Colorado River states are staring down a Feb. 14 deadline. Here's what might happen next

Arizona’s water future depends on negotiations over Colorado River water that are coming to a head right now.

Ours and other Western states are staring down a Saturday deadline to come to a deal on Colorado River water — or, likely, leave it to a judge. As climate change is shrinking the river, we all have to use less water — but, who will shoulder the cuts?

Upper Basin states like Colorado and Utah have largely refused cuts for months of negotiations, but, after a meeting in Washington last week, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said she wouldn’t agree to any deal unless they do. And, she said she’s cautiously optimistic that they are starting to see the light.

 “We were clearly at an impasse. I feel like we're at a place where we can start to move past that now,” said Hobbs.

The Show heard from two people who are watching the negotiations over Colorado River water closely.

Sammy Roth is a climate columnist and writes the Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter on Substack.

Cynthia Campbell ran Phoenix’s water resources for more than a decade. Today, she’s the director of policy innovation at the Arizona Water Innovation Institute at Arizona State University.

First, The Show spoke to Roth, who in a recent piece for The New York Times argued the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — are taking steps to reduce their water use, and that their Upper Basin neighbors — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — need to do the same.

Next, The Show spoke with Campbell to answer the questions: Are we headed for a system crash — where we reach deadpool — and we don’t have enough water in the reservoirs to get it out or generate hydropower? And what does it mean for all of us who rely on Colorado River water every day?

Campbell talked more about where we are and how bad things could get if these Colorado River negotiations don’t go Arizona’s way.

Full conversation with Sammy Roth

Sammy Roth

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Handout

SAMMY ROTH: I mean, it’s the Lower Basin states are making that argument. And I’ve also talked with and read some research by a number of independent experts who are based across the basin and in Upper Basin states as well, and a number of them agree with that assessment as well.

MARK BRODIE: So there are people in the Upper Basin states who would agree with what the Lower Basin states are saying, which is that we all need to be taking cuts here?

ROTH: I mean, yeah. Not the people running the negotiations, but if you go to people who are working at universities and think tanks, yeah. Absolutely.

BRODIE: Well, so one of the responses that you get from the Upper Basin — and you allude to this in your piece — is that the Lower Basin states are the ones that are using most of water, so why should we have to make cuts and send them more water when we’re already kind of doing our part?

I’m curious what you think about that.

ROTH: Well, I mean, so if you look at the numbers, absolutely, yes, the Lower Basin uses more water than the Upper Basin.

I mean, look at the Bureau of Reclamation’s most recent reports on how much water consumption there is overall, in 2024, the Lower Basin states — California, Nevada, Arizona — used 6.1 million acre feet. And the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Mexico, Wyoming — used 4.5 million acre feet.

So definitely an imbalance there in total water usage. And from the Upper Basin’s perspective that’s unfair, in part because of what was negotiated in the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which was supposed to divide the water use in half, where the Upper Basin was going to get 7.5 million and the Lower Basin was going to get 7.5 million.

The perspective that I argued and tried to make the case in this New York Times op-ed was that the Lower Basin states, just what happened in history over the course of the last hundred years, was that they grew a lot more and a lot faster. They used a lot more water. The cities developed a lot bigger.

The Los Angeles area and the Phoenix area in particular, the agricultural districts in Southern California and Arizona used a lot more. And so yeah, it got kind of out of control where the Lower Basin used a lot more than it was supposed to.

But the Lower Basin has also done a lot of really hard work to cut back. They’ve got farmers fallowing their fields and water cops running around Las Vegas policing water use, and Los Angeles carrying out grass lawns and investing in wastewater recycling and groundwater capture.

And water use are really steadily declining now for decades in the Lower Basin. And those cuts really coming down quite harshly in the last few years in trying to get water use back in line.

And meanwhile, in the Upper Basin states, there’s just not been an agreement to do that kind of mandatory cutting that the Lower Basin has done, especially the last few years, to get Lake Mead back in order.

And so I think that there’s a pretty good case to be made. And the Lower Basin has been making that case that, “Hey, we’re taking emergency measures here and forcing ourselves to do what needs to be done to avoid the reservoirs from crashing. We need you to agree to do the same, or we’re going to have trouble convincing the people in our states to keep doing that.”

BRODIE: Well, I can imagine folks in the Upper Basin saying, “Yes, but we didn’t tell Phoenix and LA to grow like this. We appreciate the fact that you’re trying to take steps to reduce your water use, but you’re still using more than you’re supposed to, and why should we supplement that?”

