With frustrating meetings on a near-daily basis, the seven states that share the Colorado River are scrambling to deliver any semblance of an agreement as they gear up for a high-profile discussion with the Trump administration next week.

About 40 million people — and economically vital farms — in the American West rely on the river for their water supply in some of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Denver.

However, according to state officials and experts, an unrelenting stalemate doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon, even with a Feb. 14 deadline to deliver a framework for how states should share the pain of a receding river.

“At the point that we sit today, there’s a lot of people at the table that still want a 20-year deal,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of resources at the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “A 20-year deal is the platinum award, and we’re ready to settle for the bronze medal.”

A temporary, five-year deal, as Nevada’s top negotiator suggested on a December panel in Las Vegas, is much more likely, Pellegrino said.

Each of the state’s governors are expected to meet with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the nation’s capital on Friday, Arizona’s lead negotiator and a spokesman for Gov. Joe Lombardo confirmed to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Meanwhile, in its first public document in months, the Bureau of Reclamation — the federal agency that manages water and dams in the West — has laid out modeling for four potential solutions that some experts say are shaky at best.

4 paths forward, furious closed-door meetings

Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in an interview that the draft environmental impact statement accurately reflects the dire situation water managers find themselves in.

“In the dry and critically dry hydrologies, which I think are what we really need to be looking at, those outcomes are way poorer than anybody should be comfortable with,” Udall said. “And that’s with these very large shortages.”

One of the so-called alternatives that the Bureau of Reclamation is considering, the “basic coordination alternative,” assumes that the seven states cannot reach an agreement. It’s a reflection of what little legal authority the agency has over the states to enforce conservation.

“It’s laughable,” Udall said. “The outcomes are horrible.”

All of the alternatives, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California General Manager Shivaji Deshmukh said in a statement when the document was released, “would likely lead to lengthy litigation.”

That’s a conclusion that officials are doing everything they can to avoid.

“I would tell any water user who sat down with me today in any state that if we want certainty about our water supply, we have to have a consensus agreement,” said Pellegrino, of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “The law of the river is complex, with different laws, compacts and decrees interwoven.”

Lower Basin not thrilled with alternatives

While the federal government mandate for cuts in the Lower Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona is legally sound, limitations of that authority in the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming are displayed in the alternatives, experts said.

Eric Kuhn, now-retired director of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in the state of Colorado, highlighted the immense burden some of the alternatives appear to put on the Lower Basin states, to the tune of mandatory cuts between 2.5 and 3 million acre-feet.

Southern Nevada, which isn’t likely to take significant cuts compared with the other Lower Basin states, is afforded 300,000 acre-feet of water per year from the river. Its estimated 2.3 million residents routinely use less than that full allotment.

Much of the conservation required of the Upper Basin remains voluntary — a function of that legally untested authority.

“Proposed conserved consumptive use programs in the Upper Basin are all going to be very difficult for the Upper Basin to implement,” Kuhn said. “They’re going to be costly, and they’re going to be politically challenging.”

In a call with reporters Thursday, Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said that forgoing his state’s legally apportioned water rights under the Colorado River Compact of 1922 would require him to petition his state Legislature.

“There is not anything on the table from the Upper Basin today that would compel me to stand up in front of the Legislature and even ask them to consider doing so,” he said, reiterating comments he made at a December conference in Las Vegas. “And I know that is a strident statement about how far apart we are, but that is my view of where we are at.”

John Berggren, a policy manager with the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, was heartened to see an alternative include the idea of a “conservation pool,” or water set aside in a “savings account” that the Bureau of Reclamation could use to stabilize reservoirs. Nonprofits floated the idea in comments submitted to the agency on a previous document.

But time is running out for the states to have total control over their water supply without federal intervention — or a yearslong lawsuit.

“If you come to a negotiated agreement, you give your water users certainty,” Berggren said. “Maybe everyone has to give a little to get this agreement, but you avoid that worst-case scenario where you have no idea how bad it could be.”

Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.