Interior secretary says 'nobody will be happy' with Colorado River decisionU.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, pressed Monday to spell out how ...

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Interior secretary says 'nobody will be happy' with Colorado River decisionU.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, pressed Monday to spell out how ...
Interior secretary says 'nobody will be happy' with Colorado River decision
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, pressed Monday to spell out how he’ll handle the Colorado River's water crisis, wouldn't get specific but said repeatedly that “nobody will be happy” with how his department will split a rapidly dwindling supply of river water among the seven states, including Arizona, that want a piece of it.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, left, and Rep. Juan Ciscomani, middle, listen to Kaitlyn Sutow, far right, a mining engineering student at the University of Arizona, during a tour of the mine at the San Xavier Underground Mining Lab in Sahuarita on Monday.

Mamta Popat, Arizona Daily Star
Speaking at a roundtable in the Tucson area populated by a host of public lands industry leaders and University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella, Burgum pledged to hand down a decision this month on the first of two crucial, divisive issues his office is confronting regarding the river.

That decision will be how much water the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation will release from its upstream reservoirs in the four Upper Colorado River Basin states to head off a potential calamity in which Glen Canyon Dam, forming the boundary between the Upper and Lower Basins, would no longer receive enough water to continue generating electricity that serves customers in seven Western states.

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Burgum will have to decide soon on an even bigger and more divisive issue: how to allocate river water supplies among users over the next 20 years, to replace an existing agreement among them on how the water is divvied up.

“We and the Bureau of Reclamation have to announce this month operating plans for next year. We can’t have all these reservoirs and no operating plan. We have to tell them to do something that no one will like," Burgum said.

"There wasn’t enough water to start with and there’s still less water” now, he said. “We’re in a super severe situation. For us to have a functioning, operating plan for 2026, decisions are going to have to be made this month. Under the current course we’re heading on, it’s unlikely there will be an agreement with the seven basin states, and the bureau is just going to have to make a decision — the best judgment it can make.”

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https://tucson.com/news/local/environment/article_bbdac218-c7c8-4574-87d6-2b6bcfa6d94b.html

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