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Joshua Lott

When a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/22/colorado-river-water-conservation-deal-states/" target=_blank>deal to protect the Colorado River’s</a> water supply finally came together after a year of contentious negotiations and a marathon weekend of last-minute haggling by phone and video calls that ran well past midnight, whatever sense of achievement the participants felt seemed outweighed by relief and fatigue.

Even as they reached this landmark moment — an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/23/colorado-river-deal-water-cuts-explained/" target=_blank>unprecedented agreement</a> among Arizona, California and Nevada to conserve more than 10 percent of their river supply over the next three years in exchange for $1.2 billion in federal funds — there was little clean or definitive about the resolution.

Within  hours, Arizona’s negotiator stressed at a news conference that the deal was simply “an agreement to submit a proposal.” The four northern states along the river signed off on further study of the plan but would concede little else. The negotiations wrapped up with a call to immediately start another multi-year round of talks.

It was a fitting ending for a year of fear and frustration along the Colorado River.

Why the Colorado River is important

The Colorado River runs through seven states and supplies more than 40 million people with water, and is a major resource for agriculture in the western U.S. But <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/05/colorado-river-drought-explained/" target=_blank>the river has been drying up for decades</a>, and water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead — both reservoirs on the river — hit historic lows in the past year.

What’s causing the Colorado River to dry up?

A combination of chronic water overuse and historic drought, accelerated by a warming climate, is draining the river. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/03/colorado-river-negotiations-water-snowpack/" target=_blank>Snow has been abundant in California this year</a>, and while the snowpack helps replenish the reservoirs, it won’t solve the Colorado River crisis or reverse the effects of a 23-year drought.

What’s being done to save the Colorado River?

It’s complicated. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/11/colorado-river-biden-review/" target=_blank>States could agree to cut back on their water use, or the federal government could step in</a>. But cuts could affect the farming regions that keep supermarkets stocked with fresh produce in the winter months, or populations of cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles, or both. If nothing is done, experts fear the impact could be even worse.

Faced with a slow-moving environmental crisis with grave implications for the West, the Biden administration and the seven states that rely on the river’s water stumbled through a process that officials on all sides described, at times, as dysfunctional.

The result is a stopgap until more durable rules can be negotiated. The temporary solution does not fully reckon with the chilling trends now apparent as the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/05/18/lake-level-decline-climate-change/" target=_blank>warming climate puts water supplies</a> at ever greater risk.

The problems with the negotiations arose partly from the size of the task. The amount of water that the administration was asking states to cut from their farms and cities had never been tried. It meant immediate economic pain across the Southwest: farms out of production, thousands of jobs lost, higher vegetable prices and water bills. And the consequences of failure were even worse: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/18/changes-needed-save-second-largest-us-reservoir-experts-say/" target=_blank>dried up reservoirs</a> that abruptly interrupted the water supply to tens of millions of people.

Ricky Carioti

But power struggles between officials also complicated the work. The state negotiators — who tend to be veteran water bureaucrats steeped in the complex technical jargon of reservoir operations and water rights — felt frustrated with mixed messages coming from the Interior Department, which led to an internal shake-up at the department.

Leadership at the Interior Department, meanwhile, struggled against the clubby and insular culture among state water authorities who have hashed out deals on how the Colorado River should be shared for more than a century. Those deals have often come at the expense of Native Americans and Mexico. <a href="https://www.doi.gov/secretary-deb-haaland" target=_blank>Interior Secretary Deb Haaland</a>, the first Native American to hold the position, wanted a more inclusive process that heard from the 30 tribes in the Colorado River basin.

In the end, a record-breaking <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/08/california-snowpack-flooding-worries/" target="_blank">deluge of snow and rain</a> this winter, and a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/08/07/senate-inflation-reduction-act-climate/" target="_blank">mountain of federal dollars</a>, opened a path to consensus and avoided, at least for now, a battle in the courts.

This account of the past year of negotiations is based on interviews with more than 20 participants and people close to the daunting effort to stabilize the Colorado River and protect Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

“This last year has been one heck of an experience. Now we get to do it all over again,” JB Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, said in an interview. “We can’t afford to screw this up.”

As President Biden took office, the Colorado River’s predicament looked increasingly perilous and impossible to ignore. A <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/16/drought-west-california-mountains/" target=_blank>drought that started in 2000</a> marked the driest period in more than a century, shrinking the river’s natural flow by 20 percent. Climate change was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/climate-environment/climate-change-colorado-utah-hot-spot/" target=_blank>making the region hotter and drier</a>. Snow was melting earlier in the year and less runoff was reaching Lake Mead and Lake Powell. These lakes had fallen to about one-quarter full and were approaching levels where hydroelectric dams could fail and water might not flow to millions of people.

“There’s so much to this that is unprecedented,” Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, told the Senate in June.

Her demands would be, too. In <a href="https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/6CB52BDD-57B8-4358-BF6B-72E40F86F510" target=_blank>her testimony that day</a> to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where she had been a staffer just three years earlier, Touton laid out the need to conserve 2 to 4 million additional acre feet of water — up to one-third of the river’s average annual flow. She called on the states to “figure this out” in just two months.

