The leaders of seven states failed to negotiate a deal to share the diminishing waters of the Colorado River by a Trump administration deadline on Saturday, leaving the Southwest in a quagmire with uncertain repercussions while the river’s depleted reservoirs continue to decline.
Former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said in an interview with The Times that the impasse now appears so intractable that Trump administration officials should take a step back, abandon the current effort and begin all over again.
Babbitt said he believes it would be a mistake for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “try to impose a long-term solution” by ordering major water cuts across the Southwest — which would likely set off a lengthy court battle.
“We need a fresh start,” Babbitt said. “I believe that in the absence of a unanimous agreement, [the Interior Department] should renew the existing agreements for five years, and then we should start all over. We should scrap the entire process and invent a new one.”
Officials for the seven states have tried to boost reservoir levels via voluntary water cutbacks and federal payments to farmers who agree to leave fields dry part of the year. But after more than two years of trying to hash out new long-term rules for sharing water, they remain deadlocked; the existing rules are set to expire at the end of this year.
Interior Department officials have not said how they will respond. The agency is considering four options for imposing cutbacks starting next year, as well as the option of taking no action.
Babbitt, who was Interior secretary under President Clinton from 1993 to 2001, said he thinks the Trump administration’s options are too narrow and inadequate. They would place the burden of water cuts on Arizona, California and Nevada while not requiring any for the four other upriver states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
Without a consensus, the only reasonable approach is to extend existing water-saving agreements for a few years while making a new push for solutions, Babbitt said.
Federal officials have “missed the opportunity” to take a strong leadership role, he said, and it’s time to reimagine the effort as a “much more inclusive, public, broad” process.
The river provides for about 35 million people and 5 million acres of farmland, from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico. California uses more water than any other state but has cut back substantially in recent years.
Since 2000, relentless drought intensified by climate change has sapped the river’s flow and left reservoirs depleted. This winter’s record warmth and lack of storms has left the Rockies with very little snow.
Lake Mead, the river’s largest reservoir, is now 34% full, while Lake Powell is at 26%.
“Our states have conserved large volumes of water in recent years,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a joint statement with Arizona’s Katie Hobbs and Nevada’s Joe Lombardo. “Our stance remains firm and fair: all seven basin states must share in the responsibility of conservation.”
The states’ positions haven’t changed much in the last two years, said JB Hamby, California’s lead negotiator, and moving toward an agreement will require firm commitments for cuts by all.
Officials representing the four Upper Basin states said they’ve offered compromises and are prepared to continue negotiating. In a written statement, they stressed they are already dealing with substantial water cuts, and said their downstream neighbors are trying to secure water “that simply does not exist.”
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast shows the amount of runoff flowing into Lake Powell will decrease so dramatically this year that the dropping reservoir levels could render Glen Canyon Dam unable to continue generating electricity.
The Interior Department said in a written statement Saturday that it will finalize new rules by Oct. 1, and it “cannot delay action.” The agency is accepting comments from the public as part of its review of options until March 2.
“Negotiation efforts have been productive,” Burgum said. “We believe that a fair compromise with shared responsibility remains within reach.”
California’s mountains are covered with snow, reservoirs are mostly filled and hills across the state are sprouting green grass and wildflowers after the latest round of soaking storms.
The snowpack across the Sierra Nevada now stands at 105% of average for this time of year, and state officials will provide an update on conditions Tuesday when they conduct their April snow survey, which is typically when the snowpack reaches its peak.
The state’s major reservoirs are at 116% of average levels, and are set to rise further as snowmelt streams in.
After a second wet winter, the state is heading into spring and summer with boosted water supplies.
“It puts us in very good shape,” said Felicia Marcus, a water researcher at Stanford University. “Any time you get to average, that’s a great thing.”
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She said the ample snow and rain this year provide the state some breathing room, but shouldn’t diminish the urgency of planning for the next severe drought and the effects of climate change.
“We’re on borrowed time,” Marcus said. “We need to save more water, even in the wet and the normal years, to get us through the increasingly frequent and drier dries that are inevitably going to come.”
In the last decade, California endured two severe droughts, and then came the historic series of atmospheric rivers of 2023, which brought one of the biggest accumulations of snow on record and triggered damaging floods in parts of the state.
This winter began with unusually dry conditions, but initial fears of a “snow drought” faded as storms in February and March pushed the snowpack to average levels.
Precipitation has been slightly above average statewide so far this year. And no part of California is currently in drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s data.
