Where the farm fields meet the desert in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, farmer John Hawk looks out over a sea of green.
“It really is an emerald gem that we have,” he said. “With the water, we can do miracles.”
The Imperial Irrigation District uses more water from the Colorado River than any other single entity – farm district, city, or otherwise – from Wyoming to Mexico. As climate change shrinks the river’s supplies, its biggest users are facing increasing pressure to cut back on their demand.
“Do we need to conserve? Absolutely,” Hawk told KUNC in 2023. “We need to conserve, but we need to be paid for the conservation.”
Last year, the federal government took Imperial’s farmers up on that suggestion. Over the course of three years, it agreed to send more than $500 million to the district to use less water and leave it in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir. That money comes from the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Water leaders in the West and Washington D.C. alike have lauded the effort as a pivotal way to boost the reservoir, which has dropped to all-time low levels in recent years. Similar spending has saved water on farms and tribal land across the region. It has also made city utilities more efficient. But now, on the cusp of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, those who use the river’s water are worried that funding could disappear.
“All these programs cost money,” said Gina Dockstader, a fourth-generation farmer who sits on the Imperial Irrigation District board of directors. “All this investment, all this infrastructure costs money, and without these additional funds, these farmers can't afford to put it in by themselves.”
The federal government needs to keep water in Lake Mead and the nation’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell. Without conservation, water levels could drop low enough to cause the shutoff of massive hydropower generators. Even lower water levels could make it impossible to send water from big reservoirs to the Colorado River on the other side of the dams that hold them back.
When the Biden Administration set aside $4 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act for Colorado River work, it lifted some weight off the shoulders of anxious water managers, who could use it to incentivize water conservation and stave off catastrophe at those reservoirs.
Those measures also bought time for negotiators working on new, long-term rules for sharing the river’s water. Nevada’s top water negotiator, John Entsminger, called the federal spending a “once-in-a-generation windfall.”
On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump said he would claw back unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. That could jeopardize the expensive programs that have brought a wave of temporary peace and certainty for the Colorado River basin.
“It would be really disappointing if that went away,” said Hannah Holm with the conservation group American Rivers. “People are pretty pessimistic.”
American Rivers receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC's Colorado River coverage.
Holm said the need for water conservation, and funding to make it possible, will only get more important in the future. Climate change is expected to keep shrinking the amount of water in the river and necessitate more cutbacks to the region’s water use.
“If that funding doesn't materialize,” she said, “We just won't be as able to adapt as well to the conditions we already have, let alone the conditions that are coming our way.”
The Biden Administration’s infrastructure funding reached a wide variety of water-related projects. Holm cited forest restoration work that helps decrease the likelihood of forest fires, which can add dirt, ash, and harmful debris to rivers that supply drinking water.
City facilities that treat water for drinking were also on the long list of entities that received federal funding under the Biden Administration.
In the Los Angeles area, for example, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is spending massive amounts of money on equipment that will help steel its network against future water shortages. That agency is spending more than $3 billion on a water recycling facility, where it will safely turn sewage back into drinking water instead of cleaning it to a lower standard and releasing it into the ocean.
“In the long run, it's going to be vital for us,” said Deven Upadhyay, Metropolitan’s interim general manager. “In the short run, it looks to be pretty expensive compared to the other resources we have. So the federal dollars really do help.”
Meanwhile, as farms and cities tighten the screws on their water use, the negotiators shaping the big-picture future of the Colorado River are stuck at an impasse. The seven states that use its water are split into two camps, divided by deep ideological differences about who should cut back on their water use going forward.
State water officials are projecting optimism that Trump’s second term will not shake up their talks, citing a historical precedent of stability within federal water agencies that is mostly unaffected by turnover in the White House.
Holm said the future they are negotiating, though, will look different if there is less federal money to ease the pain of water reductions.
“In order to be able to make less water do more,” she said, “We need to be able to manage it a lot more precisely. That takes investment in science, in infrastructure, in monitoring, in figuring out different ways of moving water around. And none of that happens by itself.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
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