AURORA — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and the state’s top negotiator are heading to Washington, D.C., this week to battle with other states over how the Colorado River will be managed for years to come.
A 19-year-old federal and state agreement for how to manage the basin’s largest reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, will expire this fall. State, tribal, federal, industrial and environmental groups have weighed in on what the next set of reservoir rules will look like. But the rules are about more than just reservoirs: They’re about the future water security for 40 million people, seven states, 30 tribes and parts of Mexico.
Federal officials have said they want the basin’s future to be decided locally, but for two years, the seven basin states, including Colorado, have been stuck in a bitter impasse. The Department of the Interior called the seven governors to the Capitol this month to try to hash it out.
“I will be heading to Washington, D.C., along with my fellow commissioners to have some more discussions,” Becky Mitchell, the state’s top negotiator, told water professionals Wednesday at a conference in Aurora. “It is tough to say I’m looking forward to it because that would be a lie.”
The expiring rules from 2007 — which were meant to help the basin respond to drought — have allowed lakes Powell and Mead to drain to a third, or less, of their capacity over 25 years of prolonged drought.
Combined, the two reservoirs make up about 92% of the basin’s entire reservoir storage capacity.
In March 2024, the basin states shared competing visions for the river’s future and how Powell and Mead would be managed. By and large, they have not shifted from those positions.
Mitchell reiterated Colorado’s stance in a speech at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Conference, a professional association that advocates for policies and laws that protect the state’s waters.
If there was a meeting with the state governors, Polis would be there, Press Secretary Shelby Wieman said. The governor’s office declined several requests for comment on the governor’s top negotiating priorities for the meeting.
“For more than a century, we built a system on optimism and entitlement. We planned for abundance, labeled it normal, wrote it in the law, and when the water showed up, we spent it,” Mitchell told the gathering. “When it didn’t, we blamed the weather, climate change or each other. Anything but the simple math.”
The seven states need to tie reservoir releases more closely to the actual amount of water coming in, Mitchell said in an interview after the speech. That’s a nonnegotiable for the Friday meeting, she said.
In 2025, the Colorado River sent about 5.4 million acre-feet of water, about 56% of the average, flowing into Lake Powell, located on the Utah-Arizona border, according to federal reports.
But because of the way the expiring rules from 2007 were set up, Lake Powell still released 7.48 million acre-feet of water downstream through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead, located on the Arizona-Nevada border, and downstream water users.
The large gap between supply and demand has happened many times over the past 25 years.
(One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to four households. Colorado used about 1.9 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year, on average, between 1971 and 2024, according to federal data.)
Powell’s releases have insulated large cities, like Phoenix and Los Angeles, and big agricultural areas from the river’s real water supply limitations and fluctuations.
And the overuse is draining the system, Colorado officials say.
In the 1980s, Powell was overflowing with water. As of Tuesday, it stored 6.2 million acre-feet of water, or about 25% of its capacity.
The basin has been using the reservoirs like credit cards, rather than savings banks, Mitchell said.
It’s downstream use that is driving the demand, so the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — are on the hook for correcting the imbalance, Mitchell and officials from other upstream states have said.
In the negotiations Friday, Colorado can’t agree to another set of rules with reservoir release plans that will drain Powell over time, Mitchell said.
Nor will the state agree to mandatory conservation, she added.
The fight over potential cuts is at the center of the dispute between basin states. The Upper Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — says it already has to limit its water use in dry years and cannot commit to mandatory conservation. The states have committed to voluntary water saving efforts.
The Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — has said future water restrictions should be shared between all seven states. The downstream states have promised 1.5 million acre-feet in water cuts and called for Upper Basin states to commit to some form of mandatory cutbacks.
Mitchell said mandatory conservation for Colorado is a no-go. The state’s constitution preserves the right for Coloradans to put available water to beneficial use. Mandatory conservation would go against that, the state’s lawyers argue.
“We can’t do it constitutionally within the state of Colorado. There is more flexibility with a voluntary program,” she said. “We can’t bend on that. We’ll get sued.”
When it comes to compromises in the negotiations, Colorado officials are willing to put releases from certain upstream reservoirs, like Blue Mesa, on the table, Mitchell said.
The federal reservoir on the Western Slope, the largest in Colorado, was called on in 2021 to send emergency releases of water downstream to avoid extremely low water levels at Lake Powell. When Powell’s water falls too low, it restricts its ability to generate hydropower for the West and could even damage Glen Canyon Dam’s infrastructure.
Colorado is also open to the idea of creating a special “pool” within Lake Powell — like a savings account within a savings account — for conserved water. If the Upper Basin states get verification that the Lower Basin is above 1.5 million acre-feet in cuts, Mitchell said.
“It’s a two-hour meeting as far as I know. We’ll see how it goes,” Mitchell said.
To the gathering of hundreds of water professionals, Mitchell said she would go to Washington and call for a future plan that responds to the river’s real hydrology, regardless of politics.
In a dry year like this, Coloradans and everyone in this room will be prepared, she said. Fields will be fallowed. Municipalities will be preparing to manage within their resources. Deals will be made to protect fish and flows.
“Colorado should be proud that we’re choosing reality over fantasy, science over slogans and responsibility over delay,” she said. “That is not weakness. That is leadership.”
And the crowd gave her a standing ovation.