Western states are brawling over the future of the Colorado River — with President Donald Trump looming in the background.
Talks kicking off Tuesday in Las Vegas will help determine whether the Trump administration has to step in and take the political heat of deciding how to divide the shrinking river’s water supplies among powerful industries and more than 40 million people — a fight that includes the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, politically influential farmers and ranchers, and burgeoning semiconductor and artificial intelligence companies.
It’s the highest-stakes water fight the U.S. has seen in more than a century. So far, there’s little hope for a breakthrough.
Instead, local tensions and parochial fault lines have driven leaders of the seven states that share the river’s water — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming upstream, and California, Nevada and Arizona further down — to demonize each other rather than make politically perilous compromises.
