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The Biden administration this week urged the seven states that share the Colorado River to speed up negotiations over its future. KUNC's Alex Hager says it's churning up the pressure to have a draft agreement in place before President-elect Trump takes office.
ALEX HAGER, BYLINE: The current rules for sharing the Colorado River expire in 2026. At stake is drinking water for 40 million people, irrigation for food crops and a lot of hydroelectricity. Western states are in charge of negotiations, but federal reservoirs, dams and hydropower generators are in jeopardy because, so far, the states haven't been able to come to consensus. So this week, the Biden administration took the rare step of publicly calling on those states to get it together. Here's White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi.
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ALI ZAIDI: To get to the other side here, there's going to be a requirement, an imperative on all of us, to find the common ground, to move the process forward with urgency to meet the 2026 timeline.
HAGER: Biden's Interior Department wanted the states to agree on river-sharing rules before the election to make sure all the paperwork could go through smoothly. The states failed to do that. Now they're going to have to figure this out under Donald Trump, who's nominated North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to run Interior. It's unknown how his leadership will shape the river's future.
State leaders say they're confident it won't disrupt negotiations, but Elizabeth Koebele, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Reno, isn't so sure.
ELIZABETH KOEBELE: I sort of worry that, like, when our house isn't in order inside the basin, and these bigger, national-level, big-P political kind of changes are more likely to impact policymaking or more likely to add more stress.
HAGER: Right now, the seven states are split into two camps, each of which released their own proposal for how to manage the river back in March. Since then, state leaders have been saying they want to collaborate on one plan.
BECKY MITCHELL: But we're also, at the same time, prepared to defend Colorado's significant interests in the Colorado River.
HAGER: That's Colorado's top water official, Becky Mitchell. As climate change makes the river smaller, there are big disagreements about who would lose water during dry times. Tom Buschatzke is Arizona's water director.
TOM BUSCHATZKE: This is a visceral issue between the states. It is a giant chasm.
HAGER: There's a concern that Trump's campaign promises will only accelerate climate change, making the challenge of sharing the shrinking Colorado River even harder.
For NPR News, I'm Alex Hager. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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