WASHINGTON — After months of fruitless negotiations between the states that depend on the shrinking Colorado River, the Biden administration on Tuesday proposed to put aside legal precedent and save what’s left of the river by evenly cutting water allotments, reducing the water delivered to California, Arizona and Nevada by as much as one-quarter.
The size of those reductions and the prospect of the federal government unilaterally imposing them on states have never occurred in U.S. history.
Overuse and a 23-year-long drought made worse by climate change have threatened to provoke a water and power catastrophe across the West. The Colorado River supplies drinking water to 40 million Americans as well as two states in Mexico, and it irrigates 5.5 million agricultural acres. The electricity generated by dams on the river’s two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, powers millions of homes and businesses.
But the river’s flows have recently fallen by one-third compared with historical averages. Levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell are so low that water may soon fail to turn the turbines that generate electricity — and could even fall to the point that water is unable to reach the intake valves that control its flow out of the reservoirs. If that happened, the river would essentially stop moving.
The Biden administration is desperately trying to prevent that situation, known as deadpool. But it faces a political and ethical dilemma: How to divvy up the cuts required.
The Interior Department, which manages the river, released a draft analysis Tuesday that considered three options.
The first alternative was taking no action — a path that would risk deadpool. The other two options are making reductions based on the most senior water rights, or evenly distributing them across Arizona, California and Nevada, by reducing water deliveries by as much as 13% beyond what each state has already agreed to.
If changes were based on seniority of water rights, California, which among the seven states is the largest and oldest user of Colorado River water, would mostly be spared. But that would greatly harm Nevada and force disastrous reductions on Arizona: the aqueduct that carries drinking water to Phoenix and Tucson would be reduced almost to zero.
“Those are consequences that we would not allow to happen,” Tommy Beaudreau, the deputy secretary for the Interior Department, said in an interview Monday.
Arizona and Nevada are both important swing states for President Joe Biden, if he decides to run again next year. Both states also have Senate seats valuable to Democrats that will be on the ballot in 2024.
Chuck Coughlin, a political consultant who worked for former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, said that if the Biden administration limits the pain imposed on Arizona, he had “no doubt” it would benefit Biden politically.
Another challenge with letting the cuts fall disproportionately on Arizona: Doing so would hurt the Native American tribes that rely on that water, and whose rights to it are guaranteed by treaty. Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community, which is entitled to a significant share of Colorado River water, said the goal should be “a consensual approach that we can all live with.”
Spreading the reductions evenly would reduce the impact on tribes in Arizona, and also help protect the state’s fast-growing cities. But it would hurt Southern California’s agriculture industry, which helps feed the nation, as well as invite lawsuits. The long-standing legal precedent, often called the law of the river, has been to allocate water based on seniority of water rights.
The draft analysis did not formally endorse any option; a final analysis is expected this summer.