A top Colorado state negotiator said Monday that the Bureau of Reclamation must consider sending less Colorado River water to California, Arizona and Nevada if regulators want to avoid “running so close to the brink of crisis all the time.”
The Interior Department and Reclamation are leading negotiations among the seven states that share the drought-stricken waterway, trying to come up with a new long-term operating plan.
The states face a November deadline to meet an agreement, but for nearly two years have been at odds over how to divide cuts to the amount of water flowing to the Upper Basin — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — and the Lower Basin of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Although negotiators from multiple states revealed last month that talks are coalescing around a proposal known as “natural flow” — sharing the river based on calculations of the supply of water in the river, based on an average of the three most recent years — questions remain over how much the Upper and Lower Basin could actually use, and how much would remain in storage in reservoirs and to provide hydropower.
