Las Vegas Sun: Nevada warns of tough choices as Colorado River deadline approaches

There’s around a year left for the seven states utilizing Colorado River water to finalize new rules on how to manage it, but the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s Colby Pellegrino said Thursday morning that negotiations were in a difficult spot.

Despite the hard deadline of October 2026, President Donald Trump’s administration has indicated that states must reach a preliminary agreement by mid-November. Missing that risks the federal government unilaterally imposing rules on the Colorado River states, the “worst case scenario,” according to U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev.

Pellegrino said she hoped the involved states could meet the deadline, but that “the reality is, it’s a really tough set of negotiations right now.” There have been regular meetings, however, she said.

Under the current agreement of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, Nevada receives a yearly allocation of 300,000 acre-feet of water — or 4% of the water allocated to the Lower Basin states. Those Lower Basin states — Nevada, California and Arizona — combine to receive 7.5 million acre-feet per year from the river.

Nevada and Arizona just learned the Bureau of Reclamation was cutting their Colorado River allocations this year ecause of a “Level 1 Shortage Condition.” Nevada’s allocation is being reduced by 7%, or 21,000 acre-feet; Arizona is being hit with an 18% reduction, or 512,000 acre-feet, of its annual river allocation. An acre-foot of water is about 325,000 gallons.

California won’t face any cuts because it has senior water rights among Lower Basin states and is the last to lose in times of shortage.

When Lake Mead drops below set thresholds, the Bureau of Reclamation requires water cuts for the Lower Basin states under shortage rules. Upper Basin states have avoided these cuts because the average 10-year river flow remains above the compact trigger, but experts say ongoing drought could bring future Upper Basin reductions if conditions worsen.

Dealing with climate change, overuse and an extended drought, the Colorado River and Lake Mead, its largest reservoir, continue to struggle. The federal government projected that Lake Mead’s elevation would drop to 1,037 feet in July 2027. That would be a historic low, breaking 2022’s record of 1,041 feet. Lake Mead’s capacity, or full pool level, is 1,229 feet.

Lee, speaking with reporters at the representative’s third annual water summit Thursday, said everyone involved in the negotiations process wants to avoid the federal government stepping into the fray and making decisions.

But Pellegrino half-jokingly said that nothing was completely agreed upon yet. It’s a “package deal,” she explained, meaning that specifics can’t be solidified without everything else also in place.

One “focal point”’ of recent conversations has been using the river’s “natural flow” to decide how much water should be released from Lake Powell, another reservoir on the Colorado upstream from Lake Mead, she said, making it more responsive to a changing Colorado.

The “natural flow” plan has been praised as a breakthrough by negotiators, Politico reported in July.

But negotiations are difficult because each party beyond those expecting to take a cut has an argument about why they shouldn’t also bear additional reductions, Pellegrino said.

Ranchers in the Upper Basin — the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — are already dealing with less water than they’ve historically used, Pellegrino said as an example. But farmers in Arizona can also say that their region has “already taken significant cuts,” she continued.

Lee said uncertainty surrounding federally funded investments related to water conservation and infrastructure also complicated discussions.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Joe Biden in 2021, gave the Bureau of Reclamation $8.3 billion for water infrastructure projects. Soon after returning to the White House in January, Trump attempted to freeze disbursements from that legislation.

Pellegrino said her team had a “fire drill” earlier this year, figuring out which projects had federal funding and what should be prioritized if grants were taken away. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is now moving ahead “unencumbered” by those previous concerns, she said.