Q&A: The Colorado River in 2025
"Hydrology is central," the promises of the Colorado River Compact + Trump 2.0
Hello, and welcome to Western Water Notes. I’m hoping to bring more interviews to this platform, and I’m excited to say I’ve got a few more in the works.
First, I wanted to start out with a recent interview about the Colorado River, which is facing a pivotal moment as its users renegotiate operating guidelines after two decades of drought. The University of New Mexico’s John Fleck is closely watching those negotiations, and has been one of the central public voices talking about how the overused river could adapt to a drier future. I found our conversation very interesting, and I hope you do too.
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A century ago, the Colorado River Compact of 1922 divided a watershed that would come to support more than 40 million people in the Southwest. The compact split the river at a place called Lee Ferry in Arizona. Lee Ferry is not only a geographic marker, but it’s also the place where the river’s governance is broken into two divisions.
Upstream are the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), where most of the water originates as snowpack. Downstream are the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada), where most of the water is consumed.
The compact was flawed in many ways, including at its foundation: There is not as much water promised by the agreement, a structural problem that has long haunted Colorado River management—and one significantly worsened by climate change.
Consider, for instance, that the average flow of the Colorado River in the past two decades (2000-2023) was 12.5 million acre-feet and the compact entitles a total of 15 million acre-feet of water to the Upper and Lower basin (7.5 million acre-feet each). Through the 1944 treaty, the country of Mexico has a right to 1.5 million acre-feet. Twenty-two of the 30 federally-recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin have recognized rights to about 3.2 million acre-feet of water, as of a 2021 policy report.
Even without everyone using their water, the basin still uses too much.
The Lower Basin states developed fast, and grew beyond their allotment. They have spent the last decade trying to use less. The Upper Basin still dreams of using more water, yet it is legally constrained from doing so, in part, by the compact itself.
The Upper Basin must deliver 82.5 million acre-feet over ten years at Lee Ferry to the Lower Basin. Keep too much water in the Upper Basin, and they hit a tripwire what could result in litigation headed to the Supreme Court—putting a water supply for millions of people at risk. Fleck and his collaborator Eric Kuhn, (check out their book Science Be Dammed), have been warning about this for a long time.
The problem is no one actually knows how any of this would go down. Although the compact is still taken as the central node of Colorado River policy, climate change has pushed the river to a point where the irreconcilable math must somehow be resolved. It’s left both the Upper and Lower Basins fighting… at least for now… at least publicly.
Add to the mix a new federal administration in Trump 2.0—in which command-and-control chaos seems to be the point—and you have even more uncertainty.
I talked with Fleck, a professor at the University of New Mexico, who has written frequently about all of this on his Inkstain blog (highly recommend). He is one of the most thoughtful thinkers on the river, and I hope you find his insights as valuable as I did. We talked for a while, so this transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: The two divisions on the river have been at this impasse for the last however many months—maybe a year—over negotiating new operating guidelines. At this point, what do you see as why they're divided?
John Fleck: For a long time, we've been able to avoid the central controversies between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin by just draining reservoirs, and we can't do that anymore.
The real sticking points are these deeply held views in local and state communities across the basin about what the Colorado River Compact promised them. And what people in the Lower Basin, especially in Arizona, historically viewed as a promise that the Colorado River Compact required a reliable delivery past Lee Ferry from Upper Basin to Lower Basin.
That was the view in the Lower Basin, and they planned their lives accordingly. The Upper Basin always operated under a more nebulous view that the Colorado River Compact promised them enough water to continue development—continue the greening of their cities and the irrigation of their farms—no matter what. Under reduced river flows, with full development of the river in both basins, both of those things can’t be true.
We reached a point a year ago when the Lower Basin offered up a compromise. We'll make some really deep cuts in the Lower Basin, and if those cuts aren't big enough, we'll share the additional cuts needed. So they offered a negotiating path, and the Upper Basin was insistent: ‘No, we're not gonna make cuts.’
Now everybody is dug in, at least in their public positions. Part of what's weird about what's going on is that, in private, I think there's a general recognition that some sort of a compromise has to be possible that avoids the winner-take-all risk of litigation. At this point, it's just trying to find a path forward that allows the negotiating parties to save face and come up with a deal that they can then sell back home.
Q: For someone who is not involved in Colorado River policy, how is it possible, after 100 years, that there could be so much disagreement about fundamental questions about how the compact works?
Fleck: It is always easier to avoid hard compromises when you don't have to [make them]—because there's extra water. Part of what's going on here is that when they wrote the Colorado River Compact in 1922, the basin’s population and its irrigated acreage was far smaller.
It wasn't really until around 2000 when we finally, as a population, grew into the allocations that had been made and then overshot them.
We've been working toward the transition since the late 1990s and 2000s by reducing [use]. California used to use more than 5 million acre-feet. Now they're using, in many years, four. Arizona used to take 2.8 million out of the main stem. Now they take two.
We've been heading down that path, but we've been doing it without having to have the difficult discussions of resolving this underlying question of what the Lee Ferry delivery obligation is.
There's two ways to deal with it. One is to litigate, and the other is to compromise. The deep compromise requires political sacrifice. Nobody's going to make the political sacrifice until they have to.
Q: I'm curious how you view hydrology and the role that hydrology plays in these negotiations. How much are the negotiators looking at how much water is stored in the reservoirs, how much water is likely to run off this year, that kind of thing?
Fleck: Hydrology is central. As long as there's enough water that people can avoid looking at the problem, they will avoid looking at the problem and use the water. It's only when the reservoirs start to get empty that negotiations get serious. We've seen this pattern over and over again.
