JB Hamby spent an evening in Southern California last week flipping through pages full of Colorado River meeting notes reflecting the same arguments and negotiating positions over the waterway’s future dating back to 2023.
“I’ve kept all my notebooks since I began this sick, twisted hobby back in early 2023,” Hamby, the state’s top negotiator on Colorado River issues, said Friday. “Our real issue is not that we’ve run out of time. … The problem is that we don’t have sufficient compromise all around to be able to close a deal.”
He’s not the only state negotiator feeling the frustration: There was no love between opposing blocs in the basin as they failed to meet a Valentine’s Day deadline.
The seven Colorado River states, including Colorado, are trying to reach a joint agreement on how to manage the river basin’s water supplies before the current rules expire this fall. Without state consensus, President Donald Trump’s administration will decide what to do. With every missed deadline, the risk of expensive, yearslong court battles over water heightens, and communities are left in limbo.
Coloradans are nervous the president could contradict a century of water law and give water to states he favors.
“Will Trump step in with a post on Truth Social and decide which states get water and which don’t?” one Colorado resident asked The Colorado Sun in response to a call for reader questions about the river basin.
Colorado political leaders have argued the Trump administration has been targeting the state, referring to decisions to nix emergency funds for flood recovery and a southeastern Colorado water project, plus conflicts over former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters who was convicted of state crimes tied to the 2020 presidential elections.
As another deadline passed with no Colorado River deal, The Sun asked basin water experts what happens next — and what federal action is, or is not, possible in Colorado.
Can Trump decide where the water goes?
Yes, Trump and his administration can make unilateral decisions on how to manage, experts said.
Whether those decisions prompt lawsuits, make it out of courts or can actually be used as the action plan for the river is an entirely different matter.
When it comes to which states face painful water cuts in the Colorado River’s driest years — a central point of contention in the deadlocked negotiations — it’s a matter of federal authority, experts say.
For decades, the federal government has had varied levels of authority within its two subbasins: the Upper Basin, made up of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming; and the Lower Basin, comprising Arizona, California and Nevada.
In the Upper Basin, it’s the Upper Colorado River Commission — not the federal government — that determines whether upstream states must cut back on water use to meet interstate water sharing obligations. (Upstream and downstream states disagree about those sharing obligations.) This is based on a 1948 interstate compact, said Anne Castle, former federal representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission.
Individual states have their own systems to manage which water users get cut off early in drier years. Colorado’s top water cop in charge of this process is State Engineer Jason Ullmann.
In the Lower Basin, the secretary of the Interior is the “water master,” which means the federal official determines when to make water cuts in Arizona, California and Nevada. The federal government received this authority in a 1968 court case, Hamby said.
The 30 tribal nations in the Colorado River Basin have different situations, but many have treaties or other legal agreements with the U.S. that outline the federal government’s trust responsibilities.
The Gila River Indian Community is a Lower Basin tribe that receives water from the Central Arizona Project, a canal system that supports big cities, including Phoenix, and is likely to be cut first in times of shortage. If the tribe’s water supplies are cut significantly, it could end up suing the federal government to fulfill its legal obligations, according to a tribal attorney who declined to speak on the record because of the risk of litigation.
And if — as The Colorado Sun reader asked — President Trump decided to take Colorado’s water from the Colorado River and give it to another state because, say, he doesn’t like the state’s Democratic leadership, the move would fly in the face of decades of water law and would likely result in legal challenges, the water experts said.
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office declined to comment on federal authority or how it would respond to such a hypothetical decision by the president.
“Colorado is prepared for any litigation, and we will work tirelessly to protect our state’s rights and interests under the Law of the Colorado River,” Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a prepared statement Friday.
So what’s happening with these negotiations?
The stalled Colorado River negotiations focus on how water is stored and released primarily from two reservoirs, lakes Powell and Mead, the largest reservoirs in the nation.
The two immense reservoirs have the critical job of pacing the flow of water to communities and acting as savings banks in dry years. Both reservoirs have dropped to historic lows, ramping up uncertainty over the future water supplies and hydropower generation.
Between January and February, the expected flow of water into a vital Colorado River reservoir, Lake Powell, has dropped by 1.5 million acre-feet, or about 488 billion gallons of water, according to federal projections.
That drop is roughly equivalent to two Blue Mesa Reservoirs, Colorado’s largest reservoir, or almost six Lake Dillons, a reservoir that stores water for Front Range communities.
Federal officials are leaning on state negotiators to propose a united path forward, saying the basin should decide its own water future. If the states can agree, their joint proposal would become the preferred option for managing the Colorado River’s water supply.
Since 2023, the state talks have been mired in arguments over sticking points, like whether additional reservoirs would be managed under the new plan and how the upstream states can contribute to conserving water.
“We’re being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create with water we don’t have,” Colorado’s top negotiator Becky Mitchell said in a statement. “The Upper Division’s approach is aligned with hydrologic reality and we’re ready to move forward.”
Colorado and Arizona are opposing forces in the negotiations. Arizona officials say they’ve suggested “revolutionary and innovative methods” of dividing the river, but their proposals have fallen on deaf ears.
“Virtually all of them have been rejected,” Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, said in a statement Friday.
If the states cannot agree, the Interior Department will choose its own plan for managing the river. It announced five management options in January.
The agency outlined one potential plan describing how it could manage the river under existing authority — but under that plan, the river’s storage levels would still crash, leading to serious economic impacts mostly in downstream states, like Arizona.
The Interior Department needs state support to pursue ideas that are outside its existing authority, like innovative conservation pools or deep water cuts.
Without state consensus, the agency’s options are limited. The depleted storage, ongoing drought, stalled negotiations and unyielding human demands might force the feds to push beyond their existing authority to stabilize the water supply for the West, Castle said.
Litigation is likely regardless of which option the feds choose, she said.
State negotiators were supposed to say whether they could have a high-level agreement in November. That didn’t happen. Then they missed the Feb. 14 deadline.
People are frustrated, John Entsminger, Nevada’s top negotiator, said in a news release.
“As someone who has spent countless nights and weekends away from my family trying to craft a reasonable, mutually acceptable solution only to be confronted by the same tired rhetoric and entrenched positions, I share that frustration,” he said.