Home Care In New River, AZ

The U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Reclamation finalized the and 2027–2028 Operating Guidelines for the Colorado River, establishing a 10-year decision framework and significant reductions in Lower Basin water deliveries beginning in 2027. Reclamation also released its August 24-Month Study, reflecting historically low reservoir conditions.

The federal action does not immediately interrupt water service or require mandatory water restrictions on Phoenix customers. Residents and businesses can continue to expect safe, reliable water service.

The decision does mean Arizona will receive significantly less Colorado River water beginning in 2027, and Phoenix is preparing to operate its water system differently as those reductions are implemented.

"The federal government’s decision does not provide the fair, basin-wide leadership the Colorado River crisis demands," Mayor Kate Gallego said. "We will continue protecting reliable water service while leading the next generation of infrastructure investments that support our residents and businesses that are essential to America’s economic and national security. Though Phoenix is prepared for this moment because of decades of planning and conservation, we will push for new federal support to mitigate the rising cost of water that will result from this federal decision."

The 2027–2028 Operating Guidelines require 1.25 million acre-feet of reductions in Colorado River deliveries to the Lower Basin states in each of the next two years. If Arizona, California and Nevada implemented their proposed sharing agreement, Arizona’s reduction would be 760,000 acre-feet, California’s 440,000 acre-feet and Nevada’s 50,000 acre-feet. The Lower Basin states will also be expected to voluntarily conserve and store at least 700,000 additional acre-feet over the two-year period.

Phoenix thanks California and Nevada for their willingness to share responsibility for the near-term reductions and help reduce impacts that otherwise could fall more heavily on Arizona.

The decision comes as Lake Powell and Lake Mead are experiencing historically low conditions, underscoring the urgency of developing a durable, basin-wide solution.

However, Phoenix has serious concerns that the federal approach places a disproportionate share of the responsibility for balancing the Colorado River on Arizona and other Lower Basin states without requiring sufficient action throughout the Colorado River basin. Long-term drought and aridification have resulted in a smaller river, creating a fundamentally different scenario than was contemplated when the Law of the River was established. In this new reality, all Colorado River users must share responsibility for protecting this important resource on which 40 million people across the basin depend.

What the Federal Decision Means for Phoenix

Approximately 40 percent of Phoenix’s current drinking-water supply comes from the Colorado River through the Central Arizona Project. About 58 percent comes from the Salt and Verde rivers, while approximately 2 percent comes from groundwater.

As Arizona and Central Arizona Project partners implement the new reductions, Phoenix is evaluating the specific effect on its Colorado River supplies. The City is prepared to increase its use of stored water and other backup supplies as needed while continuing to invest in new water resources and infrastructure.

Phoenix is evaluating the final federal reductions and what they mean for operations under the City’s Drought Management Plan. The City remains committed to keeping customers informed before any changes are implemented.

"Phoenix has prepared extensively for reduced Colorado River supplies, and our customers can continue to expect reliable water service," Phoenix Water Services Director Brandy Kelso said. "But preparation does not mean we can be complacent. Balancing supply and demand will require us to carefully manage our reserves, invest in future supplies, and work with residents and businesses to use water as efficiently as possible."

Phoenix’s preparations include water stored underground for future shortages, groundwater-recovery infrastructure, the Drought Pipeline that allows Salt and Verde River water to be moved to north Phoenix, conservation investments, and the development of Pure Water Phoenix and other future renewable supplies.

"The water we stored underground was developed for conditions like these," Phoenix Water Resources Management Advisor Dr. Max Wilson said. "Those reserves provide a critical bridge, but that bridge must lead to the next generation of renewable water supplies. Phoenix will use this moment to accelerate the projects and partnerships needed to strengthen reliability for decades to come."

Supporting a Vibrant and Sustainable Phoenix

Phoenix will continue planning for a vibrant, growing, and economically diverse city in which future generations have access to the jobs, housing, and opportunity needed to thrive.

Water planning and economic planning must move forward together. Phoenix invests decades in advance to provide reliable service to existing customers while supporting responsible growth and nationally important industries, including semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, defense, bioscience, and technology.

"Phoenix is proving that a desert city can lead in both sustainability and innovation," Gallego said. "We can protect reliable water service, create economic opportunity, and strengthen industries important to our country. Phoenix will continue to lead with responsible growth, continued conservation, and investment in infrastructure improvements that serve our city and the region."

Phoenix Calls for Basin-Wide Responsibility

Phoenix will continue doing its part, but the Colorado River cannot be stabilized through reductions imposed primarily on Arizona and other Lower Basin communities.

A lasting solution must:

Phoenix will continue coordinating with the State of Arizona, the Central Arizona Project, tribal nations, California, Nevada, other municipalities, agricultural interests, businesses, and regional partners as the federal guidelines are implemented.

About City of Phoenix Water Services Department

The City of Phoenix Water Services Department is dedicated to providing high-quality, reliable, and sustainable water services to the residents, businesses, and visitors of Phoenix. With a commitment to water conservation, innovation, and long-term planning, the department ensures a secure and resilient water supply for future generations. For more information, visit

Media Contacts:

NEW RIVER, Ariz. - The North Phoenix area saw several roads flooded due to Tuesday morning's storms. That included Desert Hill Drive, which was flooded by nearby Skunk Creek.

What we know:

People driving down Desert Hills Drive in New River had to take an alternate route for much of Sept. 29, as early morning storms flooded the creek.

"I thought nope, time to turn around," nearby resident Linda said. "The river’s in the road."

Another nearby resident, Lulu, agreed. "I'm definitely not gonna go through."

Rising Waters:

Carlos, who lives nearby, says he watched the creek rise after an intense round of rain.

"The creek started to come down, it started to come down around 5 in the morning," Carlos said. "It was about four or five feet in some parts."

Flooded Roads:

Neighbors say it’s not unusual for the road to flood during the monsoon.

"This year I think it's rained quite a lot," Lulu said. "So, this is probably like the fourth, fifth time."

Road Closures:

Even hours later, most drivers still deemed it uncrossable, obeying the closure signs.

"I would say it's uncrossable unless you're in a pickup truck," Linda said.

Staying Cautious:

While FOX 10 witnessed some people braving the water, others insisted it’s not worth the risk, having witnessed water rescues here during past storms.

"I think it looks kind of dangerous, like I wouldn't try to go through," Lulu said.

What they're saying:

The Flood Control District of Maricopa County says anyone who comes across more than a few inches of water in the road needs to find an alternate route.

"It's just not worth it," said Kim McMahon, public information officer for the Flood Control District of Maricopa County. "It only takes six inches of fast-moving water to knock somebody off their feet, but it then can only take 12 inches of water to float those vehicles."

Roads Reopen:

By Tuesday afternoon, the water had gone down significantly and crews removed the road closure signs, with cars able to pass through without an issue.

The Source: Information in this report was gathered from Linda, a nearby resident; Lulu, a nearby resident; Carlos, a neighbor; and Kim McMahon, public information officer for the Flood Control District of Maricopa County.

A new federal plan for managing the Colorado River is expected to be finalized in the coming days. But before the ink is dry, Arizona laid out its issues with the plan, and the state’s top water official did not hold back.

In a letter to the Bureau of Reclamation, he wrote the water-sharing plan could “inflict catastrophic harm on Arizona’s citizens” and outlined a list of contentions with its details. Those arguments could make up the basis of a future lawsuit over the Colorado River.

Climate change and drought have been shrinking the river’s supply, and cities and farms have not done enough to cut back on demand accordingly. The seven states that use the river — Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — have been locked in disagreement about how to do so for years, forcing the federal government to come up with its own strategy.

Arizona’s opposition comes after the federal government published its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for managing the Colorado River after the current rules expire this fall. Reclamation, the federal agency in charge of Western dams and reservoirs, put forth a strategy that rattled Arizona water leaders. For the next 10 years, the federal government would have the ability to cut the Colorado River supply for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40%.

After a wave of initial pushback by Arizona politicians and water officials, the letter goes into greater detail by providing seven specific objections.

It was written by Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. He makes the case that the federal government may be overstepping its legal bounds by implementing its plan.

Buschatzke first points out that the FEIS, which is more than a thousand pages long, does not mention the Colorado River Compact. The Compact is a 1922 agreement that serves as the bedrock for policies about managing the river. More than a century of laws and practices for sharing water across the seven states that use the Colorado River is built on the back of its guidance.

Arizona’s letter claimed that the Interior Department — Reclamation’s parent agency — isn’t adhering to that foundational law, and wrote it “has refused to even take a position on what federal law requires.”

“The [Interior] Department gives Arizona neither transparency about how the River will be managed nor any basis on which to plan for its water future,” Buschatzke wrote.

Then, he wrote, Arizona reserves the right to take its complaints to court.

Read the letter:

Most other complaints in the letter are highly technical.

The state disagrees with the timeline of the federal plan, which would last for 10 years and bring states back to the negotiating table every two years along the way, at which points they would tweak water-sharing rules in response to river conditions. Arizona asks that, instead, the plan only last for two years, which it says would give states more room to develop a longer, comprehensive plan for the river.

Buschatzke also wrote that Interior doesn’t do enough to define how much water could be sent downstream from major federal reservoirs in the Rocky Mountain region. In recent years, those reservoirs have been used as a backup supply to prop up water levels in Lake Powell, where dropping water has threatened the ability to generate hydropower and perhaps pass water through the dam at all — limiting the amount that flows to Arizona and its neighbors.

