Two separate courts ruled this week that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must enforce regulations that restrict states from emitting pollution that could cross borders into neighboring states.
U.S. district courts in Maryland and New York both ruled separately that EPA was derelict in its duty by not enforcing states to comply with the “Good Neighbor provision” under the Clean Air Act meant to address smog pollution.
The New York court found that EPA failed to meet an August 2017 deadline that would begin the process of enforcing the law throughout states. The court’s judge ruled that EPA must take necessary steps to limit the smog that blows into New York and Connecticut from five surrounding states: Illinois, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan and Virginia.
The court set a Dec. 8 deadline for compliance.
In Maryland, a similar verdict found that EPA must take a final action by Sept 15.
“The court notes that it does not grant the above extension lightly,” Maryland’s district court wrote in its verdict. “On the contrary, the court is troubled by EPA’s apparent unwillingness or inability to comply with its mandatory statuary duties within the timeline set by Congress.”
An EPA spokesperson said said the agency plans to propose a new action that will address the good neighbor policies in CAA by the end of the month.
“As we have already publicly announced, we intend to propose – by the end of June – and finalize – by December – an action that will address any remaining good neighbor obligations related to the 2008 ozone standard for these and other states,” the EPA said in a statement.
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
Summary
Over the last week, dry conditions continued in the Desert Southwest and in parts of the Central Rockies, leading to drought persistence and degradation in these areas. Farther east across the Great Plains, scattered thunderstorms led to some areas improving or staying out of drought, while some areas that missed the rain were degraded. In the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains, precipitation patterns also dictated areas which experienced degrading and improving conditions. Near normal or wetter than normal conditions occurred over most of the eastern United States, where few changes to the USDM depiction were made…
Warm weather occurred over much of the Southern region; the warmest temperatures (6 or more degrees warmer than normal) took place in the Texas Panhandle, western Oklahoma, and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Paltry rain amounts for this week combined with high temperatures and long term precipitation deficits added additional stress to the water systems in parts of the Texas Panhandle, leading to the expansion of extreme and exceptional drought conditions. Moderate to heavy rain over the Interstate 35 corridor in Oklahoma and in north-central to west Texas allowed for 1-category improvements in some areas that were experiencing abnormal dryness, moderate drought, severe drought, and extreme drought. Meanwhile, continued dry and hot conditions led to the introduction of extreme drought west of Lubbock and in areas near Corpus Christi where soil moisture deficits and mid to long term precipitation deficits supported degradation. Additionally, extreme drought was expanded in the Del Rio area northeast of the Rio Grande and in a corridor north of Houston and College Station in response to building precipitation deficits in these areas. The drought impact designation in far south Texas was changed from S to SL, indicating that drought conditions are present at both short and long term timescales. Elsewhere in the South, a few areas of abnormal dryness and moderate drought formed or expanded in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma that missed out on the moderate to heavy rains in the region…
Significant rainfall fell in parts of the High Plains region, while most of the mountainous areas remained dry. Thunderstorms in northeast Colorado, Nebraska, and northwest and eastern Kansas delivered between 0.5 and 3 inches of rain, helping to prevent additional drying caused by the high temperatures. Similar rainfall totals in southwest Kansas were enough to lessen precipitation deficits and result in an improvement from extreme to severe drought. Aside from the Black Hills, much of the Dakotas saw rainfall amounts over a half inch, with some areas exceeding 2 inches. This rainfall led to the removal of abnormal dryness in some areas west of the Missouri River in South Dakota and far southern North Dakota. Recent rainfall also helped decrease moderate drought in northwest South Dakota, though if recent hot weather and a high atmospheric demand for moisture continues, a reversion back to moderate drought conditions may occur. Severe drought was reduced in coverage in north-central North Dakota, where precipitation deficits over multiple time scales had decreased sufficiently for an improvement. Meanwhile, over the central Rockies, continued warm, dry weather exacerbated longer term precipitation deficits leading to an expansion of drought and abnormal dryness in north-central Colorado and south-central Wyoming…
During the past week, precipitation fell in the mountainous areas of western Washington and Oregon, northern and central Idaho, and parts of western Montana. The highest amounts, with isolated spots in the 2 to 3 inch range, fell in western Washington, western Oregon, southwest Montana, and the southern Idaho Panhandle. Precipitation, some heavier, also fell over the high plains of Montana. Elsewhere across the region, conditions were quite dry, aside from some isolated precipitation south of Tucson. In the drier areas of central Washington and north-central Oregon, abnormal dryness developed as 1 to 2 month precipitation deficits increased. Severe drought crept south in southwest and south-central New Mexico due to increasing short- and medium-term precipitation. Relatively cool conditions occurred in most of central and northern California and in much Oregon and Washington, while above normal temperatures were found in eastern Montana, parts of Idaho, Utah, most of Nevada, and Arizona. The warmest areas, primarily in New Mexico and Utah, had temperatures reach at least 6 degrees above normal for the weekly average, while the coolest areas saw mercury drop 4 to 8 degrees below normal…
Looking Ahead
The National Weather Service medium range forecast calls for two significant areas of wet weather over the next 7 days (June 13 to June 20). Widespread and potentially heavy rainfall is expected to bring 2 to 5 inches of rain to coastal and central Texas and southern Louisiana. Rainfall may also extend into the Southern Plains and the remainder of the Gulf Coast region.
Farther north, showers and thunderstorms are likely from the Northern Rockies to the High Plains and Upper Great Lakes. Rainfall over the northern tier is likely to be locally heavy (3 to 5 inches) creating the potential for isolated flooding. In contrast, dry weather is expected to prevail over the Pacific Coast and the drought inflicted areas of southern California, southern Nevada, and western Utah.
Bicycling the Colorado National Monument, Grand Valley in the distance via Colorado.com
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Charles Ashby):
The district’s three-member board of directors voted 2-1 Tuesday to forego any legal challenge to District Judge Lance Timbreza’s ruling last week, saying there was no guarantee they would prevail in an appeal and they didn’t want to subject district businesses and residents to more legal uncertainty.
As a result, the board said it would refund the $7.2 million it’s collected so far — plus interest — to the 40,000 property owners who have been assessed the tax since 2016, but exactly how that will happen is yet to be determined.
That’s partly because the district has already spent about $2.2 million of the money, and isn’t yet sure how much in interest it is obligated to pay.
The district’s board and staff is to spend the next couple of weeks trying to figure all that out, said district manager Tim Ryan.
First, the district staff has to figure out how much in interest it is obligated to pay, and then — because it doesn’t have the cash to cover the entire refund and interest — how it will do so. That could involve taking out a loan, laying off some workers, declaring bankruptcy of the enterprise fund the district formed to finance the stormwater improvements, or a combination of those options.
Under the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, any overcollected tax that isn’t refunded within a year requires a 10 percent interest payment along with it, Ryan said.
“The ruling was (the fee) exceeded TABOR, and that it’s an extra tax, so those who paid it are entitled to what they paid plus 10 percent,” he said. “It’s no longer a fee, that’s the conundrum. Now we have to go back to 2016 and 2017. Those are the years that require interest because we’ve held their money for over a year. Everybody else will get their refunds within a year.”
While board member Mary Brophy was adamantly opposed to appealing the decision, and Jim Grisier cast the lone dissenting vote against not going ahead with one, board chairman Cody Davis stood somewhere in the middle.
While he ultimately cast the deciding vote not to appeal, Davis said part of him wanted to because there are aspects to Timbreza’s ruling that he saw as incomplete. The judge ruled that unlike fees charged in other jurisdictions that were for specific purposes, such as Aspen’s grocery bag fee, this fee was for a core function of the district’s mission, to handle drainage needs.
MARRIAGE OF DATA AND WATER LAY THE FOUNDATION FOR TOMORROW’S SMARTER CITIES
The water industry has reached a turning point. Utilities are finally recognizing the power in digitizing operations and increasing economies of scale to extend asset life and address legacy funding issues. As the industry focuses more on sustainability, value and innovation, a new water economy appears to be emerging: Utilities are embracing data and infrastructure in
new ways to maximize efficiencies.
The reality conveyed throughout the 2018 Strategic Directions: Water Report is that capital costs will continue to rise as infrastructure ages well beyond end-of-life expectations and regulatory uncertainty increases. Skepticism about a proposed federal infrastructure plan adds additional complexity to questions about who will pay for vital repairs and upgrades. Calls to prepare for climate change and build resilience against extreme weather events also are stretching already thin budgets. However, water industry leaders in the United States and abroad are now innovating at an unprecedented pace, reinventing how technology is used to solve industry challenges.
The water industry’s digital evolution continues to be linked to conversations regarding sustainability, as maintaining or expanding asset life again was chosen as the most significant sustainability issue for utilities. As we see throughout this report, utilities are examining how data analytics can inform smarter operations and maintenance decisions and they are integrating these programs in their capital planning. Technology also is helping utilities communicate more effectively within their workforces and to their ratepayer and stakeholders, as well as within their infrastructure systems.
This year’s report explores how data are supporting innovations in alternative water supply, smart water solutions and case studies from state-of-the-art water infrastructure projects from around the world.
After a very dry winter and spring, Arizona is desperate for any moisture to help relieve some of the extreme drought.
There are indicators that Arizona could experience a wetter than normal summer, but there’s still a question mark because several weather factors have to come together in the atmosphere for the skies to open up…
While Monsoon is not as helpful as winter rains, the desert and High Country do benefit, says meteorologist, Marvin Percha…
Percha said there are signs Monsoon could start sooner and dump more rain.
“When we have years like this when the winters are dry, that high pressure that normally moves northward, tends to move northward earlier,” Percha said.
When that happens, it draws moisture from the south. Combine that with desert heat and thunderstorms and walls of dust can erupt.
“We get impulses of moisture that move up and it’s difficult to predict when and how much rain they will bring, if and when they do occur,” Percha said.
Another good sign is warmer Eastern Pacific waters for tropical storms.
“[It] gives more moisture and energy to develop so they tend to be stronger,” he said.
Percha said that could mean more Pacific hurricane moisture moving into the southwest, especially during August and September.
July 4 weekend, Percha said, is when Arizona really starts to see Monsoon action across the state and the upcoming weekend appears to be an earlier start.
Meteorologists are also looking to a better than average chance of an El Niño developing, which could bring us more rain in late summer and early fall.
While the odds appear to be in the favor of a busier Monsoon and El Niño, it’s still early.
FromKUNC (luke Runyon, Matt Bloom & Esther Honig):
“Buy and dry” describes a class of water transactions that typically involve a municipality or other local government paying the owner of a farm for some or all of their available water rights.
It’s a slow, mostly invisible flow of water from the region’s heritage industry — agriculture — to a new powerhouse: real estate development and urban growth.
The transactions go back decades, with plenty of cautionary tales to guide both farmers and government officials, casting various Front Range cities and Eastern Plains farming communities as both villains and victims.
Concern about the practice has reached a fever pitch. The state’s water plan, adopted in 2015, frowns at buy and dry tactics. Water prices continue to rise. Some alternative methods for leasing water are slowly being implemented, at the same time multi-million dollar checks are passed from developers and city planners to farm families.
Urban growth is a driver
The practice of buy and dry is primarily driven by the growth of water-short cities – of all sizes – along the Front Range. According to Colorado’s State Demography Office, communities along the I-25 corridor in Weld and Larimer counties are the fastest growing. Populations there are increasing at a rate twice as fast as the state as a whole…
Windsor, like many fast-growing Front Range communities, sees agricultural water as a viable source to supplement future growth. As recently as May, Windsor purchased water rights from at least two different farming families, according to allotment contracts from the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District.
One purchase was of units of water within the Colorado-Big Thompson Project from the John Ernest Lucken Revocable Trust. The other with the Andrew H. Blase Family Trust.
In both cases Wagner says he doesn’t know whether the town’s purchases led to farms “drying up.”
“I’m not sure of what’s happened to those farms,” he said. “Whether they still have enough water rights to irrigate or whether they’ve reduced the farming acreage.”
Wagner added that Windsor, unlike other cities, has not specifically purchased farms to own them and take the water off them. When asked about the likelihood of the town doing that, Wagner said it very well could…
Water rights worth millions
For farmers in the West, access to water is a key part of making agriculture possible in an arid region. Without irrigation farmers are significantly limited on the range of crops they can grow and in the profitability of the land they own.
With commodity crop and milk prices at low points, selling water rights can help make a farm operation whole.
That’s the case for Colorado dairy farmer Timothy Bernhardt, just down the road from Windsor in Milliken. The Bernhardt family has farmed there since the 1920s. Access to water to quench the thirst of his 900 dairy cows is essential, Bernhardt says.
“Cattle drink a lot of water, so about 50 to 100 gallons of water a day,” he says. “So it’s critical for milk production because milk is made up mostly of water.”
In May Bernhardt and his brother made the choice to sell 175 units of water within the Colorado-Big Thompson Project — about 57 million gallons — to the city of Milliken for nearly $5 million.
That money will be used to pay off debt, Bernhardt says. Like many businesses, farms rely on loans and credit to operate and the brothers wanted to pay it off because they’re each older than 60 and looking at retirement. Their children aren’t interested in running a dairy farm, so when they retire, the business ends with them…
Cautionary tales
There’s no arm-twisting in buy and dry, cities are often quick to say. These transactions involve willing buyers and sellers. Cities get what they need — new water supplies — and farm families get an opportunity to pay off debt, make on-farm upgrades or retire.
But on a regional-scale, water managers and government officials are troubled. Water flowing from farms to the Front Range means a movement of power and economic activity, from rural areas to cities. Take the Colorado-Big Thompson Project as an example.
When the vast network of reservoirs was originally built in the 1930s to transport water from the state’s wetter Western Slope to the east, agriculture was the majority user of its stored water. Today, 70% of the project’s water is used by municipalities and industry…
Conversations about buy and dry often turn to the Arkansas River valley and the communities of Crowley, Ordway and Sugar City. Water managers don’t really have to imagine what a future of rampant buy and dry could look like. It has already happened there…
Cronin and a handful of other water managers in the South Platte Regional Opportunities Working Group recently started a conversation about what it would take to allow Front Range cities to keep growing, without draining farms in the process. It looked like at least three — maybe four — new reservoirs positioned along the South Platte River to the stateline with Nebraska to supplement water supplies for cities and farmers.
Cronin cautions that these are preliminary discussions.
He calls the discussion of new reservoirs a “generational” one — if the idea gains enough supporters for it to happen at all. Large-scale water projects often take decades in planning, permitting and litigation before a shovel hits the ground. This one would likely follow a similar timeline, Cronin says. Questions still linger about how much it would cost, another big hurdle to bringing it to fruition.
Tens of thousands of people on the Navajo Nation lack running water in their homes. But that could change in the coming years, as the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project goes into effect. It’s expected to deliver water to the reservation and nearby areas by 2024, as part of a Navajo Nation water rights settlement with New Mexico, confirmed by Congress in 2009.
Survey work begins for the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project on the Navajo Nation. Photo credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation via The High Country News
Three other Native water settlements currently await congressional approval. They arise from federal legal decisions recognizing that many tribes in the West hold water rights that largely pre-date — and therefore override — the water rights of non-Native settlers.
Many tribal nations are currently asserting those rights as a way to ensure economic vitality, affirm sovereignty and provide basic services that some communities lack. In many places, however, Native water rights have yet to be quantified, making them difficult to enforce. Settlement is usually the preferred remedy; it’s cheaper, faster and less adversarial than a lawsuit, and can include funding for things like pipelines or treatment plants. With settlements, “the tribes are able to craft solutions that work for them and that can be more flexible than anything that could be achieved through litigation,” says Kate Hoover, a principal attorney for the Navajo Nation Department of Justice water rights unit.
Once negotiations are complete, Congress has to confirm the settlements. Here are the three introduced in the Senate this session:
Pipes are laid for the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project on the Navajo Nation. Photo credit: Northwest New Mexico Council of Governments via The High Country News
THE TAKEAWAY: This settlement allocates 4,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water per year from the Central Arizona Project to the 2,300-member Hualapai Nation. It also authorizes federal spending for a water pipeline to Peach Springs, the reservation’s main residential community, and Grand Canyon West, an economically important tourist destination featuring a horseshoe-shaped “skywalk” jutting out over the canyon.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The legality of Native water rights settlements stems from a 1908 U.S. Supreme Court case involving agricultural irrigation. Winters v. United States established that when reservations were created, they included an implied right to water.
Subsequent legal decisions confirmed that so-called “reserved water” could also be used for livestock, drinking water and even commercial purposes. That’s crucial for this settlement, because the Hualapai Nation plans to use a portion of their water to expand Grand Canyon West — and their economy. “We have done everything possible to provide jobs and income to our people in order to lift them out of poverty — but the lack of a secure and replenishable water supply on our Reservation is our major obstacle to achieving economic self-sufficiency,” wrote Damon Clarke, chairman of the Hualapai Nation, in testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.
THE TAKEAWAY: This settlement affirms the Navajo Nation’s right to 81,500 acre-feet of water each year — enough to serve about 160,000 households — from the Utah portion of the San Juan River, a Colorado River tributary. In addition, it would establish funds for treating and transporting drinking water.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: In many Native water rights settlements, tribes agree to give up a portion of the water to which they’re entitled — often allowing other groups to continue using that water, which might otherwise have been cut off — in return for expensive water projects, typically built by a federal agency.
The Navajo Utah settlement is different: It would transfer money directly to the tribe for water infrastructure. During a U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs hearing in December, Russell Begaye, the president of the Navajo Nation, explained why the tribe, rather than the U.S. government, should lead the work: “It’s important as a sovereign nation that we are able to do that — employ our people, use our laws — in order to build and construct any kind of construction that may take place.”
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Kansas, like much of the West, is prone to drought. This settlement would help the Kickapoo deal with dry periods by allowing the tribe to store more than 18,000 acre-feet of water in a reservoir that has yet to be built, but that has been contemplated for at least 40 years. A dispute over how to acquire the private land that the reservoir would flood led to a 2006 lawsuit, and, eventually, to settlement negotiations, which concluded in 2016.
