Native range data for Arkansas darter provided in part by NatureServe via USGS.
Here’s the release from Colorado Parks and Wildlife:
The Arkansas darter is a two-and-a-half inch native perch found throughout southeastern Colorado, Kansas and a few other states. On Oct. 6, 2016, after a 12-month finding, these fish were official categorized as “ not warranted” for federal listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, bringing some relief to more than 40 years of concern for the species.
Arkansas darter were listed as threatened at the state level by Colorado Parks and Wildlife in 1975, and through a collaborative effort with FWS and other state wildlife management agencies, were designated a federal candidate species in 1991. Candidate species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, are described as “having sufficient concern for their biological status but for which development of a proposed listing regulation is precluded by other higher priority listings.”
In 1994 (with recent updates) these status listings prompted CPW biologists to partner with the FWS and other wildlife agencies to develop an individual recovery plan for the species. The plan included ramping up conservation efforts, such as work with private landowners, habitat conservation, hatchery propagation, reintroduction and re-establishment of populations, and long term monitoring and research, among other actions.
“This ‘not warranted’ decision is a testament to the dedication and effort of many CPW staff over many years,” said Harry Crockett, CPW Native Aquatic Species Coordinator.
The decision was based on a recent status assessment of the Arkansas darter throughout its range in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Representative species biologists from each state, FWS biologists, as well as climate and hydrology scientists worked throughout 2014 and 2015 on assessing the species’ health, distribution and potential future.
“The Species Status Assessment Report for the Arkansas darter, and the FWS’s resulting 12-month finding was a superb collaboration between the affected states and the FWS,” said Vernon Tabor, Species Biologist, FWS; Arkansas darter assessment lead. “While the finding was solely FWS responsibility, we needed the excellent data, coordination and expertise we found in our state partners, including Colorado Parks and Wildlife. This allowed us to make our decision based on the most sound and recent science available.”
Threats to Arkansas darters still persist, as illustrated by their listing as a Tier One species in CPW’s 2015 State Wildlife Action Plan.
“Probably our greatest concern for the long term stability of Arkansas darters is specifically related to the future of water, especially spring water and headwater reaches, that provide good habitat on the plains of the Arkansas River Basin,” said Paul Foutz, Native Aquatic Species Biologist – CPW Southeast Region.
The darter occupy cool, clear spring-fed streams and seeps with abundant vegetation and feed primarily on invertebrates. The fish are found throughout the Arkansas River Basin, however populations are now typically isolated from one another. These populations are primarily found in the Big Sandy Creek, Chico Creek, Fountain Creek, and Rush Creek drainages, as well as several drainages north and east of Lamar, Colorado.
Historical records of Arkansas darters date back to 1889, but records were scant until a 1979-1981 CPW native fishes inventory of the Arkansas River Basin identified a far more widespread distribution of the species.
CPW will continue to make recovery and conservation of Arkansas darters a high priority.
“CPW is fully committed to continuing work to ensure that the species persists and fulfills its important niche in a fundamentally water-scarce region which is likely to become drier in the future. However, we, along with our partner agencies throughout the species’ range, can all be proud to have achieved the level of security and stability for the species that this ‘not warranted’ decision reflects,” said Crockett.
Despite recent snow storms, drought conditions in Colorado have remained largely unchanged over the past few weeks, with nearly all the state in some level of dryness.
With the continued exception of [northwest] Moffat County, all of western Colorado is considered abnormally dry, the lowest level of drought.
Much of northeast Colorado, including large areas of Weld, Adams, Morgan, Washington, and Logan Counties are also abnormally dry, along with portions of Las Animas, Baca, Prowers and Bent Counties.
Most of the remaining area in eastern Colorado is in moderate drought, however much of Larimer, western Lincoln and most of eastern Kiowa Counties are in severe drought. Extreme southeast Baca County is also showing severe conditions.
One year ago, 90 percent of the state was drought-free, with the remainder abnormally dry.
Kiowa County Courthouse, Eads, Colorado, 1903 via wikimedia.
From the Natural Resources Conservation Service via the Kiowa County Press:
Producers in Colorado who are interested in implementing conservation practices to improve natural resources on their private agricultural land have until Friday, February 17, 2016, to submit applications for FY 2017 funding through the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s (NRCS) Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Eligible applications that are received after February 17th will be considered during a later time and will be processed throughout the fiscal year as needed.
