The three Lower Basin states of the Colorado River have developed a short-term agreement they say could stabilize the struggling river and its reservoirs, while minimizing the pain of cuts to farms, cities and other users.
It’s potentially a big deal, both in the idiomatic and literal sense of the term. So big, in fact, that state Department of Water Resources chief Tom Buschatzke began his remarks on the deal to a recent meeting of local stakeholders with a toast and a list of thank-yous worthy of an Oscar acceptance speech.
A fuzzy shot of Buschatzke toasting with, fittingly, a glass of water.
“It might be bad luck, but I’m going to toast everybody — this is just water, for those who are watching — a toast to all of you,” he said, raising his glass to the room at Wednesday’s meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, a group of tribal, public and private sector officials that advise the state’s Colorado River policy.
Before him were many of the people he said helped make the deal happen — staff with ADWR, the Central Arizona Project, Yuma irrigation districts, the Gila River Indian Community.
“This is a really huge accomplishment for us, a huge accomplishment in having the three states put something on the table,” he continued. “We weren’t quite as fortunate to have that same level of collaboration with folks in the Upper Basin. But we came forward in this Lower Basin proposal and stepped up … to help protect both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.”
And that more or less says it all.
The two halves of the Colorado River basin — the three Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada and the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah — have been stuck in stalemate for years, unable to agree how to share the river’s dwindling supply of water. All the while, the basin is historically dry.
That hasn’t changed. But the three Lower Basin states — particularly Arizona — are now offering to make significant cuts to their consumption of Colorado River water with or without the help of the Upper Basin. And the plan seems to have some buy-in from both local stakeholders and the federal government, as we’ll discuss here shortly.
Or, to speak a little more plainly, here’s how Terry Goddard, the chair of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Board of Directors, put it in an interview with the Agenda:
“(It’s) a courageous effort to try to keep things from coming completely apart,” Goddard said.
What’s in the deal?
The new agreement proposes leaving between 700,000 and 1 million acre feet of water in Lake Mead over the next two years, on top of about 1.2 million a year that the states had already put on the table. In total, that comes to about 3.2 million acre feet of savings — not necessarily the same thing as long-term cuts — through 2028.
“That 700,000 feet will prop up the elevation of Lake Mead, and hopefully defer the point in time when the cuts bigger than 1.25 million acre feet a year are needed to stabilize (the lake),” Buschatzke told reporters Thursday.
It’s an “integrated package” that will only work if all parts are approved, Buschatzke said. That means federal funding, infrastructure improvements, releases from reservoirs in the Upper Basin, a water banking program, a special conservation pool with priority access for tribes and more.
The deal doesn't include any action on the part of the Upper Basin states — one of the main sticking points in basin-wide negotiations — so it doesn’t exactly represent a new era of good will in the region. Nor does it preclude the possibility of fighting out the future of the river in court, certainly a costly, time-consuming endeavor. Already, Lower Basin officials are saying that deliveries of water from Lake Powell to Lake Mead could be low enough to trigger a compliance action under the 1922 Colorado River compact as soon as September, and the text of the three-state deal makes clear that the states reserve the right to pursue such action.
It’s also not a long-term fix. Rather, it’s a two-year deal designed to stabilize the reservoirs while continuing negotiations toward a basin-wide consensus — if such a thing can be found in current conditions.
“Given the timeline that we’re under … and a really urgent set of hydrologic catastrophes inflicting the basin, what we tried to do with this proposal is basically allow the players to continue talking for two years and not have some immediate consequences for the Lower Basin that would have frankly been intolerable,” Goddard told us.
What does this mean for Arizona?
Arizona is the second-biggest user of Colorado River water in the Lower Basin, following California.
But many users in the state — particularly the Central Arizona Project, which brings water to cities like Phoenix and Tucson — have low priority rights that make Arizona a prime target for reductions. The Lower Basin deal works by spreading reductions more broadly across the region, meaning that California and Nevada are essentially agreeing to reduce their use of Colorado River before they legally have to under the priority system.
Still, Arizona will see significant cuts under the plan, something like 1.8 million acre feet over the term of the deal. Arizona is allocated about 2.8 million acre feet of Colorado River water a year. But leaders feel the structure of the agreement gives the state a fairer shake than proposals advanced by the federal government that would practically dry out the Central Arizona Project.
“The main thing that Arizona gets out of this is that California has apparently agreed to share in some of the shortages,” said Kathryn Sorensen, the director of research at ASU’s Morrison Center for Public Policy. “That helps backfill CAP.”
The federal plan
Right now, the agreement isn’t worth much more than the paper it’s printed on.
But the states have submitted the plan to the federal government for consideration, and the federal Office of Management and Budget has approved spending about $354 million in leftover Inflation Reduction Act dollars to support systemwide conservation.
All that said, the Bureau of Reclamation recently shared with the seven states of the basin the sketches of a “framework” for managing the river and its reservoirs that could impose up to 3 million acre feet of reductions on the Lower Basin “in order of what the federal government believes is the priority of the law of the river,” Buschatzke said.