Experts say it’s not unusual for settlements to take years or even decades to complete, and that securing congressional approval requires balance. “Ultimately, these settlements are political instruments,” says Steven Moore, a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund and an advisor to the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas. “You really have to work these settlements out so that it’s a win-win for everybody.”
Emily Benson is an assistant editor at High Country News.
This article was published in the June 22, 2018 print edition of High Country News.
Paired historical and current photographs of the Cheesman Reservoir landscape (near Denver CO) illustrating the general increase in forest density and loss of openings that occurred from the late 1890’s to 2000. These types of paired photos can help us to give scientists a broad idea of how forests have changed over time (photos from 2000 by M. Kaufmann) via the Rocky Mountain Research Station.
Click here to read the January/February Bulletin from the Rocky Mountain Research Station. Here’s the summary:
Historically, the ponderosa and dry mixed-conifer forests of the Colorado Front Range were more open and grassy, and trees of all size classes were found in a grouped arrangement
with sizable openings between the clumps. As a legacy of re suppression, today’s forests are denser, with smaller trees. Proactive restoration of this forest type will help to reduce fuel loads and the risk of large and severe wild res in the Colorado Front Range. Using the best-available information on the historical conditions of these forests to develop “desired conditions” for restoration, the Rocky Mountain Research Station has published Principles and Practices for the Restoration of Ponderosa Pine and Dry Mixed-Conifer Forests of the Colorado Front Range (RMRS-GTR-373).
This guide was produced and reviewed by a range of scientists and managers from federal agencies, environmental non-pro ts, and academia to address the unique forest structure and re regime of this area as well as synthesize current Front Range forest science. It aims to help the management community understand the desired conditions for these forests, the principles behind the restoration recommendations made, and steps for implementing the principles. The guide is being released with a companion document, Visualization of Heterogeneous Forest Structures Following Treatment in the Southern Rocky Mountains, (RMRS-GTR-365) which allows users to “see” what the recommended treatments may look like at the stand level.
“Bergen Park” was painted by John Frederick Kensett circa 1870. The painting illustrates the open, spatially-variable structure of a ponderosa pine stand with an open understory typical of some Front Range forests at that time. (Bergen Park, at an elevation of 7800 ft., is located near Evergreen, CO, 25 miles west of Denver.) via Rocky Mountain Research Station
Take a moment to picture Colorado in your imagination. You’re probably seeing mountain vistas with postcard-perfect evergreen forests. There’s a good chance what you’re imagining looks like Hall Ranch — a 220-acre carpet of pointy green trees flooding the landscape in Boulder County.
Ecologists who know the state’s forest history say it wasn’t always this way. Colorado’s lower elevation vistas have become too crowded.
“The first thing I see is we’re missing the meadows. Where are the meadows?” asked Tony Cheng, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University.
Euro-American settlement in the 1860s dramatically changed Colorado’s lower elevation forests. Before 1860, there would have been plenty of large open meadows. Small stands of ponderosa pines of various ages would have broken up the negative space. And low intensity wildfires would have moved through the stands of trees far more regularly.
Compare that to today where some crowded forests haven’t seen wildfire in more than a century. When fire comes it’s more likely to burn hot and intense, killing off all the trees.
Researchers care about this historical range because they want to make landscapes like Hall Ranch more wildfire friendly. Workers who manage forests now have specific guidelines on how to manage trees based on this framework. A new paper, published in April in Forest Ecology and Management, gives metrics to help guide and evaluate restoration projects.
“We’re not trying to exclude fire,” Cheng said. “We’re actually trying to set the landscape up to receive fire.”
Cheng, along with Peter Brown of the Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research organization, looked into the ranch’s historical forests and found that it’s pretty crowded today. Brown said, “there’s 10 times as many trees in these stands as there were historically.”
Click here read the briefing (scroll down). Here’s an excerpt:
The latest monthly briefing was posted today on the Intermountain West Climate Dashboard. The highlights, also provided below, cover current snowpack and drought conditions, runoff and reservoir conditions, May precipitation and temperature, and ENSO conditions and outlooks.
Below-normal precipitation for May and early June in most areas has clinched an extremely poor runoff season for Utah and southern and western Colorado. Meltout and peak runoff occurred 3-6 weeks earlier than normal in most of those basins. The low winter and spring precipitation and warm May temperatures have led to very high wildfire risk, with multiple large fires currently burning in Colorado and Utah.
As of June 11, snow remains at less than 10% of the SNOTEL sites in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, and the current SWE is well below normal at nearly all of those sites. Even in those areas that had near-normal or above-normal peak SWE this spring, the snowmelt since mid-May has been unusually rapid.
Observed monthly flows for May were around or below the 10th percentile for most gages in central and southern Utah and southern Colorado, with record-low May flows at a handful of gages in those areas. Observed flows in northern Colorado and northern Utah have been generally closer to average, while Wyoming had above-normal to record-high May flows in most basins. Due to the low May inflows, June 1 reservoir storage in Utah and Colorado has slipped compared to May 1, but is still slightly above average overall.
May precipitation was below normal to well below normal for western and southeastern Colorado, western and far southern Utah, and south-central Wyoming. The rest of Wyoming, northeastern Colorado, and northwestern Utah had wetter-than-normal conditions. May temperatures were much warmer than normal across the region, with some parts of western Colorado experiencing the warmest May on record.
Since early May, drought conditions have worsened in northeastern Utah and southeastern Colorado, while improving in north-central Colorado. D4 conditions persist in the Four Corners region and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The total area in the region affected by drought is similar to one month ago. As of June 5, 60% of Utah is in D2 or worse, and the remainder in D0 or D1; in Colorado, 51% is in D2 or worse, and 24% in D0-D1; and in Wyoming, only 14% is in D0-D1, with no D2-D4.
The La Niña event has finally petered out and ENSO-neutral conditions prevail in the tropical Pacific. The majority of models predict ENSO-neutral conditions to continue through fall 2018, with 50-50 odds for the emergence of El Niño conditions by winter 2018. The CPC seasonal precipitation outlooks for the June-August and July-September periods show slightly enhanced chances for an above-normal monsoon season affecting southern Utah and western Colorado, which would be most welcome if it occurs.
From email from Colorado Parks and Wildlife (Joe Lewandowski):
To assist federal and local agencies during the current dangerous fire conditions and recently enacted public land closures, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has announced that some State Wildlife Areas in southwest Colorado are now closed to all public access. But in addition, several other water-based wildlife areas and two state parks remain open to the public.
In and near Durango the Bodo, Perins Peak, Haviland Lake, Devil Creek and Williams Creek state wildlife areas are closed until further notice. In Bayfield the Lion’s Club shooting range, managed by CPW, is also closed.
West of Durango in Dolores and Montezuma Counties, Lone Dome and Fish Creek State Wildlife Areas are also closed.
“We regret having to enact these closures, but we do so in an effort to protect the public and protect natural resources. These measures will also help with compliance to the recent closures enacted by the U.S. Forest Service and La Plata County,” said Adrian Archuleta, a District Wildlife Manager with CPW.
CPW also wants area residents and visitors to know that there are several other State Wildlife Areas and State Parks that remain open for recreation. CPW asks that people comply with any current local fire restrictions so that these areas can remain open for recreation.
The areas that are open include: Echo Canyon SWA in Archuleta County; Pastorious SWA in La Plata County; in Montezuma and Dolores counties — Summit, Puett, Narraguinnep, Totten, Twin Spruce, Dolores River, Joe Moore and Ground Hog Reservoir state wildlife areas.
Also open are Navajo State Park in Archuleta County; and Mancos State Park in Montezuma County. Both parks offer campsites, hiking, fishing and other water recreation.
From Kevin Duggan writing on the opinion pages of The Fort Collins Coloradoan:
The cost of a water-storage project Fort Collins has been pursuing for more than a decade continues to float higher and higher.
But even at its current estimated cost of $74.1 million — $27.3 million more than estimated just a few years ago — city officials say expanding Halligan Reservoir along the North Fork of the Poudre River remains the city’s best and most affordable option for securing future water supplies that would be needed in the event of drought.
That’s a big-ticket item by any measure. The cost would be covered by reserves in a fund that gets money from water rates paid by Fort Collins Utilities customers and fees charged to developers for tapping into the city’s water system.
Those development fees could go up 23 percent in coming years to help pay for Halligan, according to a memo to City Council…
Part of the reason for the project’s rising cost estimates is the uncertainty that comes with going through the National Environmental Policy Act process. The current projected cost includes $16.3 million in contingency funds to cover potential surprises in federal and state requirements for permitting and mitigation.
Fort Collins has been working on and paying for an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, for the proposed expansion of Halligan for 12 years. The latest estimate for when a draft EIS for the project will be released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is April 2019, said Adam Jokerst, the city’s project manager.
Construction costs have gone up over the years and continue to rise. If the project is permitted, construction on the expansion, estimated to cost $31.3 million, could begin in 2023 and be completed in two years.
It would be quite an effort. The city has proposed enlarging Halligan’s capacity from 6,400 acre-feet to about 14,525 acre-feet by raising its concrete dam 25 feet…
The Halligan project has faced a lot of issues over the years. For a time, the EIS process included the city of Greeley’s proposal to expand its Milton Seaman Reservoir, which also is on the North Fork of the Poudre. Greeley wanted to expand its 5,000-acre-foot reservoir to 53,000 acre-feet.
The Halligan-Seaman project included the cities in partnership with North Poudre as well as the Fort Collins-Loveland, East Larimer County and North Weld County water districts, also known as the Tri-Districts.
The Tri-Districts backed out of the project in 2009, citing mounting costs and a lack of progress on environmental studies. North Poudre withdrew in 2014 over the same concerns.
Those withdrawals required scaling back the project, changing its environmental impacts and adding time to the review process, Jokerst said. There’s also been a lot of turnover at the Corps over the years with personnel overseeing the EIS.
The Seaman project was separated from Halligan in 2015 because of changing scopes for the projects and differing time frames. Greeley is now proposing to expand Seaman to 88,000 acre-feet to meet its water supply needs to 2065, according to the Corps’ website.
Fort Collins officials maintain the Halligan project still makes sense for the city even with its escalating costs. It makes use of an existing reservoir and could potentially improve flows on the North Fork through mitigation. The city has the water rights it needs to fill the reservoir, Jokerst said.
And Halligan is still less expensive than other water supply sources, according to the city. The going rates for an acre-foot of firm yield from the Colorado-Big Thompson project is $60,000. Under current estimates, water from the Halligan project would cost $8,800 per acre-foot.
So far, Fort Collins Utilities has spent $12.6 million on the project. The city has appropriated $37.4 million for it and would have to come up with another $36.7 million under current projections.
The upper Roaring Fork River, east of Aspen, near the river’s confluence with Difficult Creek. The stretch of river between Difficult Creek and Maroon Creek is often plagued by low flows in late summer and fall.
As a way to settle a 2009 state water court case led by Pitkin County and the Colorado River District, the Front Range city of Aurora has agreed to let as much as 1,000 acre-feet of water run down the upper Roaring Fork River each year instead of diverting the water under Independence Pass.
The pending settlement could mean that about 10 to 30 cubic feet per second of additional water could flow down the river through Aspen in summer and fall.
It’s an amount of water that Pitkin County Attorney John Ely said would be “visibly noticeable” and would help bolster flows in the often water-short stretch of the Roaring Fork between Difficult and Maroon creeks.
“It’s exciting,” Ely said. “It’s not very often you get to put water into the upper Roaring Fork. These opportunities are pretty limited, and I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another one.”
A June 13 memo from Ely on the agreement states that “the Pitkin County Healthy Rivers and Streams Board has long recognized this reach of the Roaring Fork as one of the most stressed reaches of the Roaring Fork” and that “the Roaring Fork Conservancy’s State of the Watershed report identifies the upper Roaring Fork just above Aspen and heading into town as being severely degraded.”
The Pitkin Board of County Commissioners is expected to approve the settlement in the form of an intergovernmental agreement with Aurora on Wednesday.
Aurora’s city council also is expected to approve the agreement, as is the Colorado River District board of directors at its July meeting. A Water Court judge has set a July 20 deadline for the parties to file the settlement.
Officials with Pitkin County and the Colorado River District see the deal with Aurora as a victory, especially as some estimates, according to Ely, place the value of water in Aurora at $50,000 an acre-foot, which makes the 1,000 acre-feet of water potentially worth $50 million.
The settlement is also of high value to officials at the Colorado River District, who led the efforts of the West Slope entities in the case.
“I think it’s a big deal,” said Peter Fleming, the general counsel for the Colorado River District, which represents 15 counties on the Western Slope. “I think it’s going to be a good deal for Pitkin County, the Roaring Fork River, and the West Slope as a whole. And frankly, I think it’s a pretty good deal for Aurora, as well.”
But Tom Simpson, a water resource supervisor with Aurora, said it’s a “bittersweet” deal for the growing Front Range city.
“We’ve worked hard on this agreement over the last year,” Simpson said. “It is bittersweet, but we are happy that we are finally there.”
The deal lets Aurora retain its current use of 2,416 acre-feet of water it diverts on average each year from the top of the Fryingpan River Basin, but Aurora also is giving up 1,000 acre-feet of water it now diverts from the top of the Roaring Fork River Basin.
Aurora also is agreeing to abide by operating protocols and future potential use of the senior water rights on the Colorado River now tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon. That agreement could limit the amount of additional water Aurora can divert in the future from the Colorado River Basin.
The provisions of the agreement relating to the Shoshone water right also include an acknowledgement that the senior water right might someday be changed to include an instream flow right rather than the water being diverted out of the river and sent to the hydropower plant.
“Aurora will not oppose an agreement between a West Slope entity or entities, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and any other entity entered for the purpose of adding instream flow as an additional use of the senior hydropower right,” the agreement states.
Simpson agreed the overall deal represented a “haircut” for Aurora’s water rights in the Colorado River Basin.
“Yes, we’re going to get the 2,416 acre-feet out of Busk, but we’re going to make these other deliveries on the Roaring Fork, and we might lose just a little bit of water on the Shoshone protocol,” he said. “It’s a haircut, absolutely.”
On the other hand, Simpson said “while this agreement is not perfect, we feel like it is a good agreement, and preserves some of our Busk-Ivanhoe water and lets us all move forward.”
A view of Ivanhoe Reservoir, where water from the upper Fryingpan River headwaters is collected before being sent under the divide to Busk Creek, Turquoise Reservoir, and then the Front Range.
Started in 2009
In December 2009, Aurora filed a water rights application in Division 2 Water Court in Pueblo to change the use of its water rights in the Busk-Ivanhoe transmountain diversion system in the Fryingpan River headwaters.
The system, built in the 1920s, gathers water from Ivanhoe, Pan, Lyle, and Hidden Lake creeks and diverts the water through the Ivanhoe Tunnel to Turquoise Reservoir near Leadville before it is sent to East Slope cities. The system was built to deliver water to irrigators in the lower Arkansas River basin.
The water rights to the system carry appropriation dates from 1921 to 1927, which makes them junior to the senior water rights on the Colorado River near Grand Junction known as the “Cameo call.”
The Pueblo Board of Water Works bought half of the Busk-Ivanhoe system in 1972, and Aurora gradually secured its half-ownership in the system between 1986 and 2001.
In its 2009 application, Aurora told the water court it wanted to change the use of its water in the Busk-Ivanhoe system from irrigation to municipal use.
However, it also conceded it had already been using the Busk-Ivanhoe water for municipal purposes in Aurora, even though its water-right decree limited the use of the water to irrigation in the lower Arkansas River valley. It also came to light that Aurora was first storing the water in Turquoise Reservoir without an explicit decreed right to do so.
That caught the attention of Pitkin County, the Colorado River District, a host of other Western Slope water interests, and the state engineer’s office, which administers water rights.
As Ely put it in a June 13 memo to the Pitkin County commissioners, “In 1987, Aurora began using Busk-Ivanhoe water for undecreed municipal and residential purposes in an undecreed area, the South Platte Valley, after storing the water in an undecreed manner in Aurora system reservoirs.”
Aurora’s stance was that since the water had been diverted under the Continental Divide, it didn’t matter how it used or stored the water, as it should make no difference to the West Slope. But an array of West Slope entities, including the Colorado River District, disagreed with Aurora’s position.
In July 2013 the Western Slope entities and the state took Aurora to a five-day trial in Div. 2 Water Court in Pueblo, arguing that Aurora should not get credit for its 22 years of undecreed water use and storage.
“It was always an issue of fact at trial as to how much water was in play because it depends on how you calculate the yield of the project,” Ely said.
In 2014, thought, the district court judge in Division 2 ruled in Aurora’s favor, and the West Slope interests then appealed to the state Supreme Court.
The appeal process prompted a host of entities on both sides of the Continental Divide to come forward and argue aspects of the case before the court. It also prompted a scolding of Aurora by former Supreme Court Justice Greg Hobbs over the use of undecreed water rights.
In 2016, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s decision, ruled in favor of the Western Slope, and remanded Aurora’s original change application back to the lower court.
“The Supreme Court wrote that notwithstanding the fact that the change application and original decree concerned developed transmountain water, water used for undecreed purposes cannot be included in a calculation for historic consumptive use and is therefore excluded from water available for change of use,” Ely wrote in his June 13 memo.
So, rather than going back to Water Court and continuing to fight over the potential size of the Busk-Ivanhoe rights, which the West Slope now saw as being between zero and well-less than 2,416 acre-feet, Aurora began negotiating in January 2017 with the Western Slope entities still in the case, which included Pitkin County, Eagle County, the Colorado River District, the Grand Valley Water Users Association, the Basalt Water Conservancy District, Eagle County, Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, and Ute Water Conservancy District.
Today, each of those entities is also a party to the intergovernmental agreement expected to be submitted to the water court in July, along with a proposed decree for Aurora’s Busk-Ivanhoe rights.
