On July 31, the Bureau of Reclamation released its Final Environmental Impact Statement for how Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be operated once the 2007 Interim Guidelines expire this year. This is the decision our community has been organizing around for three years. Reclamation has now named its preferred path forward. The Record of Decision that makes it legally binding is the final step and is expected in the coming weeks, but the direction is set.
We want to tell you three things honestly: what your voice accomplished, what this plan actually does, and why — even with this plan in place — the system still isn't safe.
What you accomplished
Reclamation received more than 18,000 comments on the draft, including 785 unique substantive submissions from states, tribes, water districts, and the public. A large share of the recreation-focused response came through you. Going back to the pre-scoping phase in 2022, Reclamation logged nearly 2,000 submittals of our "Fill Lake Powell — Path to 3588′" letter, and our members have kept that pressure on through every comment window since.
That mattered, and here is the precise, defensible version of how. Reclamation acknowledged the Path to 3588′ and the recreation-access concerns our members raised in the administrative record. The proposal was never formally analyzed as a standalone alternative — but look at the structure of what Reclamation actually chose. The preferred alternative is built on protective operational thresholds, which Reclamation calls "sideboards," that guard against catastrophic drawdown, paired with reductions that step down as water availability declines. That is the same architecture we argued for: floors to protect the reservoirs, and graduated cuts tied to how much water the system actually has. The specific elevations are not the ones we asked for. But the shape of the policy moved toward us, and that alignment did not happen by accident — it stayed on the table because tens of thousands of people refused to let recreation be treated as an afterthought.
There is a second outcome worth naming, and we take it seriously. For years, some voices have pushed "Fill Mead First" — a proposal to drain Lake Powell, consolidate storage in Lake Mead, and ultimately decommission Glen Canyon Dam. BRC has opposed that idea without qualification, and Reclamation gave it no foothold here. Reclamation has repeatedly declined to carry the drain-Powell concept forward for analysis, and the preferred alternative points firmly the other way: it provides for storing conserved water in Lake Powell — up to 8 million acre-feet of it — and for protecting the dam's infrastructure. That is the operating posture of an agency planning to keep Powell as a working reservoir, not abandon it. There is no appetite in this framework for draining Lake Powell, and keeping it that way is exactly what our members' continued engagement protects.
We keep an independent record of your participation precisely so this impact can't be under-counted. Thank you for showing up.
What the plan actually does
Credit where it's due: Reclamation was handed an almost impossible assignment. It had to balance seven states, more than 30 Tribal Nations, a binational treaty obligation to Mexico, hydropower, environmental flows, and a river producing far less water than the paper promises written against it. The preferred alternative is a genuine attempt to manage that tension.
Rather than lock in one operating strategy for a decade, Reclamation built an adaptive framework that runs through 2036. It sets outer boundaries — "sideboards" — and then issues shorter operating guidelines, roughly every two years, that can flex with actual hydrology. The sideboards it analyzed include:
- Annual releases from Lake Powell ranging from 5.0 to 12.0 million acre-feet
- Lower Basin shortages of up to 3.0 million acre-feet
- Storage of conserved water up to 8.0 maf in Powell and 3.0 maf in Mead
- Voluntary Upper Basin conservation of up to 200,000 acre-feet, subject to hydrology
The framework also leaves room for the Basin states to reach a consensus agreement and fold it into future operations. For an agency navigating this many competing interests, choosing adaptability over a brittle one-shot rule was the responsible call.
Why this plan cannot save the system
Read those sideboards again and the hard truth is right there in the numbers. A Powell release that can fall to 5.0 maf. Lower Basin cuts up to 3.0 maf. This is a framework for rationing a shrinking supply — deciding who goes short, and by how much, in a bad year. It is scarcity management. It is not a supply solution.
No operating rule, however well designed, adds a single acre-foot to the river. The structural deficit — the gap between what the Colorado actually produces and what the Law of the River obligates it to deliver, once evaporation and system losses are counted — does not close because we got better at dividing the shortfall. It just gets managed.
That is why we've been candid with you that this plan, for all its flexibility, cannot secure the reservoirs our communities depend on. It can slow the decline. It cannot reverse it. Without new water entering the system, a deep enough drought still ends with reservoirs drawn down past the point where marinas, hydropower, and recreation access survive.
Where we stand on conservation
The preferred alternative leans heavily on conservation — voluntary Upper Basin savings, conserved water stored behind both dams. This is a place where honest advocates have to hold two things at once, and we want our position on the record.
We support conservation. The cheapest acre-foot saved is often a better deal than the most expensive acre-foot produced, and where real savings can be had without gutting a community, they should be taken first. Any serious plan for this river uses conservation, and ours does not oppose it.
Conservation also carries limits we don't say out loud often enough. It is finite and front-loaded: the easy savings go first, each additional acre-foot costs more than the last, and eventually you are paying to retire water that a farm town, a tribe, or a city is actually living on. Agricultural conservation especially is rarely as cheap as its top-line price — fallowed fields ripple out into farm-town payrolls, county tax bases, the region's food supply, and, on the Lower Colorado, the exposed playa of the Salton Sea and the dust it lifts into people's lungs. A clean number on a spreadsheet can hide all of that.
None of our formal plans — not the Path to 3588′, not the Abundance Act — is built on squeezing more out of conservation, and that is deliberate. The river's long-term security cannot rest on a tool whose cost climbs as its supply runs out.
The real risk is not that conservation gets used. It is that a good conservation year gets mistaken for a solution — that the system banks some savings, exhales, and defers the harder work of adding water. Conservation buys time; it does not buy a future. If the basin spends the next decade celebrating the use of less from a supply that keeps shrinking, it will arrive at 2036 having managed the decline more gracefully and solved nothing.
The real work starts now
Here is the opportunity in this moment. For the first time in years, the operating rules are settled for about a decade. The basin doesn't have to spend the next ten years locked in a zero-sum fight over how to slice a shrinking pie. That energy can finally go toward making the pie bigger.
We saw this limit coming, and we didn't wait for the operations plan to disappoint us. Back in January — while we were still fighting through the comment process — we released the Colorado River Abundance Act. We built the long-term answer while the short-term fight was still underway, because we already understood what a NEPA operations process can and cannot deliver. It can divide the water more fairly. It cannot make more of it.
That is the entire premise of the Act: authorize up to 7 million acre-feet of new supply through desalination and reuse, treat recreation as a coequal project purpose alongside water supply and hydropower, require Recreation Modernization Plans for the major reservoirs, and establish transparent accounting so new "replacement water" can actually stabilize Powell and Mead without distorting Compact obligations. It is the one approach on the table that addresses the deficit itself rather than just redistributing it.
The Post-2026 framework was the ceiling of what public comment could win: a fairer, more flexible way to manage scarcity. Solving scarcity is a different fight, and it's the one in front of us now. We'll be back in touch soon with specific ways to push the Abundance Act forward. For now, know that the reservoirs you fought for are still in play — and that the next chapter is about giving this system more water, not just better rules for running low on it.
Thank you for standing with us. This is a marathon, and you've kept us in it.
