Under the searing desert sun, Max Wilson watched water flow through a canal in north Phoenix. This unassuming strip of blue next to a busy road is the city's lifeline to the Colorado River. Soon, there will be less water in it.
Wilson, who is the water resources management advisor for the City of Phoenix, has to make sure cuts to this canal's supply don't cause taps to go dry for more than 1.7 million people who depend on his system.
He is confident water will keep flowing out of kitchen sinks, showers and sprinklers across the nation's fifth-largest city.
"Arizonans have been solving water problems for our entire history, and we didn't forget how to do that overnight," Wilson said. "We're going to do it again now."
The cuts, which kick in on Jan. 1, are the result of a new federal plan for managing the Colorado River. After more than 26 years of drought and climate change sapped the river's supply, the nation's two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — are at record lows. The seven states that use the river's water spent years trying to agree on a plan to rein in demand. Those negotiations failed, and the federal government had to step in with its own.
The result is a strategy that includes mandatory cuts of 27% to Arizona's Colorado River supplies each year through 2028, with an option for steeper cuts after that.
Now, Central Arizona cities are charting a course through a future with less Colorado River water. Water managers across the Phoenix metro say they have robust backup plans in place to keep taps flowing, thanks to years of preparation and huge construction projects. Those upgrades, though, come with a big price tag, and will carry the area into a future that is still rife with uncertainty.
The Central Arizona Project — a system of canals and pumps which carry Colorado River water 336 miles across the desert to the Phoenix and Tucson areas — will be hit the hardest by new cuts. Colorado River water makes up 40% of the supplies Phoenix feeds to its customers.
"The cuts that we're talking about today will not threaten water deliveries to homes," Wilson said. "There will never be a moment where you go into your house, you turn on your faucet and no water comes out the other side."
The very fact that Phoenix and its neighbors can receive water from the Colorado River is a feat of engineering. The canal system that carries it from western Arizona is a gravity-defying product of 1960s optimism and more than $4 billion in building costs.
Soon, with less water in that canal, it will take more feats of engineering to survive. The steep costs of those projects will likely be passed along to residents.
"All those solutions are here, and we know what they are, and we're working on implementing them," Wilson said, "They are going to be very expensive. And ultimately, our customers are going to be the ones who have to pay that bill."
Decades of planning
Cities say the main reason they can survive Colorado River cuts is the simple fact that they have diverse water portfolios.
When one source is short, they can lean harder on a different one. In the Phoenix area, that is most often the Salt and Verde River system and groundwater.
You wouldn't know it driving around Phoenix, but the city is built on the banks of a major river.
In the city today, the Salt River is mostly reduced to a wide, dusty trough that passes unceremoniously under freeway bridges. That's thanks to more than a century of planning and construction stretching back to some of the area's earliest waves of white settlement.
The Salt River's first major dam, Roosevelt Dam, was completed in 1911 in an effort to tame erratic flows and wrangle its water for the nascent farming communities downstream. In the century-plus since, Roosevelt was joined by other dams, which now form a chain of reservoirs in the foothills east of Phoenix.
As farming ebbed, the water stored in those reservoirs helped the area's cities and suburbs become one of the nation's fastest growing urban areas. Now, it will help keep them afloat during epically dry times.
The cuts to Phoenix's Colorado River allocation are survivable partially because the city gets so much water from the Salt and Verde Rivers, which supply about 58% of the water sent to customers.
Early settlers of the Valley constructed the Salt River's first dams and laid the groundwork for the area's future. Throughout the 20th century, water managers built on top of it. In the 1990s, a $430 million project raised the height of Roosevelt Dam and increased its storage capacity by 20%.
Now, 21st century water managers have to invest hundreds of millions more to make sure they can get water from the Salt River system to the places it's needed. The City of Phoenix spent about $300 million building a "drought pipeline," which was completed in early 2023 and carries water from the south side of the city to the north.
Before the pipeline, north Phoenix was largely dependent on water from the Colorado River. Phoenix has legal access to Salt River water that it can use to help keep taps flowing for more than 400,000 people in that area, but that water flowed into the south side of the city. The 12-mile pipeline fixes that, but came with a large price tag.
Still, Wilson said it was necessary and, in the future, might look like a bargain.
"Three hundred million dollars seemed like a lot of money at the time," he said. "I think many of the projects that we're talking about moving forward are not in the hundreds of millions, but are rather in the billions of dollars."
Doug Dunham, associate director of water resources for EPCOR USA, agrees.
