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December 3, 2025
January date scrapped in favor of June 29, 2026, after ‘key witness unavailability’ — four years after Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management was first approved by Subdistrict 1 and with the unconfined aquifer still in a historic decline
The San Luis Valley’s highly-anticipated district water court case — the water trial of this century if you will — originally scheduled to last five weeks beginning in January has been pushed back six months to the summer of 2026 due to the departure of a key witness in the fallout from a series of contentious October emails.
The Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management by Subdistrict 1 in the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has lived a precarious life without ever being implemented, going back to 2022 when it was originally crafted by subdistrict managers and January 2023 when it was adopted by Rio Grande Water Conservation District board.
Later came approval by the state engineer, and then after objections were filed against the new amended plan, Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales set a trial date to commence on Jan. 5, 2026, and to last five weeks.
That is, until the week before Thanksgiving when Gonzales scrapped the January date in favor of June 29, 2026, some four years after the plan was first approved at the subdistrict level and the unconfined aquifer still in a historic decline. The judge did so after a series of emails sent by a key expert witness for the main objectors to the plan surfaced.
The effect is that a new plan to recover the Rio Grande’s unconfined aquifer, which has been approved at the local and state levels but still requires sign-off from district water court, remains in limbo.
Following filings by the Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group requesting a six-month continuance to the start of the trial, and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and state Division of Water Resources objecting to the request, Gonzales ruled the two main objectors challenging the new aquifer recovery plan had good reason to ask for a six-month continuance after Taylor Adams, an environmental and water resources engineer for Hydros Consulting in Boulder, resigned from the case due to “personal and family circumstances.”
Adams was set to challenge the Subdistrict 1 water plan on a variety of engineering fronts until a series of emails he sent in October to State Engineer Jason Ullman and Senior Assistant Attorney General Preston Hartmann came to light. In one email, he tells Ullman, “Also, GFY.” In another, he emails that he is “no longer interested in anything other than publicly exploding the rampant corruption at DWR and the AG Office.”
And in an email sent Sunday, Oct. 19, to Attorney General Phil Weiser, Adams writes, “We haven’t met, but I understand that you’re running for governor of Colorado. You should know that if you continue this pursuit without addressing the persistent and laughable perjury that has been carried out in your name by Preston Hatman (sic) and Jason Ullman, you will be the subject of my attention throughout your campaign…”
The Rio Grande Water Conservation District asked Gonzales not to delay the water court proceedings due to the urgency to recover the unconfined aquifer and the lack of “credible evidence that demonstrates that Mr. Adams is unavailable. Rather, they now assert that he ‘should not be pressured into returning to the case at the risk of further harm to his mental health.’”
“In any event,” district water attorneys argued in their objection to a trial delay, “none of this changes the fact that the unconfined aquifer is still over 1.3 million acre-feet below the water levels measured in 1976, and more than 830,000 acre-feet below the water levels previously determined by this Court and the Colorado Supreme Court to be sustainable.”
Subdistrict 1 is home to the San Luis Valley’s richest crops of potatoes, barley and alfalfa. Without recovery of the shallow aquifer, the state is threatening mass shut down of groundwater pumping wells and requires both a master plan and annual replacement plans to show recovery efforts.
The subdistrict’s proposed Fourth Plan of Water Management is its most drastic effort yet to meet the state’s orders. The new plan, crafted in 2022 and adopted by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in January 2023, is designed to “match the amount of groundwater pumping to the amount of water coming into the subdistrict.”
It does this through a 1-to-1 augmentation, meaning for every acre-foot of water used, an acre-foot has to be returned to the unconfined aquifer through recharging ponds. The amended plan relies on covering any groundwater withdrawals with natural surface water or the purchase of surface water credits.
Farmers in the subdistrict have expressed support for the plan, which includes a $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee that farmers would pay if they exceed the amount of natural surface water tied to the property in their farming operations.
Objections are coming from farmers who do not have natural surface water coming into their property and around the steep fee for purchasing surface water credits from a neighboring operation to offset groundwater pumping irrigation. Both proponents and opponents of the plan say the $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee could put farmers who rely on groundwater pumping out of business.
The five-week water trial will sort through these issues in much more granular detail. With the trial date pushed back six months, any new strategy to recover the Valley’s ailing aquifer will shift into 2027 at the soonest.