Ely said Pitkin County didn’t start out in the case with an eye on securing 1,000 acre-feet for the Roaring Fork, but did have a local interest in the operation of the Busk-Ivanhoe project.
“We weren’t doing it to obtain an end result, we were doing it because the [Busk-Ivanhoe] project is in our backyard and we felt it was the right thing to do,” Ely said. “And all the other dialogue developed after the trial and the Supreme Court decision.”
At the time of the 2016 Colorado Supreme Court decision, Pitkin County had spent $353,000 in legal and other fees in the case, using money brought in by a tax to fund the county’s Healthy River and Streams program, which includes litigation in water court.
Since then, Ely said the county had spent an additional $27,300 for hydrology and engineering work, but had not spent more on additional outside legal help, as he and Assistant County Attorney Laura Makar handled the settlement negotiations for the county.
The dam across the main stem of the upper Roaring Fork that diverts water from Lost Man Creek and the Roaring Fork into a tunnel under Green Mountain and, eventually, into Grizzly Reservoir and the tunnel under Independence Pass to the Arkansas River basin. Some of the water owned by Aurora will be bypassed at this point to run down the Roaring Fork.
Pan, or Fork?
For Pitkin County and other Western Slope entities, it made more sense to negotiate with Aurora for some of the water it owns in the Independence Pass-Twin Lakes system rather than the Busk-Ivanhoe system, as any water bypassed by the Busk-Ivanhoe system would be scooped up by the Fry-Ark Project, which sits below the Busk-Ivanhoe system in the upper Fryingpan valley and also diverts water to the East Slope.
Aurora owns 5 percent of the shares in the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Co., which operates the Independence Pass Transmountain Diversion System. Its share of the water diverted each year from the top of the Roaring Fork equals about 2,100 acre-feet a year, so the 1,000 acre-feet of water equals about half of Aurora’s water in the Twin Lakes company.
In the 10 years from 2007 through 2016, Twin Lakes Co. diverted a total of 485,762 acre-feet of water from the upper Roaring Fork River Basin through its diversion system, putting the 10-year average for that period at 48,567 acre feet. 2011 was the biggest year of diversions since 2007, with 67,463 acre-feet diverted, and 2015 was the lowest year since 2007, with 18,374 acre-feet diverted.
Colorado Springs owns 55 percent of the shares in Twin Lakes Co., Pueblo 23 percent, Pueblo West 12 percent, and Aurora 5 percent. There are also other minority shareholders, holding 5 percent of the shares, still using the water from the system for agriculture.
Twin Lakes is not a party to the intergovernmental agreement between Aurora and the West Slope entities, but it is willing to work with all involved to make the water deliveries as beneficial as possible for the Roaring Fork River.
Ely said Pitkin Country was grateful for the willingness of the Twin Lakes Co. to work with the county and the Colorado River District to release the water in a way that benefits the river, even if it means more work for the operators of the Independence Pass-Twin Lakes system.
According to Kevin Lusk, the president of the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Co. and a senior engineer at Colorado Springs Utilities, the company is simply responding to the desires of a shareholder in the company, Aurora.
He also said it’s legal under a 1976 water-rights decree held by Twin Lakes to bypass water for use on the West Slope instead of diverting it under the Continental Divide.
“The decree allows for this type of operation and so really all we’re doing as a company is accommodating the request of one of our shareholders to do something that was contemplated and provided for in the decree,” Lusk said.
And as part of the agreement, representatives from Pitkin County, the Colorado River District, Aurora, and Twin Lakes will meet each year to agree on a delivery schedule for the water that describes the “desired rate, timing, amount, location and ultimate use of the water, as well as the operational needs and constraints” of the Independence Pass-Twin Lakes diversion system.
In a letter attached to the agreement laying out how Aurora and the Twin Lakes Co. plan to manage the releases, Aurora said it “would prefer the water to be delivered at times of the year and at locations that will provide the most benefit to the Roaring Fork River stream flow. Typically this will be in the second half of the summer, beginning July 15, through the fall season.”
And Pitkin County feels the same way, according to Ely.
“We would like it delivered later in the year when the flows of the river start to go down,” he said.
However, Lusk at Twin Lakes said if the West Slope entities wait too long in the season to bypass the water, it may not be there to bypass.
“I know that there is a great interest in saving a lot of this water and bypassing it at the end of the season,” Lusk said. “But it’s going to be a bit of a balancing act. You’ve got to take the water when it’s there, because if you don’t take advantage of it there won’t be any to release later.”
Lusk also said that if the West Slope really wanted to take full advantage of the water, it might consider building a reservoir above Aspen to store the water at peak runoff and then release it later in the season.
Grizzly Reservoir on Lincoln Creek, well above its confluence with the Roaring Fork River at Lincoln Gulch Campground. The reservoir briefly stores water before it is diverted under the Continental Divide.
Flows on the Fork
According to a draft resolution to be voted on by the Pitkin County commissioners Wednesday, there were several factors that went into the county’s goal of acquiring 1,000 acre-feet per year of water for the upper Fork, including “the expected amount of yield for Aurora in the Busk-Ivanhoe system; existing in-basin and out-of-basin diversions from the Roaring Fork River between Independence Pass through the City of Aspen; potential future demand on the river; extent of existing conditional water rights; and the results of a stream analysis and channel measurement study.”
If the deal is approved, as soon as next year 700 acre-feet of Aurora’s water is expected to be captured briefly in the Independence Pass system, which includes dams on Lost Man Creek, the main stem of the Roaring Fork River, and on Grizzly Creek, and then released down either the Fork or Lincoln Creek toward Aspen.
Another 200 acre-feet of Aurora’s Twin Lakes water will be held in Grizzly Reservoir on Lincoln Creek, which holds 570 acre-feet of water. That water will then be released late in the year, after most transmountain diversions have stopped, to bolster late-season flows in the river.
“So it’s actually reservoir release of previously stored water, while the [700 acre-feet] is a true bypass of water that would have gone through the tunnel that day to the other side,” Lusk said. “It’s new for us. We typically don’t operate the reservoir that way. Typically we would run that reservoir quite a bit lower, just for safety-of-dam reasons. But this change in operation is going to be holding the reservoir up much fuller for a lot longer, and we just need to watch the behavior of the dam.”
Another 100 acre-feet of water could also eventually be left in the Roaring Fork each year after a complicated exchange-of-water arrangement is worked out with Aurora and other parties on the Fryingpan River, which brings the potential total water left in the Fork to 1,000 acre-feet.
There is also a drought contingency provision which will allow Aurora to bypass 100 acre-feet less than they would have under the deal if the water level in their system of reservoirs falls below 60 percent on April 1 in a given year. So in a dry year, that could bring additional flows in the Roaring Fork back to 900 acre feet.
The upper Roaring Fork River at the Cascades at about 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 16, 2016, after Lincoln Creek surged into the Fork, about an hour after the Twin Lakes Tunnel was closed. When the Twin Lakes system is closed for whatever reason, as it has been the past several seasons, the Roaring Fork River leaps to life with renewed intensity.
Other provisions
The pending Busk-Ivanhoe settlement also includes a provision that allows the Basalt Water Conservancy District to store 50 acre-feet of water in Ivanhoe Reservoir, which holds 1,200 acre-feet of water and serves more as a forebay for the Ivanhoe Tunnel diversions than a storage reservoir.
And, in a provision to Aurora’s benefit, the West Slope entities, including Pitkin County, have agreed not to fight, at least on a wholesale basis, the permitting of two potential reservoirs that Aurora is working on, Wild Horse Reservoir in South Park and Box Creek Reservoir, which could hold between 20,000 and 60,000 acre-feet on private land on the south flank of Mt. Elbert.
“Any participation in the permitting processes by the West Slope Parties will not seek to prevent the project in its entirety and comments or requests may be raised only for the purpose of addressing water related impacts caused directly by either of the two above specified projects on the West Slope,” the draft agreement between Aurora and the West Slope says.
The concession from the West Slope is significant as Box Creek Reservoir will be able to store water from the West Slope.
The West Slope entities also agree not to oppose changes in diversion points tied to the Homestake transmountain diversion system in the Eagle River Basin, not to oppose Aurora’s efforts to repair the Ivanhoe Tunnel, which is also called the Carlton Tunnel. The tunnel was originally built as a railroad tunnel, and then used as a highway tunnel.
Finally, the parties to the deal have agreed, in what’s called a “diligence detente,” not to challenge in water court for 15 years a list of conditional water rights, held by both East Slope and West Slope entities, that are required to periodically file due-diligence applications with the state.
The list of conditional water rights includes rights held by Aurora tied to the Homestake project and rights by the Southeastern Water Conservancy District tied to the Fry-Ark Project. They also include rights held by the Colorado River District on a number of West Slope water projects, including the potential Iron Mountain Reservoir near Redcliff and the Wolcott Reservoir near Wolcott.
Notably, the agreement does not include provisions to legally shepherd the water from the Independence Pass-Twin Lakes system all the way to the confluence of Maroon Creek, so it’s possible that diverters on the river near Aspen, such as the Salvation Ditch, could pick up the water left in the river.
However, Ely said the county will seek cooperation from diverters on the river near Aspen.
“We’ve had some conversations with water users on this side of the hill, and we’ve had conversations with the Division 5 engineer’s office, and we’re hopeful that when the water is being bypassed and put in the river and there is an increase of flow, folks won’t take advantage of that and we’ll be able to get it down through Aspen,” Ely said. “And eventually, you know things will change, and we hope to have that water associated with its own water right, so we can call it further down, but that won’t be the case right away.”
An additional benefit to the deal, according to Ely, is that the management of the 1,000 acre-foot pool of water from Aurora may also lead to better management of a 3,000 acre-foot pool of water also available in the Independence Pass-Twin Lakes system.
That pool was created to mitigate the impacts to the Roaring Fork River from diversions by the Fry-Ark Project on Hunter, Midway, and No Name creeks, which drain into the Fork in central Aspen. And while Twin Lakes releases the water down the Roaring Fork, releases from the Fry-Ark Project replace the water in Twin Lakes Reservoir, where both transbasin diversion systems can send water.
For years, the water from the 3,000 acre-foot pool has been released at a rate of 3 cfs on a year-round basis and has not been timed to help bolster low-season flows. Now, given the greater cooperation over the management of the 1,000 acre-foot pool from Aurora, how the 3,000 acre-foot pool from Fry-Ark is managed may also change, to the benefit of the river.
Aspen Journalism is collaborating on the coverage of rivers and water with The Aspen Times. The Times ran a shorter version of this story on Tuesday, June 12, 2018.
The state shut down Milliken’s water plant in May 2014 following at least a year of warnings regarding the high-salinity brine water — a product of the town’s drinking water treatment process — the town was discharging into the river.
The town faced fines of up to $10,000 per day, which could have totaled in the millions of dollars, but the fine was reduced to $140,000.
Milliken officials have since spent $400,000 on engineering studies, which helped officials come up with a new process for treating the leftover water. It’s the same process mining companies use, involving a variety of filters to treat the brine water.
It’s a $2.9 million fix, and town officials announced Wednesday the town has received a $900,000 grant from the Department of Local Affairs.
The results, for Milliken, won’t be felt until December at the earliest, and it will put an end to an expensive alternative the town has employed for the past four years…
In the past, Milliken has treated about one-third of its residents’ drinking water, relying on Greeley and Central Weld County Water District for the rest.
The past four years have seen Milliken’s reliance on Greeley and Central Weld increase to make up for the town’s inability to treat its own water, Wiest said.
Wiest wasn’t sure how much more that setup cost Milliken, but he said the town has been paying more for water from the outside suppliers than it would have cost to treat its own.
In one of the latest bids to save the Navajo Generating Station, the West’s largest coal-burning power plant, the Department of Interior has stepped in to try and stave off its closure. Last week, Timothy Petty, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, sent a letter to the Central Arizona Project, a regional water utility, pressuring it to continue purchasing electricity from the power plant, which is slated to close in 2019.
In the past, the water project, which is operated by the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, has purchased most of its power from the generating station. However, with the impending closure of the plant, the utility began looking to new and cheaper energy sources, including renewables like solar. On Thursday, despite the Interior Department’s recommendation, CAP’s board voted to sign a 20-year power purchase agreement with a solar company.
Navajo Generating Station. Photo credit: Wolfgang Moroder.
Those working to save the plant fear that CAP’s decision to move forward with alternative suppliers will prevent any potential investors from coming forward to buy the generating station. However, the utility has said it will still consider purchasing electricity from the power plant if a new owner can “provide competitively priced power,” CAP spokeswoman DeEtte Person said in an email.
The battle to keep the coal-fired power plant running is emblematic of a larger national effort to keep coal in operation, despite market forces that favor natural gas. As part of his “energy dominance” mandate, President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to bolster the country’s coal production, moving to lift regulatory burdens to increase the profitability of the energy source. Time and again those efforts have proven inadequate to save the struggling industry.
Several attempts have already been made in the case of the Navajo Generating Station. In April, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that would provide a multi-million dollar tax break for coal in Arizona, as a way to attract a potential buyer for the generating station. A few weeks ago, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., revealed a draft bill that would require the operator of CAP to purchase as “much of its total power requirements as possible” from the station until the utility has paid off its $1.1 billion debt. In addition to that mandate, the bill would temporarily exempt any potential new owner of the plant from having to conduct a National Environmental Policy Act review, and would waive Clean Air Act requirements, according to AZ Central.
If no buyer comes forward — a Chicago-based company has said it might make an offer — the plant will close in December 2019. The generating station supplies over 700 jobs, 90 percent of which are held by citizens of the Navajo Nation. In a statement, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye asked for more time to find a buyer before utilities like the CAP pursue alternatives. “We should continue to work to find solutions to keep the plant operating while supporting both the Navajo economy and families,” he said. Both the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation also receive royalties from coal production, with 85 percent of the Hopi Tribe’s annual budget coming from the generating station.
In the same week that the Interior Department put pressure on the Arizona utility to buy power from the generating station, a leaked White House draft memo directed the Department of Energy to save struggling coal and nuclear plants across the country. The memo described plans to order grid operators to buy energy from coal and nuclear plants for at least two years, allegedly to boost the resilience of the power grid, according to a statement from the White House.
Despite a coal-friendly administration, Thursday’s vote for solar by the CAP board suggests that coal is no longer considered an economically viable option for future energy generation. Addressing representatives from both the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation at Thursday’s board meeting, CAP’s Board President Lisa Atkins stated that the utility was “not at war with coal.” Rather, it was seeking a “long-term, cost-effective, reliable and diverse power portfolio.” Coal, it would appear, no longer has a prime spot in that energy mix.
Jessica Kutz is an editorial intern at High Country News.
This article was first published June 8, 2018 on The High Country News.
Upper Colorado Basin states are working on innovative conservation projects that will protect the economic benefits from the river, support agriculture, and encourage the long-term health of the Colorado River. Listen today to We Are Rivers Episode 11: How Water Management and Flexibility Can Save the Colorado River.
For several years, an array of Colorado River Upper Basin stakeholders, including state agencies, farmers and ranchers, conservationists and municipal water managers have been partnering on innovative water conservation pilot projects to help ensure healthy flows and habitat in the river, maintain levels in Lake Powell and protect our vibrant agricultural communities.
Additional support is needed, though, to turn those pilot projects into a sustained, effective demand management and system conservation program that includes a water bank in Lake Powell to store the conserved water. Expanded funding for these projects will help implement market-based solutions on a larger scale to maintain healthy flows in the Colorado River and sustain the jobs, wildlie and communities that depend on it. Additionally, states will need to enact water policies and procedures that allow water conserved through these projects to be left in the river and allowed to reach Lake Powell.
In Episode 11 of We Are Rivers, we explore the ideas and efforts behind expanded demand management and increased conservation across the Upper Basin with Scott Yates of Trout Unlimited and Taylor Hawes of The Nature Conservancy, both of whom are deeply integrated into the nuance and detail of developing a system that works for everyone who relies on the Colorado River, as well as the long-term, sustainable health of the Colorado River itself.
Sanpete County Commissioner Scott Bartholomew, also a farmer, noted the harsh truth: “All these storms brought was wind. And you can’t water with wind.”
Jensen says irrigation company records show it hasn’t been this dry in Sanpete County in 41 years.
“We are definitely in panic mode.”
He’s harvesting his first cut of hay, but will idle 75 percent of the rest of his field for the second round…
“It’s pretty serious. Unless you have some sort of irrigation, there is nothing growing at all.”
Sanpete County, Utah, however, is not alone.
Multiple counties across the state made an emergency disaster declaration because of the low water year and dry conditions. May was the hottest on record in the lower 48 states in 84 years, eclipsing a Dust Bowl-era record set in 1934, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“The future is very dismal,” said Norman Johnson, from the San Juan County Water Conservancy District. “There will be no carryover for next year unless we get snowpack. We had zero runoff from the Abajo Mountains.”
Hay farmers will get one cutting.
“Then they will run out of water,” he said.
Johnson said farmers usually get two cuttings, sometimes a third. But even this first crop will be somewhat stunted.
Across these most severely affected counties in Utah, the $332 million hay and alfalfa industry is taking a hit.
“Alfalfa is the No. 1 crop of Utah,” said Earl Creech, an agronomist with Utah State University’s Extension Service.
“We’re in love with it and we are really good at growing it,” Creech said. “We export hay all over the United States and the world.”
Creech said the drought’s impacts on the crop will be felt across the state.
“It will be a huge hit, not only to the farmers, but the rural communities they live in and the state as a whole. It is a big economic driver for Utah.”
The drought has farmers making tough choices.
Some farmers like Jensen aren’t planting corn for cattle and poultry feed — corn takes more water than a crop like oats — so the effects are hurting ranchers and other agricultural producers who depend on it.
Pastures are drying up as well.
“There’s no feed for the cattle out in their normal grazing areas,” Johnson said. “We are not getting any natural grasses growing.”
Allen Henrie, president of the West Panguitch Irrigation System, said almost everyone will start selling off cattle early before the prices get more depressed.
