Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The Colorado West Land Trust is looking to play a larger, more focused role in helping address the water challenges that face western Colorado. The nonprofit has developed a water protection plan that aims to help strengthen agricultural water supplies, preserve important wildlife habitat and enhance watershed health. Rob Bleiberg, the land trust’s executive director, said water is such a significant issue facing western Colorado that the organization needs to think creatively and try new things to help respond.
“This plan represents our goal of viewing water in a more systematic, comprehensive way, and increasing action that we are taking on the ground to benefit our community now and into the future,” he said.
The land trust, which operates in Mesa County and several other area counties, has worked for decades in cooperation with landowners to protect land from development through conservation easements. Bleiberg said that with ongoing drought, water scarcity problems and impacts on agricultural production and wildlife habitat in the region, the land trust felt an urgency to take a fresh look at water and not just think about what the land trust does on individual farms and ranches, but look at entire systems. He said one aspect of the plan involves looking at what opportunities exist for protecting some of the most important irrigated farmland locally in terms of the seniority of water rights, quality of soils, and economic production that is occurring and its importance to local communities. The land trust is looking at tools beyond conservation easements that it might employ. One that Bleiberg said it is already pursuing on a pilot basis and ideally wants to scale up involves buying irrigated farmland and then selling it with restrictions in place to ensure that it isn’t subdivided and developed and the water isn’t permanently separated from the land. Bleiberg said retiring farmers in western Colorado who don’t have heirs wanting to farm but want to see their land remain available for agriculture don’t have a lot of options. The land trust wants to work with such farmers, pay them a fair price for their land, implement conservation measures on the farms and then sell them, ideally to young farmers, he said.
Homes line the foothills outside Colorado Springs on Sept. 11, 2024. The city has doubled down on water conservation to make its recent spike in population growth possible. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
When researcher Brian Richter set out to take a close look at how big cities in the Western U.S. were adapting to water scarcity, he already knew the story’s basic contours.
Previous studies showed the trend clearly for some large utilities. As a megadrought has baked the Southwest since 2000, the region’s biggest cities have reined in their use to keep pace with the declining supply.
But it had been years since someone took a more region-wide look at who was conserving and how much. Richter, a lecturer at the University of Virginia, and president of his own independent research firm, Sustainable Waters, was up to the task.
After gathering data for 28 large and medium-size water utilities dependent on the Colorado River, Richter and his team were able to see the more modern trend lines in sharp detail. The results surprised him. It wasn’t just that cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Tucson and Las Vegas were using less. They were doing it while growing rapidly.
His 2023 study found that collectively the region’s cities had grown by 25% from 2000 to 2020, while their water use dropped by 18%. Per person use rates declined even more sharply, falling by 30%.
“We thought that was nothing short of miraculous, to be honest,” Richter said. “It’s quite a water conservation success story.”
Richter had heard the region’s growth anxieties before. As homes spring up, highways widen and new schools open, conversations about rising populations in the arid West eventually find their way to water. Those new residents mean more green lawns and household faucets, forcing cities to scramble to meet the new demand, or so the thinking goes.
It’s easy to understand why the notion that more people beget more water use jumps to people’s minds, Richter said. All of the on-the-ground impacts of growth are highly visible.
“What you can’t see so easily are the numbers, the water numbers behind that growth,” Richter said. “We felt it was really important to start getting those numbers out there, and to start revealing the fact that it’s not necessarily true any longer, that as a city’s population grows its water use has to increase at the same time.”
Now, as pressure from climate change mounts, the region faces a critical question: Can urban areas keep pace with their past successes in water conservation, or is there a floor to just how much water savings can be wrung from Southwestern cities?
The Colorado Springs skyline rises above Fountain Creek on Sept. 11, 2024. For the past couple decades the city has experienced rapid population growth while ratcheting down its demand for water. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Using less in Colorado Springs
Until 2002, Colorado Springs was using water like there’s no tomorrow. As the city grew, so did its water demand, hand-in-hand.
