What does a durable solution to the crisis on the Colorado River look like?

According to Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, it’s a future with less water. And that’s not just for the lower basin states of the Colorado River.

Colorado water users need to look at how to use less, too, he said.

Mueller spoke Friday at the Colorado River District’s annual water seminar in Grand Junction. The annual seminar is looking at the river’s future, drought policy and perspectives from Colorado’s river neighbors.

A durable solution must be workable regardless of the political party in power, one that meets all the needs of all communities, and avoids creating winners and losers, which Mueller said is exactly what has happened over the last 100 years with the Colorado River compact and other agreements.

Figuring out those solutions will take difficult conversations, especially with the lower basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California, given their views of entitlement of the river and a desire to avoid uncertainty in their water supplies, he explained.

In the upper basin states, farmers have learned to deal with hydrologic uncertainty. They plan for good years, average years and dry years.

“We need to take that farmer logic and apply it to a much broader system, and that’s how we get durable solutions,” Mueller said.

Those discussions will also have to include compromise, Mueller said, which is sometimes interpreted as weakness. 

This is also an important time to support the work of the state’s Upper Basin commissioner, Becky Mitchell, Mueller said. The discussions around revising the Colorado River’s operations, which are set to expire in a few years, have pivoted from the immediate crisis at hand, which is the draining of Lake Powell and Lake mead, and are shifting to looks at long-term durable solutions. Those discussions are not about renegotiating the 1922 compact, Mueller said. “That’s off the table.”

That said, the river’s operating guidelines must be overhauled, not just tinkered with, Mueller said.

As part of those negotiations, Mitchell has come up with principles, which Mueller said his river district agrees with. 

Those principles include: 

• Climate change is real, and so is a drier future. That’s had a substantial impact on agriculture, with farmers going out of business, Mueller said.
• Prevent overuse of the river in the lower basin states, which Mueller said “touches on a few hot nerves.” 
• Preserve federal reserved water rights for tribal nations, which Mueller noted means senior water rights and about 25% of the river’s annual flow. This is also frightening to non-tribal water users because it means they may lose water, Mueller said. But tribal nations have not gotten their fair share, and “we have to make sure those communities are no longer left behind. It’s not a threat to us. It’s an opportunity to solve problems and bring the entire basin up,” he said.

Another difficult conversation facing Colorado River water users, according to Mueller, is around the basin’s growing population and at the same time a shrinking water supply. 

The only way to get through that is by bringing the per capita consumption of water down, Mueller said, and that includes the upper basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming, not just the lower basin states.

“We have a shrinking resource and a growing population” that has to be fed and needs water. “How do you do that? By figuring out better ways to use the resource we have.” That includes less water use by cities, including changes in landscaping. “We’re not asking you to make it look like a rock garden,” he said.

Without reductions in water consumption, the answer to growth is to take water out of agriculture, “and that’s not how we succeed as a society. In fact, that’s what leads to the downfalls of societies is when we don’t produce our own food.” The answer is not to vilify agriculture, he added. “It’s how every sector can use less water and sustain the growth we know is coming.”

Both the river district and Mitchell are looking for permanent reductions in lower basin use of the Colorado River, Mueller concluded, but that does not mean that those lower basin communities or their agriculture is not valued. Those who are working on the 2026 guidelines for the Colorado River must find solutions that allow the river to operate within the hydrology it provides. “But if some of us are living outside of the actual hydrology and the pressure’s not there,” those solutions will be elusive.