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Federal Colorado River Plan Leaves States Guessing Every Two Years
Now, key agreements for managing the river are expiring at the end of this year. These include agreements reached in 2007 that lasted nearly two decades, which took fewer than three years to craft. This round of talks has already taken longer — and, so far, produced nothing so durable. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal steward for the river under the Department of the Interior, last week released a 10-year framework that establishes rough parameters for managing the river, but imposes no specific long-term plan. The federal provisions include cuts of up to 40% to the shared supply of California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin. They also allow releases from Lake Powell, which collects flows from the upper basin, to dip low enough they risk violating a legally required threshold for water deliveries to downstream states. These dramatic cuts are an upper limit for future operations: The federal government plans to roll out more detailed management plans every two years if the states continue their impasse. The agency will release the first of those plans any day, imposing cuts in the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada — an estimated 10% cut to California’s supply...
