From the Valley Courier (Ruth Heide):
Wolfe said the computer groundwater model, the Rio Grande Decision Support System, is still being updated, and the new target date for that model to be ready to go is April. The San Luis Valley’s first water management sub-district depended on the model calibrations to determine how much it owed senior surface water rights, and future sub-districts will depend on the model for those numbers as well.
Wolfe said he wanted to make sure the model could be used to accurately determine the amount of depletions each sub-district needed to replace to surface water rights before moving forward with the rules.
“We want to make sure it’s done right,” Wolfe said.
He added he would like the model to be ready in April, but if it still needs work, he would rather wait than use incomplete information.
“We have a lot of hours, man hours, and people working on getting the task accomplished,” he said.
“I am optimistic we are getting closer to final numbers.”[…]
Rio Grande Water Conservation District General Manager Steve Vandiver said the model could have been completed more quickly if those working on it had not had to take time for court hearings and trials over the sub-district. Vandiver said after the first sub-district was approved in 2006, two lawsuits were filed that bound up resources including engineers, modelers and attorneys. They have had to prepare for three major trials and a Supreme Court decision. Those legal challenges were the reason the model has not been completed more quickly, Vandiver said…
As soon as the model is satisfactorily updated, the groundwater rules advisory committee will begin meeting again, Wolfe said. This group is now in its third year of working on the regulations, he added. Two pieces of the regulations still need to be finalized, the phase-in portion and the sustainability portion, Wolfe said. The phase-in portion lets each sub-district get a plan of water management approved by the court and an annual operating plan in place. The sustainability portion was difficult, Wolfe said, because the group had to determine how to measure sustainability.
Once the rules are completed, they will be submitted to the water court for final adoption, Wolfe said. If the rules are opposed, they will go through an appeal process, so the effective date of the rule implementation would depend on how quickly and smoothly that process went.