His system is blocking off the Sevier River — running it nearly dry in some locations — so water can get to the farmers. Along its route, it will recharge from groundwater.
“Sevier River is dismal, dismal. I have never seen it this dry on the Sevier River side,” Henrie said.
Sometimes, a low snowpack year finds some respite with a rainy spring that delays the need to irrigate.
This hasn’t been that year for southern and central Utah.
“There’s no good news anywhere, and we are the worst of the worst,” Johnson said.
It’s a different story for other parts of the state.
Most northern Utah reservoirs are close to full. Deer Creek is at 94 percent capacity, East Canyon sits at 98 percent and Jordanelle is at 97 percent. Those reservoirs may save the irrigation season, but water managers are anxiously hoping to hang onto enough storage going into the fall — in case next year is just as bad.
There will be little to no carryover in other areas, when you consider that Gunnison Reservoir on the San Pitch River is dry, Yuba is 21 percent and Piute is at 23 percent.
Some farms may be eligible for disaster assistance from the federal government via low-interest loans.
Johnson, however, said it is bitter comfort.
“No amount of declarations or government assistance is going to fix it,” he said. “It is dry.”
Water curtailments are also in effect and more are looming in Washington County, where the Virgin River Basin sits at 20 percent of average.
Some with junior water rights will have to forgo any water this season.
“Honestly, in terms of snowpack and runoff, I think it is probably the worst I’ve seen in my career,” said Ron Thompson, who has been with the Washington County Water Conservancy District for 35 years and is now its general manager.
Creech said funding from the Utah Legislature is kick-starting new research from USU looking at alternative crops and ways to get water to crops more efficiently.
“But in a year when there is no water in the system, it doesn’t matter how efficient it is, there is nothing there,” he said.
Creech grows hay in Cache Valley and as a farmer understands the constant challenges.
“It’s heartbreaking. There is really nothing you can do about it. It’s the weather,” he said. “You just sit there and watch your crops burn up.”
In June 2017, the Cucharas River in Huerfano County was overflowing its banks, resulting in localized flooding and the issuance of evacuation orders for some residents.
This year, large portions of the riverbed are exposed and there’s only a trickle of water inching its way along.
An extremely dry winter left no snowpack on the peaks of Southern Colorado, and there’s been very little rain so far this spring.
“It’s devastating,” said Doug Brgoch, District 16 water commissioner with the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the agency that administers water rights and interstate compact agreements.
“We had no — absolutely no — spring runoff. If you look at our hydrological graphs, it’s just flat. There wasn’t even a bump in it for a day.
“We’re in extremely dire conditions. We’re actually approaching the drought conditions of 2002, which was statewide, and 2007, which was confined to this area. For example, on (June 1) of 2002, we had about 3 feet of water in the (Cucharas) river, and this year we have 4. So that’s really how close we are to 2002.
“Actually we’ve had less precipitation this winter than we did in the winter of 2002. But because of that huge amount of water we had over last year from the flooding and the extensive moisture, we had a much higher ground-moisture content going into this spring.
“But that only lasts so long, and I tell everybody it’s kind of like picking up a sponge by a corner. You know, all the water will drain out the bottom corner and then it’ll all be gone, and pretty soon the sponge starts to crinkle and dry up.”
[…]
The communities of La Veta and Walsenburg rely on the Cucharas River for their water.
Brgoch, who also serves as the mayor of La Veta, estimates there is enough water in storage to supply the town for 280 to 300 days, if it’s used wisely. The town’s board of trustees passed a resolution last week limiting the hours and days its residents can water their lawns and gardens.
“And I would suspect Walsenburg would be in a similar situation,” he said. “They use quite a bit more water than La Veta, but they have substantially more storage. So I would say they probably have a year’s supply, also, and maybe even a little more.”
Drought and ranching
Drought conditions exist across Southern Colorado, border to border. This year’s snowpack was the third lowest on record, with only 2002 and 1981 being drier, reports the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.
As of May 30, statewide snowpack was 29 percent of average: 78 percent of the state is in some level of drought classification, with 33 percent in extreme drought and almost 8 percent — in the southwestern corner of the state and the Sangre de Cristo range, which traverses Chaffee, Fremont, Custer, Saguache and Huerfano counties — in the worst classification of exceptional drought.
Much of the land affected by the drought is agricultural.
In Colorado, rights to water do not go with the land: they’re a separate commodity. Water distribution is based on the appropriation doctrine, which essentially means that the oldest — or most senior — water rights have priority over less-senior right holders. In good years, when rivers and streams are full, the doctrine basically dictates who gets their water when. In dry years, it could mean that lower-priority right holders may not get any water at all.
Don Andreatta, whose family has been farming and ranching in Southern Colorado for generations, usually produces 250 to 300 tons of hay a year on his operation near La Veta, which he uses to feed his cattle.
Despite possessing very senior water rights, Andreatta won’t be growing any hay this year. There’s so little water moving in the irrigation ditches that it won’t even reach his ranch.
“So even those most senior rights, the cream of the crop, there’s not even enough water in the stream now to be used effectively by them,” said Brgoch.
Andreatta is luckier than some, maybe most, other ranchers. He has natural springs on his property, so he won’t have to sell cattle, although the size of the herd isn’t quite what it was before the 2002 drought. But he will have to buy all of his hay this year.
“In this country, to winter a cow in this country, it’s going to take two ton per cow,” he said.
The Edmundson family has been ranching in Southern Colorado for close to 150 years.
Lewis “Beaver” Edmundson, his wife, two sons and their families run cattle on three ranches — two in Huerfano County and the other in Crowley County — that encompass about 96,000 acres. They don’t farm any of their land; instead, they rely on the natural grass and supplements to feed the herd.
“We’ve had less than 20 percent normal precipitation since September, and our grass never greened up this spring,” said Edmundson.
The lack of water and natural forage has forced the Edmundsons to sell some of their cattle.
“We had about 1,400 cows three weeks ago,” Edmundson said. “We sold 200.”
And it’s possible they’ll have to sell more.
“We can go a little longer but not much longer,” Edmundson said.
They’ve also sent another 200 head to Wyoming, where they’ve leased grazing land, and another 450 are headed to the Castle Rock area, where conditions are better.
John Campbell is the general manager of Winter Livestock in La Junta. He saw firsthand the devastation the drought of 2002 brought to the industry.
Asked whether he anticipates seeing the same number of cattle move through the auction house this year as he did in 2002, Campbell said, “Everybody was in a lot better posture grass-wise prior to this drought versus in ’02. … However, the places that are dry, they’re every bit as dry as they were in ’02.
“(The price) of feed has gotten extremely high,” continued Campbell. “It’s in very short supply. Hay has probably come close to doubling in price versus where it was a year ago.
“That (2002) drought actually lasted about 12 years,” continued Campbell. “We were, just in the last three years, starting to get ranchers in a position where they were trying to build back numbers. That’s how devastating the 2002 drought was. I question whether we have the number of cattle available now that we did in 2002.”
A healthy amount of precipitation in 2017 resulted in good snowpack and runoff levels heading into this spring. All but the basins in Southwestern Colorado experienced above-average reservoir storage, meaning irrigators on the Front Range and Eastern plains of the state who have storage rights received their full allotment of water.
The irrigation account at Trinidad Lake — which receives its water from the Purgatoire River — will be declared “empty” around June 15, said Brgoch, the water commissioner, and within a few days, farmers and ranchers with shares in that account won’t receive anymore water.
“Same with Pueblo reservoir,” Brgoch said. “It was full, and (the irrigation account holders) are going to be out of water here somewhere around the first of July or something like that.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated 18 counties in Colorado — including Huerfano, Chaffee and Alamosa counties — as natural disasters, opening the door for agricultural producers in those areas to receive financial assistance.
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Gary Harmon):
With most of that snow now gone from the state’s high elevations, reservoirs are being increasingly tapped by irrigators due to low streamflow levels, especially in southwestern Colorado. That has triggered sizable drops in storage levels in some areas.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service says that statewide, Colorado hasn’t experienced as poor a snowpack year since 2012. But in southwest Colorado, the year was only slightly better than 2002, the worst winter on record based on Colorado automated SNOTEL measurement site data.
While generous May snowfall has helped rescue some past Colorado snowpack seasons, precipitation this May was just 55 percent of normal statewide, 54 percent of normal in the upper Colorado River Basin in Colorado, and only 34 percent of normal in the Gunnison River Basin.
The service said in a news release Friday that in a normal year, on June 1, 21 of the 115 SNOTEL sites in the state have at least an inch of snow water equivalent.
This year just 10 sites had any measurable snow.
“While these conditions are more favorable for hiking Colorado’s mountains, snowpack and precipitation shortages in May further depleted Colorado’s summer water supply outlook,” Brian Domonkos, Colorado snow survey supervisor for the NRCS, said in the release.
Statewide snowpack was at just 24 percent of average at the start of June, and as warm and dry conditions have continued it had fallen to just 12 percent by Friday.
“Even sites that reached close to normal snowpack peaks this year have melted out earlier than normal, some more than two weeks early,” the NRCS said in a separate monthly water supply outlook for Colorado.
Domonkos said that in dry years in particular, “When streamflows peak early, less water is available later in the summer when it is needed most.”
Measurement sites in far-southwestern Colorado are virtually free of snow, and the Arkansas River Basin on Friday had the largest remaining snowpack level, at 29 percent of average.
A key measure of snowpack each year is the peak accumulation level, which typically is reached in April.
Northern Colorado did fairly well this year, with the North Platte River Basin having a peak that was slightly above normal, and the South Platte, Colorado, and Yampa-White River basins peaking at 91, 88 and 87 percent of normal respectively. But remaining river basins all peaked with less than 60 percent of normal accumulations.
May was the second-driest month of the current water year, which started in October. December’s precipitation was just half of normal.
“While reservoir storage was above average in all major Colorado basins through most of the water year, we are starting to see the effects of the minimal snowpack in southern Colorado with low natural streamflows and resulting declines in reservoir storage,” the servicesaid in its water supply outlook.
It said water restrictions are already in place in many parts of the state.
Statewide reservoir storage remained at 106 percent of average as of June 1. But it had fallen to just three-quarters of average in far-southwestern Colorado, 90 percent of average in the Upper Rio Grande River Basin, and 92 percent of average in the Gunnison basin. Those areas all had been above average a few months earlier.
The service said that in the Gunnison basin, current streamflow forecasts range from 48 percent of average for the Slate River near Crested Butte to just 10 percent for the inflow to Paonia Reservoir.
In Greeley, developers have historically been required to bring water to the table for any proposed development.
Often, that water is associated with whatever piece of land the developer bought, so it’s an easy transfer.
But when the land has already been dried up, developers are forced to hit the open market, competing with other developers to buy water at increasingly higher prices.
“The way it is now, it’s kind of driving water prices up,” said Martin Lind, a major Front Range developer. “You’ve got 50 developers looking for small (portions) of water here and there.”
In Greeley, there are fewer pieces of land with water rights still attached than ever before, and if Greeley wants to continue to grow — and city leaders say it must — officials say they’ve got to do something.
Greeley’s solution, in the works since at least 2003, exchanges buckets of water for buckets of cash, as city leaders contemplate a transition to a system that allows developers to pay cash-in-lieu of water, a system officials say would be less burdensome on developers.
That plan, based both on a dwindling supply of water and upon Greeley’s ability to potentially strike better deals, likely wouldn’t be approved until August.
For Harold Evans, chairman of the Greeley Water and Sewer Board and a man who has experience in Colorado real estate, the plan would be good for everyone.
“It gives (developers more options),” Evans said. “I think it will be a positive for the development community.”
SMART WATER
Greeley’s water planning goes out to 2065, and the city has been engaged in an aggressive, multi-phase water buying plan during the past several years.
The city owns most of the water in its projected growth area — the areas not yet within city limits but expected to be one day, areas like the ones between Weld County roads 17 and 13, north of U.S. 34.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why there are fewer water resources available for developers.
Take Journey Homes, which is building a 400-home development at the southwest corner of 83rd Avenue and 10th Street in west Greeley.
Journey Homes Principal Larry Buckendorf said water comes first in almost everything Journey does.
“For Journey, it’s water,” Buckendorf said. “That is the first consideration that we look into — what are the municipalities’ raw water requirements and what kind of water is attached to the land? It’s item No. 1.”
Journey followed probably the simplest process available. It bought the land and the water that came with the land and deeded it to the city.
But what happens when there’s no water attached to the land? That’s literally a growing problem as agriculture users sell their water rights to growing municipalities across the Front Range.
The answer, for Greeley, is to let developers pay cash for water they don’t have. Buckendorf said it’s always good to have more options, and he said he has always enjoyed working with Greeley.
Today, Greeley allows developers to pay cash-in-lieu of water for just 8 acre-feet of water.
To give some perspective, Journey Homes’ development sits on 166 acres. Greeley requires 3 acre-feet of water for every acre of land. That means the city required 498 acre-feet of water from Journey, and Journey could bring cash to the table for just 8 of those.
Switching fully to cash-in-lieu wouldn’t necessarily reduce developers’ costs, as Greeley will factor in not just the cost of water but the relative costs of storage expansion projects and system upkeep. But it would reduce the headache of buying water on the open market.
“We see that we need to start to do a transition to support development,” Water and Sewer Director Burt Knight said. “If I don’t do a transition, and you don’t have water tied to the property, I’m forcing you into the market to buy C-BT (Colorado-Big Thompson). That’s a very difficult market, and it’s expensive.”
A nice, round, roughly accurate number is $30,000 per acre-foot. If Journey paid cash, it would be out $14.9 million just in water — before selling a single home.
To recoup those costs, Journey would need to take out about $40,000 from each of the 400 homes it’s building in west Greeley. That helps explain why housing affordability is so difficult to attain, officials say.
“Before you’ve moved any dirt, before you’ve bought the land, before you’ve done anything, you have to calculate about $100,000 per each acre just for the water,” Greeley Community Development Director Brad Mueller said.
It’s possible more housing stock would help drive prices lower, and Greeley does have room to grow. Today, Mueller said the city has more jobs than houses, and that’s an imbalance — although not the worst version of such an imbalance — city officials hope to fix at least in part by switching to the cash-in-lieu system.
DIFFERENT STROKES
Brian Werner is the spokesman for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which manages a number of projects, including the Colorado-Big Thompson project.
That project diverts water across the continental divide to the Front Range. Talk to anyone who knows water and they’ll say it’s the best water. Why? Well, first, it comes from high in the Rocky Mountains, fed by snowmelt.
Second, unlike almost any other water source in Colorado, it can be used for anything in the South Platte River Basin, all the way to Julesberg and Nebraska, without a decade-long water court battle to change its use. To clarify, if a city buys water that has historically been used to water crops, it must go to court and get approval to use the water for residential development.
Because there are no such requirements for CBT water, though, it’s costly. Werner said an auction earlier this year featured $30,000-per-unit prices.
In 1957, the first year the CBT project was in operation, units sold for $1.50 apiece, Werner said. If CBT water shares simply followed inflation, they would cost $13.47 per share today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.
And back then, 85 percent of the units were owned by agriculture producers. Today, that’s 30 percent.
Werner said that won’t get much lower, as there are a few large farming operations that might not ever sell.
All of that, combined with developers needing the water to help Front Range cities grow, leads to price increases.
It’s another reason Greeley is looking to switch to a cash-based system.
But the same problem leads to different solutions.
Many smaller water districts and municipalities are actually taking an opposite approach to the problem, forcing developers to bring water to the table so those water districts don’t have to deal with the open market.
Werner said there’s no way to say either system represents a smarter approach to water policy, as a variety of factors affect any given water district. And he certainly wouldn’t criticize Greeley, a city he uses as an example of proper water planning.
“They’ve done one of the best jobs in northern Colorado of building a water portfolio,” Werner said. “They’ve been doing it for 150 years, so they’ve got a better starting position than some of these newer communities.”
GROWING PROBLEM
Knight said without the impending change to the way Greeley manages water, it would be difficult if not impossible for new development to move forward.
It begs a question, though: Is there pressure to grow at the expense of smart water policy?
Even if Knight and Mueller said they’ve never felt that pressure, there’s enough at stake that Greeley regularly studies its neighbor municipalities when it comes to water and development policy.
Every five years, the city looks at prices and trends and compares itself with others. The most recent study, completed in July 2015 by BBC Research and Consulting, cost $41,876.27, and the study looked at the 21 fastest-growing municipalities across the Front Range.
That study showed Greeley’s costs, including the amount of water required to be deeded to the city, impact fees and tap fees, were above average among those municipalities, and called the high cost of water significant for developers and new homebuyers.
The prices have only gone up since July 2015, but even then, Greeley’s costs were $36,271 per home — $8,000 higher than average. With CBT shares going for $5,000 more today than before, the costs are closer to $40,000 per home today.
Some of the other municipalities were similar, including Johnstown, which was higher in 2015 at $35,000 per home, and Windsor ($28,500 per home).
Others were far lower, including $11,375 in Evans and $10,000 for the Central Weld Water District, which covers a vast swath of rural Weld County from Evans and Kersey down to Firestone. Longmont and Lafayette were below $10,000.
“There are some communities that we kind of shake our head,” Knight said, refusing to name names. “It looks either low or high. The ones that are low make us wonder, ‘Are they making themselves vulnerable in the future?’ ”
So how does Greeley compete for new development with costs like that?
Buckendorf said the costs tend to shake out in the end.
“Land sellers are very astute,” Buckendorf said. “They know if the raw water requirement is less, they’ll ask for more for their land.”
Knight said Greeley sets its rates in such a way as to ensure the city recoups the necessary costs, and typically that leaves Greeley somewhere in the middle of the city’s Front Range neighbors.
“It’s important for Greeley residents to appreciate that we have a current water board and history of water board members who have been very serious stewards of the water for the community,” Mueller said.
Photo credit Upper Yampa River Water Conservancy District.
Here’s the release from Colorado Parks and Wildlife (Mike Porras):
Due to critically low water flow caused by dry conditions and minimal snowpack levels, Colorado Parks and Wildlife will close a 0.6-mile stretch of the Yampa River between the dam at Stagecoach State Park down to the lowermost park boundary.
