The Colorado River, which provides water across the Southwest, has lost about 20% of its flow in the last quarter-century, and its depleted reservoirs continue to decline. But negotiations aimed at addressing the water shortage are at an impasse, and leaders of environmental groups say the secrecy surrounding the talks is depriving the public of an opportunity to weigh in.
Representatives of the seven states that depend on the river have been meeting regularly over the last two years trying to hash out a plan to address critical shortages after 2026, when the current rules expire. They meet in-person at offices and hotels in different states, never divulging the locations.
The talks have been mired in persistent disagreement over who should have to cut back on water and by how much.
“We need more transparency, and we need more accountability,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network. “I think if we had more of those things, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we are currently in.”
Roerink and leaders of five other environmental groups criticized the lack of information about the stalled negotiations, as well as the Trump administration’s handling of the situation during a news conference Wednesday as they released a report with recommendations for solving the river’s problems.
Roerink said there is “a failure of leadership” among state and federal officials, and “everybody else is being left in the dark.”
Disagreements over how mandatory water cuts should be allotted have created a rift between two camps: the three downstream or lower basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — and the four states in the river’s upper basin — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. State officials have talked publicly about the spat, but much of the debate is happening out of the public eye.
“This process is a backroom negotiation,” said Zachary Frankel, executive director of the Utah Rivers Council. “We need to shift the governance of the Colorado River Basin … back into the halls of democracy so that people can get engaged.”
Frankel said the limited details that have filtered out of the negotiators’ “secret backrooms” indicate officials are still debating water cuts far smaller than what’s really needed to deal with the current shortage.
He said the Southwest could face “serious water crashes” soon if the region’s officials don’t act faster to take less from the river.
The Colorado River provides water for cities from Denver to Los Angeles, 30 Native tribes and farming communities from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico.
It has long been overused, and its reservoirs have declined dramatically amid unrelenting dry conditions since 2000. Research has shown that the warming climate, driven largely by the use of fossil fuels, has intensified the long stretch of mostly dry years.
Near Las Vegas, Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is now just 32% full.
Upstream from the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir, is at 29% of capacity.
“We’re using a third too much water. There’s no accountability for the fact that the reservoirs are disappearing,” Frankel said. “And we’re not even looking at what the drop in future flows is going to be from climate change.”
California uses more Colorado River water than any other state, and has been reducing water use under a three-year agreement adopted in 2023. As part of the water-saving efforts, Imperial Valley farmers are temporarily leaving some fields dry in exchange for cash payments.
A large portion of the water is used for agriculture, with much of it going to grow hay for cattle, as well as other crops including cotton, lettuce and broccoli.
The main sticking point in the negotiations is how much and when the upper basin states are willing to share in the cuts, said J.B. Hamby, California’s Colorado River commissioner.
“The river is getting smaller. We need to figure out how to live with less, and the upper basin absolutely must be part of that,” Hamby said in an interview. “We are running out of time.”
The new rules for dealing with shortages must be adopted before the end of 2026, and federal officials have given the states “several milestones” in developing a consensus in the coming months, Hamby said.
“The clock is ticking,” he said. “And we’re still essentially at square one.”
Federal officials have not said what they will do if the states fail to reach consensus. The impasse has raised the possibility that the states could sue each other, a path riddled with uncertainty that water managers in both camps have said they hope to avoid.
Hamby said he believes solutions lie in a compromise between the upper and lower states, but that will require all of them to stop clinging to “their most aggressive and rigid dreamland legal positions.”
Experts have called for urgent measures to prevent reservoirs from dropping to critically low levels.
In a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications, scientists found that if current policies remain unchanged, in the coming decades, both Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be at risk of reaching “dead pool” levels — water so low it doesn’t reach the intakes and no longer gets through the dams, meaning it doesn’t flow downstream to Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico. The researchers said a more “sustainable policy” will require larger water cutbacks throughout the region.
Federal officials have said they recognize the need to move quickly in coming up with solutions. In August, Scott Cameron, the Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, said “the urgency for the seven Colorado River Basin states to reach a consensus agreement has never been clearer. We cannot afford to delay.”
But the coalition of environmental groups raised concerns that federal and state officials are flouting the normal procedures required when making new water rules.
The environmental review began under the Biden administration, which announced several options for long-term river management.
Roerink and other advocates noted the last time the public received any information about that process was in January, as Biden was leaving office. They said the Interior Department was expected to have released an initial draft plan by now, but that has not happened.
“The Trump administration is absolutely missing an opportunity here to get everybody at the table and to get something meaningful done under the time frame that they are obliged to get it done,” Roerink said. “The fact that we’ve heard nothing from the Trump administration is troubling.”
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