EQIP is a voluntary incentives program that provides financial assistance for conservation systems such as animal waste management facilities, irrigation system efficiency improvements, fencing, and water supply development for improved grazing management, riparian protection, and wildlife habitat enhancement.
NRCS continually strives to put conservation planning at the forefront of its programs and initiatives. Conservation plans provide landowners with a comprehensive inventory and assessment of their resources and an appropriate start to improving the quality of soil, water, air, plants, and wildlife on their land.
Conservation planning services can also be obtained through a Technical Service Provider (TSP) who will develop a Conservation Activity Plans (CAP) to identify conservation practices needed to address a specific natural resource need. Typically, these plans are specific to certain kinds of land use such as transitioning to organic operations, grazing land, or forest land. CAPs can also address a specific resource need such as a plan for management of nutrients. Although not required, producers who first develop a CAP for their land use may use this information in applying for future implementation contracts.
To find out more about financial and technical assistance available to help Colorado farmers and landowners improve and protect their land, visit the Colorado NRCS website at http://www.co.nrcs.udsa.gov.
The High Plains Aquifer provides 30 percent of the water used in the nation’s irrigated agriculture. The aquifer runs under South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.
By mid-century, says a new study, some of the biggest grain-producing regions could run dry.
Rising temperatures and growing demands for thirsty grains like rice and wheat could drain much of the world’s groundwater in the next few decades, new research warns.
Nearly half of our food comes from the warm, dry parts of the planet, where excessive groundwater pumping to irrigate crops is rapidly shrinking the porous underground reservoirs called aquifers. Vast swaths of India, Pakistan, southern Europe, and the western United States could face depleted aquifers by midcentury, a recent study finds — taking a bite out of the food supply and leaving as many as 1.8 billion people without access to this crucial source of fresh water.
To forecast when and where specific aquifers around the globe might be drained to the point that they’re unusable, Inge de Graaf, a hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, developed a new model simulating regional groundwater dynamics and withdrawals from 1960 to 2100. She found that California’s agricultural powerhouses — the Central Valley, Tulare Basin and southern San Joaquin Valley, which produce a plentiful portion of the nation’s food — could run out of accessible groundwater as early as the 2030s. India’s Upper Ganges Basin and southern Spain and Italy could be used up between 2040 and 2060. And the southern part of the Ogallala aquifer under Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico could be depleted between 2050 and 2070.
“The areas that will run into trouble the soonest are areas where we have a lot of demand and not enough surface water available,” says de Graaf, who presented her results last week at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
Farming has mushroomed across arid regions like these in the past half-century. With scarce rains and few rivers and lakes, they depend on water pumped up from underground. Since 1960, excessive pumping has already used up enough groundwater worldwide to nearly fill Lake Michigan, estimates de Graaf, who projects that with climate change and population growth, future groundwater use will soar. She considers an aquifer depleted when its water level falls below a depth of around 300 feet, at which point it becomes too expensive for most users to pump up.
Shrinking groundwater supplies will dent the world’s food supply, says de Graaf’s co-author Marc Bierkens, a hydrologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Bierkens points out that 40 percent of global food production now relies on irrigation with groundwater. If the amount of available groundwater were cut in half, for example, he estimates that farm output would drop by roughly 6 percent—reflecting the portion that’s absolutely dependent on unsustainable groundwater use.
“It’s not that the whole population will starve,” says Bierkens, “but it will have an impact on the food chain and food prices.”
To an untrained eye, the Colorado River near Kremmling looks, well, like a river. It winds through a wide valley dotted with ranches and covered by a western blue sky.
But Paul Bruchez, a Grand County rancher and fly fisherman, does not have untrained eyes.
He sees the lifeline for his ranch and others like it in this otherwise arid corner of the Western Slope. The river’s been decimated by a one-two punch: water diverted to the Front Range, and a surprise erosion that dropped the river bed by two feet nearly overnight.
“It was jaw-dropping for all the landowners to realize just what dire straits this river and our ag systems were really in,” Bruchez said, standing on the banks of the river in late September.
Bruchez and 12 other ranchers now have reason to celebrate. They’ve been working with environmental groups like American Rivers and Trout Unlimited to get grants to help with vital restoration work — and now a big federal grant has come through. Bruchez and his neighbors will receive about $2.5 million from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“This news is life-changing for the headwaters of the Colorado River and those who rely on it,” Bruchez said in a press release announcing the grant…
So the ranchers devised a cost-effective way to help the river: riffles. Rock walls are sunken into the river bed in an open v-shape form. They back up the water slightly which helps raise the water table, re-introduce oxygen to the water to help with fish habitat, and re-steers the river current to keep it from crashing into the banks and causing erosion.
