Conferees told Colorado River action ‘absolutely critical’

LAS VEGAS — The first weeks of 2023 will be crucial for Southwest U.S. states and water entities to agree how to use less water from the drought-stricken and fast-shrinking Colorado River, a top federal water manager said Friday.

“The coming three months are absolutely critical,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau told the Colorado River Users Association conferees ending three-day annual meetings in Las Vegas.

“To be clear, the challenge is extraordinary,” Beaudreau said of a withering two-decade Western drought that scientists now attribute to long-term, human-caused climate change. “The science tells us it’s our new reality.”

Beaudreau closed the conference with a call for water managers, administrators and individuals throughout the West “to develop solutions to help us all address the crisis.”

The first deadline is next Tuesday, when the federal Bureau of Reclamation finishes taking public comment on an effort expected to yield a plan by summer about how to use at least 15% less river water split among recipients in seven Western U.S. states, 30 Native American tribes and Mexico.

States have until the end of January to come to an agreement. A preliminary report is expected in the spring.

At stake is drinking water for 40 million people; hydroelectric power for regional markets; and irrigation for farmers tilling millions of acres of former desert, producing most of the nation’s winter vegetables.

Options range from voluntary agreements among competing interests to use less, to draconian top-down federal cuts in water deliveries — perhaps affecting cities including Denver, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego.

The problem was demonstrated again and again since Wednesday in new data and charts at workshops and panels: Less water flows into the river in the so-called Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming than is drawn from it by the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.

The states share water under an interstate agreement reached 100 years ago that overestimated the amount of water the basin receives annually, mostly through snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains.

In recent years, as drought has progressed, interim agreements for Lower Basin states to share cutbacks have been enacted. Arizona farmers have been the most affected.

But unrelenting drought has dropped the river’s largest reservoirs to unprecedented low levels….