The Colorado River remains the most volatile flashpoint. Shrinking snowpack in the Rockies has pushed both Lake Mead and Lake Powell toward dangerously low levels, and federal officials have spent years trying to get California, Arizona, Nevada and other states that rely on the river to agree on how to share the pain of a shrinking supply. So far, consensus has proven elusive. California draws less from the river than its neighbors, but that hasn’t kept the region out of the fight. When the Bureau of Reclamation recently stepped in with temporary rules governing river operations, Nevada responded with a lawsuit, and Arizona has signaled it may do the same.

Closer to home, momentum is building behind the long-discussed Sites Reservoir, an off-stream storage project planned for the west side of the Sacramento Valley. The idea of capturing extra water during wet years and holding it for drier times is not new, but concerns about diminishing snowpack have given the project fresh urgency. Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing to finalize the project before his term ends in four months, and the State Water Resources Control Board recently released a draft decision on the water rights Sites would need. Before the reservoir — envisioned to hold 1.5 million acre-feet of water — can move forward with financing, it must first secure the right to draw from the Sacramento River.

Newsom is also racing to advance another ambitious and long-stalled project: a tunnel that would reroute Sacramento River water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, improving deliveries south through the California Aqueduct. Conveyance projects like this have been debated in some form for more than six decades without ever making it across the finish line. Supporters argue the tunnel would relieve stress on the Delta’s fragile ecosystem, while opponents, including several environmental organizations, warn it could deepen existing problems. Assembling the regulatory approvals and financial commitments needed from water agencies that stand to benefit has proven just as difficult this time around.

Meanwhile, a separate but related struggle is playing out over the San Joaquin River. Even as the state pushes forward with a plan to divert Sacramento River water away from the Delta, it is simultaneously asking San Joaquin Valley farmers to send more water into the Delta by cutting back on their own river diversions. Those reductions were originally framed as voluntary, but state officials have been preparing mandatory measures in case voluntary offers fall short. Last week, Westlands Water District — the largest in the valley — withdrew from voluntary talks, arguing the state was steering the process toward coercion rather than cooperation. If mandatory cutbacks are eventually imposed, a legal fight over the state’s authority to override established water rights seems likely.

Adding to the tension are ongoing restrictions on how much water farmers can pump from underground aquifers. Some projections suggest that shrinking water supplies could force as much as 900,000 acres of farmland out of production altogether. That threat prompted major agricultural groups to lobby state lawmakers last week, successfully pushing through legislation that makes it easier to convert farmland currently protected as open space into sites for solar energy development.

Taken together, these four battles — over the Colorado River, the Sites Reservoir, the Delta tunnel and San Joaquin River diversions — represent the central fault lines in California’s water future. How state and federal officials navigate them in the months ahead will go a long way toward determining who gets water, how much, and under what terms, for generations to come.

Original source: CalMatters

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The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation last week released a 10-year framework for the river, but rather than settling how California, Arizona, Nevada and the upper basin states will divide increasingly scarce water, the plan simply sets broad outer limits. Actual operating rules will now be revisited every two years, leaving water agencies to plan in short bursts rather than decades, as they have in the past.

The stakes are high. Longtime agreements dating to 2007 — negotiated in under three years and lasting nearly 20 — expire at the end of this year. This time around, talks have dragged on longer and produced far less certainty, even as the river’s reservoirs sink toward historic lows.

Under the new federal framework, California, Arizona and Nevada could eventually face cuts of up to 40% to their shared allocation. The plan also permits Lake Powell releases to drop low enough that they risk breaching legal delivery requirements to downstream states. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to soon announce the first two-year operating plan, which sources say will cut California’s Colorado River supply by roughly 10% — about 440,000 acre-feet annually — through 2028. No mandatory reductions are expected for the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, reflecting the federal government’s limited authority to compel cuts there.

For Southern California water managers, the lack of a durable, long-term deal complicates already difficult planning.

“A cut is never fun, but you can deal with it,” said Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District. “But not if you say, ‘Well, we have a cut here, and then maybe a cut in two years, and maybe another cut in two more years.’ We need to plan for our future, and this deal does not let us do that.”

Metropolitan supplies water to roughly 19 million people across six counties, blending Colorado River supplies with imports from Northern California. When those Northern California supplies ran low during the last drought, six million Southern Californians faced unprecedented restrictions in 2022. Officials worry that Colorado River uncertainty could deepen the impact of the next dry spell.

“There’s a good chance it’ll be as bad as it’s been, and there’s a reasonable chance that it’ll be worse,” said Keith Nobriga, an operations manager at Metropolitan focused on long-term climate planning.

The unresolved river negotiations also complicate decisions on two massive, multibillion-dollar projects: the proposed Sites Reservoir north of Sacramento and the long-debated Delta tunnel, which would move more Northern California water south. Metropolitan’s board, given its financial weight and water needs, will play a major role in whether either project moves forward. The district has already spent hundreds of millions on tunnel planning and roughly $31 million on Sites, but has not committed to funding construction or accepting water from either. A recycled-water initiative with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, called Pure Water Southern California, adds another variable to the equation.

