MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
States that share the Colorado River are still deadlocked over a new agreement for how exactly to do that. About 40 million people in some of America's biggest cities rely on the river. It irrigates much of the country's food supply. The Trump administration says if the states don't show progress by November 11, it will get involved. KUNC's Alex Hager reports.
ALEX HAGER, BYLINE: The drought-strangled Colorado River no longer fills America's second biggest reservoir, Lake Powell, by a lot, which is obvious hiking here beneath its towering red-rock walls.
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ERIC BALKEN: We would've needed scuba gear 20 years ago. We would've been 150 feet underwater.
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HAGER: Eric Balken with the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute says the water is gone thanks to climate change and steady demand from cities and farms. Since 2023, the states that use it have been negotiating over how to share the shrinking river. The old agreement from 1922 divided it up based on outdated estimates of the Colorado's typical flows. John Ensminger is Nevada's top negotiator.
JOHN ENSMINGER: We've got these 19th century laws and 20th century infrastructure and 21st century climate, and those things don't fit together very well.
HAGER: Negotiations are stuck. The states where the river starts - Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico - can't agree with those downstream - California, Nevada and Arizona. One thing all the states can agree on, they'd rather work it out amongst themselves instead of leaving it up to the federal government or U.S. Supreme Court.
ENSMINGER: My hope is the professional water managers that I'm at the table negotiating with have their own self-interest at heart and realize that turning these decisions over to another group of human beings is not in any of our best interests.
HAGER: The Biden administration averted a crisis in the short-term by paying farmers and cities hundreds of millions of Inflation Reduction Act dollars to not use water. That helps keep enough in the river to stop Lake Powell from dropping too low to generate hydropower. The Trump White House has hit the brakes on that. But it's top river official, the Interior Department's Scott Cameron, says he doesn't want the federal government to tell the states how to share the river either.
SCOTT CAMERON: It'll be like using blunt tools to solve a very complex problem.
HAGER: Cameron says federal rules would pave the way for big lawsuits, which he says are a cop-out.
CAMERON: Litigation only serves the interests of lawyers who want to put their kids through graduate school.
HAGER: Cameron says he's been meeting with the states often to help push them towards agreement. This after the states at the top of the watershed objected to the administration's first nominee to run Interior's river agency. For now, the downstream states have proposed some cuts they could make to water use. The upstream states haven't countered with any firm commitments. That's because headwater states already use less when Mother Nature delivers a dry season, says Becky Mitchell, the state of Colorado's top negotiator.
BECKY MITCHELL: If we want to change and work better within the system, you have to acknowledge what people are actually doing already. And the upper basin has taken the brunt of all the hits.
HAGER: Trump's Interior Department says that if the states don't show real progress by November 11, it will start getting more involved. Anne Castle, a former federal water official who has co-authored papers calling on the states to work towards agreement, says the negotiations are so hard because growing cities and farms don't want to hear that they'll need to use less water.
ANNE CASTLE: We can't not do it. We have to come up with a scheme that lets us live within the supply that nature is giving us.
HAGER: For NPR News, I'm Alex Hager in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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