Day: October 6, 2023

@AlamosaCitizen: Despite Renewable Water Resources principals’ claims, Upper #RioGrande Basin remains over-appropriated — ‘There is no surface or #groundwater available for a new appropriation in Water Division 3′ — Craig Cotten

San Luis Valley irrigation crop circles. Photo credit: The Alamosa Citizen

Click the link to read the article on the Alamosa Citizen website:

In response to claims by principals of Renewable Water Resources, officials this week with the Colorado Division of Water Resources reiterated that the Upper Rio Grande Basin is over-appropriated and has no surface or groundwater available for a new appropriation.

The reply from state water officials came in response to questions from Alamosa Citizen after the Douglas County Future Fund made a series of claims in a recent newsletter it publishes to influence decision-makers in Douglas County.

RWR principals, who include former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and political strategist Sean Tonner, have been working to convince Douglas County commissioners that there is water available in Rio Grande Basin that Douglas County could own and pump into the Front Range bedroom community.

The search for a future water source by suburban communities like Douglas County is one of the pitched battles of the climate-influenced 21st century. The storyline goes like this: Sprawling suburban communities that blew up during the 1980s and ’90s and first decades of the 21st century are on the hunt for new water sources as periods of extreme drought and intensified changes to surface temperatures reduce the availability of water as a natural resource.

The agricultural corridors of America, meanwhile, are working to reduce their own consumption of water through technological advances and through reducing the amount of acreage used to grow crops.

Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources

It’s a classic new battle: population centers vs. rural regions, and there is no clearer example of the conflict than Renewable Water Resources and its efforts to export 22,000 acre-feet of water from the Upper Rio Grande Basin to Colorado’s Front Range on a perpetual basis.

“The San Luis Valley has 1.02 billion acres of unused water, because it sits over the second-largest aquifer in the United States,” is one of the claims RWR made in a Douglas County Future Fund newsletter in September.

Another claim it made as fact: “The RWR project proposes to use 22,000 acre-feet. This water would come from the confined aquifer in the San Luis Valley, which is fully renewable within five days of runoff from the San Luis Valley mountain ranges.”

Neither is the case and both claims fly in the face of state groundwater rules governing irrigators’ use of water in the Valley. The lack of recharge and dropping levels of the confined and unconfined aquifers of the Rio Grande Basin have pushed state water engineers to develop specific groundwater usage rules in an effort to restore the aquifers and save the Rio Grande Basin. Each irrigation season, the state curtails water usage along the Rio Grande Basin, which impacts farming and ranching production in the Valley as Colorado works to control the water availability and meet its own obligations to New Mexico and Texas under the Rio Grande Compact. 

“At this time the Division of Water Resources is not going to comment on the specific details included in the newsletter produced by the Douglas County Future Fund. However, due to the over-appropriated nature of our water system, there is no surface or groundwater available for a new appropriation in Water Division 3, the Rio Grande Basin in Colorado,” said state water Division 3 Engineer Craig Cotten.

Douglas County recently created a 12-member water commission to advise it on water issues. The new committee includes Tonner, who uses the Douglas County Future Fund newsletter to make the case for Renewable Water Resources’ water exportation proposal.

The Douglas County water commission members include:

District 1
Merlin Klotz, James Myers, Donald Lagley

District 2
Clark Hammelman, James Maras, Roger Hudson

District 3
Frank Johns, Evan Ela, Kurt Walker, Harold Smethillis

At-large Seats
Sean Tonner, Tricia Bernhard

Water managers on the Rio Grande Basin continue to monitor the efforts in Douglas County. The county government in Douglas County is not set up to be a water provider and is dealing with its own conflicts. 

The Douglas County commissioners have been advised by attorneys that the Renewable Water Resource concept is littered with problems and would have difficulty gaining traction in state district water court. 

Any effort to export water from the San Luis Valley would get tied up for years in state water court. The six counties in the San Luis Valley also recently banded together to create local planning rules that local officials believe would block a water exportation plan from moving forward.

