From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
A request for $75,000 [for Purgatoire River cleanup], which will be matched with $83,000 in local funding sources, will move to the Colorado Water Conservation Board in January, once the application passes the review of the needs assessment committee…
The Trinidad Community Foundation assessed the needs of the Purgatoire River below Trinidad Dam, located two miles southwest of Trinidad. The most critical reach is just east of Interstate 25 and is about one-half mile long, said Jeris Danielson, manager of the Purgatoire Conservancy District, which is contributing $15,000 to the project. “If you’ve driven through there and seen it, you know it’s in sorry shape,” Danielson said.
The channel is filled with Russian olives and tamarisk and inaccessible. Removing the plants could increase the water available to irrigators in the district, he noted. The project seeks to remove the invasive species and revegetate the area, create structures in the river to improve fish habitat and build a handicapped-accessible trail through the area. The trail would connect to an existing park.
Meanwhile the roundtable discussed adding water quality information to the basin-wide model being developed by the CWCB. Here’s a report from Chris Woodka writing for The Pueblo Chieftain. From the article:
A blueprint for an Arkansas Valley decision support system for water administration and planning was reviewed Wednesday by the Arkansas Basin Roundtable. Colorado Water Conservation Board staff is outlining what steps it will take to develop the model in a feasibility study that will be presented to the board in May. After that, it will take years and millions of dollars to develop the actual model.
“The feedback that we’ve gotten is that water quality is important and should be addressed,” Lindsay Griffith of Brown and Caldwell Engineers told the roundtable. “There is a need for the basin to have real-time tools, and we’re looking at how to integrate water quality into the basin model.” That would be a step forward from the decision support systems the state has developed in other basins. Since the early 1990s, the state has completed models for the Colorado River and Rio Grande basins. The CWCB is finishing a model for the South Platte basin. All of those concentrate on water supply alone…
The statistical platform for the model is still being debated by a technical committee. Some want the model to be based on a computer program developed by Colorado State University that is already used for specific projects in the valley. Others say the model now used by the state would provide consistency across basins.