From the Aspen Daily News (Catherine Lutz):
The Denver Post published an article on Monday citing a state study showing Front Range water consumption to be down while “some parts of the Western Slope have seen per capita water use explode in the last decade.” Referencing the study, the Post wrote: “Residents of Pitkin County, home of Aspen, used 1,851 gallons per person each day, the data show, as Elbert County folks used 111 gallons each.”[…]
CWCB’s report, however, is a draft, and staffers are working on a number of inconsistencies they’ve been alerted to since it came out in June, said CWCB’s Eric Hecox, section chief of the water supply planning division. Water providers gave the CWCB data on their systemwide water deliveries, which was divided by the permanent population of the service area to get at the per capita water use figure, said Hecox. The Pitkin County data was flagged for follow up, he said, because it was assumed there had to be some inconsistencies on how either the total water delivery or total population was calculated. For example, the population of Aspen’s water service area had somehow decreased by 10,000-15,000 people, Hecox said. And there are many communities in Colorado, like Aspen, that have high second-home owner and tourist populations that have to be factored in…
[Aspen utilities director Phil Overeynder] sent an e-mail to a CWCB staffer in November indicating that those served by Aspen city water use about 171 gallons per person per day — just under the national average and well below the Colorado average. In his e-mail, Overeynder explains that he’s using a local population of 12,000 people, taking into account second-home owners and tourists for a given period of time. Counting only the permanent population of the water service area — 7,550 people — Aspenites use 273 gallons per day. That does not include snowmaking, which is also served by the city utility…
The final CWCB report, whose full title is “State of Colorado 2050 Municipal and Industrial Water Use Projections,” should be finalized and released publicly by June, said Hecox.
More conservation coverage here.