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SALT LAKE CITY — The Department of Interior on Wednesday unveiled a new plan that offers to pay communities, tribes and farmers in Arizona, California and Nevada hundreds of dollars for every acre-foot of water they cut from the Colorado River so it can stay in the struggling Lake Mead.
Water users in those three states — members of the Lower Colorado Basin — can receive the money by reducing water. The program pays $330 per acre-foot under a one-year agreement, $365 per acre-foot under a two-year agreement and $400 per acre-foot under a three-year agreement. Lake Mead remains at 28% of full capacity.
The plan is one arm of the new Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program, which is funded by this year's Inflation Reduction Act. The congressional bill includes $4 billion in funds set aside for water management and conservation efforts in the Colorado River Basin and other basins suffering from extreme drought.
Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland explained that the "historic" legislation should help those who use the river "receive adequate assistance and support" to be more efficient with the water they use.
"The prolonged drought afflicting the West is one of the most significant challenges facing our country," she said, in a statement. "I have seen firsthand how climate change is exacerbating the drought crisis and putting pressure on the communities who live across Western landscapes."
Wednesday's announcement comes after a pair of "listening session" meetings held over the past weeks following a 24-month study that the Department of Interior and Bureau of Reclamation released in August. The report mostly focused on Lake Powell along the Utah-Arizona border and Lake Mead along the Arizona-Nevada but also called on states along the river basin, including Utah, to voluntarily reduce their Colorado River consumption. It also led to annual river allotment cuts in Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
Prior to that, Utah and three other states agreed on a plan to send 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge to Lake Powell while the Bureau of Reclamation approved a plan to reduce 480,000 acre-feet from leaving Lake Powell in an effort to keep the reservoir above the minimum needed to supply hydrologic power.
Paying water users to cut back on consumption is another "near-term" solution for Lake Mead this time through the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program. Another component of the plan calls for "proposals for additional water conservation and efficiency projects that could involve a variety of pricing options," according to the department.
Department officials add that they will begin accepting proposals for "long-term system efficiency improvements that will result in multi-year system conservation" beginning in early 2023. The bureau posted information online Tuesday afternoon on how to sign up for any of these three programs.
While Wednesday's announcement centers more on the lower basin states, Utah experts note that drought has taken a significant toll on the Colorado River over the past two decades, lowering how much water states like Utah can take from it, said Amy Haas, the executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
This decline matters because a series of reclamation projects take Colorado River waters to areas like the Wasatch Front, which has helped fuel the state's population growth in recent decades. That's why Gene Shawcroft, the chairman of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, said it's important for all water users in the state to reduce their water consumption as drought conditions continue.
"We can't control Mother Nature. We don't know if she's going to provide 6.3 million-acre-feet or 22," he said, of the river's yearly flow. "What we can do is we can control our demands. We can control how much water we use."
