Lee looks to CRA to crush GSENM plan

Plus: Another Colorado River wonkfest; more public lands and aridification news

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both MAGA Republicans from Utah, have formally introduced legislation to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke the Biden-era management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. If successful, the move would also bar the feds from developing a new management plan that resembles the current one.

The current management plan is not draconian by any means. It was fashioned over years, with oodles of input and compromise, and is far less restrictive than the preservation-oriented alternatives It allowed for motorized vehicle use on designated routes and added almost no new restrictions for livestock grazing. Revoking it is not the same as rescinding the national monument or shrinking its boundaries, and will not open up any of the monument to new mining claims or oil and gas leases.

So it’s not clear what Lee and Maloy hope to achieve, except to strike a blow to a national monument that they don’t like and to throw oversight of 1.9 million acres of public land into disarray. Or maybe they’re just trying to build up their anti-public-land credentials to head off challenges from even more extreme candidates such as, say, Phil Lyman, who just challenged Maloy for her 3rd District congressional seat.

You still have time to let your representatives in Congress know how you feel.

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Ugggg.

While well-intentioned greens are parsing BLM director nominee Steve Pearce’s words for indications he might be inclined to sell off public land, the Trump administration is orchestrating a massive de facto transfer of public lands to oil and gas companies.

I’m talking about oil and gas leasing. And no, it’s not an actual transfer of public land; the lessee does not take title to the land, nor can they block public access, but they do get the rights to drill that land and preclude other uses on it. And, once it is drilled, the land is scraped of all vegetation, covered with heavy equipment, poked with a massive drill, hydraulically fractured, and becomes an industrial-scale, methane-, hydrogen sulfide-, and VOC-oozing hydrocarbon factory for many decades to come.

On the auction block this June is a good chunk of slickrock-studded landscape northwest of Moab, between Hwy. 191 and the Green River, along with some parcels in the Lisbon Valley. All in all, the BLM proposes selling off 39 parcels covering some 71,600 acres. You have until March 30 to give your two cents. https://eplanning.blm.gov/Project-Home/?id=6fad61fa-a7f2-f011-8407-001dd80bcf93

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Of course, sometimes the BLM holds an oil and gas auction and no one comes. That was the case with the Big Beautiful Cook Inlet Oil and Gas Lease Sale (yes, that is the official name) held March 4 in Alaska, in which more than 1 million acres of offshore leases were put on the block. There were zero bids. Zilch. Nada. Someday, maybe every oil and gas lease sale will be like that.

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A federal judge has halted construction of the Northern Corridor Highway through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area near St. George, Utah, while an advocates’ lawsuit proceeds.

The BLM approved the contested project earlier this year. The Utah Department of Transportation, apparently wanting to get started before a legal challenge could take hold, began erecting fencing along the project, even though their development plan hadn’t been approved. This activity would have disturbed desert tortoise habitat.

The court did not approve, blocking further work until the lawsuit is resolved.

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In other Utah road news, Garfield County began chip-sealing the first ten miles of the Hole-in-the-Rock Road in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, drawing protest and a lawsuit from environmental groups.

The county has been aching to pave the gravel road, which often becomes riddled with potholes and washboards, for years, but failed to gain BLM approval. Environmental groups have resisted, saying that improving the road could lead to more paving or widening of primitive byways in the area, and would increase the number of people and their impacts on the fragile landscape.

The county has also wielded RS-2477 — an 1866 statute — in an attempt to wrest control over the byway, which leads to the famed Colorado River crossing of the 1879 Latter Day Saint expedition to Bluff. Last July, a federal court granted Garfield County quiet title to the section of the road within the county.

Garfield County interpreted that as a green light to chip seal the road.

That triggered a lawsuit from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, pointing out that because the road crosses BLM land, the county must still get the agency’s go-ahead for major improvements. It didn’t, but the BLM has done nothing to stop the action, which SUWA says violates federal environmental laws.

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🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

I was accused recently of being all “doom and gloom” when it comes to this year’s snow levels, so I set out to find some good news to report. It didn’t go so well, but I did uncover a few tiny nuggets, including:

1. After the February storms, the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies reported: “This is rare, but currently we do not have any dust on the snowpack.” That’s good news because dust on the snow decreases albedo (reflectivity), leading to faster snowmelt. We need what little we have to stick around as long as possible. Buzzkill: The really big dust events tend to come in the springtime.

