A nonpartisan citizens action group for Colorado & the Southwest
The Colorado River supplies drinking water to 40 million people and irrigates over 5 million acres of farmland. Its two great reservoirs just hit their lowest combined level on record — and the rules governing the river expire at the end of 2026. This is the decade we fix it, or lose it.
Gauge fill is illustrative of elevation between dead pool and full pool. Live data: USBR / lakepowell.water-data.com
Climate-driven megadrought cut the river's flow while demand kept climbing. Then a wave of fast-tracked, deregulated development — hyperscale data centers, expanded drilling, sprawl — began competing for the water that's left.
Million acre-feet, approximate end-of-July values, 2000–2026
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation; Colorado Sun (July 2026). Historical values approximate — replace with USBR series before launch.
Share of consumptive use, approximate
Source: Colorado Water Plan / CWCB. Every sector has a role — and every new industrial demand competes with all of them.
We are pro-growth — smart, sustainable growth. What we oppose is development that takes water out of the cycle permanently, shifts costs onto ratepayers, and answers to no one.
Cooling water a single large data center can consume
The AI boom is driving a data center land rush across the arid West. Counting the water burned by their power plants, data centers in five Western states could demand ~89,700 acre-feet a year by 2035 — while biocides and anti-corrosives in cooling blowdown add treatment burdens downstream, and utilities forecast 4.5% annual demand growth that lands on your electric bill.
Colorado Sun explainer →Fresh water used by Colorado oil & gas annually (ECMC data)
Unlike cities and farms, which return most water to rivers, fracking turns fresh water into toxic "produced water." In Colorado, 87% of it is disposed of — mostly injected into deep wells, severed from the hydrologic cycle forever. The DJ Basin uses 90% of the state's fracking freshwater and recycles less than 1%.
Inside Climate News →Agreed by the 7 basin states as rules expire in 2026
Development approvals across the Southwest are outpacing the water math behind them. States blew past federal deadlines to agree on cuts; litigation between basins is now a live threat. Meanwhile subsidized industrial projects are green-lit with little scrutiny of their water and grid impacts on the communities around them.
CNN, Aug 2026 →Our work runs from the neighborhood to the Constitution. Every tier feeds the one above it.
Our north star: a U.S. constitutional amendment guaranteeing every citizen the right to clean water. Water is not a commodity of last resort — it's the precondition for life, liberty, and every other right. We organize, draft, and build the multi-state consensus to get there.
We coordinate a coalition of conservation groups, hydrologists, engineers, industrial designers, farmers, and tribal and municipal partners across the basin — a shared calendar, shared assets, and a shared, nonpartisan voice.
We push for guardrails: water and energy reporting for data centers, produced-water recycling mandates, growth tied to real water budgets — and we back the technologies that shrink demand, from closed-loop cooling to aquifer recharge and reuse.
Infographics and videos you can share, FAQs that answer the hard questions, model letters and public-comment guides, and events near you. Awareness is the aquifer everything else draws from.
The technology and policy to balance the basin already exist. What's missing is the public will — that's our job.
Data centers can cut water use by orders of magnitude with closed-loop liquid cooling, air-side economization, and reuse of captured runoff. Require it in arid basins.
Colorado's first-in-the-nation rules require oil & gas to recycle more produced water starting in 2026. Enforce them, extend them basin-wide, and end freshwater fracking in the DJ Basin.
No development approval without a real water budget behind it. Tie permits to verified supply, not paper rights from a wetter century.
Turf replacement, leak detection, reuse, and tiered pricing have already cut per-capita use sharply in Las Vegas, Aurora, and Tucson. Scale what works.
Agriculture uses ~86% of Colorado's water and grows our food. Fund efficiency upgrades, compensated demand management, and crop-switching — with farmers at the table.
End sweetheart utility rates for hyperscale loads. If a project raises grid costs, its owners pay — not households already squeezed by rising bills.
That was true in Aurora, and it's true from the Rockies to the Gulf of California. Follow, share, show up. The river doesn't have a lobby — it has us.
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Saving Our Water