Water levels in the state’s largest reservoirs in Northern California are well above average levels for this time of year. Shasta Lake is now 92% full and continuing to rise with runoff from the latest rains, while Lake Oroville is at 88% of capacity.
In Southern California, Diamond Valley Lake is also nearly full.
Wetlands spread along the shoreline at Big Break in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta near Oakley.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Marcus, a former chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, said the reprieve this year buys the state a bit of time to advance conservation efforts in cities and farming areas, and to invest in projects to recycle wastewater, capture stormwater and recharge groundwater.
“It doesn’t mean we take our foot off the gas pedal,” she said. “Because every year could be the first year of a 10-year drought.”
Even with the state’s reservoirs at healthy levels, California continues to face complex water management problems, such as struggling fish populations and the depletion of groundwater in many farming areas.
Chronic shortages of supplies from the Colorado River, a key source for Southern California, are also forcing water managers to make plans for scaling back water use.
For Southern California’s cities, however, this year’s storms and the substantial amounts of water stored in reservoirs are expected to keep supplies flowing reliably — a dramatic change from 2022 and early 2023, when shortages led to mandatory drought restrictions for millions of residents.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which delivers supplies to cities and local agencies that serve 19 million people, now has a record amount of water stored. That 3.4 million acre-feet of water, banked in various reservoirs and underground storage areas, equates to nearly three years’ worth of imported water, and a large portion of it accumulated thanks to conservation efforts, said Adel Hagekhalil, the MWD’s general manager.
“We in Southern California have done a great job in managing our water and reducing our water use,” Hagekhalil said.
While two wet years are helping the region’s water outlook for now, he said, the district’s officials are continuing to focus on long-term plans to ensure supplies during more severe droughts supercharged by climate change.
“We may be out of drought for the time being, but we’re not out of drought for the future,” Hagekhalil said. “This is the future climate, and we need to prepare for it.”
Last month, California increased the water allocations that suppliers will be able to receive this year from the State Water Project to 30% of their full allotments. That level of water deliveries “puts us in balance” with current water demand, Hagekhalil said, enabling the MWD to not draw down its stored supplies this year, and instead keep those reserves for when they’re needed.
Hopefully, he said, the latest storms will bring another increase in the state’s water allocations.
“That puts us in a place where we are storing water everywhere we can,” Hagekhalil said.
“Every drop that we can now store is a drop that we have available for the future,” he said. “This is the climate whiplash. We’re going to see hotter and drier days, and probably a number of years of drought coming to us, so this is the time to capture the water and store it.”
In the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the center of the state’s water system, a recent increase in the deaths of fish at pumping facilities has prompted criticism from environmental groups and led to limitations on pumping.
“Overall, our pumping has been low throughout the year,” said Lenny Grimaldo, environmental director for the State Water Project. “We’ve seen a lot of protections triggered for species.”
The powerful pumps at state and federal pumping facilities reverse the flow of water in parts of the south delta, and fish can be sucked into the pumps or eaten by predators. Some fish are regularly captured at the facilities and released.
State officials said the estimated losses of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon and threatened steelhead trout at the state and federal pumping facilities surpassed annual take limits on March 21, which prompted discussions among multiple government agencies about additional measures to protect fish.
As a result, Grimaldo said, state and federal officials have kept pumping to levels that they deemed are “protective of minimizing additional losses of fish but also protective of water supply.”
The pumps that supply the aqueducts of the State Water Project and the federally managed Central Valley Project have been operating at a little more than one-third of combined capacity.
The state’s water withdrawals have been reduced since February to protect migrating fish, and in the last week, pumping was slightly increased based on data suggesting that this level of pumping “is not drawing additional steelhead into the zone of influence of the pumps,” said Mary Fahey, a spokesperson for the state Department of Water Resources.
State officials believe “protections for steelhead have been suitable for winter-run salmon as well,” Fahey said. She said the uptick in pumping will be short-lived because rules to protect another fish species, longfin smelt, take effect this month.
Meanwhile, other debates over long-term water management are continuing.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and his administration are supporting plans to build Sites Reservoir, the state’s first new large reservoir in decades, as well as the proposed Delta Conveyance Project, a 45-mile tunnel that would transport water beneath the delta.
Newsom’s current plan for adapting to a hotter, drier climate predicts that California could lose 10% of its water supply by 2040.
Bidwell Bar Bridge spans Lake Oroville in February.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
State water regulators are considering alternatives for new water quality standards that will determine how much water may be drawn from the delta.
