Cave Creek mayor says federal Colorado River plan won't secure town's future

Morris likens town’s situation to preparing for a meteor strike

Cave Creek, a desert community of about 5,000 on the outskirts of Phoenix, gets nearly all of its water from the Colorado River. Mayor Robert Morris said the town has capped new development, revived old wells and arranged water-sharing agreements with neighboring utilities as deliveries from the river have fallen.

Those measures have bought the community time, Morris said. They have not resolved a deeper worry: that a recent federal plan to address the basin’s deepening crisis will not give the town a viable path forward.

The Bureau of Reclamation announced the plan last week. Morris said Cave Creek was already forced to make cuts this year and stands to lose more under the new federal plan.

The Colorado River serves 40 million people across the U.S. West and has been dwindling because of climate change, persistent demand and chronic overuse. The river’s decline has forced communities that depend on its deliveries to seek alternative supplies.

Cave Creek’s options are constrained by its heavy reliance on the river and the arid landscape around it. The federal plan was issued as the seven states that share the river have struggled to reach a longer-term agreement on how to divide a shrinking supply.

Morris likened the town’s predicament to preparing for a meteor strike.

“You can see it coming, but you can’t get out of the way and you don’t know what the damage is going to be,” Morris said.

He said the community’s revived wells and water-sharing deals can stretch existing supplies in the near term but cannot replace river deliveries if the basin’s drought continues to deepen. The federal plan’s cuts, layered on top of reductions the town has already absorbed, leave no obvious next step.

As covered in MSI’s August 22 report on the Bureau of Reclamation’s order for sharp Colorado River cuts, the federal plan ordered California, Nevada and Arizona to cut their Colorado River water use by 1.25 million acre-feet annually over the next two years, with Arizona absorbing the steepest reductions. Cave Creek’s situation shows how that order is now landing in specific downstream communities.