PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — Average gas prices have gone up nearly 20 cents a gallon in Oregon and Washington in the past week as tensions in the Middle East continue.

Washington state has the third most expensive gas in the country at an average of $5.57 a gallon for regular, followed by Oregon at fourth in the U.S. with roughly $5.15 per gallon for regular.

The average price for regular in the U.S. is $4.30 a gallon. AAA says the price of oil has surged to more than $100 a barrel, with no indication of when the Strait of Hormuz will be back open.

A poll found that half of all Americans expect gas prices to rise even higher in the next year.

That same poll from ABC and Ipsos said some Americans are changing their behaviors because of the higher gas prices.

About 4 in 10 people are driving less (44%) or have cut back on other household expenses (42%) to compensate.

More than a third have changed their travel or vacation plans, the poll said, and about 15% of people said they’ve considered buying an electric vehicle.

Pump prices are now the highest they’ve been during this time of year since 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed crude oil prices above $100 per barrel.

The poll found that about a quarter (23%) of all Americans are falling behind financially, which is up from 17%in February, before gas prices started to spike.

About half of those who took the poll said they have just enough to maintain their standard of living, while 24% said they are getting ahead – down from 28% in February.

ST. GEORGE — As negotiations over the Colorado River remain at a standstill, Utah and other states in the Upper Basin are asking for outside help.

Negotiators from Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming called for “immediate mediation” among the seven states that share the Colorado River and the federal government, according to a statement from the Upper Colorado River Commission last week.

“It’s past the eleventh hour. It’s 11:59,” Estevan López, New Mexico’s negotiator, said during a commission meeting on April 21 while discussing the looming deadline for new operating plans for the river that provides water to roughly 40 million people.

Current guidelines for managing the river system and its reservoirs during dry times expire this year. The Bureau of Reclamation is currently going through an environmental review process and has said it must have a new plan in place by Oct. 1. If the states reach consensus, the bureau has said they will choose that as its preferred path forward.

The states have failed to agree, though, missing two federal deadlines over the past six months.

“I think it would be worth all of us stepping back from this and seeking to get a mediated solution to solve this really difficult problem,” López said.

So far, the bureau has facilitated negotiations among the states. López acknowledged the agency’s “good” attempts but also said that the bureau is “not an independent entity in this discussion.”

“Reclamation has a really important interest in the outcome,” he said. “They obviously operate the reservoirs. Reclamation and the Secretary of Interior are the river master in the Lower Basin. Interior serves in a trust responsibility for the tribes throughout the basin.”

Utah’s negotiator, Gene Shawcroft, said that he agreed with López and that “it’s extremely disappointing” that the states haven’t reached a resolution yet.

“It’s critical for us to continue to work together,” he added. “A seven-state solution will still be much better than any other alternative.”

The Upper Basin states are in discussions with the bureau and the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — about developing a mediation process currently, the commission said in an email to The Tribune on Wednesday.

John Entsminger, Nevada’s negotiator, said he’s “open to bringing on an independent mediator” but that he’s also disappointed that the states’ seven representatives “can’t come up with a common-sense solution.”

“But mediation beats litigation,” he added. “So if there’s a chance this helps break the logjam, then tell me when and where to be.”

The idea of a mediator has surfaced in river negotiations “a handful of times” over the past two decades, Entsminger said. But in the past the negotiators were able to come to “a mutually agreeable solution where everybody gives a little,” he added.

That hasn’t happened this time around. “I think it’s become more difficult for the states to agree, because the magnitude of the problem has increased,” he said.

Much of the Colorado River Basin experienced its worst snowpack and hottest winter on record. The bureau and Upper Basin states reached an agreement to release up to 1 million acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge this year to prevent Lake Powell from reaching minimum power pool — the level at which the dam can no longer generate hydropower or sustainably send water downstream.

California proposed a mediator last year, JB Hamby, California’s negotiator, told The Tribune in an email.

“However, effective mediation requires common ground, and the system cannot wait,” he added. “Current conditions require immediate, measurable water reductions from every state.”