In farming areas in the Central Valley, local water agencies are starting to plan for mandatory reductions in agricultural water use to comply with the state’s groundwater law, which calls for curbing overpumping by 2040.
And for urban areas, the state water board is considering new conservation rules that will require each city or local supplier to meet a locally tailored water-use budget. After an initial proposal encountered criticism from water agencies, the board’s staff issued a revised proposal that includes less stringent water-saving standards and would reduce the number of suppliers that need to make large cutbacks.
The changes were supported by water agencies. But environmental groups and conservation advocates have objected to the weakened plan and urged the state to adopt strong water-efficiency standards to help the state prepare for more severe droughts and hotter temperatures.
Marcus said she agrees with the conservation camp and thinks it’s short-sighted to roll back the requirements to the extent state officials are proposing.
“We’re in a climate emergency and a water emergency that’s decadal at minimum,” Marcus said.
“The red alert is on for this, and conservation is the most cost-effective in the long run for communities,” she said. “We’ve got to definitely do a much better job of cutting back on our water use in the most creative ways we can come up with.”
Under the canopy of the enormous olive tree that shades his home, Daniel Gerwin’s 11-year-old son ascends the tree’s gnarled trunk like an expert climber while his brother, 7, reads a book a few feet away inside the house.
Standing nearby, architect John K. Chan, who recently renovated the interiors and designed a modern 500-square-foot addition, can’t help but smile as he watches the boys’ parents cook dinner amid all the activity.
“It’s so wonderful to see the house working for them,” Chan says as the family and their dog, Phoenix, circulate in and out of the house through sliding glass doors — a classic California indoor-outdoor move. “As an architect, the sweetest gift you can get from your clients is seeing the house working. Sometimes Daniel will text me, ‘This is happening right now,’ with a photo of the kids doing something we designed, and it’s so gratifying.”
“The olive tree is the soul of the house,” says homeowner Daniel Gerwin. “So we built the house around it.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Gerwin and his wife saw plenty of promise in the 1,100-square-foot home when they purchased it in 2016. Like many traditional homes built during the 1930s, the house featured a simple floor plan with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room with a fireplace, and a formal dining room and entryway.
Despite its compact layout, the house had many perks: It was within walking distance of a good elementary school and across the street from the Ivanhoe Reservoir. The majestic olive tree, which the couple guesses is as old as the house, was another bonus.
At first, the house was fine.
But as their family grew and they adopted a large Rhodesian Ridgeback, the single-story home’s compartmentalized rooms began to feel claustrophobic.
“The boys’ room was OK when it was just a crib and a toddler bed,” Gerwin says, noting the tiny bedroom connected to the primary bedroom through a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, “but it was not sustainable.”
Adds Chan, co-founder of the Chinatown-based firm Formation Association: “It was a traditional house carved into rooms.”
Chan, who began rethinking the house in 2016, says his challenge was to add everything the family wanted — an open floor plan, storage and natural light — on a small, triangular lot.
They also wanted to preserve the olive tree, which absorbs noise from the preschool across the street and shades the house and backyard.
“The olive tree is the soul of the house, and we feel connected to it,” says Gerwin, an artist. “It feels good to have a huge olive tree anchoring our house.”
The silvery green leaves of the olive tree resonate throughout the house, including the front door.
Daniel Gerwin and his family’s renovated Ivanhoe Vista house is built around a giant olive tree.
The modern addition, left, and the traditional home, right, can be seen from the backyard where architect John K. Chan plays with the family dog.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Chan agreed as someone interested in architecture as a cultural project. “When we do research for a house, we need to meet the client’s needs and address the practical concerns, but we are also interested in the poetics of the site, the specific cultures and ecologies of sites and their narratives,” he says, recalling the wooden cover that shielded the Ivanhoe Reservoir in the 1930s.
“The house’s sensibility is very East Coast,” Chan adds, noting the neighborhood’s Spanish, Tudor and Modernist homes by architects Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner. “We decided to tailor the addition to the site’s landscape.”
The newly remodeled house, which took a year to complete, demonstrates Chan’s vision. The silvery and green hues of the olive leaves repeat throughout the house, in the living room furniture, the kitchen’s stained oak cabinets and the olives and leaves preserved in the concrete flooring.
“Every day you see the tree, you sense its roots,” Gerwin says. “It’s nice to see it resonate throughout the house.”
To open up the interiors, Chan removed walls and the fireplace, enlarged the narrow galley kitchen, and added a two-story, 500-square-foot primary bedroom and bathroom that overlooks the reservoir, connecting the family to the lake, the walking path and an olive grove in the pocket park across the street.