The closure begins June 14 and will continue until further notice.
“Should the flow rate increase substantially for a continuous period of time, CPW will re-evaluate the emergency fishing closure,” said Senior Aquatic Biologist Lori Martin. “But for now, we need to take this course of action because of the current conditions at this popular fishery.”
When water flows are minimal, fish become concentrated in residual pool habitat and become stressed due to increased competition for food resources. The fish become much easier targets for anglers, an added stressor that can result in increased hooking mortality.
“We are trying to be as proactive as possible to protect the outstanding catch and release trout fishery we have downstream of Stagecoach Reservoir,” said Area Aquatic Biologist Bill Atkinson. “This stretch of the river receives a tremendous amount of fishing pressure, especially in the spring when other resources might not be as accessible. This emergency closure is an effort to protect the resource by giving the fish a bit of a reprieve when they are stressed like they are right now.”
CPW advises anglers to find alternative areas to fish until the order is rescinded. Many other local areas are now fishable, with tributaries contributing water to maintain various fisheries. Several area lakes are also open and fishing well.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife asks for cooperation from anglers; however, the closure will be enforced by law with citations issued for anyone violating the order.
Wildlife officials warn when a fish population is significantly affected by low flows or other unfavorable environmental conditions, it could take several years for it to fully recover if not protected.
Like many rivers and streams in western Colorado, the Yampa River offers world-class fishing and attracts thousands of anglers each year, providing a source of income to local businesses that depend on outdoor recreation.
“We ask for the public’s patience and cooperation,” said Atkinson. “It is very important that we do what we can to protect this unique fishery, not only for anglers, but for the communities that depend on the tourism revenue this area provides for local businesses.”
For more information, contact Stagecoach State Park at 970-736-2436, or CPW’s Steamboat Springs office at 970-870-2197.
Trends in TWS (in centimetres per year) obtained on the basis of GRACE observations from April 2002 to March 2016. The cause of the trend in each outlined study region is briefly explained and colour-coded by category. The trend map was smoothed with a 150-km-radius Gaussian filter for the purpose of visualization; however, all calculations were performed at the native 3° resolution of the data product. Graphic credit: Jay Famiglietti, et al.
Click here to read the report. Here’s the abstract:
Freshwater availability is changing worldwide. Here we quantify 34 trends in terrestrial water storage observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites during 2002–2016 and categorize their drivers as natural interannual variability, unsustainable groundwater consumption, climate change or combinations thereof. Several of these trends had been lacking thorough investigation and attribution, including massive changes in northwestern China and the Okavango Delta. Others are consistent with climate model predictions. This observation-based assessment of how the world’s water landscape is responding to human impacts and climate variations provides a blueprint for evaluating and predicting emerging threats to water and food security.
Three years ago, Pope Francis issued a sweeping letter that highlighted the global crisis posed by climate change and called for swift action to save the environment and the planet.
On Saturday, the pope gathered money managers and titans of the world’s biggest oil companies during a closed-door conference at the Vatican and asked them if they had gotten the message.
“There is no time to lose,” Francis told them on Saturday.
Pressure has been building on oil and gas companies to transition to less polluting forms of energy, with the threat of fossil-fuel divestment sometimes used as a stick.
The pope said oil and gas companies had made commendable progress and were “developing more careful approaches to the assessment of climate risk and adjusting their business practices accordingly.” But those actions were not enough.
“Will we turn the corner in time? No one can answer that with certainty,” the pope said. “But with each month that passes, the challenge of energy transition becomes more pressing.”
He called on the participants “to be the core of a group of leaders who envision the global energy transition in a way that will take into account all the peoples of the earth, as well as future generations and all species and ecosystems.”
In an era when the White House is viewed by many scientists as hostile to the very idea of climate change, with President Trump announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Francis is seen as an influential voice to nudge oil executives to take action on the issue.
“We know that the challenges facing us are interconnected,” he said, according to Reuters. “If we are to eliminate poverty and hunger … the more than one billion people without electricity today need to gain access to it.”
“But that energy should also be clean, by a reduction in the systematic use of fossil fuels,” he added. “Our desire to ensure energy for all must not lead to the undesired effect of a spiral of extreme climate changes due to a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, harsher environments and increased levels of poverty.”
According to a report by FTSE Russell, a key provider of stock market indices and associated data , the green economy is now worth as much as the fossil fuel sector and offers more significant and safe investment opportunities, pointing towards even more significant growth in the future.
The green economy is defined as an economy that aims at reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, and that aims for sustainable development without degrading the environment.
The green economy is also characterized by being efficient, clean, circular, collaborative and low carbon. As such, it is central to achieving the key objective of the Paris Agreement on climate action.
Presently, the green economy is worth as much as the fossil fuel sector with 6% of the global stock market, roughly $4 trillion USD, coming from the clean energy, energy efficiency, water, waste and pollution services.
If the sustainable economy maintains its current course, it could represent as much as 10% of the global market value by 2030, assuming around $90 USD trillion in green investment have been made by then.
Green companies generate higher returns than the broader stock market
FTSE Russel found that, over the last five years, green companies generated higher returns than the broader stock market. The report finds large investment opportunity, backed by global efforts to combat climate change and broader environmental challenges.
“Climate change is the death of progress and prosperity. Doing nothing about it is simply a bad investment in the future.”, said UN Climate Chief Patricia Espinosa in a message to the World Manufacturing Convention in China earlier this year. “The shape of the new economy is clear: it’s clean, green and prosperous, and I encourage all of you to get on board,“ she added.
The FTSE Russel report finds the green economy has spread across companies of various size, nature, and geographical range in contrast to fossil fuels which has shrunk. Still, more work is required to keep the global economy on track to meet the Paris agreement goals.
The report analyzes a broad range of products and services from different sectors. Findings were based on the impact of these factors on climate change mitigation and adaptation, water, resource use, pollution, and agricultural efficiency.
In terms of diversification, large companies lead the way by representing roughly two thirds of the total green market value. Similarly, small and medium sized firms now represent a larger number of green companies.
The energy industry, a very diverse segment ranging from building insulation to cloud technology, makes up more than half of the green economy with food, agriculture, water and transport being other important sectors.
High-Tech, Renewables Have Major Role to Play in the Green Economy
Specifically, the buildup of cloud infrastructure technology is a focus for industry leaders such as Microsoft and Amazon. According to a recent Accenture report, companies can reduce carbon emissions by up to 90% by switching to cloud computing technology.
Alternative energy also plays a significant role in with rapidly growing and diversifying solar and more established technologies, such as large hydroelectric. Resources such as lithium for batteries, lightweight materials, organic foods or seeds developed to boost agricultural yields are also a key area of the green economy.
Moreover, the study found approximately 3,000 globally listed companies with exposure to the green economy. This number has risen by approximately 20% since 2009 and covers 30% of global, listed market value.
The largest companies in the green economy are a mix of both companies where the majority of their revenue is green, such as Tesla or Waste Management Inc, and large companies where a segment is green, such as Microsoft or Siemens.
The report allows investors to understand their interactions with the green economy while developing investment strategies by quantitatively measuring the world’s transition to sustainability.
The Global Climate Action Summit, which will take place from September 12-14 in California, is the next big opportunity for businesses to provide confidence to governments to ‘step up’ ambition to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, and we can expect a further strengthening of the green economy at that event, co-chaired by the Patricia Espinosa as the UN’s top climate change official.
Less precipitation doesn’t only mean less water, it also means less food, less vegetation and less places for animals to hide, making wildlife especially vulnerable when drought conditions persist.
The lack of vegetation can pose some serious problems for the animals that call the region home, including many of its bird species,
according to Brian Dreher, a senior wildlife biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
“Essentially, when it’s dry, what we tend to see is that a lot of plants don’t appear, and plants are important for bug life and communities,” Dreher said. “So that’s obviously a food source for a lot of birds. Also, there’s just the lack of vegetation. If you’re a bird that nests on the ground, you can become more vulnerable because of the lack of vegetation around.”
Fortunately, Dreher said, the area’s wildlife are extremely adaptable, and even sparse events of precipitation can make a major difference in helping species rebound.
“These are dynamic systems that can respond quickly to rain, and wildlife can certainly adapt to the environment as it changes,” he detailed…
“Decreases in water levels oftentimes … reduce habitat,” said Paul Foutz, a native aquatic species biologist for CPW. “It can condense whatever is occupying that water body into a smaller volume of water, which can be impactful to things like water quality.”
While lower water levels can impact all of the region’s aquatic life, it is perhaps most detrimental to the fish who dwell in smaller bodies of water, such as those that live in small streams on the eastern plains.
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
STATE OF THE WATER STATE
Drought Activation
On May 2, 2018, in response to persistent and prolonged drought in portions of Colorado, the Governor activated the Colorado Drought Mitigation and Response Plan for the agricultural sector for select counties. The Drought Task Force, a cabinet level group, will meet throughout the period of drought activation to ensure coordination among state agencies, the Governor’s Office, and federal partners. The Agricultural Impact Task force is also meeting throughout the period of activation and will assess and track the impacts to the agricultural sector, as well as work with federal partners to get aid and resources to people in the impacted areas. The goal of these groups is to improve communication among state and federal agencies, increase the speed with which aid gets to impacted communities, and to address concerns before they become crises. Learn more about the drought.
The Land Water Conservation Fund is set to expire, thanks to a partisan Congress.
Reckoning with History is an ongoing series that seeks to understand the legacies of the past and to put the West’s present moment in perspective.
In 2015, Congress allowed the Land and Water Conservation Fund to lapse. The LWCF functions like a trust fund, where Congress directs offshore oil and gas royalties into conservation projects; it remains very popular across the country and across the political aisle. Because of the public outcry when it expired, Congress extended the fund three more years, which means that it will die at the end of September — unless lawmakers vote to revive it. If the fund folds, it will be in part because of the partisan environment that has developed since its inception. But its collapse will close off a popular and successful avenue for federal and local collaboration.
The fund’s history stretches back to the 1950s, when pent-up consumer demand and a growing population pushed more Americans into the leisure-seeking middle classes. They flooded national parks, forests and refuges to recreate, and public-land agencies needed a plan to respond to the demand. The Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, authorized in 1958 by Congress, recommended a public fund to support recreation, in places ranging from city parks to wilderness. Congress obliged and passed the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act in 1964 “to assist in preserving, developing, and assuring accessibility” for outdoor recreation opportunities “for individual active participation … and to strengthen the health and vitality” of Americans and visitors from other countries. The LWCF furnished money to acquire new lands, such as inholdings within existing federal parks or wilderness areas, and to match state grants to bolster local public parks, including those in urban neighborhoods. Support for the bill was bipartisan; just a single representative in each house of Congress voted against it.
Initially, the funding came from user fees, sales of surplus federal property and a tax on motorboat fuel. By 1968, Congress had modified the funding formula to grab a share of oil and gas leasing receipts from drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, a clever way to soothe legislators’ feelings of guilt for allowing exploitation of natural resources by funding conservation. (Today, the LWCF is nearly fully funded by offshore drilling royalties.)
The Bonneville Shoreline Trail winds along the hills above Salt Lake City. It received support from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Michlaovic/Wikimedia Commons
The authorized annual limit of the fund has steadily increased, to $900 million, but Congress must specifically appropriate the money. Only twice in its half-century history has the Land and Water Conservation Fund been fully used. So while money flows into the account — some $36.2 billion since 1965 — Congress has only appropriated $16.8 billion. Even that deflated sum has been sufficient to acquire close to 7 million public acres. In its early years, the fund helped create new national parks and recreation areas. In 1968, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act authorized using up to $17 million from the LWCF to protect wild river corridors. More recently, the LWCF helped prevent development and acquire land to connect portions of long-distance paths, such as the Pacific Crest Trail and Continental Divide Trail, or more modest and local favorites like the Bonneville Shoreline Trail along the Wasatch Front. Virtually every Western county has received LWCF investments; 42,000 grants have been sent to states to partner in developing recreational opportunities.
Despite such successes, the fund has drawn the ire of lawmakers over the years, especially as the way it was distributed changed. The original law provided that 60 percent of the fund should be allocated for state projects and 40 percent for federal. Now, the law specifies that not less than 40 percent should go toward federal projects. In 1998, Congress amended the LWCF to allow for “other purposes” aside from land acquisition. In a 2000 Senate hearing about restoring full funding to the LWCF, Larry Craig, R-Idaho, put it clearly: “I don’t want the federal government owning one more acre in Idaho. I’m mainly concerned because federal lands become king’s lands.” Today, conservative and free-market environmental think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Property and Environment Research Center, similarly object to reauthorizing the fund and expanding federal holdings, drawing inspiration from the Sagebrush Rebellion’s opposition in the 1980s. Such opponents argue instead that private property and the free market offer the best path forward for improving conservation. Some critics also oppose the migration to “other purposes” and the shift toward greater benefits to federal compared with state and local projects, because they maintain that federal agencies do a poor job managing existing lands.
When Congress debated the law in the early 1960s, National Park Service Director Conrad Wirth urged senators to support it so that unborn generations could develop “their God-given right to understand, enjoy, and obtain inspiration and healthful benefits from the very land, water, and air from whence all have sprung.” No such rhetoric may be able to save the fund now, even if Wirth’s faith in parks and wildernesses still widely endures. For more than 50 years, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has helped create a full range of outdoor recreation and conservation opportunities, from favorite neighborhood parks to remote wild canyons and sometimes the trails that connect them, adding immeasurable wealth to the United States. Unfortunately, a conservative bloc in our partisan Congress seems unwilling to admit that.
Adam M. Sowards is an environmental historian, professor, and writer. He lives in Pullman, Washington.
This story was originally published at High Country News (http://hcn.org) on June 8, 2018 date
The Fountain Creek Watershed is located along the central front range of Colorado. It is a 927-square mile watershed that drains south into the Arkansas River at Pueblo. The watershed is bordered by the Palmer Divide to the north, Pikes Peak to the west, and a minor divide 20 miles east of Colorado Springs. Map via the Fountain Creek Watershed Flood Control and Greenway District.
Bennet’s amendment would provide as much as $9 million to reimburse water utilities in Security, Widefield and Fountain for what they laid out in 2016 after learning their drinking water contained unsafe levels of perfluorinated chemicals from toxic firefighting foam released by Peterson Air Force Base.
“This builds on years of our work with the Air Force to address … contamination and is long overdue for the local water authorities who worked to provide safe drinking water to Colorado residents,” Bennet said in an email. “We’ll continue to push for its inclusion in the defense bill.”
Security Water and Sanitation District would get up to $6 million to pay for a pipeline it installed to pump clean Pueblo Reservoir water to its more than 19,000 customers.
“That’s something we have been working for and hoping for,” said district General Manager Roy Heald.
Southern El Paso County water districts began piling up bills in May 2016 after tests of water from the aquifer revealed contamination levels up to 30 times more than the maximum recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Districts’ officials assumed the Air Force would pay to fight the contamination and were shocked when the military refused to pay the bill. The Pentagon concluded it couldn’t reimburse the districts without authorization from Congress.
That’s where Bennet’s amendment comes in. The brief measure piggybacks on a similar move to reimburse towns where water contamination came from National Guard bases and expands it to include active-duty posts including Peterson.
Bennet got support from Colorado Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, who signed on as a co-sponsor.
Heald said the senators have worked for months to figure out a fix for the utilities’ financial woes.
“They have both been here to talk to us directly about these issues,” he said.
But Heald isn’t counting the federal cash just yet. The provision for the money is a tiny part of the massive National Defense Authorization Act, a bill that sets spending across the military and includes hundreds of policy tweaks and changes.
With $716 billion at stake, lawmakers are expected to fight for weeks over every word the bill contains.
Bennet will need Senate approval, which seems likely with bipartisan support. But then he will have to fight with House lawmakers who signed off on their version of the defense bill, which doesn’t contain the water money.
Meanwhile U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton is pushing the EPA to keep their lawsuit active to get relief for Pueblo County from Fountain Creek stormwater. Here’s a report from Pam Zubeck writing for The Colorado Springs Independent. From the article:
U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, has joined plaintiffs in the EPA’s lawsuit against the city of Colorado Springs in urging EPA chief Scott Pruitt to stay the course in the Clean Water Act litigation…
Here’s Tipton’s letter, the latest salvo in the dispute:
Dear Administrator Pruitt,
I am writing in regard to the lawsuit the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Colorado Public Department of Public Health an Environment (CDPHE) have filed against the City of Colorado Springs, Colorado. The lawsuit was filed on November 9, 2016, pursuant to Sections 309(b) and (d) of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and the Colorado Water Quality Control Act.
The City of Colorado Springs’ failure to control stormwater has led to decades of discharge that is not in compliance with state and federal clean water laws. The stormwater has led to sediment buildup in Fountain Creek and created significant problems for downstream communities, especially for Pueblo, Colorado, which is in my Congressional District.
Recent reports that the EPA may re-enter negotiations with the City of Colorado Springs raise questions about the future of the lawsuit and the ability of the EPA to provide long-term certainty to downstream communities that their upstream neighbors are complying with clean water laws.
The long history of stormwater negotiations between Colorado Springs and downstream water users has not yielded positive, lasting results for communities like Pueblo. While I have been encouraged by the commitment demonstrated by Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers to solve the long-standing problem, the lawsuit was filed by both the EPA and the CDPHE for a reason. It is imperative that the EPA work to permanently protect the water quality for communities downstream from Colorado Springs.
If you have any questions or wish to discuss this issue further, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers has said he’d rather spend money on stormwater projects than litigation, but the city’s failure to fix its drainage system over the years has instilled distrust in downstream communities.
Voters approved a stormwater fee last fall that kicks in on July 1 but litigants in the lawsuit question if the $17 million a year for 20 years will be adequate to reduce flooding and mitigate sediment in Fountain Creek.
Drought impacted corn. Water stress can lead to insufficient water supply for cities, agriculture, and vegetation. Dry vegetation may facilitate the propagation and increase the risk of wildfires.
Brad Udall likes to tell folks that, “Climate change is water change,” and he is right.
Please consider voting for the environment. You owe it to those that have a good chance of being alive in 2050. With the CO2 in the environment already the atmosphere will continue to warm for generations. Science has known about the greenhouse gas effect over a 100 years.
Here’s a look at water sustainability from Rebecca Lorenzen writing for NewSecurityBeat:
Food and Floods: Challenges
“Agriculture currently uses about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater resources, with only about 10 percent going to cities and residents, and 20 percent going to industry,” said Kate Tully, Assistant Professor of Agroecology at the University of Maryland. Water is “embedded in the foods that we eat,” she said; the most “water hungry” foods—like beef and pork—represent much more water use than poultry and legumes.
Through agricultural products, virtual water moves around the world. “The globalization of trade has decoupled the environmental effects that are a result of our agricultural production from the places that are consuming those products,” said Tully. “We now are relying very heavily on a few water-rich regions to provide most of our food.”
But environmental changes, including climate change, may threaten this reliance. For example, at the current rate of sea-level rise, a good portion of habitable and agricultural land space in Bangladesh will be underwater. In Africa and Asia, eight major crops may be lost by 2050, warned Tully.
Droughts and floods in the United States also threaten trade. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages navigable rivers, channels, and dams, can recover from floods relatively quickly, said Kathleen White, the lead of the Corps’ Climate Preparedness and Resilience Community of Practice. But droughts can present significant challenges: If “you can’t get any barges down the river, then there’s a real problem.” Improving the United States’ hydroclimatic forecasts will help improve dam management, she said.
Here’s the release from the Alliance Center via PR Newswire:
On Thursday, June 14 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., Governor John Hickenlooper and other state officials will speak at The Alliance Center (TAC), 1536 Wynkoop Street, Denver, to discuss the 2018 version of the Colorado Climate Plan. The governor will address how climate actions across the state have and will continue to create economic opportunities, and how clean energy jobs continue to build our state’s economy. Following the governor’s remarks, a panel of the governor’s staff will talk about strategies and actions to address a broad range of sectors including water, energy, transportation, and public health.
In 2017, Colorado joined the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of states pledging to uphold the climate goals of the Paris Agreement, and by executive order, Gov. Hickenlooper created a specific, measurable goal for carbon reduction. The state objective is to cut greenhouse gases by 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, and to cut carbon from the electricity sector by 25 percent compared to 2012 by 2025 and 35 percent by 2030.
The Colorado Climate Plan, a statewide set of policy recommendations and actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to increase Colorado’s level of preparedness, was updated to set clear and specific emission reduction goals for the state. This update follows Gov. Hickenlooper’s executive order from July 2017, Supporting Colorado’s Clean Energy Transition and Colorado Electric Vehicle (EV) Plan, which commits the state to additional climate action.
This event is sold out, but it will be live streamed here. Spanish translation will be available for in-person attendees. The program will begin at 6:00 p.m.
Here’s the release from the NRCS (Brian Domonkos):
Since the first of May, mountain weather conditions in Colorado have been dominated by a drier weather pattern with snowpack melting earlier than normal. Statewide snowpack on the first of June was 24 percent of normal. “While these conditions are more favorable for hiking Colorado’s mountains, snowpack and precipitation shortages in May further depleted Colorado’s summer water supply outlook,” says Brian Domonkos, Colorado Snow Survey Supervisor, Hydrologist with the NRCS. In a normal year, on the first of June there are 21 of a total 115 SNOw TELemetry network sites in the mountains of Colorado that show an inch or more of snow water equivalent. However, this year on the first of June only ten sites had any measurable snow at all. With snowpack on its way out, other contributors serve as indicators for summer water supply predictions such as precipitation, reservoirs, and current streamflows.
At 55 percent of average, May 2018 precipitation was the second driest month of this water year behind December which was 50 percent of normal. Unlike April, when precipitation was near 95 percent of normal in the northern half of Colorado, May precipitation failed to top 75 percent of normal in any of the major basins across the state. Only three of the major watersheds in Colorado received at least half of their average monthly precipitation; the South Platte, Colorado, and combined Southwestern basins. Fortunately, statewide year-to-date precipitation showed only a small decrease from 72 percent of average on the first of May, to now 70 percent of normal on the first of June.
Statewide reservoirs remain slightly above normal, at 106 percent of average, dropping six percent since May 1. Most of the declines occurred in the southern basins including the Gunnison and combined southwest basins where storage fell 14 and 16 percent, respectively, and most notably in the Rio Grande basin, which fell 25 percent. These decreases in reservoir storage are due to calls for irrigation to supplement receding runoff.
Many streams which typically peak in June, peaked in May this year, two to three weeks early. In dry years especially, Domonkos adds, “When streamflows peak early, less water is available later in the summer when it is needed most.” With peak streamflow in the past, streamflows are forecasted near record lows at some stream gauges in the Gunnison, through the southwest corner of the state to the Rio Grande. Shifting the focus northward, basin-wide reservoir storage remains above normal, above 110 percent. Streamflow forecasts however are generally lower, between 50 and 85 percent of normal.
A proposal to increase winter flows on the lower Fryingpan River could have big benefits for downstream trout populations.
The Colorado River District is proposing to the Colorado Water Conservation Board a one-year, renewable lease of some of the water it owns in Ruedi Reservoir to boost winter flows in the Fryingpan. CWCB staff presented the proposal to the board at its May meeting in Salida.
Currently, the decreed instream flow rate between Nov. 1 and April 30 in the Fryingpan below Ruedi is a minimum of 39 cubic feet per second. Often, winter flows are higher than this, but in dry years they can hover around the minimum amount.
But 39 cfs is not enough to maintain a healthy food source for the Gold Medal fishery’s population of trout. The proposal seeks to boost the minimum flow to 70 cfs.
The proposal is a collaboration between the Colorado River District and the Roaring Fork Conservancy.
Heather Tattersall Lewin, watershed action director with the conservancy, explained that low streamflows, combined with frigid temperatures, can lead to the formation of anchor ice on the bottom of the river.
This ice has a negative effect on the population of aquatic insects, known as macroinvertebrates, which are food for the brown, rainbow, and cutthroat trout that call this 14-mile stretch of river home.
“When the water and air temperatures are both really cold, the anchor ice can scour the bottom of the river,” Tattersall Lewin said. “It can scrape the macroinvertebrates in that area and they can get moved downstream. The insect population is what we are concerned about because it’s the fish food.”
Extra water in the stream will prevent anchor ice from forming. The conservancy estimates that 56 days is the maximum amount of time the leased water would be needed during the winter.
“This is a great opportunity to manage water to the benefit of environmental and recreational needs,” Tattersall Lewin said.
Under the proposal, the CWCB would lease up to 3,500 acre-feet of Ruedi Reservoir water from the river district. It would cost $65.25 per acre-foot, plus a $400 application fee, which for the total 3,500 acre-feet would cost $228,775.
The river district owns a total of 11,413.5 acre-feet of water in Ruedi, with 7,500 acre-feet of that available for leasing. Of the total the river district owns, 5,412.5 acre-feet is to support flows for the endangered fish recovery program.
Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller said there are two reasons his organization decided to offer up their water for lease. The first is to improve the health of the river and its trout populations. The second is related to the business arm of the district.
“We are charged with maximizing our assets and our assets are pools of water in different reservoirs,” Mueller said. “In this instance, we are leasing water to the CWCB and they are paying our district’s enterprise fund to release that water. It’s a win-win from our perspective.”
The Fryingpan River is popular with anglers because of predictable hatches that lead to fish feeding frenzies and great conditions for dry fly fishing.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife supports the increased winter flows.
In a letter of support to the CWCB, CPW instream flow program coordinator Jay Skinner wrote, “recent history has taught us that more flow during the winter months improves fish habitat, increases spawning success and fry emergence for brown trout, promotes a more robust macroinvertebrate food base for fish and most importantly, addresses issues related to anchor ice formation and accumulation.”
The CWCB will consider the proposal for approval at its July meeting. If approved, the increase in flows could begin this winter.
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism is collaborating with The Aspen Times, the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, the Vail Daily and the Summit Daily on the coverage of rivers and water. The Times and the Post Independent published this story in their print editions on Thursday, June 7, 2018.
Fryingpan River downstream of Ruedi Reservoir. Photo credit Greg Hobbs
The Colorado River has already reached its peak flow for the season, and that’s lousy news when it comes to fire danger, water supply for farmers and residential users, recreational opportunities and the health of numerous fish species, among other things. And while Victor Lee, an engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation, isn’t ready to hit the panic button yet, he concedes that bad can still turn worse.
“If we end up with several dry years, the situation can change pretty quickly,” Lee says. “And even more problematic is the total water going into Lake Powell right now. It’s much less than average, and that could have very severe consequences for the upper-basin states of Wyoming, Utah and Colorado.”
Brenda Alcorn, senior hydrologist for the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center in Salt Lake City, notes that the low peaks “are indicative of the poor snowpack and poor runoff this year, and what we’ve got is pretty much what we’re going to get. We’ve reached the bottom line in terms of volume — and we’re not expecting a lot of water to flown down into Lake Powell this year.”
She adds that “this is one of the earliest peaks we’ve seen” for Colorado River flow. “Last year was a pretty good runoff year, but in general during the last fifteen years or so, we’ve definitely been on the dry side, with a few wet years mixed in. It does appear to be a trend, and that leads to earlier peaks and lower volumes.”
A commercial raft on the Colorado River, during 2017 bridge construction in Glenwood Springs. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Lee elaborates on Alcorn’s points.
“Two elements to focus on would be the earliness of the peak and the magnitude of the peak,” he points out. “We’re dealing with the low snowpack, but upstream, in the upper basin, we’re not extremely low. If we move further south in the state, though, the snowpack gets very low. In some places, it’s the lowest snowpack and forecasted runoff in the historical record, as far as the earliness of the peak. And that’s concerning for water management, because it’s an indication there may not be so much water later on in the year that we would normally have — flows that are adequate to meet agricultural demands or biology needs or even recreational needs.”
Potential shortages also exacerbate longtime conflicts within the state over water use, as Lee, who works directly on the Colorado-Big Thompson and Fryingpan-Arkansas projects, knows from personal experience…
Low flows also impact the Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program.
Colorado River Basin. Graphic credit: Water Education Colorado
“There are four species of fish that are native to the Colorado River that are considered endangered: the humpback chub, the bonytail chub, the Colorado pikeminnow and the razorback sucker,” Lee goes on. “And there’s a stretch of water between the Gunnison River confluence in Grand Junction that, if it didn’t have extra water during the September-October period, would be de-watered. That would affect the fish’s ability to move from the lower to the upper portion of the river, so we release water from the reservoirs at different times to make sure that doesn’t occur. But we also need to meet the needs for irrigation and agricultural users, as well as municipal and industrial water users. So there are a variety of concerns over that, in addition to concerns about biology and also water quality.”
The upper Colorado River basin “isn’t in as much pain as other areas of Colorado,” Lee acknowledges. “All of the reservoirs are expected to fill or get near to full, in part because we’ve had several previous years of quite a bit of water — and there’s a lot of water in the system right now. But in the southern part of the state, they don’t have much water at all. They’re definitely in pretty severe-to-extreme drought conditions at this point, which has very significant consequences for what water’s available for a variety of different uses.”
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
Summary
Frontal and thunderstorm activity provided moderate to heavy rain (at least 0.5-inch) over northern, eastern, and central portions of the CONUS this past week. A weakness in the mid-tropospheric subtropical ridge over the Gulf of Mexico and southeastern states contributed to the influx of subtropical moisture across this region. Over the weekend, a cold front moved into the mid-Atlantic area and stalled, providing a lifting mechanism for the inflowing moisture. This resulted in heavy rain (generally 2-6 inches, locally greater) across much of Virginia, Maryland, eastern West Virginia, and southern Pennsylvania. Temperatures were near to above average across practically the entire contiguous U.S., with the greatest departures (6-12 degrees F above average, locally greater) for a large portion of the southern Great Plains, the Mississippi Valley, the Dakotas, the Great Lakes region, and the Ohio Valley…
According to ACIS, measured precipitation during the past 7-days was less than 0.5-inch over much of the South. Weekly temperature departures generally ranged between 4-10 degrees F above average. Significant 30-day precipitation deficits and near-record warm temperatures prompted the expansion of D0 across portions of Texas. In fact, the entire Texas drought depiction experienced another major overhaul this week. Low stream flows have been an issue in the Texas Hill Country for several months already. The position of the impacts line was adjusted to approximately bifurcate the state into a western portion (now SL, with longer-term deficits appearing), and an eastern portion (still S). Across the deep South Texas counties of Willacy and northern Cameron, conditions were degraded this week from D1 to D2, based on stressed fields of cotton (despite ongoing irrigation), high KBDI levels (600-700), and a 120-day SPI blend. In Oklahoma, continuing degradation of conditions led to an expansion of both D0 and D1 in southeast parts of the state. A few tweaks were made to the depiction in western Oklahoma as well, based on recent rainfall. Hot, relatively dry conditions prompted a broad expansion of D0 across most of Louisiana, western Arkansas, and adjacent portions of western and southern Mississippi this week. Current NLDAS soil moisture anomalies for the root zone (top one-meter) indicate values ranging from 1-3 inches below normal. Shreveport, LA, reported its warmest May on record, 78.4 degrees F, which supplanted the old record of 77.8 degrees F set back in 1933. Two areas of D1 were introduced in northwestern and south-central Louisiana this week. Topsoil moisture (Very Short to Short) for a few states include: Louisiana (73% this week, 55% last week), Arkansas (34%, 21%), Mississippi (22%, 14%) and for the Contiguous U.S. as a whole (28%, no change from last week). For Rangeland/Pastures, the percentages rated Very Poor to Poor this week compared to last week include: Louisiana (30% this week, 17% last week), Arkansas (6%, 8%), Mississippi (11%, 11%)…
Heavy rain (2-6 inches, locally greater) fell over portions of North Dakota this week, with the highest amounts over the northwest part of the state. Much of the heaviest rain actually fell north of the Canadian border in extreme southeastern Saskatchewan. Slight alterations (both improvement and deterioration) were rendered to the depiction in western, north-central, and southeastern North Dakota, based in part on the 1-month EDDI, which takes into account evaporative demand. Both improvements and degradations were also made to the South Dakota depiction, which received much less rain this week than its northern counterpart. For example, Aberdeen reported only 0.52-inch of rain in May (2.59 inches below normal), making it the seventh driest on record. An area of severe drought (D2) was introduced to northeastern South Dakota, based on 60-day precipitation deficits, 30-day and 60-day SPI, recent warm temperatures, and increased water demand through evapotranspiration. A spectacular dust storm, attended by 50-80 mph winds, blew through this region (Hand and Faulk Counties) on June 1st. In southeastern Colorado, a one-category degradation was made to the depiction in Kiowa County. Decent soil moisture from the wet summer and fall of 2017 is now gone, due to the recent hot, dry weather. This, in turn, has taken its toll on crops. Although welcome rains fell across eastern Nebraska this week, it was decided not to make any changes to the state depiction until more information is at hand next week…
Minor adjustments were made this week to the D0 area along the eastern Montana state line. In northwestern Montana, it was eventually decided to postpone the introduction of D0 to the region. Although some drying has occurred, this area experiences healthy stream and river flows, due to continuing snow melt. In nearby northern Idaho, recent flooding precludes the introduction of any D0 at this time. This area will continue to be monitored for the possible inclusion of D0 in the next week or two. In western Oregon and western Washington, an extended dry pattern set in ahead of schedule, with rapidly declining stream flows (most are now within the lowest quartile of the historical distribution for the day of the year). There is a notable degradation in the SPI maps going from 60- to 30-days out. The more recent SPI values in this region range between -2.0 and -2.5. Accordingly, D0 was expanded across western portions of both Oregon and Washington this week. Finally, in southwestern New Mexico, water restrictions were initiated as storage in the Elephant Butte and Caballo reservoirs (along the Rio Grande in Sierra County) dropped below 400,000 acre-feet…
Looking Ahead
For the ensuing 5-day period (June 7-11, 2018), the northern and eastern CONUS are generally predicted to receive 0.5-1.5 inches of rain. Heavier amounts are forecast over portions of the western Corn Belt, the southern Great Lakes region, and the Florida peninsula. A relative maximum of 3-4 inches is possible in Iowa, likely due to nocturnal thunderstorm clusters (MCS) which are common at this time of year. Little to no precipitation is expected elsewhere during this period. For the subsequent 5-day period (June 12-16, 2018), CPC predicts elevated odds of above normal rainfall across the southern CONUS, with a weak tilt toward above running northward across the Mississippi Valley and eastern Great Plains region. Elevated odds of below normal rainfall are highlighted over the Northwest, the northern High Plains, and most of the Atlantic Coast states from Maine to Virginia.
…this week, a University of Colorado Denver public-health study funded by the National Institutes of Health will begin testing the blood of 200 residents, The Denver Post has learned.
No government agency has systematically investigated health impacts of the contamination. This area of southern El Paso County is among the most populated of more than 70 places where PFCs detected at levels up to hundreds of times higher than an EPA health advisory limit are spreading from military bases that used firefighting foam containing the chemicals.
Municipal firetrucks also carry the foam and PFCs are used in consumer products, including fast-food wrappers. They have emerged as one family in a widening array of synthetic chemicals detected in water that cannot be removed easily due to molecular structures…
Neither the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment nor the EPA has been monitoring PFC levels in the Fountain Creek watershed. Tests done more than a year ago showed contamination at levels far above the EPA health advisory limit.
CDPHE officials last week welcomed the EPA visit and said they’re pushing the Air Force to move faster into a planned 2019 “remedial investigation” phase that would include tracking the spread of PFCs in groundwater beyond the military base and airport.