2. I tend to rely on a handful of high-elevation SNOTEL sites as indicators of how the mountain snowpack is doing. One of them is in Columbus Basin in the La Plata Mountains. Like everywhere else, the snow water equivalent there is way below normal. However, it’s still above 2002 levels for early March, so that’s kind of heartening. I guess?

3. Hope lies in 1990: That year, snowpack levels in the Animas River watershed were lower on March 6 than they are today. But beginning in mid-March, storms pummeled the region, resulting in a May 3, 1990, snowpack peak that was 94% of normal and bringing runoff up to decent levels. We could see a repeat of that March-April-May miracle!

   

   As grim as this may be, it also offers a glimmer of hope: The snowpack could still recover like it did in 1990. Source: NRCS.

4. And … oh. I’ve just been informed that there is no more good news.

Now back to our regularly scheduled doom and gloom, bullet style.

• The late February-early March heat wave across most of the West shattered thousands of daily high temperature records and dozens of monthly ones, topping off the West’s warmest winter on record. Monthly records (121 tied or broken nationwide during the last week of Feb.) include:

  • Dinosaur National Monument in Utah hit 68° F on 2/26;

  • Imperial County, California’s airport reached 97° on 2/28;

  • Albuquerque airport, 77° on 2/25;

  • Hovenweep National Monument in Utah, 70° on 2/28;

  • Havasu, Arizona, and Malibu Hills, California, were both 93° on 2/27;

• Sampling of daily records (845 broken or tied during the last week of Feb) include:

  • Mancos, Colorado, hit 50° F on 2/28; the aforementioned Columbus Basin (elev. 10,784 feet) reached 48° and Mineral Creek, Colorado, hit 51° that same day;

  • McClure Pass, Colorado, reached 49° on 2/28;

  • Needles, California, and Phoenix both hit 92° on 2/28;

  • South Lake Tahoe airport, 60° on 2/28.

Those kinds of temperatures melt the snow, even on north faces, causing this year’s snow water equivalent graph lines to uncharacteristically dip during a time of year when they normally would be shooting upward. They also heighten risk of wildfires in the low country. On the last day of February, a blaze broke out in Chautauqua Park in Boulder, forcing some evacuations before it was contained. Another one was sparked west of Boulder on March 4.

The North Fork of the Gunnison, which feeds the ditches in and around Paonia and Hotchkiss and the orchards, vineyards, and farms there, is in trouble. This year’s snowpack so far is in the same boat as it was on this date in 2002 and 2018, two very dry years when irrigation ditches were shut off early in the growing season.

Aside from the entire Upper Colorado River watershed, I’m also especially concerned about the North Fork of the Gunnison. Snowpack levels are at a record low for this date, or about the same as they were in 2018, and Paonia Reservoir is currently utilizing just 22% of its storage capacity (note the record high temp on McClure Pass above, at the headwaters of Muddy Creek, which feeds the reservoir). This does not bode well for the many small farmers who rely on the river for irrigation. In 2018, downstream senior rights holders made a call on the river in June, forcing junior irrigators in the North Fork to lose water perilously early in the season.

This bad situation could be exacerbated if the feds were to decide to release water from Paonia Reservoir in an attempt to buoy Lake Powell water levels. While this is hypothetical, it is not beyond the realm of possibility by any means.

And, saving for some sort of April-May miracle, the Colorado River runoff will be extraordinarily scant this spring and summer, almost certainly pushing Lake Powell to critically low levels.

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That demands a plan, and the Bureau of Reclamation came up with several alternatives last month. Most of the major players have commented on the alternatives, and it’s safe to say that almost no one is satisfied with any of them — albeit for different reasons.

One of the more universal critiques is that none of the alternatives adequately address dry and critically dry scenarios on the river, like the one that is likely to occur this summer. The draft environmental impact statement itself states, “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.” That leaves many wondering what, exactly, the Bureau of Reclamation plans to do to keep the system from collapsing over the next nine months.