“So just look to your left, look to your right,” he said. “That’s us. That’s Arizona.”
Such cuts would drive CAP toward the mud and potentially even impact some higher-priority users in the state.
That proposed “framework” covers 10 years, and it would involve the basin states and other stakeholders negotiating new operational guidelines within that framework every two years. Ideally, Buschatzke said, the Lower Basin plan would be adopted by the federal government and cover the first two-year chunk of the framework.
The Buschatzke Method for Dealmaking and Decompression
In the conclusion to his remarks before the ARC Wednesday, Buschatzke picked up a small, white object from his desk and held it in front of the crowd.
“These are my earbuds,” he said. “I need to thank the inventor of these things. Cause nightly I do my knee-replacement rehab walk around my neighborhood. It’s also my decompression walk around the neighborhood. But these things are in my ears. I talk to this guy next to me, I talk to this person next to me,” he continued.
He gestured at Patrick Adams, the senior water policy advisor to Gov. Katie Hobbs, and Brenda Burman, the general manager of CAP. Sometimes, Colorado River negotiators from Nevada and California, John Entsminger and J.B. Hamby, are on the other end of the line, he said.
“It’s a great way at the end of the day to synthesize everything that has occurred, and if I didn’t have these, the neighbors who are walking their dogs and children would think I’m a crazy person, so hopefully they see these things in my ears,” Buschatzke concluded.
Buschatzke will need all the decompression he can get. The federal government is expected to release its final plan for the river by July. And officials from the seven states — now with the proposed federal framework in hand — are expected to meet again in coming weeks.
Dreamers’ dreams delayed: DACA recipients trying to renew their authorization are being met with much longer delays than usual from the Trump administration, sometimes causing them to lose jobs or driver’s licenses, Daniel Gonzalez and Laura Gersony write for the Republic. Median wait times have gone from two weeks in 2025 to more than two months this year, and some recipients report waits of longer than six months.
What’s going on in there?: A 911 call details how an ICE agent pepper-sprayed 47 detainees in one room at the agency’s Mesa-Gateway Airport facility, Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports for the Arizona Mirror. The story also notes that use of force incidents at the overcrowded facility have increased more than threefold since at the overcrowded facility compared to the beginning of 2024, and that ICE has rarely kept the number of detainees under the facility’s capacity of 157.
Sic the robots on fraud: Gov. Katie Hobbs announced that the state government will start using an AI tool to weed out Medicaid “fraud, waste and abuse,” the Capitol Times’ Reagan Priest reports. The tool, created by an East Coast-based company, will rank claims by fraud risk before an official will review them, Hobbs said.
“This reflects Arizona’s commitment to catching problems before money goes out the door, rather than relying on post-payment recovery, which is costlier, less effective, and yields only a fraction of improper payments,” Hobbs wrote in a letter to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
From Virginia, with love: Flyers attacking two challenger candidates in a Tempe City Council race were sent by a new PAC called Arizona First Fund, but were paid for with money from a Virginia-based Republican Super PAC, New Times’ Clarissa Sosin reports. Even the flyers themselves say they are paid for with money “100 percent from out of state contributors.” It’s not the only new wrinkle in the race; the Republic’s Lauren De Young also reported that incumbent Councilwoman Jennifer Adams recently called one of her colleagues a “fucking bitch” in a late-night, typo-laden email the same day she was arranging to tout an endorsement from said colleague.
Instead of spending money on politicians, please consider donating to the Arizona Agenda First Fund — AKA becoming a paid subscriber.
Bucking the trend: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that while overdose deaths fell across the country by about 14% last year, they climbed by more than 10% in Arizona, the Associated Press reports. The same things happened for other Western states like Colorado and New Mexico, and a Brown University researcher thinks that could be because of a lethal fentanyl and methamphetamine combo becoming more widely used in them.
With primary season heating up, the Republican-on-Republican spats are multiplying by the day.
But one spat is catching attention for its particularly nasty racial undertones.
Former Rep. Joseph Chaplik and former NFL kicker Jay Feely — who’s endorsed by President Donald Trump — are the frontrunners in the race to replace Congressman David Schwiekert in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District.
On Wednesday, Feely breathed life into a since-deleted tweet by Chaplik claiming Feely “imported Hatians.”
Feely took it as an attack on his decision to support two men from Haiti (whom Feely described as family, though he didn’t legally adopt them) and help them create good lives for themselves in the United States.
Chaplik responded by saying that he wasn’t talking about Feely’s family members, but rather, referencing an interview in which Feely said his history of humanitarian work includes helping Haitians get linked up with NGOs that help migrants in a legal immigration process.
For any normal person, helping the less fortunate would probably be considered honorable — whether it’s family or someone else. But to the MAGA brain worm that seems to have won out here, simply using the word “Haitian” derogatorily as a punch line is irresistible.
And when you have to do that much explaining on a deleted tweet, you’ve probably already lost the round.