Click the link to read the article on the Aurora Sentinel Website (Max Levy and Kristin Oh). Here’s an excerpt:

The City of Aurora is poised to sign a deal that would allow it to periodically divert more than 7 billion gallons of water from the Arkansas River to the city every decade with the purchase of farmland in rural southeast Colorado. While the $80 million sale would see more water piped away from the already parched Lower Arkansas Valley, the city says the 4,806-acre property in Otero County will continue to be used to raise crops when Aurora isn’t actively tapping its water rights.

“It’s a new idea,” said Aurora Water general manager Marshall Brown. “Nothing like this has really been done exactly in Colorado.”

[…]

City of Aurora officials and representatives of C&A Companies — to whom Aurora will lease the land, structures, equipment and water needed to grow crops — insist the latest transaction is not a buy-and-dry…The property eyed by the city is irrigated by the Catlin Canal, which intercepts the Arkansas River about 40 miles southeast of Pueblo. Shares in the Pisgah Reservoir and the Larkspur and Otero ditches are also included in the purchase, though Baker said they are “supplemental” and represent some storage in that area as well as a small fraction of the water historically used to irrigate the land. Under existing intergovernmental agreements and the City of Aurora’s new agreement with C&A Companies, the city will be allowed to tap the water rights associated with the Otero County property no more than once a year, three times in any 10-year period, with each withdrawal not to exceed 7,500 acre-feet, or about 2.4 billion gallons of water. Aurora is and will continue to be limited to calling on its Arkansas River rights when its storage reservoirs are no more than 60% full.