Colorado River Deal is a Temporary Fix

The federal government is heralding an agreement reached last week with California, Arizona and Nevada on sharing water from the Colorado River as a breakthrough in efforts to avert a catastrophic “doomsday” scenario for the cities and farms in the three states that rely on that water.

But the agreement—which must be ratified by the seven states that make up the Colorado River basin—ensures that the negotiators will be heading back to the table, probably before the ink is dry: the deal expires in 2026.

The compromise announced by the Interior Department was made possible by an unexpected shift from an unexpected source: the record winter snowfall in California’s mountains, which erased the effects of what had been called a 1,500-year drought and postponed what the Feds had been calling a “doomsday” scenario.

Last fall, the Feds were warning the states in the basin that they needed to cut by the amount of water they draw annually from the river by 3M acre-feet a year in order to avoid a situation where the water level gets so low at Lake Mead and Lake Powell that two of the nation’s largest dams would have to shut downs, cutting off water supplies to cities including Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The agreement calls for the federal government to pay about $1.2B to irrigate districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states as they temporarily use less water. The cuts will amount to about 13% of the total water use in the lower Colorado Basin. The funding will come from the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Colorado River supplies drinking water to 40 million Americans in seven states as well as part of Mexico and irrigates 5.5 million acres of farmland.

California, Arizona and Nevada get their share of water from Lake Mead, which is formed by the Hoover Dam and is controlled by the federal government. The Bureau of Reclamation, an agency within the Interior Department, determines how much water each of the three states receives.

The other states that depend on the Colorado—Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming—get water directly from the river and its tributaries.

“This is an important step forward toward our shared goal of forging a sustainable path for the basin that millions of people call home,” Camille Touton, the Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, said in a statement.

The agreement still needs to be formally adopted by the federal government. At that point, all seven states that rely on the river—which include Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—could face even larger cuts.