STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — A dry summer in Colorado and across the Colorado River Basin is ratcheting up the pressure to cut back on water use, fast, but one federal conservation program has been stalled in Congress since June.
The reason why isn’t clear to U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District.
The program, called the System Conservation Pilot Program, pays people in four Western states, including Colorado, to voluntarily and temporarily cut back on their water use. Officials re-launched it in 2022, with $125 million in federal funds, as a two-decade drought tightened water supplies across the basin. It initially ran from 2015 to 2018 and restarted in summer 2023.
In December, federal lawmakers did not pass a bill to reauthorize spending for the project before the end of the last session. In June, a new reauthorization bill passed the Senate but its sister bill has stalled in the House.
“We’ll dig in further as to the decision-making behind why Republicans in the House have decided to hold the bill at the desk,” Neguse, whose district includes parts of the Colorado River Basin, said Tuesday at the Colorado Water Congress Summer Meeting. “I don’t think that we have a clear answer as to why they’ve done that thus far.”
Democratic U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper were also at the conference. Conference organizers invited all of Colorado’s congressional delegation.
If reauthorized, the pilot program could run for one more summer. Lawmakers have until 2026 to spend the designated funding, which comes from a big Biden-era spending package called the Inflation Reduction Act.
Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican who represents Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District including the Western Slope, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The compensation for cutting back on water use boosted financial stability in 2024, said Joe Bernal, a farmer in Loma, northwest of Grand Junction. It also helped the irrigators experiment with ways to adapt if they are ever forced to cut back on their water.
Bernal’s farm was OK without those payments this year, but he’d definitely consider participating again, he said. He estimated about 60% of the agricultural producers in his area would too.
“We’ve lived without it. … It seemed like it provided stability,” he said. “Also it seems like we’re telling people we don’t need our water, so it’s uncomfortable.”
By Bernal’s estimation, the other 40% either aren’t interested or are ideologically opposed to the idea.
What do the producers think?
That opposition is one of the central problems, and opportunities, when it comes to water conservation in the Colorado River Basin, according to researchers and agricultural producers at a Tuesday morning panel at the Colorado Water Congress conference.
George Raftopoulos, owner of Loma Livestock, said participating in the pilot program helped them get through some tougher times.
“We were a touch disappointed that the program didn’t continue,” he said. “That’s one of the buy-in problems that you’re having with some of the producers — the inconsistency.”
The fast relaunch in 2023 left farmers, ranchers and other water users with little time to learn about it or to implement water-saving techniques, like taking a field out of production for part of the season or switching to more drought resistant crops.
In 2024, more people joined — in Colorado, mostly farmers and ranchers on the Western Slope. Then, in 2025, there was no program.
So far, the costs have been high compared to the water use reductions. In 2023, Colorado farmers and ranchers received almost $1 million to cut their use by about 2,000 acre-feet. In 2024, the estimated cuts totaled about 14,200 acre-feet and the cost was about $7 million.
Colorado uses about 5.34 million acre-feet of water on average each year. Of that, about 4.84 million acre-feet goes to agriculture, according to the Colorado Water Conservation Board. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
Western States Ranches joined the System Conservation Pilot Program to research the best way to adapt to dry years and share that research with others, agricultural operations manager Mike Higuera said.
Western States Ranches is owned by Conscience Bay, a Boulder-based real estate firm that owns cropland on the Western Slope and runs one of the biggest cattle operations in the state.
One key task was getting everyone on board, Higuera said. Some of his team members have been ranching since they were kids. Their entire goal is to grow as much hay as possible — saying they weren’t going to irrigate was “anathema” to them.
But they know they have to prepare for dry years and this was a way to experiment with the best way to do that, he said.
What does the research show?
Seth Mason, a postdoctoral candidate and principal hydrologist at Lotic Hydrological, is researching what drives participation in water conservation programs among farmers and ranchers.
He looks at how policy attributes and water user attitudes impact participation — and how different conservation practices and geographic characteristics change how much water can be conserved — to determine what exactly is possible.
“If we really want to drive significant increases in conservation, we need to be thinking hard about changing hearts and minds,” Mason said.
Flexibility is important, said Dan Mooney, associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at Colorado State University.
Shutting off water in July instead of June might be the best choice for some producers. A rancher who feeds cattle year-round by growing hay could conserve more water by stopping production, i.e. fallowing, a hayfield for an entire season. But they still have to feed the cattle somehow, and the costs of buying replacement hay can make full-season fallowing financially unrealistic.
“There are a lot of programs that recommend fallowing or land retirement, but this is saying we need some kind of middle-ground,” Mooney said.
A lot of discussions have also focused on setting the right price to compensate farmers and ranchers. But there’s no magic dollar amount for that, said Brett Bovee, intermountain regional director at WestWater Research. In fact, making the risk of a shrinking water supply clear may be more motivating than money, he said.
There aren’t simple solutions, and there’s not a single approach that’s going to work for everyone, said Hannah Holm, associate director for policy in the southwest region with American Rivers, an environmental advocacy organization.
“We need a bigger toolbox,” she said.