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Interior Department officials said at a news conference that they see the alternatives, which have been negotiated with little success for four months, as "bookends," between which would be placed more moderate, still-undetermined solutions to people's chronic overuse of a dwindling water supply.

In a draft environmental report released Tuesday, Interior studied in detail one alternative that would allocate all the needed cuts in river water use by legal priority. That would mean those users with older rights to the water such as Southern California farmers would come out far ahead of those such as Central Arizona Project water users whose water rights are much newer.

A second alternative would divide up the cuts proportionally among all river water users, based on how much they use. That would favor ÃÛÌÒÓ°ÏñAV over California because this state has fewer rights to and uses much less river water than its more populous neighbor.

Under both alternatives, Interior would cut water deliveries to the Lower Basin states by up to nearly 2.1 million acre-feet next year, with the exact level of cuts depending on how low Lake Mead is at that time. The environmental report also calls for additional cuts in 2025 and 2026, totaling as much as 4 million acre-feet, depending again on reservoir elevations.

In all cases, these cuts would include more than 800,000 acre-feet of reductions already approved under past agreements among the states.

To put those numbers in some perspective, the CAP, which serves drinking water to Phoenix and Tucson and irrigation water to some farms, uses about 1 million acre-feet a year. An acre-foot is enough to serve about four Tucson households a year.

A third alternative being studied would take no action beyond water use curbs already authorized under previous agreements signed in 2007 and 2019. Such a course would be by far the most environmentally damaging alternative, Interior officials said at the news conference, because it would provide no protection for existing river reservoir levels, let alone the wildlife and plant life that depends on the river's diminishing supplies.

Preferred alternative not yet chosen

Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau stressed that the department has not yet chosen a preferred alternative, a course often taken when the federal government issues a draft environmental report such as this one. Instead, he said federal officials are hoping that the 45-day public comment period on this document gives representatives of Arizona and the six other basin states time to craft a compromise between the alternatives they've proposed.

The new draft report "lays out a framework, gets something on paper for the ongoing negotiations and conversations among the basin states," Beaudreau said.

A seven-state agreement would, in contrast to the mandatory reductions that would be required under a federally-run solution, chart out agreements and voluntary measures "so we close the gap on the potential for those shortages," Beaudreau said.

"It is our hope and fervent desire that the tools laid out in the Supplemental EIS never have to be used, and the way to get there is through ongoing collaborative processes, to reach agreements that reflect everybody’s best interests," he said.

"At the end of the day it's the secretary's responsibility to keep this system operating and providing services, and we are going to protect the minimum critical levels in (Lakes) Powell and Mead in order to accomplish that," Beaudreau said, in a veiled threat of a federally dictated solution if it becomes necessary.

The news conference was held in a federal meeting room near Hoover Dam, with a closeup view of Lake Mead's famed "bathtub ring" in the background behind a large plate glass window. The bathtub ring's white coloring shows where water used to reach before lake levels started plunging in around 2000.

At the news conference, state water officials from Upper and Lower Basin states also used the word "bookends" to represent the two conflicting alternatives, indicating their desire to reach some sort of compromise between them.

Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke noted that the states have been coming up with shorter-term fixes for the river's problems for years now, and that these efforts have accelerated since reservoir levels really started plunging in 2021.

'We need to get off the merry-go-round'

"We're on a merry-go-round, we need to get off the merry-go-round. We need to have an outcome in which the cuts are going to be big enough cuts so we don’t have to do emergency actions every few months,' he said.

"It’s an impossibility to keep that up from a staffing perspective. (And) we lose the confidence of the public, if they don’t see us taking major steps to create an outcome to stabilize the system," Buschatzke said.

J.B. Hamby, a water negotiator for California, agreed with Buschatzke that a seven-state solution remains feasible and necessary.

"We're looking to develop a true seven-state consensus in the next 45 days that will make beneficial changes," said Hamby, representing the Colorado River Board of California.

He said the recently enacted federal Inflation Reduction Act has helped the negotiations, by appropriating more than $4 billion to spend on Western drought relief measures, some of which will compensate river water users for taking less.

This winter's heavy snows have also helped, by promising well above average spring and summer runoff into Lake Powell and making the "worst case outcomes" on the river less likely in the immediate-to-near future, Hamby said.

But while Interior officials hinted at the news conference that heavy runoff into Powell could lead to reductions in the scale of short-term water use curbs, Beaudreau said this year's weather does not get us off the hook.

"These deficits took decades to cause. One encouraging year of precipitation does not get us out of that hole," he said.