This photo from December 2021 shows the famous “bathtub ring” at Lake Mead due to declining water levels. Voluntary plans proposed by the upper basin states and municipal water providers won’t do much to get more water into lakes Mead or Powell in the near future.

Christopher Tomlinson/The Daily Sentinel

FILE PHOTO - The Colorado River flows toward Fruita, as seen in an aerial shot, with Colorado National Monument and McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area in the background. The Colorado feeds into Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which are fast deteriorating toward “dead pool” status.

HUGH CAREY/The Colorado Sun via AP

The Colorado River flows along Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon.

Christopher Tomlinson/The Daily Sentinel

FILE PHOTO - The Colorado River flows toward Fruita, as seen in an aerial shot, with Colorado National Monument and McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area in the background. The Colorado feeds into Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which are fast deteriorating toward “dead pool” status.

Officials from up and down the Colorado River Basin on Friday talked in Grand Junction about the shared challenge of reducing water usage amid dwindling supply, with some Upper Basin representatives suggesting that the first step needs to address Lower Basin usage.

Andy Mueller, general manager of western Colorado’s Colorado River District, said at the annual water seminar that his entity puts on that everyone in the basin needs to come to the table with solutions for reducing usage.

But before that can occur, he said the federal Bureau of Reclamation needs to address the fact that the way river water is currently divvied up between Upper and Lower Basin states doesn’t account for evaporation and transit loss in the Lower Basin that amounts to 1.2 million acre-feet a year.

“The key here is getting the accounting fixed and then recognizing that we all have an obligation to participate (in conservation measures) as well,” Mueller said.

He warned that alternatively the river district may consider pursuing litigation to make that fix happen.

Friday’s event at Colorado Mesa University comes as the Colorado River Compact that divvies up river water between the Upper and Lower basins turns 100 years old this year. Drought and a warming climate have reduced precipitation and streamflows in the basin during the last 20 or so years that the compact has been in effect. While it allocated 7.5 million acre-feet a year to each of the basins, the watershed doesn’t produce that volume of water. Water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at less than a quarter of what they can hold, which is threatening their ability to produce hydroelectric power and raising the prospect of them reaching “deadpool” and being no longer functional.

The Lower Basin has been using more water than allocated to it under the 1922 compact, and the Upper Basin, far less than its share.

In addition, Mueller said, evaporation of water in federal Upper Basin reservoirs such as Powell, Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa gets attributed to the usage by the Upper Basin, which he said makes sense.

But evaporation and transit losses aren’t calculated into Lower Basin usage, which Mueller, an attorney, said is “probably illegal in the context of the river.”

He said the Bureau of Reclamation needs to fix that, but doesn’t want to because of the pain it would cause in the Lower Basin and the potential for resulting litigation.

This photo from December 2021 shows the famous “bathtub ring” at Lake Mead due to declining water levels. Voluntary plans proposed by the upper basin states and municipal water providers won’t do much to get more water into lakes Mead or Powell in the near future.

Mueller then added, “I just want to be clear, from my perspective and the river district’s, there very well may be litigation if they don’t fix this problem, from us, because if their threat is to come after our federal projects in the Upper Basin we will defend those projects.”

Already, the Bureau of Reclamation has been making some water releases from Upper Basin federal reservoirs such as Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa to try to shore up levels in Lake Powell.

Earlier this year, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton told the Upper and Lower Basin states to come up with 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water through means such as conservation to address low levels in Powell and Mead, or face action by the Bureau of Reclamation to protect the system.

Upper Basin states offered a plan without specific water volumes in it, and the Lower Basin was unable to come up with a plan by the August deadline Touton set, though Reclamation has yet to take further action on her ultimatum.

Steve Wolff, general manager of Colorado’s Southwestern Water Conservation District, recalled at Friday’s forum that during drought-contingency discussions in 2013, the Upper Basin put out as a prime negotiating topic the need for the Lower Basin to permanently reduce its annual use of the river to 7 million acre-feet.

HUGH CAREY/The Colorado Sun via AP

The Colorado River flows along Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon.

“I think that (that reduction) is a big first step for Upper Basin users to be incentivized to use less water than might be available to them. ... That’s got to happen first,” Wolff said.

Patrick Dent is assistant general manager of water policy at the Central Arizona Project, which already has been taking significant cuts due to the basin’s water shortage.

He said he thinks accounting for evaporation loss might be a great tool for Reclamation to use in further addressing that shortage.

But he also said every water-using entity in the basin needs to be making a plan for how to use 20% to 30% less water.

He said he took issue with the sentiment he was hearing Friday involving a “quid quo pro” associated with what some other water users might need to do.

“If we think ... time is short and we think resources are minimal, then we need to find a way to move forward as quickly as we can and we can’t necessarily stand on the side and say ‘I’ll go after somebody else goes,’ ” he said.

Bart Leeflang, program manager with the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, warned against approaching the situation in terms of winners and losers.

“I have to say in Utah we really like salads in the middle of winter, and I think that probably holds true in Colorado, and I’m guessing a lot of our salads in the winter come from Yuma,” he said, referring to the Arizona community along the Colorado River.

“We all have legitimate, defensible stakes in the river and we really can’t just sit and say, you know, I’m really happy that it’s not my end of the boat that’s sinking, because we’re all in the same boat together,” he said.

J.B. Hamby, with the Imperial Irrigation District in California, said that recently collaboration has gone out the window within the basin and finger-pointing has begun, which doesn’t really help.

He described reductions in river use California already has made, and said the state is working to leave millions of acre-feet in Lake Mead over the next four years to preserve the river system.

“We might all have to live with a little bit less so we can all have a river in perpetuity,” he said.

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