Nobriga compared the strategy to buying insurance — spending money now to keep projects viable without committing to a specific solution until the need becomes clear.

“We’ll keep these projects alive. We’ll keep looking down the road,” he said. “And if it gets to a point where we really think these droughts are imminent, then we’ll construct and pay the big money for one or several of these projects. We don’t know which ones yet.”

Agricultural interests are similarly caught in limbo. The Imperial Irrigation District, which uses the largest share of California’s Colorado River allocation to irrigate roughly half a million acres of alfalfa, winter vegetables and other crops, struck a deal with the Biden administration worth more than half a billion dollars to fund short-term conservation. That effort helped raise Lake Mead’s level by more than 12 feet, according to Tina Shields, the district’s water manager. But that funding and its regulatory approvals are expiring, and any new conservation program would require fresh environmental review tied to the Salton Sea, which relies on irrigation runoff.

“That needs to be done on a longer term, not on a two-year term,” Shields said, noting it could take a year or more just to negotiate the necessary environmental approvals. The district has not committed to further reductions. “Our perspective is: We’ve done a lot. We’re doing a lot. It’s challenging to do more,” she said.

Federal officials have so far avoided imposing a top-down solution, instead pushing the seven basin states to reach consensus — an approach that hasn’t worked. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has called on Washington to intervene more forcefully. Tensions between negotiators have spilled into public view: Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke has accused the upper basin of failing to offer meaningful cuts, while Colorado’s Becky Mitchell has argued that the lower basin’s overuse created the current crisis.

Jay Weiner, an attorney representing the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, whose reservation straddles the river, said the federal plan amounts to a temporary fix rather than a real solution. “To a large extent,” he said, “it leaves us at the mercy of this coming winter.”

Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said negotiations tend to succeed when officials build strong working relationships — something that appears to be eroding under the strain of repeated crises. “We have been governing in crisis for a long time,” she said, “and so every time we meet at the table, there’s this big problem to solve. The house is on fire.”

Legal action remains a possibility if lower-basin deliveries fall below legally guaranteed thresholds, but both sides risk unpredictable outcomes in court. For now, Southern California and its neighbors are left managing a shared resource one two-year cycle at a time.

“In essence, this federal action has 40 million people living from paycheck to paycheck on water supply,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist and Metropolitan Water District board member.

Original source: CalMatters

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DENVER (AP) — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday it plans to propose reclassifying a rare Colorado River Basin fish called the razorback sucker from endangered to threatened status after a multiyear and multistate effort throughout the Southwestern U.S. to replenish its populations.

A proposed formal relisting, to be published Wednesday in the Federal Register, would classify the fish as no longer on the brink of extinction. But it would require continued management of the razorback’s survival in the Colorado River and several key tributaries. The Fish and Wildlife Service first said it would recommend the change in 2018.

Hundreds of thousands of razorbacks once thrived in the Colorado River and its tributaries, which flow across seven states and Mexico. By the 1980s, they had dwindled to about 100. Researchers blamed non-native game fish that preyed on the razorbacks and the construction of dams that disrupted their habitat.

Their adult numbers have since reached more than 50,000, thanks to the work of Fish and Wildlife and other federal and state agencies, Native American tribes, hatcheries, dam operators and landowners, said Tom Chart, director of the Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. The program was created in 1988 to rescue the razorback and other endangered aquatic species in the basin.

“The razorback was the most rare species we came across,” Chart said Tuesday. “Today we are finding fish that originated in hatcheries and were stocked out under the program 20 years later, and they’re behaving like they’ve always been in the wild.”

Ancient and odd-looking, the razorback gets its name from a sharp-edge, keel-like ridge along its back behind its head. It can grow up to 3 feet (1 meter) long and live up to 40 years.

Individual fish are protected under endangered status. Threatened status means biologists can take steps to improve the overall population even if some fish might be hurt.

Wildlife advocates oppose the move, saying the fish’s numbers aren’t yet self-sustaining and that climate change is bringing lesser and warmer river flows that will jeopardize the fish’s survival. Drought and increasing human demand are straining the rivers, which makes it harder for fish to survive.

“Our two core concerns here are the perilous climate future of the Colorado River Basin and, despite a robust program for stocking the razorback in the river, almost of none of those fish are reproducing successfully, with the exception of Lake Mead,” said Taylor McKinnon, whose work focuses on endangered species and public lands for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They spawn, but those spawn are being consumed by non-native fish. It precludes establishing self-sustaining populations.”

The proposed relisting acknowledges that “recruitment of razorback sucker to the adult life stage remains rare in all but one population, and the species currently depends on management actions in order for populations to be resilient.”

Chart said Fish and Wildlife has and will work with its partners to address climate change’s effects in the future, especially when it concerns water flow.

“Fundamental to this decision is the razorback sucker is not at risk of extinction now,” he said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”

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