There continues to be no new information from the ongoing negotiations among the protagonists for the seven states trying to work out a new two-basin management plan for the Colorado River. The Bureau of Reclamation, however, is pressing ahead; it recently went public with its ‘Draft Environmental Impact Statement’ (DEIS) for ‘Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.’ The five alternative ‘operational guidelines and strategies’ analyzed in this DEIS were announced back in the fall of 2024; the Bureau has spent the past year-plus examining their environmental impacts. I’m not going to go into their analyses right now; I’m still working on skimming, skipping, sprinting and plowing my way through enough of the 1600 pages or so of the report to feel reasonably informed on its contents. But I will note that the first action analyzed (skipping past the mandatory ‘No Action’ alternative) is for the Bureau to go ahead and run the river system as … Read More