Arizona, California and Nevada have agreed to take less water from the drought-stricken Colorado River, a groundbreaking deal that, for now, prevents the river from falling so low that it would jeopardize water supplies for major western cities like Phoenix and Los Angels. as well as some of the most productive farmland in the United States.
He agreement, announced Monday, requires the federal government to pay about $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states if they temporarily use less water. The states also agreed to make additional cuts beyond those tied to federal payments to generate the total reductions needed to prevent the river from collapsing.
Taken together, those reductions would amount to about 13 percent of total water use in the lower Colorado Basin, among the most aggressive ever experienced in the region, and are likely to require significant water restrictions for residential and agricultural uses.
The Colorado River supplies drinking water to 40 million Americans in seven states, as well as parts of Mexico, and irrigates 5.5 million acres of farmland. Electricity generated by damming the river’s two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, powers millions of homes and businesses.
But drought, population growth and climate change have reduced river flows by a third in recent years compared to historical averages, threatening to cause a water and energy catastrophe through the West.
California, Arizona, and Nevada get their share of their water from Lake Mead, which is formed by the Colorado River at the Hoover Dam and is controlled by the federal government. The Bureau of Reclamation, an agency within the Department of the Interior, determines how much water each of the three states receives. The other states that depend on the Colorado get their water directly from the river and its tributaries.
“This is an important step toward our shared goal of forging a sustainable path for the watershed that millions of people call home,” Camille Calimlim Touton, Commissioner of the Office of Reclamation, said in a statement.
The agreement reached over the weekend runs only through the end of 2026 and has yet to be formally adopted by the federal government. At that point, the seven states that depend on the river, which include Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, could face a deeper reckoning as its decline is likely to continue.
Negotiations on the Colorado were spurred by a crisis: Last summer, water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs along the river, dropped enough that officials feared the hydroelectric turbines that they fed would soon stop working.
There was even a risk that reservoir levels would drop so much that water would no longer reach the inlet valves that control flow out of the lakes, essentially drying up the river downstream.
Faced with that prospect, the Department of the Interior last June told the seven states that Find a way to reduce its water use from two to four million acre-feet of water per year. (An acre-foot is about the same amount of water that two or three households use in a year.) The states failed to reach an agreement, even as water levels in the two reservoirs remained dangerously low.
That inertia led the federal government to lay the foundations for unilaterally impose cuts on those states. To add to the pressure, the Interior Department said last month it could ignore century-old rules governing which states should bear the brunt of cuts and instead come up with a different formula.
The federal government gave states until May 30 to take a position on the prospect of unilateral cuts. But behind closed doors, the Biden administration has been negotiating with the states to reach an agreement and avoid having to impose cuts that would surely face legal challenges and end up delaying any action.
Under the agreement announced Monday, the majority of the cuts, 2.3 million acre-feet, would come from water districts, farm operators, cities and Native American tribes that agreed to take less water to qualify for federal grants offered under the Law of Inflation of 2022. Law of reduction. Those payments will total about $1.2 billion.
Another 700,000 acre-feet would come from California, Nevada and Arizona, which have agreed to work out the cuts among themselves in the coming months. (Under the terms of the agreement, as much as 200,000 acre-feet of those cuts could qualify for compensation through other federal programs, but those arrangements have yet to be worked out.)
If states don’t identify those 700,000 acre-feet in additional cuts, the Interior Department said it would withhold the water, a move that could face legal and political challenges.
Together, the reductions would save three million acre-feet over the next three and a half years, beyond existing agreements. That’s far less, on an annual basis, than the federal government demanded last summer.
The Interior Department was able to negotiate less drastic cuts thanks to an unusually wet winter that provided snow levels in the Colorado Basin that are well above average. especially in california. That is expected to significantly increase the amount of water in the river, at least temporarily.
The terms of the deal were described to The New York Times by a senior Interior Department official who was involved in the negotiations and spoke on condition of anonymity. the washington post reported elements of the deal last week.
The structure of the agreement allows the Biden administration to avoid, for now, the problem of which states will be hit hardest by the cuts.
The Interior Department declined to provide a breakdown showing how much of the 2.3 million acre-feet in voluntary reductions compensated by the federal government would come from each state. And finding the additional 700,000 acre-feet remains a problem for the three lower basin states to solve.
As a result, what until recently looked like a state-versus-state cage fight has produced an outcome that is more tolerable for the states involved, if not exactly welcome.
Rules governing the river, which date to 1922, say much of Arizona’s supply from the Colorado River would be reduced to near zero before California experienced reductions. Although Arizona would still see its water supply significantly reduced, the agreement effectively removes the threat of drastic cuts.
“I’m very happy with this proposal,” Tom Buschaztke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the state’s lead negotiator in the talks, said Monday. “I think there is a lot of equity in this.”
Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, called the deal a positive step, but one that could only offer a stay of enforcement. “Before 2026 we could be in that danger zone again,” she said.
California is also doing better than might have been the case. The Department of the Interior raised the possibility of cut the supply of each state equally, as a part of your total usage. Because California uses more Colorado water than any other state, it would have lost the most, a shock to Southern California farmers as well as cities like Los Angeles and San Diego. Relying heavily on voluntary reductions avoids that concern.
Bill Hasencamp, Colorado River resource manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said the deal could provide a few years of stability for Los Angeles, San Diego and other California cities that rely on Colorado water.
The biggest challenge will be reaching an agreement after 2026, when the federal government won’t be willing to provide as much funding to conserve water, and states won’t be able to count on more winters of heavy rain and snowfall. “We know that the future will be drier than the past,” Hasencamp said.
The deal is also something of a victory for the Biden administration, which at times seems unsure how to respond to the growing crisis. Twice last year she set deadlines for the states to reach an agreement, which they missed. The Department of the Interior said the agreement shows states can work together with the federal government to address the challenge of Colorado’s decline.
That notion will also be put to the test soon. The department has said that its next step will be to study the effects of the agreement that the states have reached, before deciding how to proceed. Meanwhile, the next round of negotiations, on what to do after 2026, will start next month.
Jack Healy contributed reporting from Phoenix.