The Upper Colorado River Commission welcomed a new representative from New Mexico to a meeting in downtown Denver on Tuesday to discuss ongoing negotiations over how to share the nation’s most over-allocated river.
Tanya Trujillo, deputy state engineer and senior water policy advisor to New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham, has replaced Esteban López as the state’s top negotiator for the Colorado River, which supplies water to seven western states, 30 tribes and 40 million people in Mexico.
Trujillo served as assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior under President Joe Biden. Although she has never participated in negotiations before, she said she has been familiar with the basin and its challenges for decades.
“For me, this is not a celebration,” Trujillo said in his opening remarks, noting that he had not sought the position but was appointed because Grisham was depressed by the lack of progress in negotiations. “We are in crisis.”
Trujillo said no one is to blame for the impasse, but New Mexico will “take a fresh look” at several issues with an eye toward cooperation.
“We see a crisis in our relationships and solidarity with our basin state partners,” she said. “I think we need to think about some things differently.”
Grisham’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Trujillo’s appointment.
But Trujillo’s message of cooperation quickly clashed with intense political, economic, and environmental pain brought on by decades of overallocation of the river’s water supply and poor hydrology.
“If you have flexibility in storage, it’s much easier to find a solution,” said Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell. “We don’t have that right now.”
In the United States, the Colorado River Basin is divided into the Upper Basin, which includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and the Lower Basin, which consists of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Water use in the basin has consistently exceeded river supplies by 11 million to 13 million acre-feet in recent years, and while there has been some reduction in use, there is an urgent need for more significant reductions.
Officials in each basin state have been negotiating new guidelines to divide the river’s dwindling flows since 2020. So far, no agreement has been reached, having twice missed deadlines set by the federal government.
As states continue to try to break the logjam, the federal government has sought to shore up dwindling supplies at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs that provide significant downstream water supplies. To do this, it plans to draw 1 million acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, a relatively full federally managed reservoir that straddles the Utah-Wyoming border. Depending on the climate, one acre-foot of water can provide water for one to three households.
Lake Powell reaches one-third of its capacity and the Colorado River flows to Glen Canyon Dam on July 10, 2025 in Page, Arizona. Credit: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
Upper Basin states have agreed to the cuts but reiterated Tuesday that future releases from Upper Basin reservoirs are off the table, although they are willing to cooperate and want to avoid conflict.
“(Upper Basin reservoirs) are not going to save the basin from a long-term crisis,” said Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s state engineer and Colorado River negotiator. “They are just finite tools, not solutions.”
The upstream negotiating team stressed that the region is already forced to live with catastrophic water loss in each year of water scarcity. This winter will be the warmest and driest in many parts of the West since record-keeping began. Utah negotiator Gene Shawcroft joined Gebhart and Mitchell in saying water users with rights dating back to the 19th century — decades before the 1922 Colorado River Compact determined how the river would be shared — had their water service cut off this year.
Any new agreement on how to share the river “must be responsive to what the hydrology and the reservoirs are telling us,” Mitchell said.
In the absence of a resolution from the seven states, the federal government is expected to release a final environmental impact report for the Colorado River Management Plan in mid-July.
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Wyoming and Western Reporters
Jake Bolster reports on Wyoming and the West for Inside Climate News. Previously, she worked as a freelancer covering climate change, energy, and the environment across the United States. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
