Colorado’s top elected officials spent the week of February 14 issuing urgent warnings about the Colorado River. They disagreed on the question at the center of the crisis: whether the state will accept mandatory cuts to its water use.
U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper called the situation “dire” the day the seven basin states missed their second federal deadline to agree on post-2026 operating guidelines. He warned that litigation would fail to solve what he called “long-term aridification” and said the math on available water “will only get worse.”
One day earlier, Governor Jared Polis joined the governors of Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah in a joint statement refusing mandatory reductions. The Upper Basin states offered voluntary conservation, upstream reservoir releases, and what they called “strict self-regulation.” Becky Mitchell, the state’s Commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission and its lead negotiator, went further. The Upper Basin “cannot and will not impose mandatory reductions on our water rights holders to send water downstream,” she said after a January meeting at the Department of the Interior.
Attorney General Phil Weiser, in a separate statement, acknowledged the drought will force the Upper Basin to cut water usage “by 40 percent or more.”
The Bureau of Reclamation’s February 24-Month Study shows why. Lake Powell inflow projections dropped by 1.5 million acre-feet in a single month — roughly 50 feet of elevation. Snowpack above the reservoir sat at 47 percent of median on February 1.
The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center projects water supplies at 38 percent of normal. Glen Canyon Dam stands eight feet above the threshold that would shut down hydropower. Under the bureau’s most probable scenario, Powell hits dead pool by November.
The Department of the Interior is no longer waiting for consensus. Secretary Doug Burgum announced the federal government will finalize new operating guidelines by October 1. The draft Environmental Impact Statement is open for public comment until March 2. Whatever framework Interior adopts will govern Lakes Powell and Mead for years.
Hickenlooper, Polis, Mitchell, and Weiser all say they want a seven-state solution. The question none of them has answered is whether voluntary conservation can close a gap that Weiser himself put at 40 percent — or whether hydrology has already made the choice for them.
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