Her testimony landed like a thunderclap out West. There had been belt-tightening cutbacks on water usage before. But nothing like this. The most recent round of cutbacks, in 2019, took nearly six years to negotiate. Touton had given the states just 63 days to find a deal. And she warned that the administration was prepared to make unilateral cuts if the states couldn’t agree.

In the states that would bear the brunt of these cuts — Arizona, California, and Nevada, known as the Lower Basin — there was angst about how a deal could be reached in such a short time. The upper end of the administration’s range of proposed cuts — 4 million acre-feet of water — was almost as much as the entire allocation of the river for California, the biggest user, who distributed it to millions of people around Los Angeles and to major <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/16/colorado-river-crisis-imperial-valley-california/" target=_blank>farming regions such as the Imperial Valley</a>. One acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons of water.

Francis Chung/E&E News/POLITICO

Roger Kisby

Many people, including officials inside Interior, were dismayed that Touton would issue such an unprecedented demand with no apparent plan to enforce it if the states failed to reach a deal in two months.

“This isn’t the way we normally do business,” said Terry Fulp, who spent three decades with Reclamation, including eight years as the Lower Colorado River Basin regional director until retiring in 2020.

A few days before Touton’s testimony, Lower Basin and Interior officials had gathered at Liberty Station, a waterfront development in San Diego. Members of California’s delegation felt ambushed by others demanding the state shoulder cuts of at least 1 million acre-feet per year, despite having legal priority to the water over other states through a series of agreements, compacts and court cases that date back to 1922 and constitute what is known as the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/05/colorado-river-drought-explained/" target=_blank>‘Law of the River.’</a>

“It was like, what?” one participant recalled. “Let’s completely ignore all of the Law of the River stuff? Lets throw that out and just have California give up a quarter of its supply suddenly out of nowhere?”

California negotiators at one point retreated to a bathroom to strategize.

The confusion grew in early July, when state negotiators began hearing from some Interior officials concerned about the department’s legal authority to impose unilateral cuts on the states.

“That’s when it became clear to us,” said one Lower Basin state official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. “We’re on our own.”

In early July, Tanya Trujillo, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, informed state negotiators that the August date set by Touton was not a hard deadline, according to three participants on the call. Interior, it became clear, would not be making cuts anytime soon.

Without the threat of federal action, the momentum to reach a deal soon fizzled among the states.

“That had a chilling effect,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources and the governor’s representative to the negotiation. “The stick that was hauled out in Congress, in [Touton’s] testimony, that stick was gone.”

Looking back on that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/16/colorado-river-bureau-of-reclamation/" target=_blank>missed August deadline</a>, some state negotiators feel an opportunity was lost to lock-in water conservation without spending such a large amount of taxpayer money.

The moment also exemplified the mixed messages coming from Interior. Many saw Trujillo, an experienced water lawyer and the former executive director of the Colorado River Board of California, as more fluent in the Lower Basin’s traditions and protocols, but less willing than Touton to push for major changes to the rules, particularly without clear legal authority.

Trujillo and Touton did not respond to a request for comment.

After the August deadline had passed with no deal, Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau pushed for a new strategy. An energy lawyer who spent part of his childhood in Alaska, Beaudreau was tasked to be the point person within the department on the Colorado River. He became more directly engaged in the talks and tried to stabilize the floundering process.

Interior’s plan, starting in the fall, was to formally revise 2007 rules that govern operations at <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/11/lake-powell-water-levels-rising-drought/" target="_blank">Lake Powell</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/27/lake-mead-reservoir-drought/" target="_blank">Lake Mead</a>. That would give the states context for the negotiations and key details about how water reductions could be distributed. It also functioned as a legal bulwark in the event of future lawsuits, defining Haaland’s authority to impose emergency cuts to protect residents’ health and safety.

Negotiating teams kept meeting throughout the winter, as a barrage of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/01/05/california-weather-explained-pineapple-express-storm/" target="_blank">atmospheric rivers</a> pummeled the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/05/flooding-california-atmospheric-river/" target="_blank">California coast</a> and snows piled up in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/local/weather/on-the-ground-for-californias-historic-snowfall/2023/03/03/d17ab7cf-9718-4be4-95fe-38367ab48709_video.html" target="_blank">Sierra Nevada</a> and the Rocky Mountains, promising a big <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/05/23/california-snowpack-big-melt-risk/" target="_blank">runoff year</a> into reservoirs.

On Jan. 26, they gathered at Woolley’s Classic Suites, a hotel near the Denver airport. Interior had asked for proposals on potential cuts by the following week. Six of the states were coalescing around a plan that would assign cuts based on evaporation of the river, an approach that would hit California particularly hard.

California negotiators were caught off guard that lawyers and technical staff from the other states had arrived early and were huddling at the hotel, already writing proposals.

“We shared that with California,” recalled Estevan Lopez, New Mexico’s representative on Colorado River issues. “And we weren’t quite able to get there.”

