Colorado is likely to see drought emergency declared to address widespread impacts
Following a historically low snowpack and hot start to the water year, Colorado is moving into its next phase of drought response
Ali Longwell/Vail Daily
The Colorado Drought Task Force is seeking an official drought emergency declaration from Gov. Jared Polis — a move that could free up additional resources to address statewide impacts to agriculture, municipal water supplies, wildlife and recreation.
An emergency declaration from the governor would move the state into the third and highest phase of Colorado’s Drought Mitigation and Response Plan.
The task force — which is composed of senior leadership from Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, Department of Agriculture, Department of Local Affairs and the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management — decided to seek an official declaration at its third meeting in Winter Park on Monday, June 1.
Tracy Kosloff, the deputy state engineer and deputy director of the Colorado Division of Water Resources, told the task force that she felt entering “phase three would be reasonable based on the water situation” in many of Colorado’s streams and reservoirs.
Polis activated the task force on March 17 amid a heat wave that would rapidly melt off the state’s lowest snowpack on record and continue a trend of record hot conditions for the 2026 water year, which started Oct. 1, 2025.
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As of June 1, Russ Schumacher, Colorado’s state climatologist, told the task force that “the snowpack is almost gone,” and many rivers have already experienced peak streamflow, something that typically doesn’t happen until early June.
While the U.S. Drought Monitor for Colorado has shown some improved conditions over the last month — particularly in parts of northwest Colorado that experienced a wet end to April and early May — nearly 77% of the state was still experiencing severe drought or worse as of May 26, Schumacher reported.
Forty percent of the state was experiencing extreme or exceptional drought, the two highest categories recorded on the monitor. This includes the worst conditions in a pocket of northwest Colorado spanning Eagle, Summit, Pitkin and Lake counties as well as parts of Gunnison, Mesa, Garfield, Rio Blanco, Routt, Grand, Clear Creek and Park counties.
In looking at heat and precipitation for May, Schumacher said the month “mostly kept things from getting worse at the statewide level overall.”
“We didn’t make up the deficits in any big way, just kept them from continuing to get worse,” he said.
The task force is the second phase and a key component of Colorado’s drought response plan. The group was activated most recently in June 2020 and maintained throughout the 2020-21 drought. Before that, it was activated in May 2018, May 2011 and April 2002. The 2002 activation — during a drought the Colorado Water Conservation Board refers to as “one of the most severe in the state’s history” — was the first since the state’s drought plan was created in 1981.
According to Chris Sorensen, Colorado’s state emergency operations center manager, an emergency declaration from the governor would not only raise public awareness about the severity of the situation, but also open up options to direct state agencies to take action, mobilize state funding, seek federal resources or waive certain statutes, rules and regulations in response to the drought.
“I think that moving into phase three and declaring a drought emergency is something we should do as soon as possible,” said Nate Pearson, assistant director for water policy for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.
Pearson added that while the drought response plan identifies actions to consider in phase three, he wanted the task force to “think beyond the bare minimum required.”
“I would love to think through more aggressive actions that we could take as we move to phase three,” he said.
