The Trump administration ordered California, Arizona and Nevada to cut back their use of water from the drought-stricken Colorado River over the next two years, setting the stage for a behemoth legal fight.
The Interior Department’s decision, issued on Friday in a series of documents detailing a two-year and a 10-year plan, breaks a negotiating logjam between the seven Western states that rely on the river by imposing a short-term operating plan while leaving the larger fight for later. It comes as the critical waterway, which provides water for 40 million people, has shrunk dramatically. The nation’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, have dropped to their lowest levels since they were created.
“These decisions provide a water management strategy for Basin stakeholders to respond to the prolonged drought by incorporating flexible tools and voluntary actions while leaving room for consensus agreements,” Andrea Travnicek, the Bureau of Reclamation’s assistant secretary for water and science, said in a statement Friday.
The plan spares the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming from having to cut back their water use. Instead, it largely adopts a proposal from the Lower Basin states to jointly lower their use by 1.25 million acre-feet in each of the next two years.
