The West’s most powerful Republicans are preparing to leverage their influence with the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill as the fight over the Colorado River nears an inflection point.
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee (R-Utah) is expected to host a strategy session in his office Tuesday morning with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and the two states’ Senate delegations, according to a person close to the Utah negotiators who was granted anonymity to share nonpublic details of the plans. A spokesperson for Gordon confirmed he plans to attend.
The convening comes as President Donald Trump’s Interior Department is preparing to assert control over the drought-stricken waterway that supplies 40 million people from the mountains of Wyoming to the desert landscape around Los Angeles.
Interior officials have said they will issue a final plan this summer for unilaterally doling out water delivery cuts among the seven Western states that share it. They are currently considering a proposal from the downstream states of Arizona, California and Nevada that could provide a framework for those cuts for the first two years. That plan, however, has drawn sharp criticisms from the upstream states of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.
“The purpose of the meeting really is to determine which political levers should be pulled, whether we should be targeting congressional action or appealing to the administration,” the person said.
While Utah and Wyoming are aligned with Colorado and New Mexico in the water fight, Tuesday’s meeting will be confined to the former two for political reasons, the person said. Trump has publicly feuded with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and all of Colorado and New Mexico’s senators are Democrats.
“The two states feel like they have the members of the Senate that are most in the position to be influential on this,” the person said.
Federal funding stands to be one of the central levers under consideration. The proposal from downstream states is premised on substantial federal funding to pay farmers, cities and tribes to conserve water they are otherwise entitled to.
Republican leaders plan to push for withholding funding from any state that launches a court fight over the river. It’s a not-so-subtle play against Arizona, which is first in line for cuts to its supplies under a 1968 law and where political leaders have been publicly preparing for potential litigation.
“The federal government should not provide water-related funding to any state that is actively suing a sister state over the Colorado River,” Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, plans to tell Lee’s committee during a Wednesday hearing on the river, according to prepared testimony.
“Every dollar spent in a courtroom is a dollar that does not go toward adding water to the system. Every hour a water manager spends in discovery is an hour they are not at the table solving the actual problem.”
Utah and Wyoming also share a more parochial interest in one of the bigger reservoirs along the Colorado River: Flaming Gorge.
It sits upstream from Lake Powell, where water levels are plunging fast toward a crisis point of hydropower production needing to be cut off and water deliveries downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada threatened. But the lake is also a popular fishing and vacation spot along the Utah and Wyoming border.
With the Colorado River facing the lowest flows on record this year, the Trump administration in April began emergency operations to bolster Lake Powell, including by releasing a third of the supplies from Flaming Gorge.
That has had a devastating impact on marinas, restaurants and other local businesses that rely on the recreational economy.
“Utah and Wyoming have a unique concern of making sure Flaming Gorge is not irreparably harmed and the communities that rely on it are not irreparably harmed in this process,” the person said.