ROTH: Yeah, I mean, I think I have some sympathy for that argument because, again, in theory this was all supposed to be divided in half. But just the situation we’re in is that there’s 10 million people in Los Angeles county. And Phoenix is the fourth biggest city in the United States. And there’s all sorts of people in the outlying suburbs.

I’m just not really sure what the Lower Basin areas are supposed to do at this point. I mean, you can’t move millions of people out of there. You can’t change the fact that the Imperial Valley is the largest vegetable growing region in the winter in the United States. History didn’t play out as the Colorado River Compact intended it to.

This is just kind of what happened. And now we’ve got climate change layered on top of that, making the river even drier. The Upper Basin has a fair argument, I guess, that the Upper Basin maybe shouldn’t have made the growth decisions that it made or that this isn’t how history was supposed to play out, but this is what happened.

And I think that we’ve all got to learn to live with that and make decisions based on reality, not based on what we wish had happened.

BRODIE: Right. Well, it sounds like to, to a large degree your argument comes down to, “This is reality. This is the situation on the ground. We’ve got to deal with it,” as opposed to what we would maybe like to see or what we would have in a perfect world.

ROTH: I think so. And part of that world is climate change now. The situation where the Upper and Lower Basin were really at each other’s throats, this was avoided for a long time because there was enough water in the river where people were able to get along and make voluntary cuts and still live within what the river was able to provide.

Some of the experts I talked to, one of them made the point of like a 13 million acre-foot river, even if it didn’t have the 15 million acre feet that the states supposedly had to divide between themselves in 1922, you could still get to 13 million acre feet.

Now when the river is averaging less than 11 million acre feet, it gets a whole lot harder. And so I think that when you’ve got Arizona and California — and really Arizona, because it’s at the end of the priority pecking order here and would in theory be the first in line for cutbacks.

When you’ve got Arizona saying, “If we’re going to keep turning off the taps to a lot of farmers, we need to see Colorado agreeing to do something similar in terms of mandatory cuts, or we just can’t keep asking our people to do this,” I think that’s reasonable.

BRODIE: To some degree, do you see this as maybe saying the quiet part out loud a little bit, that like, "look, we have to deal with this and this is the situation in which we’re finding ourselves now. Let’s just figure out a way out of it," as opposed to sort of standing on ceremony?

ROTH: I think so. I think there’s understandably a lot of delicacy in these conversations, definitely between the negotiators but even with a lot of the sort of stakeholders and experts involved with this, where nobody wants to rock the boat too much and everyone wants to be able to try to get the negotiators in the states to a peaceful resolution.

And it’s just really looking right now like that’s not going to happen. I mean, the Trump administration set this November deadline, which nobody met, and now they’ve set this Valentine’s Day deadline, which looks very much like it’s not going to get met. And meanwhile, Arizona and Colorado look like they’re gearing up for a fight in court.

I just kind of got to a point where I was talking to folks involved with this and just felt like, OK, this seems like an obvious point that needs to be made that no one’s making. So I’m just going to go and say this. So I’m glad I said that. I think that there were other folks who were thinking it.

We’ll see what happens next. Right now, unfortunately, it’s looking like the most likely thing that’s going to happen here is either the Trump administration implements one of these plans that it’s outlined in the draft environmental impact report — which involve clamping down on the Lower Basin — or Arizona and Colorado end up in court, which nobody wants, because that’s a really dangerous game.

Hopefully, that doesn’t happen. Hopefully they find a way to resolution.

Full conversation with Cynthia Campbell

City of Phoenix

CYNTHIA CAMPBELL: We’ve driven the system so far down that now we need probably 2 to 4 million acre feet of demand reduction. What that means, in layman’s terms, is that about 2 million acre feet of water that’s being used — not promised, not allocated, used today — needs to stop being used.

LAUREN GIGER: That’s a lot, right?

CAMPBELL: It’s an awful lot, if you consider, as an example, that the entire state of Arizona’s allocation is 2.8 million acre feet. And I could come in and bring other states in and say there’s this one and that one, but it’s a lot of water.

It’s a very significant amount of water, and that is not because anybody’s hoarding it somewhere and it’s not because somebody’s wasting it somewhere else. It’s simply because it doesn’t exist anymore.

GILGER: So it sounds like what you’re saying here is that you’re watching these negotiations play out, and you think that no one is looking at the bigger picture. It’s like picking away at smaller amounts of cuts here and there. But what we really need is to look at the big system, which is going to require much more cuts.

