Colorado River cities and farms face dire trade-offs – Williams Environmental Justice Clinic

The Biden administration on Tuesday moved closer to imposing unprecedented cuts in how much water Arizona, California and Nevada could pull from the Colorado River, while raising the possibility that these reductions could be distributed in ways that contradict long-standing water rights that favor powerful farming regions.

In releasing a new environmental review of how to operate the Colorado River’s major reservoirs, the Interior Department detailed the painful dilemma facing the American West after a two-decade drought and chronic overuse.

Interior officials also defended Secretary Deb Haaland’s right to make cuts in a proportional way in times of emergency even if that goes against water rights held by farming communities from more than a century ago.

Over the past year, the seven states of the Colorado River basin have been unable to reach an agreement among themselves to make major cuts to protect the reservoirs. The federal government expects to make a decision on how reductions could be distributed by August.

Amid the tables of numbers and technical jargon in the draft environmental review, the three options the Interior Department proposes for consideration expose the stark decision in the coming months. One option would strictly follow water rights and give priority to farming regions in California, such as the Imperial Valley, that stock supermarkets across the country with winter vegetables — while letting a large part of the water supply of Phoenix and Los Angeles “get taken virtually to zero,” as Interior Department Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau put it in an interview.

Another option would distribute up to 2 million acre-feet of cuts in water usage — more than 15 percent of the river’s average flow over the past two decades — in the same percentage across all users in Arizona, California and Nevada. That would be different from how cuts have been distributed in the past.

Both federal and state officials have warned that the third option, changing nothing, would be the worst of all. That’s because climate change and the drying of the West have put the reservoirs of Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the water supply for tens of millions of people — on a path toward falling so far that the dams could no longer produce hydropower, or even hit “dead pool,” when water would effectively be blocked from flowing to the southern states.

If no action is taken, “we can expect water levels to continue to decline, threatening the operations of the system, and the water supply of 40 million people,” U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said Tuesday from a conference room at the Hoover Dam.

Through the windows behind her, the bleached “bathtub ring” on the hillside above Lake Mead was clearly visible — a reminder of how far the reservoir, now about a quarter full, has fallen over the past two decades of drought.

“Some may believe that this winter’s snow and rain has saved the river, but that is not the case,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “We have a lot of hard work and difficult decisions ahead of us in this basin.”