“There was a lot of inefficiency out there, a lot of inefficient fixtures, a lot of landscape irrigation, primarily of turf grass,” said Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager. “A lot of it was, frankly, egregious.”
A punishing drought in 2002 provided a shock to the system. While reservoirs declined, the people in charge of Colorado Springs started to realize that unchecked water use would eventually lead to serious shortages. Mandatory restrictions on use at the city level ran from 2002 to 2005.
“I don’t think people thought of the water system, the water supply, as being constrained in any way until we hit 2002 and then our perspective changed on the scarcity of water and how reliable our supply was,” Winter said.
Conservation is now seen as a reliable way to live within their means, he said.
Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager, points out a turf grass conversion project on Sept. 11, 2024. The utility offers incentives to encourage homeowners and commercial businesses to swap lawns for native grasses. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Colorado Springs has taken a gradual approach. First came the rate changes. Residents who irrigated more paid more per gallon. Then came the incentives to swap out indoor plumbing fixtures, such as replacing a toilet that uses 5 gallons per flush with a new model that uses less than 1.
The city has also begun to embrace the loss of its lawns. It ramped up its lawn replacement program, in which thirsty yards are replaced with native grasses, like blue grama or buffalo grass, which use 60%-80% less water. The utility offers 50 cents per square foot of lawn converted.
Since Colorado Springs started those conversions in 2013, the city has swapped in native grass on about 3.1 million square feet, or about 72 acres, mostly on commercial properties like shopping centers, churches and business parks. In 2020 a permanent shift to only allow for three days per week of outside watering on existing grass went into effect as well.
Blue grama grows alongside a Colorado Springs parkway on Sept. 11, 2024. Concerns over dwindling water supplies have sped up the city’s conversions of turf grass to blue grama and other native species. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
All of the focus on conservation is paying off, Winter said. From 2000 to 2023, Colorado Springs has grown by about 40%, while also recording a 39% reduction in average per capita water use and about a 25% drop in total water deliveries. The city’s water use is now about equal to what it was in the late 1980s, despite the rapid growth, he said.
Mandatory conservation measures have started taking hold in some parts of the Colorado River Basin, like a nonfunctional turf ban in Las Vegas, for example. But Winter said the cultural and political contours of Colorado Springs mean water managers have to get creative, relying more on voluntary incentives than strict mandates that could rile its conservative voter base.
When the city decided to overhaul its building code a few years ago, the process brought up the usual tensions over growth. One code change ruffled feathers. A restriction on new developments limited turf to 25% of the total landscape.
“Individual freedom is a core value here,” said Nancy Henjum, a Colorado Springs city council member. Henjum summarized the early complaints of some fellow council members: “What do you mean I wouldn’t be able to have Kentucky bluegrass in my whole yard?”
But after lengthy discussions, plus field trips to the infrastructure that brings Colorado River basin water over the mountains to Colorado Springs, lightbulbs went off for the city council members about the scarce nature of their supply, she said. As of June 2023, the turf restriction is now officially part of the city’s landscape code.
“It was ultimately fascinating to watch people who are policymakers kind of push back initially, and then little by little over time recognize this is the right thing to do,” Henjum said.
A sign indicates where to find low water use plants in Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. A punishing drought in 2002 reframed the way the community saw its reliance on the shrinking Colorado River. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Conserving the way out
While city leaders are proud of the water conservation success they’ve had over the past two decades, they say that was the easy part. In Colorado Springs, another 40% reduction in use over the next few decades will be tough, if not impossible, Winter said.
“Used to be that we could put a conservation program out there and anyone could participate. Almost everyone was inefficient, and so you could just broadcast a program out there and it worked,” he said. “It’s getting harder, it’s getting more expensive. We’re having to get a lot more strategic and targeted in our approach.”
The same is true just to the north, in Aurora. The city grew by 40% from 2000 to 2020, while lowering both its total water use and per-person use, according to Richter’s study.
“We are the first city (in Colorado) to pass a turf ban,” said Alex Davis, assistant general manager for Aurora Water. “Fifty percent of our use is outdoor water use in the summer, and we’re trying to ratchet that down.”