Lopez said there was “definitely a lot of tension” in that Denver meeting; another negotiator described the mood as “acrimonious.” The two states that had the most to lose from big cuts, Arizona and California, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/31/colorado-river-states-water-cuts-agreement/" target=_blank>failed to agree</a> on a way forward.

Rebecca Noble

By February, the talks appeared stuck. With multiple missed deadlines, White House officials had also becoming increasingly concerned by the process, and wanted answers from Interior on how the department planned to reach a deal.

That month, Beaudreau held separate conference calls with Upper and Lower Basin officials to clarify the lines of command. Lower Basin officials related that the turmoil and strife was not helpful, and they wanted clear direction from Interior.

Beaudreau informed state officials that he would be in charge, along with Touton, in the months ahead.

Trujillo, the assistant secretary, was taken off the Colorado River negotiations.

“Whatever power struggle that was going on internally had resolved,” said one Lower Basin water official involved in the talks. “They wasted six months, or nine months, and a lot of time and effort.”

In an interview, Beaudreau said that during those calls, he stressed solving the Colorado River crisis “is the highest priority in the department.”

“I will give this all the time it needs,” he said.

When the <a href="https://www.usbr.gov/ColoradoRiverBasin/SEIS.html" target=_blank>476-page draft environmental review</a> was published last month, it laid out two alternatives on how the federal government might impose cuts on the states: One strictly followed water rights priority, favoring farming regions at the expense of major cities; the other called for Arizona, California, and Nevada to take an equal percentage of cuts.

The states didn’t like either alternative, which represented painful trade-offs and potential lawsuits.

“Everyone hated them for some reason,” said one state negotiator, who conceded it was an effective negotiating tactic by the federal government. “That’s actually right where you want to be if you’re pushing people to get together.”

Arizona and California — who consume far more water than Nevada — had the most at stake in the negotiations.

As the failed Denver meeting in January was wrapping up, Buschatzke said he tapped Hamby on the shoulder and proposed they meet one-on-one to keep talking. The following month, Buschatzke drove from Phoenix to meet Hamby at the River City Grill in Yuma, Ariz., across the state line from where Hamby lived in California’s Imperial Valley.

“We both wanted to see if we could get the ball rolling again in a more positive direction. And that’s what started it,” Buschatzke recalled.

That led to discussions in the spring among Lower Basin officials in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Burbank — where a plan took shape to use commitments among farmers, cities, Native American tribes and others within their states to make voluntary water conservation, paid for with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, over the next three years.

The amount of snow beginning to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/03/30/mountain-west-utah-record-snow/" target=_blank>melt off the Rocky Mountains</a> also eased the crisis and far reduced what was necessary to keep the reservoirs above critical levels. But Lower Basin officials also wanted to extricate themselves from the federal environmental review process, which could enhance Interior’s power to impose cuts in the future.

“California and Arizona recognize that, for the most part, it’s their issue to work out,” said Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s Colorado River commissioner, said at the time. “They both know that if they can’t work it out, an imposed solution could be more harmful than a negotiated resolution.”

John Locher

On April 21, John Entsminger, Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager, presented the Lower Basin’s proposal to Beaudreau and Touton at his offices in Las Vegas. The response was not good. The Interior officials opposed the idea of abandoning the federal review process and the request for compensation for all water savings. Beaudreau and Touton walked out to confer but eventually came back, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

That night, Beaudreau’s flight home got canceled. He slept in the Las Vegas airport.

But even with these hurdles, the Lower Basin and the federal government were nearing a solution. The parties made progress in subsequent meetings and grew closer to acceptable terms. They were settled in late-night negotiations last weekend, leaving the parties exhausted when an agreement was finally struck.

Hamby made it through five minutes of “Succession” before crashing.  Entsminger got just three hours of sleep. In Washington, Interior Department officials didn’t wrap up until about 2 a.m. Monday.

The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/23/colorado-river-deal-water-cuts-explained/" target=_blank>eventual deal</a> was that the Lower Basin would commit to conserving 3 million acre feet over three years — 13 percent of its allocation of the river. Of that, 2.3 million acre-feet would be compensated, amounting to $1.2 billion in federal funds. The environmental review process would continue but by analyzing the new plan.

On Monday morning, after the deal was announced, Entsminger said his state’s modeling shows the agreement keeps reservoirs higher over the next three years than the two alternatives it replaced because it front-loads water savings this year and next.

He said he felt “very solid comfort” that the deal would be implemented, even though Lower Basin states haven’t finalized exactly where the water savings will come from.

Matt McClain

The Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism 2018

Fellow at Woodrow Wilson Center, spring 2013

Fellow at Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, fall 2012

Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award 2010

A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster 

Duke University, BA, 2000

Columbia University, MS in journalism, 2002

Columbia University, MA in international relations, 2003

Joshua Partlow is a reporter on the The Washington Post’s national desk. He has served previously as the bureau chief in Mexico City, Kabul, Rio de Janeiro, and as a correspondent in Baghdad. 

Josh Partlow

How the Colorado River deal was reached in a year's worth of negotiations

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Lake Powell And The Colorado River Is Receding Due To The Recent Drought In Marble Canyon, Arizona.

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