The Colorado River District — also known as the Colorado River Water Conservation District — sent a letter to Scott J. Cameron, Acting Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), on February 27, stating the District’s position on BOR’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) regarding post-2026 operational guidelines and strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
These two large reservoirs collect water from the Colorado River and its tributaries — including the San Juan River — and release the water to downstream users, generating hydroelectricity in the process. The upstream sources for these two reservoirs are in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah. The downstream users are California, Arizona and Nevada.
The letter to Acting Commissioner Cameron can be downloaded here.
On March 2, the Colorado River District posted a press release about their response to the DEIS, as follows:
Last week, the Colorado River District submitted comments and specific recommendations to the Bureau of Reclamation on the recently released Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). In its comments, the River District calls for future operational decisions that reflect hydrologic realities, address Lower Basin overuse, and move the Colorado River System beyond constant crisis management.
“A core part of our mission is safeguarding, for all Coloradans, the waters of the Colorado River to which our state is entitled under the various laws, agreements and compacts that govern the river,” said Raquel Flinker, Director of Interstate and Regional Water Resources at the Colorado River District. “Our water users have adapted to the reality of variable hydrology. We are living with a river that has 20% less water and this trend is expected to continue. It is past time that our neighbors in the Lower Basin learn how to live within the means provided by the river.”
“What is very clear in these proposals is that we still have a basic math problem,” said Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller. “Every year, around 1.5 million acre feet of Colorado River water disappears due to evaporation and transit loss in the Lower Basin, yet this amount is unaccounted for in the Bureau’s water deliveries. If we want to move out of crisis response mode, every proposal must begin by reducing consumptive use in the Lower Basin by this amount every single year before discussing shortages. If we had fixed the math to align with the laws of nature twenty-five years ago, we would have almost 30-million-acre feet of storage still available in the system today.”
The River District’s letter includes 13 specific recommendations organized around several key themes. First, it calls for post-2026 operations that align demand with available supply and put hydrologic reality, not predictability for the Lower Basin, at the center of decision-making. The River District urges Reclamation to evaluate alternatives that perform under critically dry hydrology, provide a fair, transparent analysis of actions and impacts, and clearly disclose Upper Basin shortage risks in the main body of the analysis.
The letter also stresses that Lower Basin use must be reduced by roughly 1.5 million acre-feet at all times, defined as system losses rather than “shortage,” and that Upper Basin conservation assumptions and scale must be re-evaluated. In addition, the River District calls for clear, durable guidelines and definitions, including fully defining and analyzing “gap water” and “additional Upper Basin actions,” and for CRSP initial unit water to remain in Lake Powell. Finally, it raises Law of the River concerns, including that inter-basin transactions must not be allowed.
The River District’s full comment letter is available here.
Reclamation formally published the DEIS on January 16, 2026, opening a 45-day public comment period. The Bureau of Reclamation must consider public feedback when developing a preferred alternative for management of the system, and the basin states will continue their negotiations alongside this process with the hope of reaching a seven-state consensus.
The current guidelines expire at the end of September 2026.