Across the Southwest, there’s a plan to survive a drier future. But it will come at a steep cost. Water managers in states that use the Colorado River say they have plans to make water systems more efficient as supplies shrink due to drought and climate change. A new list of potential water infrastructure projects shows the ways Arizona and its neighbors might adapt to a drier future, and the massive spending it will take to make them possible.
The list appears to follow an April meeting between Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and governors from the seven states that use water from the Colorado River. The secretary requested a sort of wish list from those states, and they returned a wide-ranging collection of more than 80 projects with ballpark cost estimates that totaled in the tens of billions of dollars.
The list, which was obtained by KJZZ, outlines more than $25 billion of potential spending in Arizona alone.
There is currently no reason to believe that the federal government will fund these projects anytime soon, if ever. However, the list provides a glimpse at the kind of work that state leaders think may be necessary to tolerate shrinking water supplies from the Colorado River…