On a recent August morning in Anthem, a master-planned community on the far northern edge of the Phoenix metro, water bubbled up into a large storage pond at a water treatment plant owned by EPCOR, a private utility company.
Dunham explained the system would keep working normally, despite the cuts, for a number of reasons.
"This isn't new headlines to us," Dunham said. "Across the Valley, across the state, from Tucson on up, there have been people who've been thinking about this and planning for these kinds of things for a long time."
In EPCOR's case, that includes big, physical infrastructure — like a system of interconnected pipes that keeps disparate water treatment plants working if one source of water can't supply enough — along with on-paper access to a special share of Colorado River water.
The company's Anthem plant is plugged into the Central Arizona Project canal via a nine-mile pipeline. But the Colorado River water that flows there from the canal will not be cut like many nearby cities. Instead, access to that water is leased from the Ak-Chin Indian Community, which has deep legal protections on its water. It would only be cut off under much steeper reductions, the likes of which are not included in the next few years of Colorado River plans.
Lease deals can be a big part of some utilities' preparations for times of shortage. Essentially, if a utility's legal rights to water are on the chopping block, it can go out and buy access to somebody else's water that is more legally protected.
But the strategies that have worked so far, Dunham said, can only do so much.
"Eventually we're going to have to do harder, more difficult, and — read into that — more expensive things to make sure that water resources are brought in," he said. "The next buckets, so to speak, the next sources of water, those projects are going to be very expensive."
Who pays for it all?
The steep costs of big, new infrastructure will primarily fall on the shoulders of the people who use the water those projects provide. Homes and businesses across the Valley have already seen some of those costs baked into water bills over the years, and they will likely see more increases.
And without a long-term strategy for spreading out those costs, rate hikes can be dramatic.
That has been on display in Gilbert.
The town gets about 41% of its water from the Colorado River, and will lose 20% of that allocation under the upcoming cuts.
For decades, Gilbert has been building contingency plans that will keep water flowing to homes and businesses even during dry times.
In the late 1990s, it built a sprawling nature preserve structured around seven ponds that are designed to help treated wastewater seep underground, filling an aquifer that can provide a backup when there's not enough water from other sources. Now, it's nearly done building the wells to get some of that water back.
Gilbert had plans to rebuild its largest water treatment plant and install a network of eight wells to help draw groundwater as part of its strategy to weather a future with less Colorado River water.
Lauren Hixson, the town's water resources manager, said the wells needed to be fast-tracked to catch up with demand for water. That more aggressive timeline, combined with a town council that had skipped increases to water rates in the past, meant Gilbert needed to raise money for its new projects quickly.
As a result, water bills in Gilbert have doubled, roughly, since 2024.
Those steep rate hikes did not land well with customers, Hixson said. Even though they helped fund important infrastructure, she said it was difficult to get people to understand the reason for the increase.
"I think we did our best to get the message out ahead of time, but a lot of people aren't paying attention until it actually takes place," she said. "Then they see the bill, and they're like, 'Wait, why?'"
Hixson said residents have been getting gradually more receptive as her team explains the need for water system upgrades, but sudden, unexpected rate increases can make it hard for people to appreciate that preparation, despite a local government's best attempts to get the word out.
"It's really important for communities to be looking at that really regularly so that there isn't a big shock," she said.
However, some experts see higher water rates as a different part of the solution to shortages.
In the Phoenix area, local utilities rarely force their customers to use less water. Mandatory restrictions on things like lawn watering, for example, are rare.
Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said mandatory watering rules may not be necessary if a city can use high water rates to send the message instead.
"I'm not convinced that voluntary or even involuntary water conservation measures necessarily get you a lot of water," she said. "What does work is a good price signal on what you pay for the water."
Phoenix's water department, which Sorensen used to run, charges more for water during the summer. That, she said, makes people think twice about growing a thirsty lawn during the hottest months of the year.
"When people get that bill, they see it and they feel it in their pocketbook," Sorensen said "That can be really painful, and the change can be immediate. No one wants a $500 water bill in the middle of the summer, right? It works."
The proof is in the data. Phoenix has brought down peak summertime water use since the 1980s by about 40%, and Sorensen said higher rates are a big part of that.
"Many decades ago, something like 80% of single-family homes had majority grass landscaping," she said. "Today, within the boundaries of the city of Phoenix, that's less than 10%. There are these kind of hardcore advocates that just want a lawn. That's not against the law in Phoenix, but trust me, they pay through the nose for that lawn. Those price signals are really effective."
