Relief, fatigue after Colorado River deal
When a deal to protect the Colorado River’s water supply finally came together after a year of contentious negotiations and a marathon weekend of last-minute haggling by phone and video calls that ran well past midnight, whatever sense of achievement the participants felt seemed outweighed by relief and fatigue.
Even as they reached this landmark moment — an agreement among Arizona, California and Nevada to conserve more than 10% of their river supply over the next three years in exchange for $1.2 billion in federal funds — there was little clean or definitive about the resolution.
Within hours, Arizona’s negotiator stressed at a news conference the deal was simply “an agreement to submit a proposal.” The four northern states, including New Mexico, signed off on further study of the plan but would concede little else. The negotiations wrapped up with a call to start another multiyear round of talks.
It was a fitting ending for a year of fear and frustration along the Colorado River.
Faced with a slow-moving environmental crisis with grave implications for the West, the Biden administration and the seven states that rely on the river’s water stumbled through a process that officials on all sides described, at times, as dysfunctional.
The result is a stopgap until more durable rules can be negotiated. The temporary solution does not fully reckon with the chilling trends now apparent as the warming climate puts water supplies at ever greater risk.
The problems with the negotiations arose partly from the size of the task. The amount of water the administration was asking states to cut from their farms and cities had never been tried. It meant immediate economic pain across the Southwest: farms out of production, thousands of jobs lost, higher vegetable prices and water bills. And the consequences of failure were even worse: dried up reservoirs that abruptly interrupted the water supply to tens of millions of people.
Power struggles among officials also complicated the work. The state negotiators — who tend to be veteran water bureaucrats steeped in the complex technical jargon of reservoir operations and water rights — felt frustrated with mixed messages coming from the Interior Department, which led to an internal shake-up at the department.
Leadership at the Interior Department struggled against the clubby and insular culture among state water authorities who have hashed out deals on how the Colorado River should be shared for more than a century. Those deals have often come at the expense of Native Americans and Mexico. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold the position, wanted a more inclusive process that heard from the 30 tribes in the Colorado River basin.
In the end, a record-breaking deluge of snow and rain this
winter, and a mountain of federal dollars, opened a path to consensus and avoided, at least for now, a battle in the courts.
“This last year has been one heck of an experience. Now we get to do it all over again,” JB Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, said in an interview. “We can’t afford to screw this up.”
As President Joe Biden took office, the Colorado River’s predicament looked impossible to ignore. A drought that started in 2000 marked the driest period in more than a century, shrinking the river’s natural flow by 20%. Climate change was making the region hotter and drier. Snow was melting earlier in the year and less runoff was reaching Lake Mead and Lake Powell. These lakes had fallen to about one-quarter full and were approaching levels where hydroelectric dams could fail and water might not flow to millions.
“There’s so much to this that is unprecedented,” Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, told the Senate in June.
Her demands would be, too. In her testimony to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Touton laid out the need to conserve 2 million to 4 million additional acre feet of water — up to one-third of the river’s average annual flow.