Each negotiator drew a card from the deck.

John Entsminger, from Nevada, picked the highest card: the ace. Gene Shawcroft, from Utah drew the lowest: an eight.

“My luck in Las Vegas isn’t very good,” Shawcroft said, holding up his card to show an audience of 1,700 people. They chuckled under the ornate chandeliers of a Caesars Palace ballroom.

Shawcroft, Entsminger and the five other negotiators from the states in the Colorado River Basin were picking cards to determine the speaking order for the final panel of the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas in mid-December.

While the stakes for that card draw were quite low, the stakes of what the seven states are negotiating couldn’t be much higher.

The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Cities, tribes, farms, fish and various industries rely on it for drinking water, irrigation, habitat, power and more.

But it has been overtapped. And as the region gets hotter and drier and populations continue to boom, there is less and less water to go around.

The states have struggled to agree on how to share the river. Politics, different experiences of the river, complicated regulations and dwindling water supplies make negotiations difficult.

On the last day of the conference, state negotiators tried to appear cordial and close to consensus, even making light of the tension.

“It’s an honor and pleasure to be here today alongside my Colorado River family,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s negotiator, said. “As you all know, sometimes you can’t pick your family, but you get through it anyways.” The audience roared in laughter.

Differences quickly surfaced, though, and states didn’t appear close to reaching a deal.

The clock is ticking: The seven basin states only have until February 14 to come up with a plan for how to manage the river in dry times. The current guidelines expire at the end of the year. If they test their luck and fail to reach an agreement, they risk the Interior Department making a plan for them or years of litigation.

The seven state negotiators are meeting for four days in Salt Lake City this week as they work to hash out a deal before that deadline, according to Becki Bryant, public affairs officer with the Bureau of Reclamation.

The bureau released a draft environmental impact statement on Friday that lays out a series of pathways to manage the river system and its major reservoirs. If the states reach a deal, the bureau says it will insert that plan as the preferred way forward, Scott Cameron, acting commissioner for the bureau, told The Tribune at the conference. If states can’t agree, the federal government will choose an alternative itself, he added.

In this game of water diplomacy, there will likely be no clear winners. “No one is too big to fail,” said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s negotiator.

Federal officials say sacrifices must be made going forward.

“That means being willing to make and adhere to uncomfortable compromises,” Cameron said.

Whether states are willing to give enough to seal a deal is yet to be seen.

Is hydrology the problem?

Throughout the conference, anxiety about drought and the abnormally warm start to winter hung over panel discussions and side conversations in hallways lined with velvet curtains colored terracotta, like the Colorado River after a big storm.

October brought heavy rains, but November and December were abnormally warm and dry. Snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin is at its lowest level in a quarter century, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.

Lake Powell is only 28% full and could drop below 3,490 feet next year, according to forecasts from the Bureau of Reclamation. At that level, water would be unable to pass through Glen Canyon Dam’s electricity-generating turbines.

The drought has been blamed for the stagnation in the negotiations. “We need to remember that hydrology is the problem,” Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s negotiator, said. “It’s not political positions. It’s not legal interpretations. It’s not one state.”

Low reservoirs mean less water storage to prop up the river system when flows are low.

“Without that resiliency, people are very risk averse, very concerned about every acre-foot, so the give and take becomes very difficult,” Chuck Cullom, director of the Upper Colorado River Commission and former Colorado River programs manager in Arizona, told The Tribune.

When the seven states established guidelines for how to manage the river during dry years in 2007, drought had begun to plague the basin. But there was a much greater storage buffer then.

“The 2007 guidelines started with Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the United States, at about 90% capacity,” Cullom said. Today, the combined contents of Powell and Mead is closer to 30% full, he added.

Even with additional deals in 2019 and 2023 that led to sharp reductions in water use in the Lower Basin, the water crisis has continued to worsen, and climate scientists have said that trend will continue.

“We haven’t really got much of a break hydrologically, but this is something that has been foreseeable for a very long time,” Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, told The Tribune in November.

Some at the conference argued leaders need to stop blaming the stalemate on the river’s flow.

“Water is life, and like all of nature, the river is inherently chaotic,” Kirin Vicenti, water commissioner for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, said. “Despite those that think hydrology is the problem, it’s not, and it can’t always be the scapegoat. Our planning and policies must allow for flexibility and innovative and dynamic solutions.”

A ‘very technical’ disagreement

The basin states are working to come to terms that will provide more flexibility in river management during dry years.

The Upper Basin states — Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming — have been at odds with the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — over how to divvy up and enforce water cuts, though.

That’s in part due to different interpretations of the Upper Basin states’ obligation to the Lower Basin under the Colorado River Compact established over a century ago.

“This is a very technical, nerdy, hydrological disagreement,” Porter told The Tribune after the conference.

If a rolling average of 7.5 million acre-feet of water doesn’t make it past Lee’s Ferry, just below Glen Canyon Dam, over a ten year period, Lower Basin states may sue the Upper Basin.

State negotiators want to avoid litigation and may include protections against that in their deal. But so far, states have not found enough common ground.

Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s negotiator said he needs the Upper Basin to make conservation commitments that are “verifiable and mandatory.” To sign on to a deal, Buschatzke has to get a deal approved by his state legislature, an “additional burden” unique to Arizona, Porter said.

The Upper Basin negotiators said demands for mandatory cuts from their water users ignores the realities of how water is managed and flows through their states.

‘Different experience of the river’

Across much of Utah, Colorado River water is often known by a different name locally: Ashley Creek, Price River, Escalante River, Rock Creek. Dozens of smaller waterways flow through the mountains and canyons of Utah to major tributaries like the Green and San Juan Rivers, before dumping into the Colorado in the southeast corner of the state.

The flow in those lesser creeks and rivers fluctuate day to day, year to year, based on snowpack, creating a variable water supply across Utah and other Upper Basin states.

Some reservoirs, such as Strawberry and Scofield, exist along the journey to store water for drinking water and irrigation. But those human-made lakes pale in comparison to the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, that the Lower Basin relies on for water delivery.

“That very different experience of the river and water supply makes it hard for people to find common ground because there’s not a lot of common experience,” Cullom said.

Beyond just differences in storage and water availability, the Secretary of the Interior has much greater powers in the Lower Basin thanks to a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that deemed the secretary the “water master” of the river below Lake Mead.

“The secretary could go to water users in the Lower Basin and say, ‘There’s an existential crisis. I’m going to cut you off.’ The secretary does not have that authority in the Upper Basin,” Cullom said.

‘We’re all on the same rowboat’

Entsminger, the Nevada negotiator, spoke last on the final panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference — a reward for drawing the ace.

He kept it short and pointed at his fellow negotiators.

“If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard, slash impossible, it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more,” he said. “As long as we keep polishing those arguments and repeating them to each other, we are going nowhere.”

Entsminger closed his speech, and the largest Colorado River conference of the year, with a metaphorical warning for any negotiator that holds a hard line.

“We’re all on the same rowboat,” he said. “The first one to fire a shot puts a hole in the boat and sinks it.”

This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver.