From the Fort Collins Coloradoan (Bobby Magill):

Fort Collins simply lacks the storage space for mandatory water restrictions to benefit the city, said Fort Collins water resources manager Donnie Dustin.

Denver Water has space to store about 550,000 acre-feet of water in its reservoirs, but Fort Collins owns only a small fraction of the water in Horsetooth Reservoir, which is controlled by the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, he said. When Denver Water imposes water restrictions, they have a large “bank” in which to store water, he said. “The city of Fort Collins just doesn’t have that,” Dustin said.

Of all the major cities along the Front Range, Fort Collins and Loveland own the least amount of reservoir storage, relying mostly on Colorado-Big Thompson Project reservoirs, including Horsetooth, he said. Northern Water limits the amount of water cities can save for use in future years, and the city can’t store more there even if it wants to.

Loveland is in a similar situation and did not ponder any water restrictions at all this year. The city, which hasn’t imposed water restrictions since 2003, doesn’t yet have a specific plan for how to respond to a drought, something the Loveland City Council is planning to consider Tuesday…

Some cities keep some level of mandatory water restrictions in place all year, regardless of drought conditions.

Both Aurora and Greeley limit lawn watering to specific days of the week all year.

While Greeley has ample water supplies, Aurora’s complicated network of reservoirs and pipelines stretching all the way to Eagle County has been hit hard by the drought.

The city’s reservoirs are at only 54 percent of capacity, and even with recent snowfall, it won’t be clear until late June if Aurora will need to change its water conservation measures, said Aurora Water spokeswoman Gabrielle Johnston…

Because every city is vulnerable to drought in different ways because their water sources and water rights can be dramatically different, it’s difficult to compare cities’ drought responses, said Harold Evans, chairman of the Greeley Water and Sewer Board. Greeley, which has access to adequate water because it has senior rights to Poudre River water and water rights in three other river basins, imposed permanent water restrictions in 1906…

Click here to read the document. Here’s an excerpt:

Since 1911, the climate in eastern Utah and western Colorado has become warmer, especially the minimum temperatures. There is also some indication that the region has seen increased precipitation. After a cooling trend from the 1940s through the 1960s, the trend towards warmer and wetter conditions has occurred since the 1970s. These general trends in regional temperature and precipitation are matched in surrounding sites. Large decade-to-decade and site-to-site variability was noted in the temperature and precipitation data.

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