When you enter the house, the kitchen faces an open dining room and living room bathed in natural light thanks to the shifting rooflines that create transitions instead of walls. Adding further drama is a giant bay window in the living room that overlooks the backyard. When it frames the boys playing outdoors, Gerwin likens it to a “diorama in a zoo or natural history museum.”
The cabinets in the kitchen are painted a gray tone that echoes the olive tree outside.
(Stephen Schauer)
Walls were removed to open up the partitioned interiors of the traditional home. “A lot of exciting plane changes occur inside the house,” says the homeowner.
(Stephen Schauer)
“One of the things that I enjoy about the house is the geometry,” Gerwin says. “A lot of exciting plane changes occur inside the house. It takes a certain kind of person to want to invest time and energy into something like that. John is that person. It continues to be a pleasure for me as I live here.”
The elevated reading nook above the kitchen allows the children and guests to visit Gerwin while he cooks. It also offers a reverse panorama of the house. Instead of being shut off in separate rooms, the family can face one another while cooking and doing homework in what Chan describes as an “egalitarian” design choice.
“Socially, the kitchen is not for the servants; it’s for the whole family,” he says.
Daniel Gerwin fixes dinner while his son reads in a nook.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Because their home sits on a corner lot and is exposed to hundreds of people who walk around the reservoir daily, Gerwin and his wife were acutely aware that their new bedroom, which faces the pedestrian walkway, would have a fishbowl effect.
Chan felt it was important to connect the addition to the reservoir. “The house has its protected spaces, and oddly, as an inversion, it profoundly connects them to the lake,” Chan says. “The bedroom brings you to the lake.”
If you’ve walked around the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, you can’t miss the addition, with its modern spiked roof, glass picture window, corrugated roof and dark cedar siding.
The homeowners say they are comfortable with being exposed this way.
“It forces me to make the bed,” Gerwin jokes. “I often see people looking up at me from the walking path. But we aren’t in our bedroom during the day. In the morning, I can open the top of the blackout roller shades and still have the bottom portion closed for privacy.” (Chan installed a clear glass guardrail in front of the sliding glass doors for safety, allowing easy access to the windows and sliding glass doors and an uninterrupted view of the lake.)
When Gerwin looks out the bedroom window, he sees a community and, eventually, when the Ivanhoe Reservoir is refilled with water, a sea of blue.
The windows of the primary bedroom connect the home to the Silver Lake reservoir, its community and the pocket park across the street.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The house, seen as a speck in the suburban landscape, overlooks the Ivanhoe Reservoir in 2022 before it was drained for new aeration and recirculation infrastructure.
(Stephen Schauer)
Similarly, in the new bathroom, where the pitched rooflines and angles converge, the color of the cement tile echoes the reservoir and the sky.
Below the house on the ground floor, a previously unpermitted tandem garage conversion now is a part of the house. Chan updated the side-by-side spaces to include an art studio for Gerwin, an office and guest room with a Murphy bed and a small existing bathroom.
Chan considered permitting the garage as an ADU, but it wasn’t a priority for the family. Although Gerwin predicts one of his sons may inhabit the space someday, until then, it works as a guest room for the couple’s parents and for work needs.
The art studio functions well for Gerwin, who previously had a studio in Lincoln Heights. “It’s a little narrow, but I can open the doors for ventilation, and at night, I can close the bug screen so I don’t have to scrape insects off my paintings.”
Photos by Stephen Schauer
Artist Daniel Gerwin in his studio, directly below his bedroom and facing the street.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He can also do carpentry in the driveway and work in the evenings when his family is asleep.
“If I have a one-hour window, I can walk downstairs and work instead of driving to a studio,” he says. As the president of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, Gerwin also can hold board meetings in the office space.
Chan, who argues that the addition reconnects the family to where they live, says that by embracing the olive tree’s narrative, it became the house’s substance.
“It was important for the house to emerge from the foliage,” he says. “The roof’s pitch is designed to accommodate the tree growing at this angle. It has a strong presence but is integrated in its context. The large hedge and the shade of the olive tree looming over the house are all important aspects. “
To many people, the Silver Lake Reservoir is an oasis in a frenetic city. But for this family, it’s an extension of their home.
“It’s fun to see people walk or run by,” Gerwin says as he walks Phoenix along the pedestrian path. “Living near a lake is a pleasure. How many people get to do that?”