The CU public health study will focus on people exposed to PFCs between 2012 and 2016, study leader John Adgate said. “We recruited more than 200 people from Security/Widefield/Fountain who will be coming to our temporary clinic for the blood draws.”
Air Force civil engineers last week provided their latest data to The Post from an “expanded site investigation” on Peterson Air Force Base and the adjacent Colorado Springs airport. They’ll drill 21 new wells to measure PFC contamination of groundwater.
The testing found PFCs at levels exceeding the EPA health limit contaminating 42 municipal water supply wells, which were shut down, with seven now back in use after the installation of treatment systems. (Fountain and Security stopped using wells for water supply, shifting to water diverted from the Arkansas River. Widefield bought and installed new water-cleaning systems to filter out contamination.)
Air Force officials said they have found 37 private wells with water containing elevated PFCs…
Meanwhile, Colorado Springs attorney Mike McDivitt, with colleagues in Denver and New York, has filed a second massive lawsuit in federal court, seeking funds from PFC manufacturers for medical monitoring. A federal judge is expected Aug. 2 to rule on whether an earlier lawsuit can proceed as a class action.
The headwaters of the Yampa River. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
From the Northwest Colorado Food Coalition via Steamboat Today:
his time of year embodies the pastoral landscapes the Yampa Valley is known for. The change of seasons brings the return of the familiar sights and sounds of geese, cranes and other migratory birds. People, too, flock from around the world to celebrate this rebirth, as our valley sheds its winter coat and begins to bloom.
While many in our community are watching the weather to see how long they can continue to ski, when bike trails will be dry and how high the river will be for the 38th annual Yampa River Festival, another group of valley residents is tuned into the weather for another reason.
Our agriculture community is tracking the same indicators that skiers, bikers, rafters and fisherman are watching: snowpack, water flows and historical averages. Area farmers and ranchers need this crucial data to determine how long they will be able to irrigate their fields.
Without the extensive use of irrigation on area ranches, our landscape would be very different. Irrigated land provides numerous benefits beyond agricultural yields: It provides habitat for migratory birds, feeds riparian zones along the Yampa and increases late-season flows.
Friends of the Yampa, or FOTY, has done a lot of growing during the past several years. FOTY received its nonprofit status in 2008 and has been hard at work ever since. Branching into roles beyond building recreational features, we now facilitate projects that address noxious weeds, late season flows and other issues specific to the Yampa River.
The Leafy Spurge Project, for example, aims to address a weed that is threatening agricultural and riparian lands throughout the West. Leafy spurge, for those who are not familiar, is an invasive weed that is becoming more prevalent each year. Through partnerships with public and private landowners, state and federal agencies and other advocacy groups, FOTY and its partners hope to address this growing threat.
FOTY continues to support exploring innovative options to provide late season flows through Steamboat Springs. Options such as Alternative Transfer Methods, headed by the Colorado Water Trust and the State Engineer’s Office, provide water-rights holders the ability to lease water to downstream users for up to three years in a 10-year period, while still retaining original rights.
Similarly, FOTY is excited about research into the creation of a water fund. Groups, including the Nature Conservancy, are exploring this concept, which could be used to finance and implement similar transfers to benefit the health of the river into the future.
It is through these collaborative efforts that FOTY hopes it can continue to be a helpful resource for water users throughout the basin. Agriculture, recreation, municipal and industrial users are in this together. Using strategic partnerships and innovative water use practices, we can insure a vibrant river community for generations to come.
Learn more about this and all our work at friendsoftheyampa.com. See you on the river.
Grand Valley Irrigation Canal. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Gary Harmon):
The Grand Valley Drainage District’s charge, which for most of its residents is $36 a year, “runs afoul of (the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights) and is unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt,” Mesa County District Judge Lance Timbreza wrote in a 43-page decision handed down a year after Timbreza presided over a trial on the case.
Mesa County and the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce sued to halt the charge, contending that it was an illegal tax.
While the ruling halts the district from continuing to collect the charge, it’s silent on how or whether the district is to return the $7.2 million already collected over the last three years.
None of the drainage district board members now serving were on the board that instituted the fee and two said they expected to discuss what steps to take next in the coming weeks.
Board Chairman Cody Davis, who joined the board two years ago as an opponent of the charge, preferring that voters approve of any revenue-increasing measure, said he was surprised by the ruling…
Mesa County Commissioner Scott McInnis said it’s now time to deal with stormwater drainage issues across the county and said the drainage district should return to the bargaining table to “pick up where they left off and work toward a unified valley authority. And frankly, they don’t have the leverage to say no.”
[…]
Previous board members had leaned away from an appeal in the event they lost the suit, but the subject has yet to come before the current board.
Timbreza’s decision makes no mention of whether the district should return money to its customers. The county and chamber had made no request in their arguments about the money already collected…
While residents were asked to pay $36 a year, many businesses paid much more than that, up to $10,000 a year, Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce President and Chief Executive Officer Diane Schwenke said…
The chamber and Grisier both noted that the need to deal with stormwater hasn’t gone away.
The drainage district charged businesses, churches, local governments and others with large-area parking lots and rooftops $3 per month for each 2,500 square feet of impervious surface, or surfaces that shed, rather than absorb water.
Residents were charged $3 per month or $36 a year.
Last month, the U.S. sizzled with record warmth. It also had drenching rains in the East, with lingering drought conditions in the Southwest and Great Plains.
Let’s see how May 2018 and spring fared in terms of the climate record:
Climate by the numbers
May 2018
The average May temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 65.4 degrees F, 5.2 degrees above average, making it the warmest May in the 124-year record, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. This surpassed the previous record of 64.7°F set in 1934, during the dust bowl era. There were more than 8,590 daily warm station records broken, or tied, in May.
The average precipitation for May was 2.97 inches (0.06 inch above average), which ranked near the middle of the record books. Two weather systems, including Subtropical Storm Alberto, helped bring record and near-record rain across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. Meanwhile, more than a quarter of the contiguous U.S. remained in drought.
Year to Date I Meteorological Spring (March – May)
The average U.S. temperature for the year to date (January through May) was 45 degrees F, 1.6 degrees above normal and the 21st warmest on record. The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during Meteorological Spring (March through May) was 52.4 degrees, 1.5 degrees above average and ranked as the 22nd warmest on record.
The average precipitation for the year to date was 12.66 inches, 0.27 inch above average. For the Meteorological Spring, the average precipitation was 7.91 inches, which ranked near average.
An annotated map of the U.S. showing other climate events that occurred in May 2018. For details, see the bulleted list below in our story. (NOAA/NCEI)
Other notable climate events
Subtropical Storm Alberto: Three days before the official start of hurricane season, Alberto made landfall along the panhandle of Florida, packing 65 mph winds and bringing torrential rain to parts of the South.
Soggy Conditions: Record rainfall triggered floods and mudslides in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions. Florida and Maryland saw record-wet conditions.
Temperature spike: Record warmth was observed in parts of the Northwest and stretching from the Southern Plains through the Midwest and into the Mid-Atlantic. On May 28, Minneapolis, Minn., hit 100 degrees F – the earliest on record it got that hot.
Cool, dry Puerto Rico: San Juan was cooler and drier than normal. It was the coolest May since 2011 and precipitation was 85 percent of normal.
Coastal high tide flooding increased last year: An update to NOAA’s annual State of high tide flooding and outlook found that the Southeastern U.S. is currently experiencing the fastest rate of increase in annual high tide flood days, with more than a 150 percent increase since 2000 predicted for the coming year (May 2018 – April 2019) at most locations.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists set up a creekside laboratory along Bear Creek Tuesday to catch and spawn an endangered trout species…
Each spring since the trout was located, CPW biologists have waded into Bear Creek to catch the greenbacks, spawn them, and send the fertilized eggs to the National Fish Hatchery in Leadville.
EPA officials announced last week that the agency has entered an agreement with a property owner who owns the Kittimac Tailings, a historic mine waste pile about six miles northeast of Silverton along County Road 2.
The EPA built a $1.5 million temporary water treatment plant north of Silverton in October, three months after the agency triggered the Gold King Mine blowout, which sent a torrent of mine waste down the Animas and San Juan rivers.
Since, the water-treatment plant has been treating and removing potentially toxic metals out of water that continues to discharge from the Gold King Mine. In April, the EPA said the mine was still leaking 450 gallons a minute.
The water treatment plant adds lime to the mine wastewater to raise the pH of the water so that dissolved metals become solid and can settle in settling ponds – a highly effective process.
The process, however, generates a lot of sludge. EPA has said an estimated 4,600 cubic yards of sludge is generated a year.
The agency had been storing this sludge waste product – which is considered non-hazardous – at the site of the water treatment plant in an area known as Gladstone, about six miles north of Silverton along County Road 110.
The EPA announced this spring, however, room was running out at Gladstone for the sludge…
Scott Fetchenheir, a San Juan County commissioner and former miner, said Wednesday local residents are pleased to learn the EPA found a better solution to the sludge waste issue.
“I think it’s a good idea,” he said. “But it’s almost like this big experiment.”
The EPA has said it will mix the Gold King Mine sludge with mine tailings located at Kittimac.
The EPA believes this will reduce high water content of the sludge, and will allow more efficient management, while at the same time immobilize heavy metals found in the tailings pile…
The EPA said it is conducting a bench-scale testing of the sludge and tailings mixture to ensure the maximum reduction of metals leaching from the tailings. The agency plans to conduct a pilot test of this transfer process for one week in mid-June.
The Kittimac tailings pile for years has been used illegally by dirt bikers and ATVers who have disregarded “no trespassing” signs to ride on the mine waste that looks like a pile of sand. Now that the EPA is using the site, access will be more guarded, Tookey said…
While the short-term problem of where to put the sludge is temporarily solved, Fetchenheir said there remains the larger, more complicated matter at hand: what to do for long-term treatment of the mines draining into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River considered the worst polluter in the headwaters.
While lime treatment plants are effective, they are also expensive to operate ($1 million a year) and have to be run in perpetuity. The EPA has yet to release its plan for long-term treatment options.
“It’s hugely open-ended,” Fetchenheir said. “The true hope is some new technology arrives that removes metals without generating a huge amount of sludge. But I haven’t seen anything like it.”
For now, the EPA said it will transfer the sludge via truck using the County Road 110 bypass. The agency said it hopes to reduce negative impacts, such as noise and dust suppression.
After the pilot test in June, the EPA will resume transferring the sludge to the Kittimac tailings after the tourist season, around early fall, for a duration of about five weeks.
From the Kansas News Service. (Ben Kuebrich) via the Hillsboro Free Press:
Great Canal of Kansas
Clayton Scott also uses the latest water technology on his farm in Big Bow. Yet he said that just using water carefully won’t be enough.
He thinks any pumping limits severe enough to preserve the aquifer would dramatically cut back the region’s harvest. That would push up local grain prices, and without cheap grain, livestock feed yards would close, and meatpacking plants would follow.
At its core, the western Kansas economy is built on irrigation.
A 2015 study calculated that losses in irrigation could cost some 240,000 Kansans their jobs and wipe out $18.3 billion of yearly economic activity, or about 10 percent of the state economy.
Scott and others in the region have their eyes on a more drastic solution to the water problem. Kansas could invest in a 360-mile series of canals and pumping stations to bring in water from the Missouri River.
He knows it sounds extreme, but Arizona has already built a similarly sized aqueduct. The Central Arizona Project diverts water from the Colorado River and there’s been extensive research into building a similar canal across Kansas.
“Arizona looked at their situation and decided, ‘We have no other choice,’ ” Scott said. “They estimate almost a trillion dollars of benefit to the economy of Arizona.”
Arizona’s aqueduct has always been controversial. The federally funded canal remains at the center of multi-state disputes of water usage.
Experts say that a generation later, the legal and regulatory hurdles of building a long-distance canal through Kansas only look more daunting.
Water from the Colorado River is channeled through Arizona, much the way some people think it should be diverted from the Missouri River across Kansas.
Pricey pipeline
Still, Kansas and surrounding states have been considering aqueducts for a long time. A 1982 study came up with a plan to bring water from the Missouri River to a reservoir near Utica, Kansas, but nothing ever came of it. At the time, though, losing the Ogallala seemed like a distant prospect.
In 2011, while western Kansas was in a drought and farmers struggled to pump enough water to keep their crops alive, the Missouri River was flooding. Scott says that sparked renewed interest in a canal.
“It’s a long-term solution,” Scott said. “We can harvest the high flows of water off of the eastern rivers and bring them out here into the western High Plains, offset the droughts … and bring things into more of a balance.”
In 2015, the Kansas Water Office and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers re-assessed that 1982 study. The agencies estimated that, depending on the capacity of the canal, it would now cost between $5 billion and $20 billion to build.
Because the water would have to be pumped uphill as it goes west, it could take more than $500 million a year in energy costs alone, for the largest-capacity canal. With interest costs from construction, the yearly tab could exceed $1.5 billion.
At the time, the head of the water office said, “this thing we studied is unlikely to happen.” The costs would simply run too steep.
A canal project would have other barriers. Although the Missouri river sometimes floods, it also experiences lows, and levels would have to be maintained to permit barge traffic. There would also be challenges displacing people in the path of the aqueduct. While a highway can be redirected to avoid a town, a canal’s path is more constrained by topography.
At the same time, environmental issues could come both from taking water from the Missouri and in the path of any aqueduct. Upstream and downstream states on the waterway already tangle over how to manage the water. An effort to siphon away water would further complicate the situation.
Scott knows the project would be massive, and massively controversial, but that’s why he’s talking about it now—before the Ogallala runs dry.
An uncertain future
At a conference in April, Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Jackie McClaskey said public support for an aqueduct is unlikely unless farmers show first that there’s no other way to water their crops.
“Until we can show people that we are utilizing every drop of water in the best way possible, no one outside of this region is going to invest in a water transfer project,” McClaskey said.
Clayton Scott says he isn’t looking for the rest of Kansas to bail out the farmers out west.
Scott imagines the canal would be a federal project, similar to Arizona’s aqueduct. Water users would repay the costs of construction and maintenance through a water use fee.
He also contends that an aqueduct could help a broader region.
Scott says an aqueduct could extend out to Colorado’s Front Range to supply booming cities such as Denver and Colorado Springs that draw water off of the dwindling Colorado River. If they drank from Kansas’ aqueduct instead, that would leave more water to trickle down the Colorado, which extends out into water-starved southern California.
A canal, advocates contend, could supply water at a fraction of the price that southern California farmers pay now and help alleviate shortages in that region.
Scott’s interest in water transfer is common in southwest Kansas but far from universal. For example, Roth isn’t convinced.
“It’s impractical and it’s one heck of a distraction,” Roth said. “Right now we need to concentrate on local conservation with what we do have, what we can do right now.”
Ray Luhman, Northwest Water district manager, thinks the state should consider all options, including channeling water across the state.
“The conversation needs to be had,” Luhman said. “But to, let’s say, mortgage your future on a project maybe 20 to 30 years from completion? We also need to look to something in the interim.”
Ben Kuebrich reports for High Plains Public Radio in Garden City and the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KMUW, Kansas Public Radio, KCUR and HPPR covering health, education and politics.
Mail-in ballots for the Colorado primary election are in the mail. (Mine arrived yesterday.) Please consider moving the environment to the top of the list of issues when you vote.
Fact: The Western U.S. is drying out and the more arid environment is exacerbating wildfires.
Fact: Action is required now to reduce global warming in the decades ahead.
CIRES-led team uncovers series of wildfire triggers that culminated in the big burn of 2017
Western wildfire seasons are worse when it’s dry and fuel-rich, and the chances of ignition are high—and all three factors were pushed to their limits last year, triggering one of the largest and costliest U.S. wildfire seasons in recent decades, according to a new paper. Climate change likely helped exacerbate fuels and dryness, the paper found, and people’s behavior contributed the sparks.
“Last year we saw a pile on of extreme events across large portions of the western U.S., the wettest winter, the hottest summer, and the driest fall—all helping to promote wildfires,” said Jennifer Balch, director of CIRES/CU Boulder’s Earth Lab and lead author on the study published today in Fire with INSTAAR, Columbia University, and University of Idaho coauthors.
The 2017 wildfire season cost the United States more than $18 billion in damages. That year, 71,000 wildfires scorched 10 million acres of land—destroying 12,000 homes, evacuating 200,000 people and claiming 66 lives. For comparison, 2016 saw only 5.4 million acres burned.
The research team sought to pinpoint the precursors that led to these fires, to support decision makers considering policies that might prevent or minimize future fire disasters. The study found that the three major “switches” affecting fire—fuel, aridity, and ignition—were either flipped on or kept on longer than expected last year.
It started with a wet winter. Increased precipitation early in 2017 fed the growth of fine grasses across the western United States—grasses that would later serve as fuel for fire. Summer and fall then swept in a wave of dry, arid conditions, baking the dense fields of grasses into dehydrated kindling.
With the fuel growth and aridity switches flipped on, the scene was set for the third switch: ignition. Nearly 90 percent of total wildfires last year were caused by people; previous work by Balch and her team has illuminated just how extensively humans exacerbate wildfire. Human activity triples the length of the average fire season.
Computer climate models project an increased risk of extreme wet winters in California, the paper notes, and a decrease in summer precipitation across the entire West Coast. Those models also tend to project a delay in the onset of fall rain and snow.
“We expect to see more fire seasons like we saw last year, and thus it is becoming increasingly critical that we strengthen our wildfire prediction and warning systems, support suppression and recovery efforts, and develop sustained policies that help us coexist with fire,” said Megan Cattau, Earth Lab researcher and a coauthor on the study.
Although naturally occurring climate variability influences environmental conditions that affect the wildfire season, that variation is superimposed on an anthropogenically warmer world, so climate change is magnifying the effects of heat and precipitation extremes, Balch says.
The authors conclude by noting many ways that policy makers have already taken action to build better and burn better in the face of increasingly flammable landscapes; and they urge continued attention to policies that address the challenge of wildfire.
“The 2018 wildfire season is already underway and here at home in the southern Rockies fuels are very dry,” said Balch. “It is forecasted that June will be a busy month in terms of wildfires due to severe drought and low snowpack.”
