Opinion: Colorado water officials can’t demand a sacrifice they aren’t willing to make

This column by Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry President and CEO Danny Seiden was published in the Colorado Sun on July 16. The column comes in response to a recent Sun opinion piece by Colorado River Commissioner Becky Mitchell regarding the ongoing water negotiations between and the responsibilities of the Upper and Lower Basin states.

Colorado’s water commissioner wants Arizona to make “hard decisions” on the Colorado River. That’s a curious thing to hear from a state that still hasn’t agreed to a single binding cut.

Becky Mitchell’s recent column in The Colorado Sun (“When it comes to sharing the Colorado River, Lower Basin states must step up and make hard decisions,” July 7) tells a story where the Upper Basin has quietly sacrificed for decades while Arizona, California and Nevada are only now waking up to reality. It’s a compelling narrative. It’s just missing most of the numbers — and facts — that matter.

Start with snowpack. Yes, Colorado had a brutal year. So did the rest of the West. Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado all set record-low April 1 snowpack readings this year. Every state at this table is living through the same basin-wide crisis in real time. Colorado isn’t further along than the rest of us on this one.

Next, the claim that the Upper Basin has already been quietly cut by 1.3 million acre-feet a year for two decades. Call it what it is: automatic curtailment, not a negotiated commitment. When the water isn’t physically there, junior water rights get shut off under state priority systems that predate the 1922 Colorado River Compact by decades. Nobody negotiated that. Nobody signed anything. It happens whether Colorado agrees to it or not.

Compare that with what Arizona put on the table this year. In May, Arizona, California and Nevada jointly proposed 3.2 million acre-feet in real conservation through 2028. That includes 1.25 million acre-feet in binding reductions for both 2027 and 2028.

Arizona’s share alone would be 760,000 acre-feet, 61% of the total and the largest of any state. The Lower Basin proposal also includes at least 700,000 acre-feet in additional conservation on top of those reductions.

And that’s before you count the 27% cut Arizona offered outright back when the February talks were still alive. Every one of those numbers was real, specific and put in writing. Most of them either sit unanswered or were rejected outright by the Upper Basin states, Colorado included.

There’s a reason the numbers look so different, and it comes down to math, not sacrifice.

The Upper Basin has never built the storage and delivery infrastructure to use its full 7.5 million-acre-foot apportionment, even in good years. Mitchell notes that Upper Basin users took about 4 million acre-feet in 2021 while Lower Basin users took 11 million, and offers that up as proof of Upper Basin restraint and prudence. 

But promising to stay below half your allocation is easy when you were never on pace to use it in the first place. 

Arizona doesn’t have that option. Cities, tribes and farms across the Lower Basin depend on water we actually use, every year, close to our full apportionment. That’s why our proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation already accounts for roughly 1.25 million acre-feet in evaporation and transit losses we used to get to write off. Colorado hasn’t put forward a comparable number for anything.

This kind of discipline isn’t new for Arizona. Our population has grown nearly 500% since 1957. Our economy has grown dramatically. Total water use hasn’t. According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, Arizona uses less water today than it did almost 60 years ago. Groundwater management, conservation requirements, water banking and decades of hard policy choices did that. Colorado hasn’t made those same choices on its side of the river.

Govs. Katie Hobbs, Gavin Newsom and Joe Lombardo said it plainly after the February talks collapsed: The Lower Basin’s position is firm and fair. Arizona’s own negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, put it just as directly: The Lower Basin has offered numerous good-faith compromises, and virtually all of them have been rejected. That pattern is a track record, not a difference of opinion.

Mitchell closes her piece by inviting Arizona to join Colorado in adapting to a changing river. We’d take that invitation more seriously from a state that had actually agreed to something. Until then, we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing: showing up with real numbers, real cuts and a plan Colorado still hasn’t matched.

Danny Seiden is the president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry.