A federally funded water conservation program in the Upper Colorado River Basin is facing uncertainty for 2025 after the bill to authorize funding for it stalled in Congress late last year.

On Friday, Jan. 10, Upper Colorado River Commission Executive Director Chuck Cullom said the commission planned to communicate to participants in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program that the commission is not accepting applications at this time for a 2025 program. Officials will let people know later this month if and when the application process will open for 2025. 

According to a post on the commission’s website, which has since been removed, applications were potentially going to be available Jan. 9, with a later-canceled informational webinar scheduled for Jan. 10. 

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Officials are holding out hope that the program can still get federal authorization in time for water users — mostly farmers and ranchers — in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to conserve water during the upcoming growing season. 

“The commission recognizes that (the System Conservation Pilot Program) has been an important and useful tool for the Upper Basin to understand the opportunities and issues that conservation programs represent,” Cullom said. “We are hopeful we will have that tool available in 2025 and again in 2026.”

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The program, which pays water users who volunteer to cut back, was restarted in 2023 as part of the Upper Basin’s 5-Point Plan, designed to protect critical infrastructure from plummeting reservoir levels. Over two years, the program spent about $45 million to save about 101,000 acre-feet of water. Funding for the program comes from $125 million allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s authorization to spend this money expired in December and now must be renewed if the program is to continue.

Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, a press secretary with the office of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said lawmakers plan to introduce a new bill for funding authorization in the next couple of weeks. He said funding for Western drought programs has not been controversial and has received bipartisan support. The authorization didn’t pass in December, he said, because lawmakers simply ran out of time before the end of the session. The Colorado Sun reported last month that the Senate passed the Colorado River Basin System Conservation Extension Act, but the House of Representatives “left it on the chopping block as lawmakers raced to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown.”

“We are trying to get this authorized as soon as we possibly can,” Rivera-Rodriguez said.

The program has been dogged by controversy since it was rebooted in 2023, after originally taking place from 2015 to 2018. 

It has been criticized for a lack of transparency in 2023 by not measuring and tracking how much of the conserved water eventually makes it to Lake Powell, and for its potential negative impacts to the agricultural communities of the Western Slope and to an irrigation company in the Grand Valley. In response to the second criticism, officials are working on how Upper Basin states could “get credit” for conserved water through a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Whether reauthorization will come quickly enough for Upper Basin agricultural producers to participate in the upcoming irrigation season remains to be seen. Short notice and a hasty rollout of the program for the 2023 growing season meant low participation numbers for that year, with just 66 water-saving projects and about 38,000 acre-feet conserved across the four Upper Basin states. The number of projects in 2024 jumped to 109, with about 64,000 acre-feet conserved.

A last-minute reprieve for the program wouldn’t be a problem for one Delta County rancher who participated in the program in 2024. Paul Kehmeier enrolled 58 acres of his ranch in the program last year and said he plans to participate again if the program is extended. 

“There are two reasons that I’m planning to participate,” Kehmeier said. “One is that the money is very good, and second is that I don’t think we in the Upper Basin can stick our heads in the sand on all this big river stuff. … My irrigation season starts April 1, so anytime up until the last day of March, if I had a chance to participate, I would jump at the chance.”

The reauthorization of the program comes at a pivotal moment for water users on the Colorado River. Negotiations between the Upper Basin states and the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, Nevada) on how shortages will be shared after 2026 have ground to a halt.

Lower Basin water managers say all seven states that use the Colorado River must share cuts under the driest conditions, while Upper Basin officials maintain they already take cuts in dry years because they are squeezed by climate change and can’t rely on the massive storage buckets of Lake Powell and Lake Mead for their water supply. Upper Basin leaders also maintain that they shouldn’t have to share additional cuts because their states have never used the entire 7.5 million-acre-foot apportionment given to them by the Colorado River Compact, while the Lower Basin regularly uses its full allotment.

But there has been a recognition in recent months by some Upper Basin officials that their states will have to participate in some kind of future conservation program on a river with flows that have declined over the past two decades due to drought and climate change. 

“As we get more familiar with this, maybe that can be ramped up to 100,000, 200,000 (acre-feet), I don’t know,” Esteban Lopez, the commissioner from New Mexico, told attendees at the December Colorado River Water Users Association Conference in Las Vegas. “Maybe we can get there, maybe we can’t. But the point is: We will conserve, and we will commit to conserve what we can conserve when there’s water available and put it in an account in Lake Powell.”

Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit news organization covering water and the environment. Read more at AspenJournalism.org.