From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
“It has been OK for 100 years. It does not seem right. It does not seem fair,” said Lynden Gill, a Lower Ark board member and Bent County commissioner, at the Lower Ark’s monthly meeting Wednesday. “In my mind, it brings up a lot of questions and concerns about how the state engineer has approached this.”[…]
Seep ditches intercept return flows — water that drains from other fields — and have water rights that are generally junior to the major ditches. Water Division 2 Engineer Steve Witte said he is enforcing the rights to bring them into compliance with the priority system.
The owners of the seep ditch rights argue that they have used them — for more than a century in some cases — without complaints from downstream senior water rights holders. At last month’s meeting, Witte and Wolfe said the enforcement is taking place to protect rights in Colorado, rather than to guard against more legal action by Kansas on the Arkansas River Compact…
[State Engineer Dick Wolfe] defended the action as working within the law to protect all water rights holders. “That’s the way our system has developed. If people want to change the law, we need to hear that, but this is embedded in the state Constitution,” Wolfe said at the September meeting. The Lower Ark plans to bring Wolfe back to meet with some of the affected farmers in November, said Jay Winner, general manager of the Lower Ark district.
More Arkansas River basin coverage here.