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Mexico says it’s finally going to hire a company to build a plant that turns the ocean into freshwater in Rosarito, reviving an idea shelved years ago amid protests that the government was privatizing water.

And, in the name of reducing how much water Mexico takes from the Colorado River, the United States is going to help get the water to the cities that need it. Construction could start as soon as Aug. 1, according to a federal Mexican project website, but the government had not yet selected a builder.

Matt Barrett has seen Lake Powell drop nearly every year since 2013 or so, when he started making annual treks to the reservoir on the Utah-Arizona border. Some very snowy winters helped it rebound quickly, but this year was far from that.

“We need another one of those fast,” he said recently. “A few of those fast.”

The operating agreements that govern Colorado River allocations expire at the end of this year, and negotiations between the seven states that share the water are stalled. With the federal government poised to step in and impose an agreement it formulates, the states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the upper basin, and Arizona, California, and Nevada in the lower basin — have asked for more time.

Whether or not the ongoing drought on the Colorado watershed will pass, or is a permanent feature of climate change, the problem is real and acute. During the 20th century, the Colorado River delivered to its lower basin states an average flow of 14.6 million acre feet per year. At the dawn of the 21st century, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, two of the largest reservoirs in the world, were close to full, together storing over 50 million acre feet.

Workforce concerns have ranked in the American Water Works Association (AWWA)’s top ten sector challenges for years. But in 2026, the question has shifted from how to replace retiring workers to something harder: how to stop institutional knowledge from disappearing with them.

When AWWA published its 2026 State of the Water Industry report in March, workforce emerged once again as one of the most pressing concerns facing utilities across the United States. With 21% of employees eligible to retire within five years and vacancy rates averaging 9%, the scale of the challenge is hard to ignore. We sat down with AWWA CEO David LaFrance to dig deeper into what the data is really telling us, and what the sector needs to do to prepare.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s two largest reservoirs, have fallen to their lowest combined levels on record, a grim marker in the deepening water crisis across seven states that depend on the Colorado River.

The two reservoirs are now lower than the previous record in 2023, researchers say.