Water experts say the reductions are manageable now. What comes after 2028 is the harder question.

By Piper Heath
The Nevada Independent

Nevada will give up 50,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water a year over the next two years under a federal operating framework released Friday that cuts distributions to three states.

Nevada holds by far the smallest share of the Colorado River of any of the three Lower Basin states — just 300,000 acre-feet, compared with Arizona’s 2.8 million and California’s 4.4 million. And it uses less than it is allocated — only 198,000 acre-feet last year according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), recycling the vast majority of its water and sending it back to Lake Mead for credit. 

That restraint hasn’t been enough to escape the reckoning. 

Nearly a quarter century of drought, worsened by hotter and drier conditions tied to climate change, has pushed combined stored water in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two reservoirs central to the Colorado River system, to its lowest point since 1957.

The temporary rules written in 2007 and expanded in 2019 to manage that decline expire in October. The final environmental impact statement released by the Bureau of Reclamation is the federal government’s answer to a question the states themselves couldn’t agree on: who gives up how much water, and when.

Because the states never reached a deal, Reclamation didn’t adopt a fixed set of rules. Instead it laid out a 10-year framework through 2036 that sets outer limits on how deep cuts can go and how much water can be released, then leaves the specific operating guidelines to be rewritten every two years. 

The framework allows Lower Basin cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet a year, nearly double what the three states proposed in May. The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah — face no mandatory cuts.

Who absorbs those cuts is a separate question. For 2027 and 2028, Reclamation expects to use the split Arizona, California and Nevada negotiated among themselves, but only for the first 1.5 million acre-feet of cuts each year. Anything deeper, and every year after 2028, would be divided by seniority instead — the oldest water rights protected first, the newest cut first.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo said in a statement that the plan “seeks to impose unrealistic reductions on Nevada and our water users” and warned it “could have devastating economic and environmental impacts” on the state if carried forward. He said Nevada has put forward reasonable compromises to the other basin states, and that he would “fight against any outcome that imposes unreasonable impacts to our communities and those living in them.”

John Entsminger, SNWA’s general manager and Nevada’s lead negotiator on the river, said the state is prepared to manage short-term reductions but that the plan introduced Friday is “fundamentally flawed.”

“As the basin’s smallest water user, Nevada cannot solve the river’s imbalance alone,” he said in a statement. “Long-term solutions must recognize that the Colorado River’s challenges are basin-wide and require basin-wide participation.”

The driest conditions Reclamation modeled are a different picture. Nevada could lose more than a third of its allocation in those years — about 36 percent, or roughly 109,000 acre-feet — leaving the state’s allocation at 191,000 acre-feet, close to what it used last year.

“The cut is the type of thing that we can endure quite well,” said Kyle Roerink, a senior adviser with the Great Basin Water Network, a Nevada based water advocacy and conservation group. “It’s what SNWA has been preparing for, what the Legislature has been preparing for. It’s not really something that is going to upend the status quo in the immediate future.”

What Nevadans will notice, he said in an interview prior to the plan’s release on Friday, is pressure rather than shortage: a continued ask from regulators and public officials to respect what scarcity means, including watering restrictions understood “not as something that impedes your life in your community, but as a shared sacrifice for the greater good.” 

The bigger risk is what happens if the snowpack doesn’t recover. 

“We’re one or two bad winters away from getting to really, really scary territory,” Roerink said. “What we need to be doing right now is our snow dances more than anything else.” 

Elizabeth Koebele, a UNR political science professor who studies Colorado River governance, said the state’s ability to build back a cushion is worrying.

“Our runoff and our hydrology is so bad this year that we’re probably not going to be able to rebuild our reservoir storage very much, if at all, to help us weather future challenges,” she said. “These kinds of water supply stressors aren’t going away.”

How Nevada got here

The 1922 Colorado River Compact dividing the river’s water was written during an unusually wet stretch of years — some of the wettest in more than 1,000 years, water law scholar Robert Glennon told Colorado public radio station KUNC — so the negotiators split up more water than the river has reliably produced ever since. 

Nevada came away from that deal with a small piece of an already overpromised river, but the state’s dependence on it has only grown: Colorado River water now makes up nearly 90 percent of the supply for the Las Vegas area’s 2.3 million residents and more than 40 million tourists who visit each year.

