Colorado River cuts are coming for Arizona, according to a new federal water plan

The federal government has announced its new plans for governing the Colorado River.

The Interior Department has released the final environmental impact statement, which sets the stage for cuts to water allocations.

Politics

There’s a new plan for Colorado River water after years of negotiations. Here’s what to know

Alex Hager

The Interior Department announced plans for sharing water. Further details are coming soon, but big cuts are likely for cities in Phoenix and central Arizona.

The exact size of those cutbacks is expected to be announced soon.

Joining The Show to talk through what all this means is KJZZ’s Alex Hager.

MARK BRODIE: Alex, good morning.

ALEX HAGER: Thanks for having me. Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So, what does this mean? What do we know so far?

ALEX HAGER: Well, what we know is the outline of a plan, and what it says is that there is going to be a 10-year strategy for cutting back on water use between now and 2036, and it will require the seven states that share the Colorado River to put their heads together every two years and tweak the amount of water that is actually getting cut back in response to river conditions.

It sets what they’re calling sideboards, these kind of loose minimum and maximum — or it’s a hard minimum and maximum, but they’re rather extreme for how much water could be cut back. And we don’t expect them to actually cut all the way to the maximum, we expect them to agree on something less than that within that range.

But they set the range and they set the table for more news to come soon.

MARK BRODIE: Is it problematic in any way for this process to have to happen every two years, and we've seen how well the states are able to come up with agreements over the past few years?

ALEX HAGER: I've talked to a lot of smart people about this, and they say there's some pros and cons. The obvious cons, like you mentioned, are that the states have not done a very good job of negotiating their water use in the past, and forcing them to come to the table frequently might not end very well if they had years to come to a decision here and didn't. It might not go so well to make them do that again.

But the pro here is that, you know, with climate change and some of the worst drought we've ever seen in recorded history on the Colorado River, maybe having two-year flexibility instead of locking yourself in for 10 years gives you the ability to be a little more nimble if you're a water manager in response to changing river conditions.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, so as I mentioned, this is the final environmental impact statement. What does this actually signify?

ALEX HAGER: I think one of the big things that it signifies is that we now officially know that there has been total failure of negotiations between the seven states that share the river. They have been under pressure for years now to come up with an agreement, a consensus plan for managing the river, and they could not do that. They split into their separate camps and have been really opposed to one another's ideas for quite a long time now.

And the fact that the federal government had to step in and release its own rules, that's something they said for a long time they did not want to do, and would only do in the absence of an agreement from the seven states.

MARK BRODIE: And the states weren't all that thrilled at certain points about this happening either, right?

ALEX HAGER: That's correct. They generally have tried to push for their own interpretation of how the river should be managed, and the federal agreement doesn't necessarily make any one party particularly happy. And it's not an agreement, it's a federal plan that goes on kind of without consensus.

MARK BRODIE: Right. But the states will have to sort of manage to sort of live within this, right? Like whether or not they agree with it, they still have to abide by this.

ALEX HAGER: That's correct. We do expect some changes that will make it easier for them to abide by this within the next few months, but the idea is that this becomes the law of the land to some extent in October, and there is going to be less water coming out of some of the major reservoirs that supply cities and farms across the Southwest.

MARK BRODIE: So Alex, what is still to come from the Feds? What do we not quite know yet?

ALEX HAGER: So like I mentioned, this is going to be a 10-year plan with the impetus to check in every two years. So what we're expecting is the plans for the first two years, for 2027 and 2028. And we expect that to be announced in the coming days, potentially as soon as Monday or early next week.

And what will likely be in there will be significant cutbacks for the lower basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. We understand that although this was not a seven-state agreement, those three states have been working pretty hard in conjunction with the federal government to come up with something that is more tolerable.

There was an earlier federal proposal that was incredibly draconian and would have placed big cuts, cuts that local leaders here have called devastating to central Arizona. And so the lower basin states worked on a counterproposal with the federal government to make those a little more tolerable for the central Arizona area.

MARK BRODIE: Does it seem as though that will be part of what we get early next week?

ALEX HAGER: That is what we expect. I've seen a few statements come out so far from Arizona's top water officials, from Gov. Katie Hobbs, saying that if we implemented the maximum amount of cuts that is possible under this 10-year plan we saw today, that would be devastating for Phoenix and many of the cities in the Phoenix metro.

But they said we hope and to some extent expect that that will not be the case because it seems like they're optimistic that the federal government will adopt some parts of that counterproposal that Arizona worked on.

MARK BRODIE: Within those two-year plans that in the 10-year, that the hope is that the states will work together, is there an expectation that if, as has been the case, the states continue not to be able to work together, the Feds will just continue to implement their own plan?

ALEX HAGER: That remains to be seen. The Feds are very clear that they are leaving the door open for the states to agree down the road. They still want them to. They still say it would be better than a federal plan being imposed upon them. But it will require a level of agreement that we just have not seen for years now that seems hard to come by. But maybe this sets the table, these first two years of cuts change the playing field in a way that makes it more possible, who knows?

MARK BRODIE: OK, so you mentioned that there's sort of an expectation of what the cuts might look like. What might they actually look like specifically for Arizona?

ALEX HAGER: Yeah, we are expecting the most significant impact of federal cuts to fall on the Central Arizona Project. That's the 336-mile-long canal system that carries water from the Colorado River to the Phoenix and Tucson areas.

And most cities in those areas, most of the places where you listening right now probably live, depend on water from the Central Arizona Project. So the good news is that — well, the bad news is that there will be less water flowing through that canal system to the cities that depend on it.

The good news is that they have spent a long time preparing for this. City utility leaders have seen this day coming for years, and they have made contingency plans to account for that. So when there is less water coming down that Colorado River canal, they will be able to lean harder on groundwater supplies that they've been storing for a dry day, or water from the Salt River, which is managed separately from the Colorado River. So … we expect that there will be significant cuts to the Colorado River supply for central Arizona, but we expect that cities will be able to tolerate them.

MARK BRODIE: Is the hope then that residents maybe won't notice it, or won't be super apparent to those of us living here?

ALEX HAGER: You know, in the short term, it probably will not make a big difference. Some cities may suggest, or potentially even mandate, rules about something like outdoor watering, and try to tighten the screws a little bit on how much water you can use to water your lawn or garden.

But realistically, I would say the most likely way that this shows up is in the long term, and that's in rate increases on your water bill. The strategies that cities are using to make these cuts tolerable are expensive. They are going out and buying new water supplies. They are building huge, sometimes multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects that will make it easier for them to tolerate water cuts in the long term, and they're going to have to spread the costs out, you know, on people who pay for that water.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, lots more to come on this. That is KJZZ’s Alex Hager. Alex, thank you as always.

ALEX HAGER: Thanks for having me.

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