On January 9, the federal Department of the Interior released a draft environmental impact statement for the Colorado River Basin, and its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
The river's current operating guidelines expire this year, and the document lays out potential scenarios for allocating water into the future. The document's release comes in the middle of contentious negotiations between the states that use the river over who will bear the burden of cuts to water usage as drought continues.
To find out what this means, Rocky Mountain Community Radio's Caroline Llanes spoke with Chris Winter, the executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at CU Boulder's School of Law.
Editor's note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Llanes: So to give a little bit of background, the seven states that rely on the Colorado River have been negotiating how to allocate that water after 2026. And those negotiations are divided between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. So where does the Bureau of Reclamation and the Department of the Interior fit in with that larger context, and what is this draft environmental impact statement that they just released?
Winter: Yeah, really good question. So the dams and the reservoirs are large federal projects—Lake Powell and Lake Mead. And so the Secretary of the Interior is responsible for releasing water, producing power, and otherwise managing those big pieces of federal infrastructure. So, it's ultimately the Secretary of the Interior's decision how to operate those units. But the secretary is looking to the states, the seven basin states, to see if they can come up with an agreement amongst themselves as to how to allocate a resource that is dealing with some real scarcity issues.
And so the Secretary of the Interior was hoping that the seven basin states could reach a consensus agreement on how to address the scarcity problems in the system, and in, in past years and decades (past), the states have been able to come up with agreements amongst themselves, and then the secretary says, 'great, I'm glad you all have an agreement. We will implement that through the federal system.' So that's what's happening right now, is the Secretary of the Interior is getting ready to make a decision, but the secretary's really hoping the states will bring to the secretary a consensus agreement on how to move forward. And so that's the situation that we're in right now.
We have a deadline for these new operating guidelines. The secretary has to make a decision by October of 2026, which means there has to be some work that happens before that. So this draft EIS (environmental impact statement) was published to lay the groundwork for that final decision to come. In the meantime, everybody is waiting for the states to see if they can come up with some type of consensus agreement that the secretary might incorporate into this decision. And of course, that's a preferred outcome, because if there's a consensus agreement that resolves the threat of litigation and other types of disputes further down the road.
Llanes: So thinking about this 1,600-page environmental impact statement or EIS, was there anything about what the Interior is proposing that stood out to you or struck you as unusual?
Winter: Typically, when the federal government releases a draft EIS, it says, 'here's a number of different alternatives as to how we could approach the problem. And then here's our preferred alternative. This is what we think we're going to do when we issue a final (decision), but we want to take public comment on that.'
In this situation, the federal government's laid out five alternatives, but there's no preferred alternative. And that's because the government wants to leave the states the room to negotiate what they think is the alternative. And so this is a very unique draft environmental impact statement because there was no preferred alternative that was laid out in the document. Instead, what the government said is, 'here's five alternatives. We think that all of the different elements that are baked into those five alternatives will eventually be part and parcel of whatever consensus agreement the states come up with. So we think all the elements are in there, but they haven't been packaged together by the states. So we think this is enough for now and we'll see if the states can come up with something out of all these things that we've laid out.'
So that's the hope, and it's a fairly unusual posture, I guess I would say.
Llanes: Tell me a little bit more about what was in some of those alternatives. What are some of the scenarios that the Interior is thinking about in the future for the Colorado River?
Winter: You know, one of the biggest question marks is how will curtailments, or scarcity, or reductions in the delivery of water: how will that be allocated across the basin? How will that pain be distributed, and how does the secretary make those decisions? And so one of the important things for everybody to know is that the secretary has a lot more authority to reduce the amount of water that's consumed with respect to the Lower Basin. So the secretary is the water master essentially for the Lower Basin, because the Secretary of the Interior delivers water to the Lower Basin through federal contracts. And those are associated with the federal infrastructure—the dams and the canals in the Lower Basin. The Upper Basin is much different and the Secretary of Interior doesn't have legal authority over how much water Upper Basin water users consumptively use in the same way that the secretary does over the Lower Basin.
And so this draft EIS really kind of lays that out, because it's placing the bulk of the reductions in consumptive water use on the Lower Basin moving forward in times of really extreme scarcity. Basically the EIS says, 'well, here's a variety of different ways we can address this, but almost all of the pain in the secretary's plan is on the Lower Basin. The Lower Basin has to take the bulk of those cuts.'
And so this is really the core of the standoff that's been standing in the way of a consensus agreement, is this question about how meaningfully will the Upper Basin participate in reductions in consumptive water use moving forward in times of severe scarcity? And that fundamental question is very much laid out in the draft EIS, and that's informed by what legal authority the secretary has over the Upper Basin as opposed to the Lower Basin.
Llanes: So we know that climate change plays a really big role in drought and the aridification that we're seeing of the Colorado River Basin. However, the Trump administration does not like to acknowledge climate change or its associated impacts. So do we see any references to the reality of climate change in this document?
Winter: So I think we all know the scientific community, the water community, you know—everybody out there that are operating in the real world—I think we all see and feel the effects of climate change. We know that we are dealing with conditions that are hotter and drier and more challenging now. And I think we all intuitively feel this connection to the broader challenge of climate change that we're facing now. The draft EIS doesn't really talk about it in those terms. So if you run a search for the term climate change in the 1700 pages of the EIS, you're not gonna find it. I don't think it shows up one time in the entire document. But they talk about "climate trends," so that's kind of the catchphrase that's replaced "climate change." So the EIS does talk about climate trends and the impact that will have on hydrology over time.
So it's incorporated into there in that way. But, you know, it's kind of framed up in a way that I think maybe addresses the administration's political priorities of not really talking about it in those terms. You know, they don't say it's human-caused, they don't call it "climate change," but the EIS acknowledges that there's going to be changes in hydrology over time. And so that's just kind of where we are. It's a little bit frustrating, but I hope that it won't stand in the way of the secretary making the right decision in the states coming to an agreement.
Llanes: All right. Well, the next big deadline is Valentine's Day. So the Upper Basin and Lower Basin have until February 14th to get the Department of Interior a plan for those post-2026 operating guidelines. And we will certainly be keeping an eye out for any news ahead of that date.
Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to break this down with Rocky Mountain Community Radio.
Winter: Happy to do it.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KSUT.