A path winds through the Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. Because of gradual water conservation measures the city has been able to add thousands of new residents while using less water from the Colorado River basin. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
But Davis isn’t convinced a city like Aurora, with its steep population curve, can rely solely on conservation to make its way toward a stable water future.
“When we look at our demand projections going forward, we have a gap that we need to fill, right?” she said. “We have a projected need that we can’t meet today for what we expect the population to be in 2060, and so we have to acquire more water resources and do more supply projects in order to meet that gap.”
A big portion of that gap is being driven by climate change, Davis said. Longer, hotter dry spells mean the uncertainty about future water supplies is greater than it was 20 years ago. Her team uses models to game out what kinds of policies the city might need to make it through extreme droughts.
Under those severe scenarios, Aurora’s plans indicate it would first cut down on outdoor watering, then eliminate it all together. That would leave just indoor, household use, but Davis said, “there are projections where we don’t have enough water to meet household use only in these very severe projected scenarios.”
John Fleck, a University of New Mexico water policy professor, said this is the challenging future facing many of the West’s municipal water leaders. Even so, he cautioned against too much hand-wringing over population growth and urban water use. There’s still a lot of slack in the system and a lot more savings to be had, he said.
Because so much water is used outdoors, Western cities face a fundamental question: As the region warms and dries, how much green space are they willing to part with to close the gap between supply and demand? It’ll be a tough call, but not an impossible one, Fleck said.
“When you think deeply about it, it would be weird for people, for communities, not to take the necessary steps to ensure their future existence, right?” he said.
“If you’re facing the choice of getting rid of some swimming pools and lawns, or abandoning your city, it’s a no-brainer. People are going to use less water. And that’s what we see happen over and over again.”
This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Mrs. Gulch’s landscape September 12, 2024. Blue Gramma in the far left corner of the photo.
Although Vice President Kamala Harris touts clean energy and Donald Trump makes misleading assertionsand false claims about it, neither candidate has set forth a comprehensive energy plan. Even if they do, a gridlocked Congress would be unlikely to pass it.
Instead, the next president’s greatest influence on clean energy will come through their handling of legislation and regulations put in place since 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration. As an environmental engineer who studies energy and climate change, I expect that Harris, who has strongly supported these policies, would follow through on them, while Trump’s record as president suggests that he would try to roll them back. Trade policies toward China, the leading producer of clean energy technologies, will also be key. https://www.youtube.com/embed/hoycdE1G0C0?wmode=transparent&start=0 Donald Trump and Kamala Harris discuss clean energy policy during their presidential campaign debate on Sept. 10, 2024.
Legislation and regulations
Three bills passed by Congress under Biden and Harris – the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – have transformed U.S. energy policy. The three bills allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for building infrastructure, providing incentives for clean energy manufacturing and purchases, and funding clean energy research.
None of these measures is likely to be completely overturned, since each funds numerous projects in red states. But implementation by the next administration will determine how effectively they stimulate clean energy growth.
In 1998, when I was in fourth grade, I joined a class field trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. But when we got to Cortez, the road was barricaded. Hours earlier, three men had stolen a water-tanker truck and killed a police officer before fleeing into the desert.
In his book Dead Run, writer Dan Schultz makes the case that the criminals were inspired by Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The men were survivalists planning to turn the water truck into a mobile bomb, Schultz says. Their probable goal: To pack the tanker truck with explosives and blowup Glen Canyon Dam.
Back then, the idea of draining Lake Powell was a fringe idea, attractive to anti-government extremists and radical environmentalists. Those who advocated a legal decommissioning of the Glen Canyon Dam, including supporters of the Glen Canyon Institute in Salt Lake City, were often laughed out of the room.
In those years, the dam was working as intended. Lake Powell was nearly full in the late ‘90s. Hydropower production was going full tilt, and millions of people were visiting the reservoir annually to fish, houseboat, and water ski.
