From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
John Martin Reservoir is kind of like the Mama Bear in the Goldilocks story.
Too far away from Pueblo or Colorado Springs for municipal storage, but close enough to users in the Lamar area.
Too politically charged to easily carve out new storage space, but designed to settle differences on the Arkansas River between Kansas and Colorado that have festered for more than a century.
And too big to ignore as a means of gaining storage space on a river where all the water rights have been spoken for.
So the Colorado Water Conservation Board approved a $48,000 grant to find out what may be “just right” when it comes to storage.
“This is making better utilization of John Martin Reservoir to benefit the basin,” said Alan Hamel, the CWCB member from the Arkansas River basin.
The Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District will work with the state to identify who could use storage in John Martin as part of a more detailed engineering study to be presented to the Arkansas River Compact Administration in 2017.
It also will incorporate an ongoing Colorado State University study that is looking at proposed operational changes at John Martin.
The reservoir was completed in 1948 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and operates under compact procedures approved in 1980 and revised in 1984 and 2010. Those rules require 35 percent of water stored in the reservoir to move into accounts for Kansas’ benefit.
It also governs winter water storage and flood control protocol.
By contrast, Lake Pueblo offers “if-and-when” or excess capacity storage that can be used when it is not storing Fryingpan-Arkansas water, its primary purpose.
John Martin Reservoir, like Lake Pueblo, is not full most of the time. It was last filled in 1999, although it nearly reached the top of the conservation pool during prolonged rains last year.
Getting a new kind of storage account would require some tricky negotiations with Kansas, which sued Colorado, and lost, on the point of Lake Pueblo’s construction and operation as part of a 24-year lawsuit over the compact.
That’s anticipated as part of “stakeholder” meetings called for in the grant. It also would require cooperation from downstream users in Colorado before any changes are made.