…[Rural] water users and hundreds more like them in southwestern Colorado draw water from a federally managed irrigation system with a decades-long backlog of maintenance issues that would cost $35.3 million to address, according to 2024 federal estimates. It’s one of 16 similar irrigation systems in the West, called Indian Irrigation Projects, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Parts of the projects are in complete disrepair, and they’ve been chronically underfunded for so long that it would cost more than $2.3 billion to completely fix them, according to the bureau’s 2024 estimate. To complicate matters further, the federal government and tribes do not agree on who is responsible for maintaining the system.

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