Student showcase their winning design at a recent Board of Trustees meeting. Photo: Mark Stahl
From Metropolitan State University of Denver (Matt Watson):
Sometimes putting plastic in the river can be a good thing.
That was the idea put forth by the MSU Trash Getters, one of eight student teams from the Colorado School of Mines, MSU Denver and the University of Colorado Denver to participate in the Clean River Design Challenge.
The Trash Getters designed 3D-printed fish heads to float atop a waterway and collect trash in their mouths. The brightly colored bits of plastic, printed on campus at the Auraria Library, sit in the water and call attention to the very problem the design challenge hopes to combat: trash in our water.
The Greenway Foundation, a nonprofit helmed by Executive Director and MSU Denver Trustee Jeff Shoemaker, works to advance the South Platte River and surrounding tributaries as a unique environmental, recreational, cultural, scientific and historical amenity that links Denver’s past and its future. The foundation held its first-ever student design challenge in 2015-16 and a second competition in 2017-18. The competition is coordinated and led by TGF’s policy and water-resources arm, the Water Connection (TWC).
“The basis of this is to continue to bring awareness that trash in my neighborhood is trash in my waterways,” Shoemaker said. “That’s the education aspect; the other, more pragmatic aspect is we’re trying to create devices that can be taken from a scale version, put into a working prototype and actually be placed in Cherry Creek or the South Platte River.”
MSU Denver faculty, staff and community members pitch in to clean up the Cherry Creek as part of the recent Roadrunners Give Back Day in partnership with the Greenway Foundation.
The student teams were scored in Round 1 on their trash-collection designs in December, with two teams from Mines placing first and third and an MSU Denver team second. The teams with the top six designs were given $1,000 to build scale models, which were then put to the test for Round 2 in April in a flume at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In addition to educating people and looking for innovative solutions, the design challenge provides students with hands-on, competitive experience.
“For students to spend a semester coming up with a concept, then have to stand up in front of a dozen working professionals in the world of water and defend their model – in a competitive way, where there are actually winners and losers – is a very valuable experience,” Shoemaker said.
In the BOR Hydraulics Lab testing, which was Round 2 of the competition, MSU Denver students shined. The first-place team was the Water Association of Student Steward Urban Program, the student water-education club associated with the One World One Water Center. The Trash Getters’ fish-head design finished third behind the Colorado School of Mines, which took second.
The top three models will be displayed July 26 at the 15th annual Reception on the River, where students will get a chance to network with more than 200 people from the water industry. The hope is that one of the models, or a combination of them, will work its way into the water in the coming years. TGF/TWC just got the first draft of professional engineering drawings based on the 2015-16 contest winner and will develop a prototype in the coming months for planned testing in Cherry Creek .
The water-cleanup efforts at the Greenway Foundation and MSU Denver aren’t limited to design and engineering, either. Foundation volunteers regularly pick up trash from Denver waterways, while the WASSUP club has adopted a section of Cherry Creek for a monthly cleanup project and University faculty, staff and students partnered with the Greenway Foundation as part of Roadrunners Give Back Day.
To learn more about Denver’s waterways, contact the Greenway Foundation at info@greenwayfoundation.org.
I recently visited a tailwater stream known for its capacity to produce lots of brown trout, some of them quite large. The reservoir feeding this stream is operated exclusively for downstream agricultural users, the result of which is that the fishery is also renowned for its poor conditions in winter, when dam releases are curtailed and the stream becomes a thin vein of shallow puddles, trickles, and exposed spawning redds. Since this stream is in the coldest corner of New Mexico, anchor ice is common.
I was pleased to see the latest work of the beaver population, knowing that their ponds would provide winter refuge for fish. But I was there to see the leveling device (beaver deceiver) installed by the New Mexico Game and Fish department to mitigate the legitimate though misplaced concern of downstream irrigators, who felt that the beavers were holding back valuable water from ranches and farms. The deceiver was working as intended, sending water downstream while limiting the pond’s depth and expanse so as not to inundate an adjacent parking lot.
My next stop was a nearby fly shop. I proudly reported my observations to the proprietor, who proceeded to give me an earful. The stretch of stream occupied by the beavers had always been a money spot for his guides and their clients. Until, that is, the beavers took up residence. The pond had since become a bugless sucker hole devoid of trout, and though he acknowledged the positive impact of the beaver impoundment on riparian storage and late season flows, the shop owner judged the local beavers as a net detriment to the fishery. Beavers are either good or bad, he opined, never both.
The beaver is a keystone species, generally defined as an organism that exerts an outsized influence on the function and even formation of an ecosystem. Beaver dams capture peak flows, prolong spring runoff, while supporting and extending baseflows with water stored in riparian aquifers. Their deep ponds concentrate nutrients and macroinvertebrates; they provide shelter and security for trout, especially in winter.
Understandably, the perceived downside of beavers comes with the keystone package. Like wolves, another disproportionately influential animal, beavers disrupt on a landscape scale. They not only plug up streams, but ditches, culverts, and bridges. Their dams inundate yards, fields, and pastures used by livestock and campers. Beavers kill and eat prized trees. The disgruntled fly shop owner hypothesized that his favorite run-turned-hated-beaver-pond might have warmed too much to harbor the trout it once did and, along with possibly consuming too much oxygen, accumulated silt may have buried insect production.
For what little it’s worth, I’ve personally witnessed few instances where beavers have negatively impacted trout. I don’t doubt that it happens, certainly not in this case, but I think such stories should be viewed in the broader context of watershed health. Consider how many of our highest quality fisheries (and grazing pastures) were literally made by beavers. They cleared trees to build their dams, which filled with trapped sediment and forced channel migration across floodplains. Over time, floodplains expanded and thickened thanks to further beaver-induced sediment deposition. This long process created thick, spongy meadows, essentially grass-skinned reservoirs feeding streams with cooled groundwater.
In addition to logging, mining, grazing, floodplain development, and road building, our large scale beaver extirpation in the late 1800s contributed greatly to watershed degradation. Without beavers, natural and man-made “nick points” went unrepaired, leading to channel incision and headcutting. By armoring and straightening streams for flood control, we actually intensified flooding by concentrating flow and increasing its cutting force. As a result, our beaver-created meadow reservoirs have been drying from within for many decades.
As climate change tightens its unpredictable yet certain grip on our landscapes, it falls on us, the ultimate keystone species, to restore the land’s capacity to absorb disturbance while maintaining function. To hedge against drought, we must lift and spread water tables and reconnect streams with their floodplains, especially in headwater regions. Reconnected floodplains will also enable our streams to de-energize high intensity precipitation events, particularly important in this era of common wildfire.
Where beavers live, we must make them welcome, as they are the cheapest and most efficient means of restoring the greatest acreage of watershed in the shortest timeframe. They work around the clock and accept food as payment; no matter how hard we try, we will never find a better deal than that.
And where they don’t live, we must imitate them; thanks to conservation groups in New Mexico, including the Truchas Chapter of TU, imitating beavers may soon become the hottest trend in stream restoration. Volunteer-made beaver dam analogs (BDAs) employ natural materials and are designed to pass water, trap sediment, and raise riparian water tables. Combined with willow and cottonwood plantings, which provide stream shading and future beaver food, BDAs create true beaver habitat and often attract the real animals to continue this important work.
As a wise man I know once said, “In times of flood, prepare for drought. In drought, prepare for flood.” I’m not sure, but I think this guy may have been a beaver in a previous life.
Toner Mitchell is TU’s New Mexico Water and Habitat Program coordinator for New Mexico.
Click here to read the essay from Jason A. Otkin. Here’s the abstract:
Given the increasing use of the term “flash drought” by the media and scientific community, it is prudent to develop a consistent definition that can be used to identify these events and to understand their salient characteristics. It is generally accepted that flash droughts occur more often during the summer owing to increased evaporative demand; however, two distinct approaches have been used to identify them. The first approach focuses on their rate of intensification, whereas the second approach implicitly focuses on their duration. These conflicting notions for what constitutes a flash drought (i.e., unusually fast intensification vs short duration) introduce ambiguity that affects our ability to detect their onset, monitor their development, and understand the mechanisms that control their evolution. Here, we propose that the definition for “flash drought” should explicitly focus on its rate of intensification rather than its duration, with droughts that develop much more rapidly than normal identified as flash droughts. There are two primary reasons for favoring the intensification approach over the duration approach. First, longevity and impact are fundamental characteristics of drought. Thus, short-term events lasting only a few days and having minimal impacts are inconsistent with the general understanding of drought and therefore should not be considered flash droughts. Second, by focusing on their rapid rate of intensification, the proposed “flash drought” definition highlights the unique challenges faced by vulnerable stakeholders who have less time to prepare for its adverse effects.
Someone noticed a puffy cumulonimbus cloud rising up in the gap formed by the Animas River gorge and gave a little cheer. Winter and spring had been freakishly dry and warm, and we really could have used the rain. Something was off about the cloud, however, and we all grew quiet. It wasn’t a cloud at all, but a billowing tower of smoke.
That was 2002 and the smoke was from the Missionary Ridge Fire, ignited that afternoon on a slope about 35 miles south of where we sat. Over the coming weeks, the blaze would eat through 73,000 acres of parched scrub oak and aspen and conifer forest along with 83 structures. The local tourism economy, already dampened by the Dotcom bust and the 9/11 attacks of the previous year, was battered. It would be remembered as southwest Colorado’s summer of discontent.
Memories of and comparisons to that summer emerged last week when the 416 Fire broke out just across the valley from where the Missionary Ridge Fire was sparked 16 years earlier. The comparisons, unfortunately, are apt. Precipitation for the 2018 water year (which started Oct. 1, 2017) has thus far mostly mirrored 2002. Flows on the Animas River are slightly better than they were 16 years ago, but only slightly (see accompanying graphs). The conditions are therefore in place for a rerun of that smoky summer.
At this point, however, the 416 Fire does not appear to be a Missionary Ridge repeat, at least in terms of severity. The 2002 blaze was started by an errant spark, possibly from a car’s exhaust pipe, in the early afternoon of June 9, and it had blown up to 6,500 acres within hours. As I write this, the 416 Fire is spreading much more slowly, having charred 2,400 acres — and no homes — after four days of burning. High winds and hot temperatures could change all of that, of course.
The cause of the 416 Fire remains unknown. Embers from the coal-fired narrow gauge train that travels between Durango and Silverton are a fire hazard, yet the US Forest Service has reported the ignition point as being in the right of way of Highway 550, meaning the fire just as easily could have been started by a motorist’s tossed cigarette butt. In any event, the railroad and the tourism economy that depends on it will be affected. Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge RR officials say they won’t run the train until June 10 at the earliest, and after that will use a diesel locomotive — to the displeasure of authenticity-seeking passengers. (UPDATE 6/6: InciWeb continues to list fire cause as “unknown,” but the coordinates it gives for the fire, and witness accounts, indicate that the fire started near the railroad tracks, not long after the train passed, far from Hwy 550. Also, the D&SNGRR announced on 6/5 that train service will be suspended until at least June 17.)…
It’s certainly too early to guess how big of a blow the 416 Fire — and any other fires to follow — will have on the regional economy. Still, it’s a tough break coming after a thin ski season and at the beginning of what will surely turn out to be a rough one for commercial rafters, with or without any more fires. It’s also a potent reminder that climate change is bad for a lot of things, including the local economy.
While 2018 is shaping up to mirror 2002, it also closely resembles another dry and disastrous time — the summer of 1879. No one was keeping official tabs on the weather or snowpack or streamflows back then, but from anecdotal and newspaper reports, we can gather that the 1878-79 winter was just as dry and warm as 2017-18. And the results were equally smoky: In early June of that year, a blaze broke out a few miles north of where the current 416 Fire is burning. It ended up charring 26,000 acres of relatively high-altitude forests.
FromThe Durango Herald (Shane Benjamin) via The Cortez Journal:
Federal firefighters have not released the cause of the 416 Fire. A federal wildfire information database, InciWeb, lists the cause as “unknown.” A longitude and latitude entered into the database pinpoints the fire just west of the train tracks in an area where nothing else is around. Chione confirmed that is about where the fire started.
The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad is not taking responsibility for the fire, but that could change based on the outcome of local and federal fire investigations, General Manager John Harper told The Durango Herald on Tuesday…
The U.S. Forest Service in conjunction with the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office and the Bureau of Land Management are conducting the investigation, according to an email sent Tuesday from Cam Hooley, acting spokeswoman for San Juan National Forest.
“A team of trained investigators was on scene as soon as Friday night, the day of ignition,” she wrote in the email to the Herald. “USFS investigators include both local and regional personnel. Because of the size of the fire, the cost of suppression and the impact on the community, the investigation team will take the time needed to conduct a comprehensive and thorough investigation before any determinations are released. No timeline has been given for release of information.”
Chione and his neighbors often spot fires started by the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. The Meadowridge subdivision, with eight houses, sits only a couple hundred feet east of the train tracks and is located on a steep grade between Hermosa and Rockwood – an area known locally as Shalona Hill.
Locomotives work hard to power up the mountain, and some hot cinders from the coal-fired engine land on the ground and start little fires. A pop car typically follows each train three to five minutes behind the train to look for fires. Five minutes behind the pop car is a water tender that can douse flames, if necessary.
It is not unusual for the train to start spot fires through this section of track, Chione said. In fact, residents are so aware of the fire danger that they converted an old insecticide spray truck into a brush truck that can spray water to help douse the spot fires.
When he sees a fire, Chione typically calls his neighbor, Cres Fleming, who either walks down to the tracks to help extinguish flames, or if the fire is more serious, drives the water truck to the tracks to help douse the blaze.
“I got a call on Friday morning after the second train had come by that there was a small fire at the bend in the tracks,” Fleming said. “I high-tailed it over there with the truck, and as I came up on the railroad tracks, I saw the fire was probably 35 feet up the hill from the tracks. The railroad patrolman was there on his radio, I guess letting dispatch know what was going on. The fire at that point was really too much for his small sprayer that he had on that first pop car.”
Flemming unraveled the hose on his make-shift water truck, but he had a water-pressure problem. By the time the hose was working, the fire had advanced 80 or 90 feet up the hill – beyond the reach of his sprayer.
“It was moving incredibly fast,” Fleming said. “I fired a stream of water and dragged a hose up the hill, which is hard for me because I’m not exactly young any more.
“I feel sort of heartbroken that I just missed putting that fire out because I know it has really caused a lot of problems for a lot of people,” Fleming said. “If I had been there a minute earlier, I think I could have gotten it.”
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
Kids learn about conservation and birding on conserved land
Last month East Middle School 6th graders enjoyed a morning bird-watching hike at Avant Vineyards conserved property on East Orchard Mesa. Thanks so much to Nic Korte from the Grand Valley Audubon Society for leading the hike and Neil Guard at Avant Vineyards for hosting!
Mail-in ballots are in the mail for Colorado’s primary election.
Fact: To combat climate change humankind must end the burning of fossil fuels.
Fact: The means to replace fossil fuels are at hand, economic and effective.
Please consider voting for candidates that put the environment at the top or near the top of their list of issues. You can find their positions on the environment and in particular climate change on their websites.
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was a landmark moment in human history. It crystallized decades of negotiations into a framework embraced by every country in the world to confront the existential threat of climate change and work together to solve the challenge.
President Trump’s announcement exactly one year ago that he intended to withdraw from the Paris Agreement raised global concerns that the agreement could weaken or unravel. Instead, Trump’s retreat has catalyzed leaders in America and around the world to stand shoulder to shoulder and press forward with climate solutions.
June 1 is not the anniversary of an end to one of the world’s greatest acts of consensus; it is a celebration of what Americans have done to fill the federal void. On the same day Trump abdicated climate leadership last year, we formed the U.S. Climate Alliance to uphold the Paris Agreement commitment in our states. In just one year, the alliance has grown into a bipartisan coalition of 17 governors representing 40% of the U.S. population and a $9 trillion economy — larger than that of every country in the world but the U.S. and China.
President Trump’s announcement last year centered on his allegation that the Paris Agreement hurts the U.S. economy. The fact that our collective economies are stronger than non-alliance states proves just the opposite. Alliance states are not only reducing emissions more rapidly than the rest of the country, but we are also expanding our per capita economic output twice as fast. Alliance states are attracting billions of dollars in climate and clean energy investments that have created 1.3 million clean energy jobs. The Alliance states are not alone: meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement is projected to save the world $30 trillion in avoided economic damages.
While the Paris Agreement is one of the greatest tests in global collaboration, this interstate effort stands as one of the biggest and most important experiments in American policymaking. From modernizing power grids to scaling up renewable energy and reducing pollution, we are saving money and cleaning our air.
We will do everything in our power to defend and continue our climate actions. This includes continuing to oppose any federal proposal to cancel the Clean Power Plan, weaken clean car and appliance standards or expand offshore drilling. One year after President Trump’s abdication, the rapid economic growth of states within the U.S. Climate Alliance remain a beacon to all Americans and to every other nation that Americans are still in the Paris Agreement and will not retreat.
Despite President Trump’s Paris Agreement decision, the world continues to move forward and not backward on climate. One year after the president’s announcement, every other nation on earth has signed onto the Paris Agreement. China canceled plans for more than 100 coal-fired power plants in 2017, offshore wind energy is competing without subsidy in northern Europe, and several countries are making plans to shift cars from gas and diesel to electric, including China, France, India, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.
We will work in lockstep with the nations of the world and continue our work to uphold the Paris Agreement. However, it is clear that we cannot meet the climate challenge alone. We need commitment from every U.S. state and we need the federal government to get back in the game. We invite others to join us and mark June 1 not as an anniversary of retreat, but as the moment when a bold, new movement of climate action took root in America.
Democratic Govs. Jerry Brown of California, Andrew Cuomo of New York and Jay Inslee of Washington are co-chairs of the U.S. Climate Alliance. Follow them on Twitter: @JerryBrownGov, @NYGovCuomo and @GovInslee.