There is a lot here, and it gets pretty darned deep in the wonk weeds. Still, what I’ve included is a mere sampling of some of the comments from just a few of the commenters in the hope that it will give readers a better idea of where different stakeholders stand, and how complicated and difficult this situation really is.

For those who don’t like weeds, here’s the short version: It’s a tangled mess with a bunch of moving pieces and stakeholders who are digging in their heels to ensure that their constituents get the water they need to drink, irrigate crops, run industries, or whatever. And they’re all butting up against the reality that there simply isn’t enough water in the river to go around.

Ian James has a slightly less crunchy version for the Los Angeles Times.

Here are the comments and commenters:

Four Democratic members of Arizona’s congressional delegation feel that the Lower Basin is getting the dry end of the stick (their comments are similar to those of the Arizona Department of Water Resources):

• Arizona is understandably displeased because they would take the greatest hit under any alternative. This is not because they are somehow inferior, but because the water rights to the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, are junior to most other big users in the Lower Basin. “… each alternative, though broad in scope, will translate in practice specifically as drastic reductions to Arizona’s water supply.”

• “We are deeply troubled that Reclamation all but abandons its increasingly critical role in ensuring the Upper Basin States fulfill their delivery obligations under the Colorado River Compact of 1922 (Compact).” This refers to the non-depletion or minimum-delivery obligation that I’ve written about before.

• “The DEIS itself acknowledges that ‘widespread impacts on social and economic conditions may also be possible,’ including circumstances in which municipalities may need to pursue alternative or even hauled water sources to maintain basic services. Drastic cuts could have cascading consequences for human health and safety and destabilize the lives and livelihoods of Arizonans, tribal communities, and critical industries that rely on Colorado River supplies.”

• They say the cuts will damage the state’s agriculture, manufacturing, and aerospace industries and that it will put at risk: “… the largest concentration of advanced semiconductor manufacturing investment in the country, representing roughly $200 billion in announced projects since 2020.” Semiconductor production is extremely water-intensive, with the average factory consuming up to 10 million gallons of ultra-pure water daily.

• They call on any plans to “include verifiable Upper Basin conservation measures commensurate with Lower Basin conservation measures, including identifying tangible metrics that demonstrate Upper Basin water conservation.”

The Colorado River District, which represents water users on Colorado’s Western Slope, wasn’t so psyched about the alternatives, either:

• “We believe that Reclamation must institute bold and meaningful changes but that those changes must be implemented in a manner that is consistent with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the 1944 binational treaty with Mexico, the 1948 Upper Basin Compact, and the other foundational elements of the Law of the River.”

• “Reclamation must prioritize hydrologic reality over predictability for Lower Basin users. The Draft EIS places undue emphasis on predictability1 for water users, a goal that is unattainable under future climate conditions unless system storage is replenished and overall demands are permanently reduced to match the supply.”

• “… several alternatives include Upper Basin water conservation ranging from zero to 500,000 acre-feet annually … <but> … fails to analyze the environmental or socioeconomic impacts associated with these conservation volumes.” It adds that a 200,000 acre-feet reduction in the Upper Basin would require fallowing 52,000 acres on the Western Slope.

• “Lower Basin water use must be reduced by 1.5 million acre-feet at all times, regardless of the alternative. This amount represents system losses (i.e., transit losses and reservoir evaporation) and should not be classified as shortage.” This is a longstanding issue. Reservoir evaporation and other such losses are counted against the Upper Basin’s consumptive use, in part because of the non-depletion obligation. The same is not true for the Lower Basin; when they say they use 7.5 million acre-feet, that does not include evaporation or seepage or other system losses, only what they pull out of the river.

• “The range of alternatives must include option(s) that perform under critically dry hydrology. Currently, none of the alternatives in the Draft EIS perform under critically dry hydrology. At least one alternative must protect critical infrastructure and respond effectively to significantly lower river flows than historically observed.” We are approaching a critically dry situation this summer, when the feds will have to decide whether and how to keep Lake Powell from dropping below minimum power pool. So far there is no plan for this.

