The California Water Board late Tuesday submitted its own ideas on how to save water on the Colorado River, one day after the other six Colorado River basin states submitted a proposal that could mean drastic water cuts for California.
The California letter was sent Tuesday to the Bureau of Reclamation, submitted as part of the federal agency's work on an environmental impact statement intended to guide operations on the river for the next two years.
The California letter said their board had been working with the six other Colorado River basin states "in an attempt to develop a joint Framework Agreement Alternative. Unfortunately, despite numerous meetings and intensive good faith efforts, a seven-state consensus was not reached," prompting the need for California to come up with own plan.
Southern California is allocated 4.1 million acre-feet (MAF) of water annually from the Colorado River. Of that total, 3.1 MAF goes to the Imperial Valley Irrigation District, which is 100% of the valley's water supply. California is the nation's number one producer of winter vegetables at roughly 40%.
One acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons, the amount it takes to cover a football field with one foot of water. That's enough water to supply two families of four for a year, on average.
California's proposal said their Colorado River contractors have committed to conserving up to an additional total of 1.6 MAF starting in 2023 and continuing until 2026. That's on top of 350,000 AF per year pledged by California in 2019 as part of the drought contingency plan, which was intended as a stopgap to preserve levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell until interim river guidelines set to expire in 2025 are renegotiated.
Should levels at Lake Mead drop below 1,000 feet in elevation, the California proposal said, the Bureau of Reclamation should reduce releases from Lake Mead based on the "Law of the River," contained in a myriad of agreements beginning with the 1922 Colorado River compact. The proposal also calls for utilizing the "Priority System to deliver available supply to Present Perfected Rights, Federal Reserved Rights, and other senior water rights until available annual supply exhausted."
That hints at bigger cuts to Arizona and Nevada, while preserving California's senior water rights.
Lake Mead is currently at 1,045 feet in elevation. At 1,025 feet, the lake would reach what's known as "deadpool," which would severely restrict the lake's ability to pump water to the lower basin states.
Becky Mitchell, Colorado's commissioner on the Upper Colorado River Commission, said Wednesday "[w]e are encouraged that there does appear to be recognition across the Basin of the need for much greater actions in the Lower Basin to address the long-term imbalance between supply and demand downstream of Lake Mead."
She also noted the six-state consensus provided by Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming is responsive to the federal bureau's notice and requests.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday the Arizona Department of Water Resources was still reviewing California’s proposal and didn’t have an immediate comment.
But Tom Buschatzke, the department’s director, said earlier Tuesday that water managers across the basin couldn’t reach agreement with California on cuts, even at the broader state level.
“The big issues are what does the priority system mean, what does the junior priority mean and how does that attach to that outcome of who takes what cut?” he said. “That was the issue over the summer, that was the issue over the fall, that’s still the issue.”
The six-state proposal released late Monday calls for 1.5 MAF in annual cuts. Of that, about 708,000 AF could come out of California's allocation, according to Andy Mueller of the Colorado River Water Conservation District.
Much of that would come from a change in how evaporative loss is calculated. Currently, the three lower basin states don't take evaporation, transportation or other system inefficiencies into account in their annual allocations. As a result, those states actually get more water from the Colorado than they're allocated, estimated by Mueller at about 1.5 MAF annually.
Arizona and Nevada, two of the three lower basin states, are now on board on a system of calculating allocations that account for evaporative and other system loss.
Accounting for evaporative loss is not part of California's proposal and part of the reason California didn't sign off on the proposal sent by the six other states, claiming the proposal violated the "Law of the River" and "current water rights system and mandates cutback without providing tools to manage reductions."
JB Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board for California, in rejecting the six-state proposal Tuesday hinted at litigation should the Bureau of Reclamation adopt the evaporative loss plan.
The upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have accounted for system loss in their allocations for the past 75 years, Mueller said this week.
The 1,450-mile long Colorado River, with its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, supplies water to 40 million people and 30 tribes in the seven states and two states in Mexico. It also supplies enough water to dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead to provide hydropower to eight states, including Nebraska.
Last June, Commissioner of Reclamation Camille Calimlim Touton, in a U.S. Senate committee hearing, called on the seven states to come up with two to four MAF of savings on the Colorado in part to preserve hydropower at the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. Touton set a deadline of mid-August, with a threat to that the Bureau, which manages the Colorado River, would come up with its own cuts if the states did not come up with an agreement. The seven states, however, could not come to an accord, and Touton instead announced cuts contained in previous agreements, a decision that spared California, given its senior water rights, but hit Arizona particularly hard.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
