Dire water conditions, missed deadlines and uncertainty on the Colorado River are complicating critical water decisions in California.
No single state, water agency or federal official has shown the power, or the will, to break the deadlock among Colorado River basin states over how to share the dwindling supplies.
Years of fraught negotiations have failed to yield consensus even as major reservoir storage plummets to record lows — ratcheting up the tensions, and the stakes, for the states’ negotiators.
Now, key agreements for managing the river are expiring at the end of this year. These include agreements reached in 2007 that lasted nearly two decades, which took fewer than three years to craft.
This round of talks has already taken longer — and, so far, produced nothing so durable.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal steward for the river under the Department of the Interior, last week released a 10-year framework that establishes rough parameters for managing the river, but imposes no specific long-term plan.
