Following a record-setting drought in 2002, the year of the Missionary Ridge and Valley fires, state officials took a new approach to water, creating nine roundtables – one for each of the eight major river basins in Colorado and one for the Denver metro area – plus an additional group made up of delegates from each roundtable./Photo by Jennaye Derge

 

Drop in the bucket

Colorado Water Board charts course for future of state’s water

 

On Dec. 10, the Colorado Water Conservation Board delivered a draft of the state’s first-ever water plan to Gov. John Hickenlooper.

The occasion called for the conventional ceremony and photo opportunity – the governor standing at a podium, surrounded by board members with a symbolic paper passing and handshake between himself and the board’s director.

What’s next? May 2015 – deadline for public comment on the draft of the Colorado Water Plan July 2015 – second draft Colorado Water Plan released To comment on the current draft: Email cowaterplan@state.co.us; or visit www.coloradowaterplan.com.

Everyone smiled for the cameras, and Hickenlooper praised all the hard work that went into the 419-page document.

Behind the handshake, however, the heated debates and long hours sacrificed by hundreds of people who weren’t even at the ceremony, was a plan. One with the potential to direct water policy statewide and here in the Southwest for years to come.

All the hard work began long before Hickenlooper requested a state water plan in 2013. Even before he took office.

Following a record-setting drought in 2002, the year of the Missionary Ridge and Valley fires, state officials took a new approach to water, creating nine roundtables – one for each of the eight major river basins in Colorado and one for the Denver metro area – plus an additional group made up of delegates from each roundtable, called the Interbasin Compact Committee.

Each basin roundtable is made up of representatives from every interest, ideology and walk of life. They are tasked with identifying the challenges the basin faces, strategies to address those challenges, and what projects or methods would help meet future water needs.

In Southwest Colorado, the 45-member Southwest Basin Roundtable represents interests of all or part of seven counties, including La Plata, with Durango as the basin’s most populated city. At the head of the table sits Mike Preston, who also runs the Dolores Water Conservancy District.

As the chair of the Southwest Basin Roundtable, he helped craft the Basin’s Implementation Plan, which along with the other basin plans was sent to the Colorado Water Conservation Board in July to be integrated into the state water plan.

For some, the state and roundtable plans don’t mean much if the documents they produce don’t have any weight. That’s been one criticism of the plan: it has no teeth.

For others, though, that’s not a problem because the point of the roundtables is the talking, not the teeth.

According to Bruce Whitehead, who serves on both the Southwest Basin Roundtable and the Interbasin Compact Committee, it’s more about the conversations. “This is a living document,” he said.

Eventually, the teeth will grow through policy, legislation and regulation.

“It’s really in the area of making policy, setting priorities for appropriations … better coordination and cooperation in the regulatory process,” Preston explained.

Colorado is unique, both in how it treats water as a private property right and the court system that has sprung up to settle disputes. What is not unique to the Centennial State is that 13 years after the Missionary Ridge Fire, the state – like much of the West – continues to suffer drought conditions.

Reservoirs, lakes and rivers are running low; and, snowpack left after each winter is simply unable to replenish levels. “You’ve got buckets half empty throughout the whole system,” Preston said.

These challenging conditions combined with a growing population, expected to double in Colorado by 2050 and jump significantly in the Southwest by 2030, left Colorado’s leaders with the belief that they needed a plan.

“How do we provide for those new residents?” Preston asked.

The potential solutions to that growing gap between supply and demand breaks down into three main categories: conservation, new water supply sources and “buy up and dry up.”

The concept of “buy up and dry up” is when agricultural water rights are sold and transferred to municipal uses.

Preston said agriculture is important to this area and a priority of the Southwest Basin Roundtable.

From the ranchers whose families first settled in the Southwest to the small farmers developing a network of locally grown foods in Durango, the water all flows from the same system.

Another way to meet future water needs is by conserving what’s already here.

The conversation on conservation hit high gear this past year when Sen. Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, introduced SB-017, which looked at limiting the amount of lawn grass on new residential lots that were both built after January 2016 and get at least some of their water from agriculture. The original bill received some backlash and was unable to make its way through the legislative process.

What it did do was spark the discussion.

In the upcoming session, Roberts plans to introduce another bill aimed at conservation. She said the bill is “intended to provide water conservation strategy 4 education to land use planners at no cost.”

With the Continental Divide splitting the state, much of the debate over solutions stem from the reality that the West Slope contains more than two-thirds of Colorado’s water, and the highly populated Front Range is where 70 percent of the state’s water is used.

Currently those life-giving liquids are carried across the mountains and into Front Range cities, farms and ranches via 15 transmountain diversions, a system of tunnels and canals that move water from the western part of the state to the east.

Discussions about new supply options often lead to the possibility of a new transmountain diversion. Whitehead said it has taken years to get everyone in the same room to start talking about it.

The idea is to start the discussions about a potential transmountain diversion project before there is a need for one. That conversation began with the Interbasin Compact Committee’s draft Conceptual Agreement, a framework for future negotiations.

“The West Slope is caught between the East Slope desire to bring more Colorado River water across the Continental Divide, and the West Slope’s own water supply needs, compact obligations, environmental requirements and persistent and deep drought cycles,” Preston said.

Broken down into seven summary points, the framework acknowledges those challenges and begins to address the management of those pressures and risks.

That’s what the conceptual agreement is all about, according to Preston, a way to answer the questions that lie in the future.

“This has developed a little bit of heartburn among some folks,” Whitehead explained.

The Interbasin Compact Committee gets together again at the end of January in Denver. It’s the first time they’ll meet face-to-face since the official draft was released. “I’m sure this framework will be discussed,” Whitehead said.