Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is stepping into the seven-state brawl over the Colorado River on Friday — a high-stakes battle over water supplies that poses significant political danger in Western swing states for the Trump administration.
According to an invitation obtained by POLITICO, Burgum will convene most of the region’s governors and their lead water negotiators in his office Friday afternoon for a two-hour meeting aimed at securing a deal to divide up the flows from the river, which have shrunk dramatically as climate change inflicts deeper droughts across the region.
It’s the Trump administration’s first big foray into the battle over a waterway that supports 40 million people from Wyoming to the U.S.-Mexico border, along with 5.5 million acres of farmland, American Indian tribes and the high-tech industry that has blossomed around Phoenix.
The states remain bitterly deadlocked ahead of the Trump administration’s Feb. 14 deadline to reach a new water-sharing agreement to govern the dwindling river. The crux of the fight is over whether the downstream states of Arizona, California and Nevada must sharply curtail the water they are currently using for farms, subdivisions and data centers in order to ensure that upstream states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — can grow using supplies that were promised a century ago, but have been diminished by climate change.