Bruchez and other ranchers put up hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the project off the ground. Two riffles on Thompson’s land were the first to be constructed.
“It’s working,” [Bill Thompson] said. But the final price tag will be more than $6 million. Bruchez needed help raising the rest of the cash — and found it from a somewhat unlikely source: environmentalists.
Ranchers and environmentalists have historically been at odds over things like livestock grazing and water pollution. But in this case, Bruchez’s group caught the eye of Trout Unlimited.
“We believe agriculture has very important role to play,” Mely Whiting, legal counsel for Trout Unlimited, said from her home office in Pagosa Springs. “If you do it right, if you minimize the amount of water that you need to use through improvements, then you can leave more water for the fish.”
The ranchers are not incorporated. So Trout Unlimited is the fiscal agent for the new federal grant, and an older state grant. That made some ranchers, like Thompson, nervous. But he said he got over it pretty quickly.
“I had to have them to get it done,” he said.
Over 30 Miles To Be Rehabilitated
About $2.5 million of the $7.75 million grant will go toward the ranch project, which will take years to complete. The rest will help another Trout Unlimited-led project — a channel to bypass the Windy Gap Reservoir upstream from Kremmling.
Put together, the two projects will help improve the river’s health over more than 30 miles. Both are now close to their funding goals.
Trout Unlimited took a collaborative approach to the bypass project as well, enlisting help from the county government, Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District and other groups that are often at odds.
While Trout Unlimited and American Rivers have worked with Front Range water managers in the Colorado River headwaters area, that’s caused tension in the greater environmental community. Others, like Save the Colorado and WildEarth Guardians, say those conservation groups are making compromises that will ultimately lead to the death of Western Slope waterways.
But Drew Peternell, director of Trout Unlimited’s Colorado water project, says this week’s grant news shows their approach is working.
“The posture on the Colorado [River] has started to change,” Peternell said. “Groups that were once at odds with each other are now working together. This $8 million grant from the NRCS is really sort of the capstone for all of that.”
“We are more connected than we’d like to admit” — Travis Smith (from the film “The Great Divide“)
The Colorado Water Congress folks have released the Wednesday workshop schedule for the Annual Convention. Here’s the email from Doug Kemper:
Colorado water community:
Wednesday Workshops Program
I am pleased to announce the program for the Wednesday Workshops on January 25 at the 2017 Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention at the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center is now posted on CWC’s website. To view, click HERE. There are 25 opportunities for connecting with your colleagues as you learn about the latest happenings in Colorado water.
Annual Convention Program
The main program for the Convention is being built and should be ready next week. Our theme for the Annual Convention is Connectivity. We will go live with the new Colorado Water Congress Strategic Plan and link members with the future direction of our organization.
Flowing from the 2015 member survey, we learned that our outlook must be toward helping members feel connected to the Colorado Water Congress and engaged with our work to protect the interests of Colorado’s water community. And that is our goal!
The top thing that we will work on in 2017 is our communications. We will launch a new Communications Standing Committee at the Convention. Expressing your thoughts as to what you would like to see occur in this dynamic age of communications will be very helpful.
Annual Convention Registration
To receive the standard 10% early registration discount, register by December 31, 2016. Register for the Convention here – 2017 AC Registration
Hotel Registration
For room reservations at the Hyatt Regency DTC, please visit Hyatt Regency – CWC</a
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Here’s the release from Colorado Trout Unlimited (Drew Peternell, Matt Rice, Paul Bruchez):
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) today announced $7.75 million in funding for an ambitious slate of projects to address the impacts on the Colorado River of trans-mountain diversions of water from the West Slope to the Front Range. Fisheries conservation group Trout Unlimited is the lead partner on the grant application.
The Colorado River Headwaters Project received $7,758,830 from the NRCS’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) to improve irrigation systems and reverse the decline in water quality and fish habitat in the headwaters of the Colorado River.
Led by an array of partners representing conservation interests, agriculture, local government, water providers, state agencies, and landowners, the Headwaters Project will create a bypass channel to reconnect the Colorado River at Windy Gap Reservoir, make channel and habitat improvements downstream of the bypass near Kremmling, Colorado, and improve irrigation systems as well as soil and water quality.