The letter also argues that the federal plan places too much burden on the downstream states — Arizona, California and Nevada — by forcing them to take major cutbacks, but does not do the same for the upstream states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

The Phoenix area has been preparing for water shortages for years. Through engineering and trades, water will keep flowing.

Other objections take issue with the process by which Interior drew up the new rules, and that they failed to consider the impacts of major water cutbacks to Arizona, which the state says was legally required.

Buschatzke and his allies have been trying to convince the federal government to adopt their counterproposal, which would spread out the pain of cutbacks and help Arizona avert the “catastrophic” water reductions described in the letter.

Reclamation is soon expected to release the specifics of river management plans for 2027 and 2028. Those rules appear likely to incorporate elements of the counterproposal.

The messy Colorado River negotiation process that led to the federal water plan has slowly pushed states closer to a potential court battle. If states disagree with water management strategies, they could take one another or the federal government to the Supreme Court.

In his recent letter, Buschatzke may be laying out some of the legal arguments that could support a case brought by Arizona.

An overwhelming majority of Colorado River experts — including state negotiators and federal policymakers — have said that it would be best to keep Colorado River matters away from the Supreme Court, but those states seem to be tiptoeing closer to that reality on the back end of fruitless negotiations.

Earlier this summer, Arizona lawmakers boosted the state’s Colorado River litigation fund up to $9 million in preparation for a potential lawsuit over sharing water.

A is here, and it could deal big cutbacks to Arizona’s water supply. Officials around the state are criticizing the plan and outlining a response that could soften the impact of water cutbacks.

The new strategy, announced on Friday, would allow the federal government to cut the Colorado River supply for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40%. Cuts that large would only be possible under a worst-case scenario, but could become a reality if record-setting dry conditions continue into the coming decade.

A statement from the Arizona Department of Water Resources said that “such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”

The new federal plan lays out a 10-year framework for managing the river. It back to the negotiating table every two years to reassess river conditions and tweak the water-sharing rules accordingly.

The Interior Department is expected to announce the details of cuts for the first two years of that plan, 2027 and 2028, in the coming days. Arizona officials expect them to incorporate elements of of Arizona, California and Nevada. Those states would volunteer to make substantial cutbacks — closer to 20% of their overall take from the river — but allowed under the federal plan.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said the new plan “contains unacceptable options that include the federal government forcing Arizona to take the majority of draconian water cutbacks” and encouraged federal water managers to adopt the “commonsense, compromise proposal” put forward by her state and its allies.

“Implementing the Lower Basin agreement would protect Arizona from massive water cuts,” she wrote in a press release, “distribute reductions more fairly across the Lower Basin States, and provide stability and protection to the water supply that our communities rely upon.”

Other Arizona politicians also criticized the plan. A joint statement from the state’s two senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, wrote that the new plan “could place an unfair burden on Arizona.”

Arizona leaders called on the river’s Upper Basin states to do more to share the burden of shortages. Those states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — did not volunteer to take any mandatory cutbacks. Those states are legally required to send a certain amount of water to their downstream neighbors every year. Officials in those states argue they already take cutbacks because climate change and drought give them less water to send.

Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s top water negotiator, told reporters the Upper Basin states “get cuts from Mother Nature every year” and have to live within “what Mother Nature provides us.”

“I’m grateful that the statement recognizes clearly the need to develop a system that’s based on what water is available,” Shawcroft said of the federal plan. “Not what water is demanded.”

The Upper Basin’s stance has been over the past few years, and appears to still be a major point of contention for their counterparts in the lower basin.

A statement from the Arizona Department of Water Resources said that Colorado River talks have been “an exercise in lowering expectations, particularly for a long-term, seven-state agreement.”

The agency appears hopeful that the federal government will adopt its proposal to voluntarily cut back on water use, which it says was a response to the “increasingly bleak scenario” of stagnating negotiations.

Across the region, federal and state officials alike said they were still working toward a seven-state agreement. The federal plan explicitly leaves the door open for states to come to a consensus, and use the resulting plan to supersede federal water management strategy.

John Berggren, a water policy expert with the nonprofit conservation group Western Resource Advocates, said the federal framework provides some “short-term certainty” and could be used as a chance for states to take a new approach to negotiations.

“Clearly, the last two and a half years of negotiations hasn't worked,” Berggren said. “So let's change that up. Let's use this as an opportunity, as a pivot point, to start something new, and get to that seven-state agreement.”

Water officials around the Colorado River basin say they are waiting for more details from the federal government’s pending announcement of operating guidelines for 2027 and 2028.

“This is an important milestone, but it is not the finish line,” JB Hamby, California’s top water negotiator, wrote of the plan announced on Friday. “The framework establishes sideboards on operations for the next ten years. It does not conclude the Basin States’ negotiations, predetermine specific operating decisions, including Lake Powell releases or shortages, or serve as the operating plan itself.”

A new paper from a group of independent water experts finds that proposed cuts to the Colorado River supplies for Arizona, California and Nevada would be “unprecedented.” It explains that recent water use in those states is already relatively low, and for reining in demand even further has “no historical analogy.”

The Colorado River is shrinking due to climate change, drought and steady demand from the seven Western states that use its water. As the nation’s two largest reservoirs , the seven states that use it failed to agree on a new plan for cutting back on demand. That forced the federal government to step in with its own plan.

That plan allows the federal government to cut Colorado River water for Arizona, California and Nevada by about 40% each year between 2028 and 2036, with the sharpest cuts likely hitting Arizona.

Arizona leaders have pushed back on the plan. They negotiated for a two-year plan that means more modest cuts — around 20% — for 2026 and 2027, but that the deeper cuts could still kick in afterwards, delivering “draconian” consequences to the state’s people and economy.

A federal plan for the Colorado River means big water cuts for Arizona. The Phoenix and Tucson areas will be hit hard. City leaders say they can keep taps flowing, but solutions will be expensive.

This new report seems to support .

The analysis is the latest publication from a regionwide group of academics and former officials who study and comment on the Colorado River. The group is colloquially referred to as the “Traveling Wilburys” of the Colorado River, a nickname which nods to a 1980s rock ’n’ roll supergroup that brought together musical megastars for a second career chapter.

Jack Schmidt, who co-authored the report, said the potential cuts represent a “really, really big number.”

The federal plan could cut up to 3 million acre-feet per year across the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. One acre-foot is roughly a year’s supply of water for three homes in the Phoenix area.

“To achieve those kind of cuts would be completely unprecedented in the Lower Basin,” Schmidt said. “We're not arguing that it should or shouldn't be, but we're saying — don't kid yourself, those are unprecedented numbers, and the economic impacts of implementing those kind of very large numbers, for which there's no historical analogy, would be very serious issues.”

Schmidt, a longtime researcher at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies, said cuts of this size should be spread out across other states. Under the new federal proposal, the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico are not forced to take mandatory water cuts.

“The fact that those magnitude cuts are without historical precedent leads me to think that there's no way you can ask the Lower Basin to make those magnitude cuts and not ask the Upper Basin to do anything,” Schmidt said.

To put the cuts into historical context, Schmidt and his colleagues looked at consumptive water use in each of the Lower Basin states over the past 17 years. They took the single lowest January total for water use, the single lowest February total for water use, and so on, for each month on the calendar and added them all up — creating a hypothetical “year” of extraordinarily low water use across Arizona, California and Nevada.

That theoretical year has states using less water than they have used in any real year during that period.

The maximum possible cuts under the new federal plan would force those states to use even less water in a year than the hypothetical “year” Schmidt created to exemplify extraordinary low water use.

Under the maximum possible cuts, the Lower Basin would be forced to limit its annual water use to levels not seen since 1935.

The study goes on to explain some of the places where there may be “room to cut” water use, even if Lower Basin states are dramatically forced to reduce demand.

The report focuses on the Imperial Irrigation District, a farming region in the Southern California desert that . Imperial and a handful of nearby farm regions often boast that they provide a majority of the nation’s wintertime vegetables, and are often criticized for the amount of water they use on crops that end up as cattle feed — chiefly alfalfa.

The study details how Imperial’s highest levels of water use typically occur in the summer, when grasses like alfalfa are grown, and the region has lower water use when it is producing vegetables for human consumption, like lettuce, onions, carrots and broccoli.

The report concludes that Imperial could further limit its demand for water without significantly cutting into the production of vegetables that end up on grocery shelves and kitchen tables.

“In times of acute water shortage,” it writes, “It is likely that continued and additional water savings can be achieved by reductions in irrigation of field crops in summer, without causing shortages to garden crop irrigation in the winter.”

The study also highlights the viability of future cuts to agricultural water use in Arizona. Since 2022, the amount of Colorado River water used from the Central Arizona Project (CAP) — a long canal system that mostly — is lower than the sum of all other Colorado River users in the state.

Across Arizona, Colorado River use is down, but those reductions are not spread evenly.

In the past three years, water use from the CAP was down 40% compared to the prior decade. All other Colorado River users in the state — largely farms — brought down their consumption by only 6%.

“You're going to have to find a way in Arizona to reduce the sum of those other users,” Schmidt said. “You can't have a system where all the cuts are being taken by CAP and the other users' line just sort of stays flat.”