Q: Have you seen it be this tense before, where people are openly talking about litigation as a way to resolve some of these fundamental problems. Do you see a collaborative option as a possibility, or are people moving away from that?
Fleck: I am fully confident that we'll figure out a collaborative compromise. It may require litigation to scare the crap out of people to lead us to compromise, but I fully expect a collaborative compromise. We really have no other choice, right? The other options are just too awful.
Q: So much of the public-facing tension has focused on the division between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin. But of course, within the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin, there's a lot of different actors that have been at odds in the past. Do you see there still being tensions within the two sub-basins?
Fleck: There’s absolute tension within the sub-basins right now. Publicly, for example, the Upper Basin is presenting this united front. Privately, there are folks who are concerned in other states about Becky Mitchell in Colorado's very stern, public, aggressive stance. So there's a lot of consistent public messaging about [the negotiation position]. But privately, there's a lot of concern about that.
In the Lower Basin, California and Arizona are working together pretty closely. But that long-standing tension associated with California's senior rights on the river…1 I would expect that tension to continue to be an important issue, and ultimately it’s already led California to compromise some on that point.
Q: Speaking of political chaos within the Basin and outside of the Basin, can you describe the role of the federal government in the Colorado River Basin, and how you're watching this administration change in light of that role?
Fleck: The most important role that the federal government has always played is this role of creating the organizing diplomatic structure by which the states can work out their disagreements. And it's based on this idea that the states understand best how to figure out how to share a river.
What happens when we no longer have a reliable federal government?
One of the things that we could always rely on was the technical staff at Reclamation managing the physical infrastructure of the dams… And I'm imagining what happens if the person who knows how to twiddle that particular water release gate at that particular dam just takes the crazy buyout and leaves.
What happened with the Success Reservoir and the Army Corps of Engineers in California, that was a wake-up call.
It’s terrifying, but it also suggests this interesting question: What do we—as the water users and local communities and states—what do we do? We all used to get mad at the federal government but there was a predictability about the process that is gone now.
Q: You broke some news a couple weeks ago of Anne Castle stepping down [as the federal appointee on the Upper Colorado River Commission].
What do you make of her resignation letter, because she speaks directly to the releases from reservoirs in California’s Central Valley and talks about how upending “carefully crafted compromises” and creating “winners and losers” could affect millions of people in the Colorado River Basin.
Fleck: The strongly-worded language in her resignation letter and the very public way she criticized, in particular, the clear chaos strategy, or tactic, of what the Trump administration did in the San Joaquin Valley—just open up the dams for a press release and a photo-op—was a pretty clear indication that Anne was signaling this is extremely problematic and not the way we should be doing things in federal water management.
When she talks about these “carefully crafted” agreements, what she's talking about is this process by which communities come together at the local and state level, interacting with reliable federal partners to craft the necessary compromises to manage declining water supplies in the face of competing and conflicting values. That’s how we solve large-scale, social collective-action problems.
As soon as you have Leviathan in the form of the federal government thinking we know the right answer, here be dragons. That's a very troubling signal that the federal government knows best, because local water users, I believe, know best.
Local water users always, first and foremost, want more water, but they also have to interact with their neighbors—the folks upstream, the folks downstream, the folks in the city have to talk to the folks who farm around them. The shared use of the space and the resource. For the federal government to signal we're going to take charge is just really troubling.
Q: Do you have a sense of how the states are looking at that. Is it pushing people toward coming up with a compromise faster so they have a united front? Are other people seeing opportunities?
Fleck: The first and foremost answer is, I don't know. There is such chaos right now.
There are a couple of things I'm beginning to see glimmerings of. One is at least the possibility that the states are realizing that they have to get off the stick and figure out a path forward on their own because of the risk of the federal imposition of a solution that they won't like.
But a lot of what’s happening is folks at the local level are looking at [operational questions]. We had a WaterSMART grant, are we going to get that money? The federal government said they were going to fix that widget over there. Are they going to be able to fix it? Can we spend the money? Can we trust them?
It's an interesting focus on, suddenly, these local nuts-and-bolts things that we used to reliably take for granted.
One other thing: Watching the recent storms
Visited the Yolo Bypass between Davis and Sacramento on Sunday, and there’s a lot of water out there from the recent storms.
Looks like I got there right around the peak on Sunday (at least for now). Here’s what the storms looked like on the California Nevada River Forecast Center:
And it appears more is on the way.
Will check back in (hopefully) later this week with more updates.
This is a reference to a deal California made in the 1960s when Arizona sought passage of federal legislation to build the Central Arizona Project. Using its political clout, California was able to get Arizona to agree that in shortages, Central Arizona Project water would be cut before California’s allocation, giving the state priority.
Great post! I started learning about the Colorado River and all the divvying up in 2023 when I spent the summer on Colorado's Western Slope, working with local farms part-time. I got to attend a 2 1/2 hour presentation by someone knowledgeable about the politics and ecology, etc., of the whole situation. It's really an important set of issues that affect many people and ecosystems, as you know! I'm also familiar with the basin from the Gila in NM and AZ, and with all the agriculture in SoCal that's fed by this system. The cottonfields in AZ are obscene, I have to say.
This summer I'll be working on a farm on the north fork of the Gunnison River, which flows into the Colorado at Grand Junction. I'm currently near Ridgway, by the Uncompahgre and I can tell you there hasn't been much snowfall this year, which is obviously worrisome for the upcoming season.
That situation with the Army Corps of Engineers in California was so ridiculous. I read a few more details somewhere else. It sounds like they were stopped from doing what they were planning, which would likely have flooded communities downstream. <eye roll>