San Luis Valley Groundwater

It’s alive! Experiment to plant trees on mine waste a surprising success — The #Durango Telegraph

The Brooklyn Mine, northwest of Silverton, is among the worst polluters in the Animas River watershed. An innovative restoration project successfully planted 900 trees on a mine waste rock pile to help repair the landscape./ Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Telegraph website (Jonathan Romeo). Here’s an excerpt:

In 2016, Gretchen Fitzgerald, a forester then with the San Juan National Forest, had a rather unconventional idea: What if we planted trees in a pile of mine waste? As the restoration forester for the district, Fitzgerald identified one of the many areas around Silverton impacted by legacy mining in the San Juan Mountains, a site known as the Brooklyn Mine, just northwest of town.

“Looking around that site, I saw some seedlings naturally creeping around from the side,” Fitzgerald said in an interview with The Durango Telegraph this week. “So I said, ‘Let’s try it.’”

[…]

Now, five years later, Fitzgerald has since moved onto the Sequoia National Park in California. Her trees, however, are doing remarkably well. This summer, in the first monitoring of the site since 2019, it was confirmed that nearly 100% of the trees survived and are thriving.

“It’s exciting,” Fitzgerald said. “There’s a lot of mines around there. We could expand this and do more work.”

The “Bonita Peak Mining District” superfund site. Map via the Environmental Protection Agency

It was the wettest summer on record for #Wyoming — Wyoming Public Radio

Wyoming 120-day precipitation map. Credit: High Plains Regional Climate Center

Click the link to read the article on the Wyoming Public Radio website (Caitlin Tan). Here’s an excerpt:

It was the wettest summer on record for Wyoming – and that record began in 1895. The moisture had huge short term impacts on the drought that began in 2020…[Michael] Natoli said it wasn’t necessarily the wettest summer on record for every single town and city, but it was for the state as a whole.

West Drought Monitor map June 6, 2023.

He said at the start of summer over half of the state was ‘abnormally dry’ and about 30 percent of the state was in ‘drought.’

“By August 22 of this year, we were completely drought free across the state,” Natoli said. He means drought free from the one that began in 2020…

While the snowy winter and wet summer helped, the impacts from the megadrought are far from resolved. Just last year, water reservoirs in western states were being drained at alarming rates. That didn’t happen this year due to the snowy winter and wet summer, but is expected in the years to come. Western states are currently trying to figure out the best way to address the impending water scarcities.

Colorado Water Conservation Board recent #Salida gathering focuses attention on the #ArkansasRiver — The Ark Valley Voice

Browns Canyon National Monument protects a stunning section of Colorado’s upper Arkansas River Valley. The area is a beacon to white water rafters and anglers looking to test their skills at catching brown and rainbow trout. Photo by Bob Wick / @BLMNational

Click the link to read the article on the Ark Valley Voice website (Jan Wondra). Here’s an excerpt:

By way of overview, the CWCB is involved in an amazing number of activities. It oversees the interstate compact compliance on water usage. It works on watershed protection, flood planning, and mitigation. It oversees stream and lake protection, as well as conservation and drought planning. The CWCB oversees water project loans and grants, water use modeling, and water supply planning focused on appropriate stewardship of the state’s water resources; which contrary to the public’s perceptions, is not an infinite resource.

The agendas for these every-other-month sessions are extensive. After moving through the director’s reports, it dived into 18 water plan grants. They ranged from a Colorado Cattlemen’s Association grant to scale up agriculture water education and funding outreach, to a San Luis Valley Rye Resurgence project, to the Blue River Watershed groups habitat restoration project to the Bernhardt Reservoir Water Storage Project for the Central Colorado Water Conservancy District.

Moving from water grants to water project loans, a big topic was a water supply reserve fund application from the Colorado Ag Water Alliance covering nine river basins: Arkansas, Colorado, Gunnison, Metro, North Platte, Rio Grande, South Platte, Southwest, and the Yampa/White/Green basin. Its purpose is to improve agricultural drought resilience and support innovative water conservation.

Near the end of the two-day meeting, the group moved into an executive session to dive into the critical  post-2026 Colorado River negotiations.  As a Colorado River Upper Basin state, the long-term division of this critical western water resource is becoming contentious, as Upper Basin states remind California, Nevada, and Arizona that they have been using far more than their share.