Managers of the Central Arizona Project, which carries water from the Colorado River to the Phoenix and Tucson areas, are raising alarm about potential water cutbacks coming to the region. A draft of federal plans released earlier this month laid out some scenarios that would drastically reduce the amount of water flowing to central Arizona.
“It is a devastating hit to the state of Arizona,” said Brenda Burman, CAP’s general manager. “It appears they are trying to wipe us off the map.”
Burman cited potential water management plans laid out in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for post-2026 Colorado River operations. That document, released by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, outlines the multiple options that federal water managers could choose to distribute water from the river.
Burman and other CAP leaders argue that some of those options would cut too deep into Arizona’s water supply, and that pain should be shared more evenly across other states in the region.
“It doesn't work if Arizona is the only one taking reductions,” she said. “It doesn't work if the Lower Basin [states] are the only ones taking reductions, this needs to be shared by all. We are all beneficiaries of the river. We all need to be part of the solution on the river.”
The seven states that use water from the Colorado River are stuck in tense negotiations about how to divide its shrinking supply. Climate change has left the river in a megadrought stretching back more than two decades, and state leaders have struggled to agree on plans that share a river that is drier than it used to be.
Those states are divided into two camps: the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.
Negotiators from those seven states are on the hook to forge a deal before current management plans expire this year. If they can agree on a way to share the river and make sure the nation’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — do not drop too low, the federal government will implement the states’ ideas by tweaking the amount of water that is released from those federally-managed reservoirs.
So if the states put their heads together and agree on new rules, the federal government could scrap the ideas in the existing draft and move forward with different plans that might be less harmful to Arizona’s water supply.
The time-worn legal policy of “prior appropriation” generally means that the first people to use Colorado River water will be the last to lose it in times of shortage. The Central Arizona Project, which was authorized in 1968, is a relative newcomer to Colorado River water use. That means some of its users have long stood as the first water users to face significant cutbacks amid regionwide drought.
In 2021, the federal government declared a regionwide water shortage and issued mandatory cutbacks to the Central Arizona Project. Those cutbacks mostly hit farmers in Pinal County.
The Central Arizona Project’s unique position recently rose to the spotlight when its former manager removed his name from consideration to run the federal government’s top water agency. Ted Cooke said some state leaders were pushing back on his nomination because they worried he would use his new role to benefit his former employer, but Cooke denied that he would have done so.