The Arizona Department of Water Resources said it had no comment at this time.

How a third party could help

Bringing in a mediator “makes total sense” to help states get past politics and personalities and reach a solution, said John Berggren, a regional policy manager on Colorado River issues for Western Resource Advocates.

“I kind of wish it would have happened two-plus years ago,” he added, “but some of the fundamental challenges that they’re facing come down to trust and communication … and not taking each other’s proposals seriously.”

The drawn out negotiations have put states in an unpredictable situation that makes finding a solution more difficult, said Danya Rumore, director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program at the University of Utah.

“Our options get more limited,” she said. “People are more likely to be entrenched. We get more fear in the conversation, and that makes it harder to actually productively deal with it. It doesn’t make it impossible, it just gives you one more thing you have to contend with.”

A trained third-party facilitator — or team of facilitators — would ideally create a process that helps people learn how to productively work through conflict while also integrating the complex science, legal frameworks and uncertainties involved in this issue, Rumore said.

“If somebody can’t understand the legal elements of what’s going on there, they don’t understand the scientific elements enough to be able to facilitate those conversations, that can create huge challenges,” she added.

Rumore and her co-workers jokingly call themselves “the group mom.” That means both getting things done and seeing what’s emotionally happening in the room.

“We have to stay regulated,” she said. “We have to stay present. We have to not go into this crisis thinking mode. And that’s going to help us get a good outcome.”

If the states do bring in a third party, Entsminger said he hopes it’s “somebody that could inject some objectiveness into the entire process because we’ve got some entrenched people. There’s no doubt about that.”

He said he thinks the states will come up with a short-term, two- or three-year operating plan this year while they continue hashing out a long-term plan.

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. 

A new tool from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) will identify and rank 114 clusters of sage grouse based on population trends.

The tool, called sage grouse cluster ordering by unified trend assessment or SCOUT, draws from population and abundance data spanning 25 years. Clusters represent sage grouse “neighborhoods.” They’re organized by leks, which are grouse breeding grounds.

Nyssa Whitford is the sage grouse biologist with WGFD. She said the rankings will help focus conservation efforts.

“We’re ranking every cluster, so we’ll know how they stack up against each other,” said Whitford. “We’re going to be focusing on those opportunity clusters. These are areas where we feel that we can move the needle.”

Whitford said the tool is part of Wyoming’s adaptive management strategy with sage grouse, which was reiterated through an executive order signed by Gov. Mark Gordon last year and a new Bureau of Land Management plan. Whitford said this approach tracks sage grouse populations and habitats for early intervention.

“The goal of adaptive management is when something starts to kind of go sideways, we can quickly pull it back to where it needs to be,” said Whitford.

Sage grouse live their entire lives in the sagebrush sea: The plant is an important food source and habitat. They are especially vulnerable to the threat of habitat fragmentation.

“Anything that’s kind of inhibiting that life cycle, they just do not respond favorably to it,” said Whitford. “They need the intact sagebrush sea to survive.”

Whitford explained that unbroken, quiet tracts of sagebrush are also critical to the springtime mating displays of sage grouse, called “lekking.”

“It’s a very visual and acoustic display,” said Whitford. “It’s very quiet out there, and so you can really get to hear all the pieces of the mating display. There’s like these pops and the swishing of the wings.”

The best time to observe lekking across Wyoming is in April.

The output from the SCOUT tool will be used to create a report that addresses questions about clusters of concern.

Whitford provided examples of potential questions: “What does the habitat look like in that cluster? Has it changed? Is it more fragmented? Has there been new development? Has there been a wildfire recently?”

The output and report will be shared with a working group made up of representatives from different agencies and industries, who will use the findings to guide conservation efforts.

Whitford said WGFD has been monitoring leks since the 1940s and codified those efforts in the 1990s, but SCOUT offers a new and more consistent way to study all the data.

“Wyoming cares deeply about its sage grouse populations and really wants to make sure all the entities involved, whether they’re managing the landscape or they’re managing the population, are on the same page and moving forward in the same direction,” said Whitford.