(Aspen Journalism) Water managers in the upper Colorado River basin took another step toward a more formal water conservation program that they say will benefit the upper basin states.

Representatives from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico unanimously passed a motion Wednesday at a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission to explore creating a way to track, measure and store conserved water in Lake Powell and other upper basin reservoirs.

The motion directed staff and state advisers to prepare a proposal that lays out criteria for conservation projects and creates a mechanism for generating credit for those projects. The deadline for the proposal is Aug. 12, and commissioners plan to consider it at a late-summer meeting.

With an infusion of federal dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, the UCRC in 2023 rebooted the System Conservation Pilot Program, which pays water users — most of them in agriculture — to leave their fields dry for the season and let that water run downstream. Over two years, system conservation is projected to save about 101,000 acre-feet of water at a cost of about $45 million.

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But how much of that water actually made it to Lake Powell is anyone’s guess. Despite one of the stated intentions of the program being to protect critical reservoir levels, SCPP has, so far, not tracked the conserved water, a process known as shepherding. The laws that govern water rights allow the next downstream users to simply take the water that an upstream user leaves in the river, potentially canceling out the attempt at conservation.

Some water managers and users have criticized SCPP for this lack of accounting, saying the water conserved by the upper basin is simply being sent downstream to be used by the lower basin. The UCRC’s motion Wednesday for a proposal is an attempt to remedy that.

“We have heard from water users and others across the Upper Basin that there is interest in ‘getting credit’ for conserved water — in other words, protecting this water in Lake Powell,” Amy Ostdiek, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s Interstate, Federal & Water Information section chief said in a prepared statement. “What the commissioners directed staff to do was simply to explore opportunities to do so.”

Tracking, measuring and storing the water saved by the upper basin states in Lake Powell is not a new idea. The concept was part of the 2019 Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan. The DCP created a special 500,000-acre-foot pool in Lake Powell for the upper basin to store water saved through a temporary, voluntary and compensated conservation program known as demand management. Demand management is conceptually the same as system conservation, with the main difference being that system conservation water simply becomes part of the Colorado River system with no certainty about where it ends up, while demand management water would be shepherded, measured and stored in Lake Powell for the benefit of the upper basin.

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“We can do things like the System Conservation Program, and if we set up an account such that we can put that conserved water into a pool, that can then accrue over time,” New Mexico Commissioner Estevan Lopez said at Wednesday’s meeting. “That can be a very useful tool when things get really dry in the system. Overall, we can make that water available to continue operations with additional stability.”

The goals of demand management were to help boost water levels in Lake Powell, allow for continued hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam and, perhaps most important, help the upper basin states meet their obligations to deliver a minimum amount of water to the lower basin states under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact. As climate change continues to rob rivers of flows, it becomes more likely that the upper basin won’t be able to deliver the 7.5 million acre-feet annually that is the lower’s basin’s share of the Colorado River, even if upper basin use doesn’t increase.

The conserved water “could be for compact compliance, or it could be for simply greater storage volume in the upper basin reservoirs to provide resilience against future dry years,” said Anne Castle, federal appointee and chair of the UCRC. “It would be credited to the benefit of the upper basin, and that’s a little vague, but it’s because we haven’t designed that mechanism yet.”

In line with upper basin proposal

After two decades of drought, climate change and overuse, water levels in Lake Powell fell to their lowest point ever in 2022, threatening the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. Officials scrambled for solutions, with the UCRC putting forth a “5-Point Plan,” one arm of which was restarting SCPP, which was originally tried from 2015-18.

Upper basin officials have long maintained that the responsibility for a solution to the Colorado River crisis rests with the lower basin states: California, Arizona and Nevada. And they are still reluctant to say that Wednesday’s motion is a move toward a long-term conservation program for the upper basin.

“I wouldn’t say that we’re on the cusp of a permanent program, but rather that this is an evolving overall conservation effort that is incorporating what we’ve learned from the previous iterations,” Castle said.

Wednesday’s motion was also the beginning of making good on a promise laid out in the upper basin’s alternative proposal for how the river and reservoirs should be operated in the future. The proposal says the four states will pursue “parallel activities” that include voluntary, temporary and compensated reductions in use, such as conservation programs that store water in Lake Powell.

“I think it’s important to acknowledge that this is in line with the parallel activities component of the upper division state’s alternative,” said Colorado Commissioner Becky Mitchell. “However, as I’ve always said, we cannot be doing conservation work to prop up overuse, and so I think this is in line with the commitments that we’ve made, but to remember that that was part of a larger package that requires responsible management.”

The authorization for system conservation runs out at the end of 2024, but earlier this month, U.S. senators from Colorado, Utah and Wyoming introduced a bill to extend the SCPP through 2026. UCRC commissioners would still have to approve continuing the program past this year.

This story ran in the July 1 edition of The Aspen Times, the July 4 edition of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel and the July 8 edition of SkyHi News.