Despite a wet winter, California and other western states will still need to cut back how much water they draw from the Colorado River. The question federal and state officials are weighing is: How much will they each need to cut?
The federal government has laid out its ideas for water cuts in the Colorado River Basin, which means time is running out for basin states to agree on a plan of their own.
In Colorado, water officials say the onus is on California and Arizona to make it work.
The federal government laid out a pair of options Tuesday to drastically cut water use along the Colorado River and keep Lake Mead and Lake Powell from crashing any further in the coming years.
One of the proposals would impose hefty cuts following a strict priority system, which would protect the California agricultural sector’s water rights while placing the heaviest burden on cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix, while the other proposal would share those reductions more proportionally across Nevada, Arizona and California.
Southern California and the state as a whole could see dramatic reductions in allocations of Colorado River water under proposals released Tuesday by the federal government aimed at protecting a system that provides water to 40 million people in multiple states along with critical agricultural irrigation.
The river also provides hydroelectric power to millions of customers, generated by dams at Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
The Biden administration released an environmental analysis Tuesday that outlined two ways that seven Western states and tribes reliant on the overtapped Colorado River could cut their use, but declined to publicly take a side on the best option.
One option would be more beneficial to California and some tribes along the river that have high-priority rights to the river’s water.
An already wet winter in the mountains that feed the Colorado River got even better in March, providing a significant boost to the amount of water that forecasters expect to flow downstream into Lake Powell this summer.
The latest prediction from the National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center shows that the river will swell to 177 percent of its average volume during the all-important April-through-July period as the snow melts and flows into the river and its tributaries.
Taps ran dry in Rio Verde on New Year’s Day.
Water had to be trucked in for household use in the affluent suburb outside Scottsdale, Arizona. The approximately 1,000 residents of the large, suburban stucco homes of Rio Verde were forced to take shorter showers and eat from paper plates.
A Native American tribe in Arizona reached a deal Thursday with the U.S. government not to use some of its Colorado River water rights in return for $150 million and funding for a pipeline project.
The $233 million pact with the Gila River Indian Community, announced in Phoenix, was hailed as an example of the kind of cooperation needed to rescue a river crucial to a massive agricultural industry and essential to more than 40 million people in seven Western U.S. states and Mexico. Officials termed it “compensated conservation.”
Despite recent water levels exceeding expectations, Lake Mead is forecast to drop back down to a record low level by the end of the month.
As of Monday, Lake Mead’s water level was at 1,045.91 feet above sea level, almost 3 feet above the level of 1,043.06 feet predicted in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s “Most Probable 24-Month Study,” released at the start of March.
The healthy snowpack whitening Colorado’s mountain peaks has given water officials some breathing room to manage the Colorado River Basin’s ongoing drought. The challenge will be not to squander it.
As winter storms wind down, water managers and policymakers are mulling over decisions about how to release and retain water in shrunken reservoirs across the basin, which supports 40 million people across the West.
