Several of Colorado’s water experts on Thursday noted that the federal government’s plan for tackling dwindling Colorado River reservoirs is “light” on the next steps but that the river’s condition also offers opportunities to boost resiliency among Western states.

“It’s a dismaying time, but one full of opportunity,” said attorney James Eklund of Sherman & Howard, formerly the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission.  

The federal government relied on the states to come up with a plan, a strategy that didn’t work, he said, but he quickly added that the Inflation Reduction Act signed earlier this week by President Joe Biden includes $4 billion to combat drought in the West. 

Eklund took part in a panel on “The Future of Colorado Water: Scarcity and Opportunity” hosted by Colorado Politics and The Denver Gazette. The other panelists were Troy Eid, an attorney with Greenberg Traurig and one of the West’s leading expert on tribal laws, including water; Jennifer Gimbel, a Terry J. Stevinson Fellow with the Common Sense Institute and formerly Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water & Science at the Department of the Interior; Jennifer Pitt, director of the Colorado River Program at the National Audubon Society; and, Don Brown, former commissioner of agriculture for Colorado. 

It was Eklund who pointed out that Tuesday’s announcement by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was “light” on steps to boost water levels at Powell and Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs.  

Currently, Lake Mead, the reservoir serving Arizona, Nevada, southern California and two Mexican states, sits at its lowest level since it was first filled back in the 1930s. That low level jeopardizes hydroelectric power production at Hoover Dam, which provides power to about 1.3 million people in the lower basin states. 

Lake Powell faces a similar situation – it’s about a quarter full, and that jeopardizes hydroelectric power production at the Glen Canyon Dam, which is currently operating at about 60% of capacity. That dam provides power to Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Nebraska through the Western Area Power Administration. 

Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton announced further reductions in water deliveries to Arizona, Nevada and Mexico, reductions agreed up in 2007 and again in 2019. The reductions over two years now total 721,000 acre-feet of water. In June, Touton called for the seven states to come up with plan to conserve 2 to 4 million acre-feet of water, more than a third of the total water the Colorado River sends to the seven states each year. 

The seven states failed to come up with an agreement. In a July letter, the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico said they faced limited options for further conservation, and while they presented a five-point plan for future conservation, they did not indicate how much water that plan would produce. 

The lower basin states of Arizona and Nevada came up with a plan to save 2 million acre-feet of water in their region, but California and U.S. officials rejected it, preferring more to rely on voluntary cuts, Arizona officials said. 

On Tuesday, Touton gave the states more time to negotiate but without setting a deadline for those talks.

“There’s gonna be pain, but there’s also an opportunity here to protect the environment, to protect irrigated agriculture and food production and food security, and the water for our cities,” Eklund said at the water panel. “We can do it, but we’ve got to get active.”

The federal government certainly saw it coming, Gimbel said, referring to the states’ failure to submit a water reduction plan. 

This river works on collaboration, and federal officials really hoped the states would offer a plan, she said.

That will take time, she said, surmising that the federal government deliberately avoided to impose more drastic measures that could lead to lawsuits – something Gimbel said there is neither time nor money for. 

Gimbel noted one important change that is in the works: the lower basin states are talking about accounting for evaporation as part of their allocations.

Why that matters is the upper basin states have accounted for evaporation losses in the reservoirs for years, which is about 10% of their allocation, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. 

Gimbel said not accounting for evaporation meant estimates for Lake Mead were higher than they should have been, and that led to Mead “crashing” sooner than expected.

The water’s not there, added Pitt, the Colorado River expert from Audubon.

Either the states will come up with a plan, the federal government will do it – or Mead and Powell will drop to zero, she said. 

The tribes have not historically been part of the equation, according to Eid. The 1922 compact dictated that tribes would get their water from state allocations – but as stakeholders, not as separate governments. They were completely excluded, Eid said.

He lamented that unfulfilled responsibilities exist in providing water to tribes that Eid described as almost “criminal.”

A third of the Navajo people don’t have running water, he said, noting an unfinished pipeline project from the San Juan River to Gallup that was authorized by Congress in 1970. 

“We need a Colorado River compact that actually recognizes tribes as governments, not just as colonies of the federal government,” he said. 

Gimbel noted she and Eric Kuhn, a well-respected water expert and former head of the Colorado River Conservation District, are assembling recommendations on statewide policies that could help Colorado face the future.

“We have enough water,” she said. “Failure’s not an option, but we have to be smart and we have to be innovative.”

More and more, the conversation is turning to ag as the solution, which makes folks in the ag industry nervous.

Ag is an easy target, Brown said, but solutions, such as alternative transfer methods, are viewed with mistrust by many in the ag community. 

With ag consuming 80% to 90% of the water, there are ways to contribute, Eklund said.

Options include taking land out of production temporarily, switching crops to those that use less water or deficit irrigation, which applies less water than would be fully used by a crop. That will require more financial incentives than have been available, Eklund said.

Farmers and ranchers need to be incentivized to use less water, he said. 

The state also needs to go back to its review of demand management, which includes some of those solutions put on hold by the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Water users should find that unacceptable, Eklund said.

“You should request and require your elected and unelected officials to get to the business of solutions,” he said.  

Deficit irrigation is a good concept, but it means reduced crop for a farmer, and, as a result, reduced income, Brown said. That’s the difference between profit and operating in the red, he said.

Switching crops works but not everywhere, and fallowing ground “conceptually” works so long as the farmer is compensated for it, he said. But problems also arise from fallowed fields, such as weeds, which then require more treatment.

“There’s all sorts of nuances that are affected here that cost the farmer and rancher money,” he said. “We here in Colorado have to figure out how are we going to … make up that gap in income so that agriculture can continue to survive here.”