CAMPBELL: Right. And I think the reason, in their defense, first of all, there are some arguments that are being offered up on both sides that are not really tenable. And at the same time, the idea of trying to face the scope of how much we need to reduce use in the basin, I think, is just too daunting for most.

And so they continue to rely upon what I believe is somewhat of a false sense of optimism about, “Well, if we just wait it out.” You hear that in the conversations, in the reports back, it’s like, “Well, if we could just get a little further down the road,” as if something’s going to change.

It’s not going to change unless the climate changes again. The thing that needs to change, unfortunately, is how much water is being used systemwide.

GILGER: OK, so let’s talk about what that looks like in real life for real people who live in this part of the country. Worst case scenarios, right? If upper basin states don’t budge on cuts, this ends up in court, lots of folks say this will not look good for Arizona. What do you think might happen?

CAMPBELL: Well, I think the problem is that the rhetoric and the negotiations have denigrated to the point where Arizona’s left with very little choices — except potentially to sue. You want to talk about the actual worst case scenarios, and you look at numbers and stuff, I think you don’t have to look too much further than one of the alternatives in the draft environmental impact statement issued by the federal government.

Basically, it takes CAP down to like 400,000 acre feet, and I think it’s done that way with a nod to protecting populations, like bare minimum water available for population use. So I say that as worst case scenario, not because on paper, you could actually wipe out the central Arizona project with some of the cuts that are needed, especially if Arizona — central Arizona specifically — has to take the brunt of all of them.

GILGER: So this is the canal that brings water from the Colorado River down to Phoenix, down to Tucson. What does that mean if the cuts mostly hit the Central Arizona Project? If we take the brunt of it, what does it mean for all of us who live here?

CAMPBELL: It’s hard to contemplate. A lot of it depends upon the timing. Because despite the fact that the utilities and the cities have had very little information over the past three years as to what level of cuts they should expect, they’ve all known that Colorado River cuts are coming, and that they might be significant.

And so many of the cities — most of the cities, I would argue, have been really trying to — prepare themselves and find alternative sources of water. Not that there’s that’s easy to do, build infrastructure, try to move ahead to plan for potential shortages. And they’re doing the best they can, but that level of shortage in a very short amount of time, maybe in, in less than five years, it would be devastating, I think.

I think we would see potentially — and these are words that no one ever wants to say out loud, right? But you could see curtailment in the cities where they’re having to do what you could also call mandatory conservation, where they’re asking people to specifically cut back, or they’re forcing people to specifically cut back on the amount of water that they use.

It just makes life a lot more difficult. Would water still be going through the tap? Yes, we will find a way to make water go through the tap collectively. But if it’s a very significant cut in a very short amount of time, that makes that promise much more difficult.

GILGER: What about the possibility, which sounds like it might be on the table now, of a short term deal — kind of another, I guess I should say short term deal — for states over these allocations. What do you think the impact of that would be?

CAMPBELL: I don’t have a lot of trust in a short term deal, because the longer we wait to address the scope of the problem, the fewer options we have on the table. And I only say that because that is demonstrably what has happened to us over the past 20 years.

GILGER: We could have done things 5-10 years ago that we just can’t do now?

CAMPBELL: We could have, and I want to be really careful not to be a Monday morning quarterback, because, you know, we shoulda coulda woulda. Yes, but there are a lot of reasons why we didn’t.

But I’m just pointing out the fact that there are alternatives and options that might have been available when the reservoirs were a little bit higher that arguably are no longer available now. And if we do a 3- or 5-year, short term deal where the result is we kind of bet that Mother Nature won’t get worse, and we lose that bet, I just don’t see how that is good for central Arizona.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why there hasn’t been a short term deal, is because I think our principals recognize that.

GILGER: Yeah, OK. Let me ask you lastly, maybe to end on a slightly higher note, what would the best case scenario look like for Arizona here? Like, is there a way we could look at that big picture of this shrinking river and stabilize these systems and ensure growth and ensure that water rates don’t go up and cities have their water in the future?

CAMPBELL: You’ve asked for an awful lot in that question. I’m not sure all of those things could be true, but if all the states recognize that this is a shared responsibility, a shared problem that we could all solve if we all could work together, I think there’s a lot of hope. But we need to be able to do that, and we need to be able to work together sooner than later, because we’re running out of time to save the system.

GILGER: Do you think that’s likely to happen?

CAMPBELL: That the system would crash?

GILGER: No, that we’ll save it.

CAMPBELL: I think the odds are, at best even, I think that the system might crash before we recognize the fact that there is a value in the system itself. Beyond what any individual state thinks it needs or wants, we need to have this system the whole Western economy of the United States it’s built on.