With state negotiators in the Colorado River Basin still at odds ahead of a key deadline, the Trump administration could soon be tasked with deciding where to cut water use across the West and appears to be weighing options like draining reservoirs or curbing senior water rights.
Less than two weeks before a mid-November deadline for negotiators to reach consensus on a plan for managing the drought-ravaged Colorado River, the seven states that share the waterway — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in the Upper Basin and Arizona, California and Nevada in the Lower Basin — have yet to coalesce around a strategy.
Despite nearly two years of talks, state officials have remained divided even as flows in the 1,450-mile-long river continue to shrink from decades of persistent drought. The water in the river has decreased by as much as 20 percent in recent decades, forcing emergency actions by states to conserve or forgo water they would normally rely on.
Without a deal, the Interior Department and its Bureau of Reclamation have threatened to step in to wield federal authority — a largely untested power — and potentially tap reservoirs in the Upper Basin and reduce flows to the Lower Basin. It’s a move that would all but guarantee new legal battles over the river’s future use. More fundamentally, it would also put the Trump administration in the position to shape the future of one of the nation’s most important waterways, which serves 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of irrigated farmland.
