"This Is Unprecedented"
A special mid-year West Slope Water Summit convened this week in Montrose — called early because the situation couldn't wait until November.
Montrose County Commissioner Sue Hansen organized the gathering after attending the Colorado River District's State of the River address. She told attendees it was time to step up the urgency.
"This year is the first year that I am not optimistic," Hansen said. "This is unprecedented and perhaps sobering for all of us."
Lake Powell on the Decline
The Colorado River District is a property tax-funded organization based in Glenwood Springs. It represents 15 Western Slope counties — the headwaters of the Yampa, White, Gunnison, and Colorado Rivers. Together, those counties provide roughly two-thirds of the Colorado River's total natural flows.
Raquel Flinker, the District's Director of Interstate and Regional Water Resources, told summit attendees that projected inflows into Lake Powell this year will be around 3 million acre-feet — well below half of normal. Yet releases out of the reservoir have historically run far higher.
"What has happened in the last 20 years, 26 years, is we've had— we've seen a reduced amount of water in the river, and we've still been releasing 8 million acre-feet out of Powell for the most part," Flinker said. "So we've seen that reservoir drop slowly but surely throughout the years."
Negotiations Stall
Lower Basin states recently put forward what they called a bridge proposal for sharing the river. Flinker was blunt in her assessment.
"The Lower Basin has put out, maybe you guys have heard of this, bridge proposal a couple weeks ago that in my opinion is a joke," she said.
Her frustration centers on the math. The proposal calls for reducing water use by 3 million acre-feet over two years. But Flinker says that's nowhere near enough — the river needs cuts of at least that much every single year.
At the heart of the standoff is a hard reality. There is currently much less water in the river than we have been using, and no one anticipates that changing any time soon.
As Flinker puts it, "Well, I can speak for myself and you probably have the same opinion. Who wants to reduce their water usage? Right? No one. And the Lower Basin has used over 10 million, close to 11 million, acre-feet out of this river every year, much above their allocation. They don't want to use less - especially when it's not a little less - it's like half, right?"
Final rules for managing Colorado River water are expected from the Bureau of Reclamation later this summer.
