PHOTO: From left, J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Becky Mitchell, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission. Credit: Tom Yulsman/Water Desk, University of Colorado, Boulder
This article by Heather Sackett appeared on Aspen Journalism on December 15, 2023.
Representatives from two lower basin states on the Colorado River have said they would finally address something that the upper basin states, including Colorado, have long pressed them to do: Fix the supply/demand imbalance sometimes called the “structural deficit.”
Water uses in the lower basin — California, Arizona and Nevada — have in recent years exceeded the supply in the drought-strapped Colorado River. Water managers in the upper basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — have long pointed to the lower basin not living within the means of what the river provides as a driving force behind plummeting reservoir levels, leading the system to the verge of collapse in 2022.
Earlier this month, lower basin representatives agreed.
“There’s a mismatch there,” said J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California. “And so, where we’re at in the lower basin, is a recognition that we have to solve and own that supply/demand imbalance. It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be challenging. But it’s absolutely necessary.”
The remarks came during a panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas, the largest annual gathering of the basin’s water managers, policy experts, environmental advocates, state and federal officials, and tribal leaders.
The structural deficit can be thought of as the amount lost to evaporation and transit loss in the lower basin, estimated in 2022 by Nevada water officials to be about 1.5 million acre-feet per year, which currently remains unaccounted for in supply/demand balance sheets, plus the lower basin states’ 750,000 acre-foot obligation to Mexico. These amounts have historically been able to be satisfied by system storage. But as drought and climate change have robbed the river of flows, Lake Powell and Lake Mead have flirted with falling below critical thresholds, triggering federal action in 2021 and emergency calls for cuts in 2022.
The amount of the structural deficit is on top of the 7.5 million acre-feet the lower basin uses — its entire share under the Colorado River Compact. The upper basin has never used its whole allocation.
The exact number of acre-feet needed to cure the structural deficit is unclear, and officials say it still won’t be enough to solve shortages on the beleaguered river, which supplies water to farms, ranches, cities and industries throughout the Southwest.
“I think that number is not quite defined yet,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the state’s principal negotiator on Colorado River matters. “There’s a range that that number might be, and so we are going to own that. But I expect once we own that, there’s the need to further stabilize the river.”
Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission, said it was exciting that lower basin officials finally acknowledged that the structural deficit was their problem to solve. But the success or failure of any conservation plan will be borne out in the details.
“The proof is in the pudding of what that looks like,” Mitchell said. “Is it real, meaningful cuts? Are they permanent? When do they take place and how do we quantify that?”
Officials have their work cut out for them as a deadline for managing the river looms on the horizon. Representatives of the seven Colorado River basin states have begun negotiating new guidelines for reservoir operations to replace the current ones, which expire at the end of 2026.
Developed in response to drought conditions in the first years of the century, the current guidelines set shortage tiers based on reservoir levels and spell out which states in the lower basin take shortages and by how much their water deliveries will be cut in dry years. At this year’s CRWUA conference, several officials have publicly acknowledged the flaws and shortcomings of these 2007 guidelines and their desire to not repeat those mistakes.
One of the mistakes that officials are working to rectify is the historical exclusion of tribes from policy talks and decision-making. In its notice of intent regarding the post-2026 guidelines negotiations, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said it intends to develop an approach that facilitates and enhances tribal engagement and inclusivity.
At Wednesday’s meeting of the UCRC, which took place in Las Vegas as part of the CRWUA conference, representatives from the upper basin’s tribes — Jicarilla Apache Nation, Navajo Nation, Paiute Tribe of Utah, Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Uintah-Ouray Ute Indian Tribe and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — were invited to speak. Tribal leaders have been meeting with UCRC officials and working to codify their inclusion in the post-2026 guidelines negotiations and other future decision-making processes.
Many tribes, especially those in the lower basin, have unquantified water rights on paper that have never been used, although some tribes say they still intend to develop their water. But in an already shortage-prone system, any new water project that takes more from the Colorado River could be problematic. Tribes’ unused water has been propping up the system for years, and when finally put to beneficial use, it could exacerbate shortages for other water users. Continuing to exclude tribes from decision-making is no longer tenable, upper basin officials say.
On Wednesday, Lorelei Cloud, tribal council vice chair for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and a representative on the Colorado Water Conservation Board, hinted at a forthcoming memorandum of understanding.
“We want to work toward creating an MOU or some type of mechanism that is going to formalize this process so that these relationships and these conversations continue,” Cloud said. “It’s something that I think tribes have been wanting for quite a long time, to be at that level.”
A big snowpack during the winter of 2022-23 provided water managers some breathing room after three consecutive dismal years. Lake Powell saw about 12 million acre-feet of inflow for water year 2023, the third-best year in the past two decades.
But even though some urgency has been lifted, tensions still ran high among the seven basin state negotiators Thursday. The legacy of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which divided the waters equally between the upper basin and lower basin, has often put the two regions at odds.
Mitchell spoke passionately about the need for pain to be shared among the basin’s water users. Others reaffirmed their commitments to compromise. Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager John Entsminger said there is no silver bullet, only silver buckshot.
“Expunge ‘can’t’ from your vocabularies,” he told the crowd. “The savings we need are all around us. They’re small. They’re incremental, but they’re there. … I’m asking every water user to look at every water use and figure out how incrementally we all contribute our little BB of silver buckshot to the solution.”