Nevada Proposes Unilateral Two-Year Plan to Stabilize Lakes Powell and Mead

Nevada broke from its longstanding pact with its Lower Basin neighbors and on March 6 submitted a standalone, pragmatic two-year operating plan to the U.S. Department of the Interior aimed at preventing Lake Powell and Lake Mead from plunging over the next two years. The plan was attached to Nevada’s official comments on Interior’s draft environmental impact statement and, according to Southern Nevada Water Authority general manager John Entsminger, is meant as a short-term stabilization mechanism that Nevada will advance even without a seven-state consensus. “Nevada is willing to step out on our own and propose a pragmatic, two‑year operating plan that we hope all six other states will adopt,” Entsminger said, adding bluntly, “But this is a Nevada proposal. This isn’t something we vetted through anybody else.”

The submission lands against the Interior Department’s draft EIS, which lays out four options for a 20‑year Colorado River operating plan that not one of the seven basin states appears to be satisfied with. Multi-state post‑2026 negotiations have stalled, the seven basin states missed the federal government’s firm deadline for a consensus‑based deal last month, and Monday was the cutoff for states to plead their case over the remaining draft EIS options. Reporting on the broader fight frames the political context this way: none of the seven Colorado River states is happy with the Trump administration’s plans to divvy up the river as it faces its driest conditions in decades.

Nevada’s two‑year proposal is explicitly pitched as short-term triage: stabilize Lake Powell and Lake Mead while talks remain deadlocked. That approach surfaces a central technical and political battleground, because the plan contemplates operational actions that could require upstream cooperation. Koebele warned that the plan’s prospects rest on Upper Basin acquiescence: “The success of Nevada’s short‑term plan hinges on whether the Upper Basin states will object to the mandate to use upstream reservoirs for Lake Powell,” she said. Koebele also noted how structured decision-making can ease tense negotiations, “Structured decision‑making processes help people better understand one another’s needs outside of the crisis context,” and pointed to past pilot programs as precedent: “What we’ve seen is that sometimes there are hard things that seem really hard, and then we experiment with them and find out they’re actually easier than we thought they would be,” adding that pilot fallowing programs often had “more interested farmers than funds in most years.”

Entsminger framed Nevada’s move as practical and urgent, telling reporters in an interview Wednesday that he sees the submission as “the only viable path forward absent a seven‑state consensus.” With the Monday cutoff passed and Interior’s four long‑term options failing to satisfy basin states, Nevada’s unilateral attachment to the draft EIS will test whether Upper Basin states will accept mandated upstream actions and whether short‑term, two‑year stabilization can buy time for a post‑2026 solution.