But since the year 2000, Lake Powell has been in decline. Climate change has reduced runoff throughout the Colorado River Basin by around 20% compared to the previous century. In 2022, the reservoir—the second-largest in the country after Lake Mead—was less than a quarter full.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Nearly every boat ramp on Lake Powell was unusable last spring, and there was barely enough water to sustain hydroelectric generation. One more bad snow year would have pushed the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse, dropping the reservoir’s surface toward the lowest outlets on the Glen Canyon Dam—a point known as “dead pool.”
At dead pool, the 27 million people who rely on Colorado River water downstream from the dam would likely be forced to reduce water use quickly and involuntarily.
But Lake Powell would still stretch 100 miles into Glen Canyon at dead pool.
That’s because there is a significant design flaw in the dam: There is no drain at the bottom. Billions of gallons of water would be trapped in the dead-pool reservoir with no easy way to release them into the Grand Canyon.
Luckily, that catastrophic scenario didn’t play out in 2023 thanks to a near-record snow year that brought Lake Powell to around 40% full. After another decent runoff this spring, the reservoir level held steady.
Twenty-four years of low levels in Lake Powell haven’t been all bad, either. Over 100,000 acres of land that were once flooded had been exposed by early 2023, including countless cultural sites sacred to Indigenous people. Along Glen Canyon’s tributaries, whole ecosystems have sprung back to life, biologically diverse and dominated by native species. Ecologists have been surprised by just how healthy the reemerging landscape is, despite spending decades underwater.
This 2023 diagram shows the tubes through which Lake Powell’s fish can pass through to the section of the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon. Credit: USGS and Reclamation 2023
The Bureau of Reclamation has been studying potential modifications to the Glen Canyon Dam, including the drilling of tunnels at or near river level that would allow Lake Powell to be emptied if necessary. Until those modifications are made, however, the potential for a crisis—caused in part by the current dam design—remains as real as ever. Two back-to-back years of severe drought, such as we’ve seen several times since 2000, would halt hydropower production at the dam and bring us dangerously close to dead pool.
Allowing the Colorado River to flow freely through Glen Canyon was a radical idea in the 1990s, but the opposite is true today. Climate change and steady water demand in the Southwest have shown us that the Glen Canyon Dam, instead of being a boon to water users, is part of the problem. Modifying the dam would give water managers greater flexibility in dry years, and it would allow Glen Canyon to continue its ecological rebirth. Since dam modifications would likely take several years to complete, there is no time to waste.
Zak Podmore. Photo credit: Writers on the Range
The extremists today are those who deny climate change, assuming that Lake Powell will refill again soon. In a rapidly warming world, business as usual should be treated as the fringe position. [ed. emphasis mine]
Zak Podmore is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively debate about Western issues. He is a Utah-based journalist and the author of Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, published by Torrey House Press in August.
The Salton Sea (pictured above ) straddles the Imperial and Coachella valleys and has long been a sticking point in Colorado River deals. But the federal government recently committed up to $250 million for restoration efforts at the sea. (Source: Water Education Foundation)
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
Imperial’s projected 2.2 million acre foot take on the Colorado River in 2024 is on track to be the lowest on record, with data going back to 1941.
California’s total projected main stem withdrawals are again under 4 million acre feet, the lowest they’ve been since the 1950s. Arizona’s main stem withdrawals remain under 2 million of their nominal 2.8 maf allocation for the second year in a row, basically the lowest they’ve been since the Central Arizona Project was built. Nevada is once again hovering around 200,000 acre feet of its 300,000 acre foot allocation.
Taken together, water use by the three lower basin states is currently on track to be the lowest since detailed record keeping began in 1964.
A note on the data
The Bureau of Reclamation has complete reported data back to 1964, when the modern accounting system was established as a result of the Supreme Court’s Arizona v. California decree. I have stitched that data together with a separate dataset that pushes California records back into the 1940s, assembled some years ago by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and kindly shared with me. For my current version of the dataset, I extend a huge thanks to Sami Guetz, who spent time QA’ing it as part of her masters project at UC San Diego.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
