A new federal plan for managing the Colorado River is expected to be finalized in the coming days. But before the ink is dry, Arizona laid out its issues with the plan, and the state’s top water official did not hold back.
In a letter to the Bureau of Reclamation, he wrote the water-sharing plan could “inflict catastrophic harm on Arizona’s citizens” and outlined a list of contentions with its details. Those arguments could make up the basis of a future lawsuit over the Colorado River.
Climate change and drought have been shrinking the river’s supply, and cities and farms have not done enough to cut back on demand accordingly. The seven states that use the river — Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — have been locked in disagreement about how to do so for years, forcing the federal government to come up with its own strategy.
Arizona’s opposition comes after the federal government published its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for managing the Colorado River after the current rules expire this fall. Reclamation, the federal agency in charge of Western dams and reservoirs, put forth a strategy that rattled Arizona water leaders. For the next 10 years, the federal government would have the ability to cut the Colorado River supply for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40%.
After a wave of initial pushback by Arizona politicians and water officials, the letter goes into greater detail by providing seven specific objections.
It was written by Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. He makes the case that the federal government may be overstepping its legal bounds by implementing its plan.
Buschatzke first points out that the FEIS, which is more than a thousand pages long, does not mention the Colorado River Compact. The Compact is a 1922 agreement that serves as the bedrock for policies about managing the river. More than a century of laws and practices for sharing water across the seven states that use the Colorado River is built on the back of its guidance.
Arizona’s letter claimed that the Interior Department — Reclamation’s parent agency — isn’t adhering to that foundational law, and wrote it “has refused to even take a position on what federal law requires.”
“The [Interior] Department gives Arizona neither transparency about how the River will be managed nor any basis on which to plan for its water future,” Buschatzke wrote.
Then, he wrote, Arizona reserves the right to take its complaints to court.
Read the letter:
Most other complaints in the letter are highly technical.
The state disagrees with the timeline of the federal plan, which would last for 10 years and bring states back to the negotiating table every two years along the way, at which points they would tweak water-sharing rules in response to river conditions. Arizona asks that, instead, the plan only last for two years, which it says would give states more room to develop a longer, comprehensive plan for the river.
Buschatzke also wrote that Interior doesn’t do enough to define how much water could be sent downstream from major federal reservoirs in the Rocky Mountain region. In recent years, those reservoirs have been used as a backup supply to prop up water levels in Lake Powell, where dropping water has threatened the ability to generate hydropower and perhaps pass water through the dam at all — limiting the amount that flows to Arizona and its neighbors.
The letter also argues that the federal plan places too much burden on the downstream states — Arizona, California and Nevada — by forcing them to take major cutbacks, but does not do the same for the upstream states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Other objections take issue with the process by which Interior drew up the new rules, and that they failed to consider the impacts of major water cutbacks to Arizona, which the state says was legally required.
Buschatzke and his allies have been trying to convince the federal government to adopt their counterproposal, which would spread out the pain of cutbacks and help Arizona avert the “catastrophic” water reductions described in the letter.
Reclamation is soon expected to release the specifics of river management plans for 2027 and 2028. Those rules appear likely to incorporate elements of the counterproposal.
The messy Colorado River negotiation process that led to the federal water plan has slowly pushed states closer to a potential court battle. If states disagree with water management strategies, they could take one another or the federal government to the Supreme Court.
In his recent letter, Buschatzke may be laying out some of the legal arguments that could support a case brought by Arizona.
An overwhelming majority of Colorado River experts — including state negotiators and federal policymakers — have said that it would be best to keep Colorado River matters away from the Supreme Court, but those states seem to be tiptoeing closer to that reality on the back end of fruitless negotiations.
Earlier this summer, Arizona lawmakers boosted the state’s Colorado River litigation fund up to $9 million in preparation for a potential lawsuit over sharing water.
