydrology, our policymakers should not carry this mistake forward in the next set of guidelines,” the statement reads.
The Bureau of Reclamation document considers flows of less than 10 million acre-feet, but those flows are deemed “critically dry” scenarios. The average flow scenarios modeled in the draft environmental impact statement assume flows between 12 million and 14 million acre-feet.
The difference in outcomes between critically dry and average scenarios are major.
Modeling from the Bureau of Reclamation shows that in average flow years, both Lakes Mead and Powell will have enough water to generate hydropower in nearly every year under four of the five plans. But in critically dry years, the likelihood that both reservoirs will remain above those levels plummets significantly under the proposed plans.
This winter’s low snowpack highlights the need for decision-makers to prioritize environmental needs in future plans for the river system, said Sinjin Eberle, the senior director of regional communications for American Rivers, a national river conservation organization. Beyond water for cities, farms and industry, the river provides ecosystems for thousands of species — some endangered — and fuels a recreation economy worth millions of dollars.
The "bathtub ring" around Lake Mead is seen near the Nevada intake tower at the Hoover Dam near Boulder City, Nevada, on June 25, 2024. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
He was pleased that Reclamation officials incorporated many of the concepts proposed by a coalition of environmental groups and tribes into its recent document.
“If we forget about the health of the river, ultimately everything else will suffer,” Eberle said.
Combined, the alternatives present a good menu of tools and strategies for managing the river in the future, said John Berggren, the regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates. But many of those tools will require states’ approval before they can be implemented.
Without agreement, Reclamation is more limited in how it can manage the reservoirs.
“I don’t think anything in here was new to them, so this doesn’t necessarily change the calculus of their negotiations,” Berggren said of the state negotiators. “This highlights the need for the states to reach an agreement ASAP.”
The new plan is expected to last for 20 years, though federal authorities in the draft environmental impact statement indicated that they would be open to a stopgap agreement while the basin states continue to hammer out a deal.
While the document considers new tools and concepts for managing the river’s reservoirs, it does not represent the grand, sweeping overhaul of management principles that some have called for to meet the challenge of climate change, Roerink said.
He understands why — a major change would introduce more unpredictability into an already precarious situation.
“There’s one word that comes up time and again in the appendices of this document,” Roerink said. “And that’s ‘uncertainty.’ ”
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