From The Durango Herald (Peter Marcus):
On water, Brown is again focused on studying water storage along the South Platte River. He tried legislation last session, but it failed amid spending concerns.
“I’m going to keep pushing on that because the low hanging fruit for the Front Range is Western Slope water,” he said. “It’s easy to just send it over the hill, and we just don’t have that water to send.”
[…]
[State Senator Ellen Roberts] is also working on bills in the wake of the inactive Gold King Mine spill, in which an error by the Environmental Protection Agency caused an estimated 3 million gallons of mining sludge to pour into the Animas River on Aug. 5.
One proposal comes out of an interim water resources committee that has suggested a resolution that would encourage Congress to pass “good samaritan” legislation, which would reduce the liability associated with private entities conducting mine reclamation work.
Roberts would also like to address jurisdictional issues between states in the wake of Gold King. The incident impacted several states, including neighboring New Mexico. State agencies found it difficult to work with one another because of legal roadblocks. Roberts has proposed legislation that would eliminate some of those barriers through intergovernmental agreements.
“When minutes matter, you need a clearer pathway,” she said.
In terms of wildfires, Roberts is supporting a resolution that would ask Congress to change how it funds fire services so that it can spend more money on forest management.
The problem is that over the last several years, there has been a sharp increase in the Forest Service’s budget for fire suppression, jumping to 50 percent from as little as 15 percent 25 years ago. The agency is forced to borrow from programs that would reduce fire risk and aid prevention in order to fund suppression efforts.
“The Forest Service’s budget gets depleted with these god-awful wildfires, and so then they don’t have the money they need to actually manage the forests,” Roberts said. “It becomes a vicious cycle.”
