With no agreement among the seven Colorado River states, which missed multiple federal deadlines, the Upper Colorado River Commission on Monday sharply criticized the U.S. Department of the Interior’s draft plan for managing the river after the current guidelines expire this year.

The critics accused federal officials of exceeding their authority and of relying on flawed modeling.

The Interior Department released a draft environmental impact statement in January with a public comment period that ended Monday.

That draft EIS contained five operational alternatives for managing the river. The bureau did not decide on a preferred alternative, hoping for a “potential collective agreement” among the seven states.

That agreement never came. The seven states missed two deadlines, including one on Feb. 14, to reach a consensus on river operations.

The divisions between the upper and lower basin states center on how much each will contribute during a drought. At issue are water cuts into the foreseeable future, the result of a 25-year drought that has reduced the river’s flow by millions of acre-feet annually.

The river, once projected to provide more than 16 million acre-feet per year, now averages around 12 million, far less than the 15 million required annually under the 1922 Colorado River compact and subsequent agreements, with 7.5 million on average apportioned each to the upper and lower basin states.

Currently, the upper basin states use only 4.3 million acre-feet — more than 3 million acre-feet less than the compact apportionment.

That “lack of available water means that Colorado water users face mandatory, uncompensated cuts to their water supplies, averaging 600,000 acre-feet of shortages per year and 1.2 million acre-feet across the Upper Basin,” the river commission’s statement said.

Monday’s public comment to the Interior Department from the Upper Colorado River Commission criticized the environmental impact statement, stating the Interior Department is exceeding its authority, is using flawed modeling assumptions — including the injection of fictional water,” omitting consumptive use and loss data from the lower basin states — and is inconsistent in how it treats upper and lower basin operations.

The commission also said some of the alternatives “rely heavily on upstream actions and ‘Mexico-dependent assumptions’ that are outside the scope of the environmental impact statement (EIS).

The EIS “models extensive operational changes above Lake Powell,” which are outside its scope, but then omits upper basin operations from its impacts analysis, the commission said.

The commission also pointed to what it described as either inaccurate or infeasible assumptions in each of the five alternatives contained in the EIS.

The commission zeroed in on the lack of consumptive use and loss data from the lower basin states, pointing out that between 2006 and 2024, the lower basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — used on average 11 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado, well in excess of the 7.5 million acre-feet on average the lower basin states are entitled to.

Of that 11 million acre feet, about 1.3 million per year is attributable to transit or evaporation losses, the statement pointed out.

A statement Tuesday afternoon from Gov. Jared Polis’ office said the upper basin states self-regulate water usage when there isn’t enough available.

The data on consumptive use and loss are not consistent with what’s included in the draft environmental impact statement, the commission’s statement also said, raising questions about the “adequacy of the alternatives and impact analyses” in the draft statement.

More specifically, in Colorado, the draft statement does not consider risk to Colorado’s two largest reservoirs: Blue Mesa, in Gunnison County; and Navajo, which straddles the Colorado-New Mexico border near Arboles in Archuleta County.

An initial news release from the commission said it is preparing to take steps to stabilize the system, including working with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on releases from Utah’s Flaming Gorge, Navajo, and Blue Mesa that would support Lake Powell.

Most notably, the news release said the Upper River Commission was considering a project to implement new Upper Basin contribution and conservation projects in 2026 to store water in Lake Powell, Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo, as well as work with ” willing partners ” for consensus on the operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

In a subsequent “corrected” news release, all information about Blue Mesa, Gunnison, and Flaming Gorge was removed without any explanation.

In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Colorado’s representative on the upper river commission, Becky Mitchell, said, “The current rules have not done enough to protect Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and it’s clear that a future management framework must better respond to today’s reality. Colorado’s comments provide constructive, legally grounded recommendations to bring the system into balance.”