Arizona, California and Nevada's plan for conserving at least 3 million acre feet of water will be more effective at staving off the threat of two primary Colorado River reservoirs falling to "critical elevations" over the next three years than current guidelines, the Bureau of Reclamation said Wednesday.
The agency, in a draft supplemental environmental impact statement over options to preserve water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead, said a deal made by the three Lower Basin states in May would more effectively protect both reservoirs through the end of 2026 than the status quo.
The agency will now open up a 45-day comment period on the draft SEIS.
"The Colorado River Basin’s reservoirs, including its two largest storage reservoirs Lake Powell and Lake Mead, remain at historically low levels," Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton said in a statement. "Today’s advancement protects the system in the near-term while we continue to develop long-term, sustainable plans to combat the climate-driven realities facing the Basin."
The assessment was a revised version of a draft supplemental environmental impact statement the agency published in March amid state gridlock in discussions over Colorado River cuts, which proposed two sharply different options: prioritize reductions based on water rights seniority or distribute cuts evenly across all Lower Basin water users. The agency withdrew that SEIS after the three Lower Basin states jointly proposed a conservation plan.
Under the Lower Basin states' plan, water users would be compensated for up to 2.3 million acre-feet of reductions with Inflation Reduction Act funding. The remaining 700,000 acre feet or more of water included in the plan would either go uncompensated or be paid for using state or local funds.
Reclamation, in the new SEIS, said the Lower Basin plan achieved "many of the same objectives" as the options it weighed in the previous SEIS, including "reducing the potential that continued low-runoff conditions could lead Lake Powell and Lake Mead to decline to critically low elevations; protecting critical infrastructure at both reservoirs; and balancing overall operational risks in the Colorado River Basin."
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J.B. Hamby, the chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, called the SEIS an "encouraging development."
"It's encouraging to see the numbers that Reclamation has developed that demonstrate that this level of conservation done on this voluntary basis with this federal partnership with conservation funding is going to be able to protect the system, or provide the best method to protect the system for the interim period," Hamby told Agri-Pulse on Wednesday.
The Arizona Department of Water Resources, in a statement, said state negotiators will now turn their attention to crafting post-2026 guidelines.
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Brad Hooker contributed to this report.