Since 2002, SNWA has spent more than $300 million in conservation programs, cutting the region’s consumptive use of Colorado River water by more than 115,000 acre-feet a year even as the area’s population grew by nearly 800,000 people. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land a foot deep — about 326,000 gallons, or enough to supply roughly two to three households for a year — and it’s the standard unit water managers use.

Lake Mead is the reservoir that the authority actually draws its water from, while Lake Powell functions mainly as upstream storage. But a group of Colorado River researchers has argued the two reservoirs should be evaluated as a single system, because water moves between them and each affects how the other operates. Researchers predict that water levels will likely keep declining to record lows until next spring’s snowmelt arrives and argue that deeper and more permanent cuts to water use are needed to stabilize the system.

Beyond drinking water, both reservoirs also generate hydropower relied on across the Southwest. If water levels fall far enough, they drop below the intakes that feed each dam’s turbines, and hydropower generation stops entirely.

Arizona, California and Nevada argue they’ve already absorbed years of cuts and that the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — need to start sharing the burden. Those states counter that they’re the ones absorbing climate change’s impact directly and that their water users face involuntary reductions each year because of the lack of physical and legal availability of water.

What’s at stake for Nevada

Strip away the interstate posturing, and the dispute centers on what water managers call the Lower Basin’s “structural deficit” — the gap between how much water the Lower Basin states use each year and how much the river naturally supplies, even in years that aren’t especially dry. Closing that gap, or at least not widening it, is the reason for the new rules.

The Upper Basin states have pushed back with a different theory of the problem. In their view, climate change, not their own water use, is why less water reaches the Lower Basin, and they shouldn’t be penalized for hydrology they didn’t create. Their proposal would tie operations to actual, observed water supply each October rather than long-range forecasts, and rejects any mandatory Upper Basin cuts.

Roerink said the river’s priority system is what gives the Lower Basin its footing in that fight. 

“It is first in time, first in right,” he said, noting that the Upper Basin states are “crying foul constantly about use in the Lower Basin.” The oldest rights on the river — in Yuma, Arizona, in Imperial County, California, and a couple in Nevada — date to a period when far more water was being developed downstream than upstream, which he called “the saving grace” for Lower Basin users under existing law.

Roerink said Nevada benefits from having nearly all its water run through a single agency, unlike Arizona, where the Central Arizona Project, municipalities, farms and tribes all hold separate rights. That, he said, “simplifies things and streamlines overall management.”

Nevada also built a backstop other states lack. In 2015, the water authority finished a project known as the third straw — a 3-mile tunnel drilled through bedrock beneath Lake Mead, ending in a new intake that draws water from its deepest point. The tunnel means Las Vegas can keep pulling water even if the reservoir drops far below the level at which the older intakes would stop working. 

What’s next

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has called cuts to the state’s allocation “unacceptable,” and won’t accept a plan that puts all the burden on the three Lower Basin states. On the other side, Utah’s top water negotiator, Amy Haas, has argued it would be “folly” for states to pursue litigation instead of managing the river system themselves.

Multiple state officials have floated challenging federal authority in court rather than accept either outcome.

Several states have set aside money to hire legal teams, but most policymakers know litigation is expensive and slow. There is currently one Supreme Court justice from west of the Mississippi and none from the Colorado River Basin, UNR’s Koebele noted, and handing water decisions to the Supreme Court “would be a really big shift in the trajectory of Colorado River governance.”

What Reclamation released doesn’t set the actual operating rules. Those come separately and would be rewritten every two years through 2036. Reclamation describes the first set, covering 2027 and 2028, as preliminary. Federal officials are expected to finalize the framework itself in the coming days, through a record of decision.

That two-year cycle is a shift from Reclamation’s earlier plan for a roughly 20-year interim period, and it means Nevada water users face a moving target rather than a settled set of rules for the next decade.

The Nevada Independent is a 501(c)3 nonprofit news organization. We are committed to transparency and disclose all our donors. The following people or entities mentioned in this article are financial supporters of our work:

• Kyle Roerink – $880
• Elizabeth Koebele – $100