Uncertainty lies ahead
For all of their advance planning, water managers are still facing an unpredictable future.
Climate science shows that the massive reservoirs that store the Colorado River are unlikely to fill back up any time soon. Drier conditions are here to stay, and so is the reality that big reductions to demand are the main way for humans to adapt to that future. Climate scientists, policy researchers, environmentalists and most water policymakers generally agree.
But the exact way state and federal governments choose to bring down demand is much less certain.
In the latest set of rules for managing the Colorado River, the federal government gave itself the authority to cut water for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40%, starting as soon as 2028. The promise of a roughly 20% cut for those states will only last for a relatively short time.
Those rules force decision makers back to the negotiating table to tweak cutbacks every two years 2036. After that, they could throw a curveball to the city utility managers that have to live with the consequences of those cuts.
EPCOR's Dunham said that can be difficult for someone who might have to build new water treatment plants and storage facilities.
"Those kinds of things take many years to get off the ground and into operating conditions," Dunham said. "So these short two-year cycles are going to be very, very challenging."
Not only does the cutback plan leave room for uncertainty, but some parts of cities' backup plans also have a murky future.
Many Valley cities are part of a water storage program through the Arizona Water Banking Authority. Since the late 1990s, taxpayers have been funding a program to stash extra Colorado River water underground, with the idea that it could be used as a backup in times of shortage.
But the shortage is here, and the Water Bank has locked horns with city leaders over policies to retrieve that water.
Local utilities said the Water Bank should give them access to exactly as much stored water as they lose to mandatory Colorado River cutbacks — essentially providing a one-to-one replacement for the water they lost. The Water Bank argued it would be better to stretch out those supplies for the future, and wanted to give cities some water, but not 100% of the amount they lost to cutbacks.
After a public back-and-forth, the Water Bank agreed to give utilities access to 100% of the water they lost to cutbacks, but only for a year. Those underground backup supplies are a big part of some cities' plans to adapt to a drier future, but they aren't certain how much of that water will be available after the yearlong policy expires.
In some parts of the Valley, the uncertainty runs much deeper.
Larger, older cities toward the core of the Phoenix metro tend to have more taxpayers, deeper pockets, larger staffs and a long history of securing access to different sources of water. Smaller suburbs and exurbs are often on the other end of the spectrum.
The town of Cave Creek, for example, is in a pinch.
Cave Creek sits in a quiet, saguaro-dotted valley less than an hour northeast of Phoenix. It gets about 95% of its water from the Colorado River. With big cuts to that supply on the way, it has had to move quickly.
With few options and high costs that would be difficult for its small population to fund, the town is working on exchange deals with nearby cities. But those don't represent a permanent solution.
A consultant for Cave Creek's water department told KJZZ in April that the city will have "five to eight years" worth of alternatives, and will need longer-term fixes once that time runs out.
The next generation
On the banks of the Central Arizona Project canal in Phoenix, city water manager Max Wilson stood on a gravel road above the steady amble of blue-green water.
He said the work to keep water flowing for the next few years — and for future generations — is already visible. With the '60s-era concrete canal on one side, he gestured in the other direction, toward a towering construction crane down the street.
"As we stand here," Wilson said, "what we're looking at is the confluence of the city's past and the city's future."
Under the crane is the city's big bet on sustainable supplies for the future. At Phoenix's Cave Creek Water Reclamation Plant, it's partway through the construction of a huge facility that will take sewage and clean it up into pure, safe drinking water. It's part of a massive overhaul at the once-mothballed plant, putting Phoenix at the doorstep of delivering recycled water to homes and businesses for the first time in Arizona history.
The project is expected to start sending water into city pipes as soon as early 2029. City officials say it could cost more than $359 million to build, and $8.5 million to run and maintain each year.
"Yes, we will have to pay some of those costs," Wilson said. "But when you think about the benefits, and you think about the fact that our kids and our grandkids are not going to be exposed to the types of shortages that we're talking about here today, I think it's worth it."
By 2033, Phoenix hopes to bring another, even bigger, reuse facility online as part of a joint venture with the cities of Mesa and Glendale, as well as EPCOR.
Wilson said the facilities will make the city "more and more drought-proof" going forward.
He also called on the federal government, which has had a big role in helping Western communities adapt to dry times, to help foot the bill for projects like the water recycling facility.
"The federal government made a choice to place this burden entirely on [Arizona, California and Nevada]," he said, "and in making that choice, I think they also made a second choice, which is that they're going to need to step up and step in to be able to help offset some of these costs moving forward."
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