• “Hydrology must drive Post-2026 operations. Operating guidelines based upon comparative reservoir elevations which do not factor in real time hydrology have been disastrous for protecting storage in Lake Powell and thus, have failed to provide the water supply certainty for the Upper Basin intended by the Law of the River …”

• “Interbasin transactions must not be allowed in the proposed action.” That is, Upper Basin users with senior rights should not be able to sell their water to Lower Basin users.

The team of Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Katherine Tara, and Kathryn Soren, river experts and academics who aren’t representing any specific water user, state, or basin, also weighed in. Their comments, as Fleck put it in his Inkstain blog, could be summed up as: “Tell us what you’re going to do.” And, also:

• The group calls on Interior to “primarily focus on the Dry and Critically Dry scenarios. … We think it important to be mindful of the underlying year-to-year hydrology of the 21st century as we look to the future. … we are struck by the fact that 50% of the individual years of the 21st century have been Dry or Critically Dry, and only 27% of the years (including 2017, 2019, 2023) have been Moderately Wet or Wet.”

• “We suggest that the DEIS include a description of an alternative that performs sufficiently well during Dry scenarios and an alternative that performs sufficiently well during Critically Dry scenarios.”

• “ … it is imperative that Reclamation provide a clear picture of what actions will be implemented in the near term (i.e., next year, next 3 years, next 5 years) to protect critical infrastructure, and to protect public health and safety.”

• Noting that lawsuits are inevitable regardless of which alternative the feds choose, they urge them to avoid “safe” options and go with a plan with “… the broadest possible interpretation of Reclamation’s and Interior’s authority to provide a predictable and resilient Colorado River so that the system can continue to operate in a reasonable manner while the lawsuits proceed.”

• Call on the feds to “… explore these areas for possible inclusion in the preferred alternative:

  • Reduction of deliveries in the Lower Basin in excess of 1.48 MAF when insufficient water is available for release.

  • Provision for releases of water from the Colorado River Storage Project initial units as necessary to protect critical elevations in Lake Powell and ensure continued Upper Basin Compact compliance.

  • Operation of federal projects in the Upper Basin to store or use less water during critical periods.

  • Continuation, expansion, and modification of Assigned Water programs (such as Intentionally Created Surplus and Mexican Water Reserve) with improvements to ensure operational neutrality and minimize adverse impact to priority water.

  • Establishing a conservation pool in Lake Powell for storing Upper Basin conserved water to be utilized for Compact compliance purposes. For more on conservation pools, check out the Shannon Mulane’s explainer in the Colorado Sun.

• The group finds fault with the plan for not addressing “the need for enforceable reductions in the Upper Basin.” They go with the Lower Basin’s interpretation of the non-depletion/minimum-delivery obligation, saying that the Colorado River Compact does not guarantee that the Upper Basin gets half of the water in the river. Plus, they point out that the plan’s demand forecasts for the Upper Basin are unrealistically high, putting more of the burden for cuts on the Lower Basin.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority and Colorado River Commission of Nevada are especially critical, writing:

• “Since the onset of drought in 2002, <Nevada water users> have reduced their overall Colorado River water consumption by more than 40 percent even as our population grew by more than 875,000 people. And they, unlike so many others, have not ignored the reality facing the basin by making the flimsy argument that our economy cannot prosper while water consumption decreases.”

• Like Arizona, they bring up the minimum-delivery/non-depletion clause of the Colorado River Compact and call on the Upper Basin to comply with it.

• Interior’s “… approach to protecting the Glen Canyon Dam river outlet works by reducing releases from Lake Powell—rather than making infrastructure repairs and improvements—is shortsighted and harms Nevada and the Lower Basin States.”

The Upper Colorado River Commission emphasizes the Lower Basin’s history of exceeding its Colorado River Compact allocation and failing to account for evaporation and other system losses. Colorado’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner Becky Mitchell submitted similar, very detailed comments that emphasized the Colorado River Compact’s equitable division of the river between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin. She points out that the Lower Basin’s interpretation of the minimum-delivery/non-depletion clause contradicts and even negates that division.

📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐

Must read: Teal Lehto’s and Len Necefer’s speculative fiction take on what might happen on the Colorado River, and to the people who rely on it, in 2030 if current climatic trends continue. It’s dramatic and sensational and catastrophic, but it’s also very well informed, smart, and not at all far-fetched, in my humble opinion.