When fully implemented, the Headwaters Project will directly benefit more than 30 miles of the Colorado River and 4,500 acres of irrigated lands that provide sage grouse habitat and make available up to 11,000 acre-feet of water to improve the river during low-flow conditions.
“This is a huge win for the Colorado River,” said Drew Peternell, director of Trout Unlimited’s Colorado Water Project. “We’re seeing an exciting and ambitious conservation vision for the upper Colorado become reality. With this funding, we’ll be able to put the ecosystem pieces of the upper Colorado River back together and restore the river and its trout fishery to health.”
“The Colorado River Headwaters Project is a great example of how municipal water providers, ranchers, conservation organizations and others can work together to restore an important reach the Colorado River for both the environment and agricultural operations with benefits downstream,” said Matt Rice, director of American River’s Colorado River Basin Program. “A collaboration like this would have been unheard of 10 years ago. It’s a win for everyone in Colorado.”
At present, transmountain diversions divert over 60 percent of the upper Colorado River’s native flows across the Continental Divide for use in the Front Range and northern Colorado. The resulting low flows in the river have seriously undermined the operations of irrigation systems and the health of the Colorado River in the project area. Low flows make it difficult for irrigators to divert water, especially during drought, and also raise water temperatures and hamper the river’s ability to transport sediment, leading to sediment buildup on the riverbed that degrades aquatic habitat.
Local ranchers wanted to address these irrigation problems as well as river health, said Paul Bruchez, a Kremmling-area rancher who organized his neighboring landowners into the Irrigators of Land in Vicinity of Kremmling (ILVK) group, a key project partner. The project will install several innovative instream structures designed to provide adequate water levels for irrigation while also improving critical fish habitat. This will be the first project in the country to demonstrate these stream engineering practices on a significant scale.
“This news is life-changing for the headwaters of the Colorado River and those who rely on it,” said Bruchez. “Years ago, water stakeholders in this region were at battle. Now, it is a collaboration that will create resiliency and sustainability for the health of the river and its agricultural producers. Healthy ranches need healthy rivers, and the RCPP funding will help sustain both.”
The Windy Gap Reservoir bypass and the Kremmling area river improvements address several pieces of the puzzle in a long-term, regional effort to restore the upper Colorado River. Other pieces include agreements that TU helped negotiate with Denver Water and the Northern Colorado Water District that contained significant river protections as well as an innovative, long-term monitoring and adaptive management process (called “Learning by Doing”) that requires stakeholders to work together to ensure the future health of the river.
That progress and collaboration is all the more remarkable coming after years of conflict between West Slope interests and conservation groups concerned about the health of the river, and Front Range water providers seeking to divert more water across the Divide.
“What’s happening on the upper Colorado shows that water users can work together to ensure river health while meeting diverse uses,” said TU’s Peternell. “This project is a model of what cooperation and collaboration can achieve in meeting our water challenges in Colorado and the Colorado River Basin.”
Other Headwaters Project partners who will provide assistance include the ILVK, Northern Water Conservation District, Denver Water, Colorado River Conservation District, Middle Park Soil Conservation District, Colorado Water Conservation Board, Grand County, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
Summary
Streaks of heavy precipitation fell from the Ohio Valley into the Northeast and across the lower Southeast. Stormy weather also prevailed in the West, particularly in California and southwestern Oregon—but also extending inland to the Rockies. Amid the active weather pattern, an Arctic outbreak peaked on December 17-18, sending temperatures as low as -40°F across northern portions of the Plains and Intermountain West and below 0°F as far south as the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas…
The Plains
With much of the region heading into a “deep freeze” during the weekend of December 17-18, there were only small changes in the drought depiction. Much of the nation’s mid-section received snow in advance of the Arctic outbreak, but liquid totals were relatively light in areas affected by dryness and drought. In the last week, some of the most significant deterioration was noted in eastern Oklahoma and neighboring areas, where drought signals were apparent in both long- and short-term indicators and where both agricultural and hydrological impacts continue to mount. The Arctic outbreak resulted in a multitude of daily-record lows, shortly after a brief burst of warmth had spread across the southern Plains. In South Dakota, consecutive daily-record lows were set on December 17-18 in locations such as Aberdeen (-32 and -37°F); Watertown (-29 and -37°F); and Mobridge (-28 and -26°F). Other places on the Plains setting consecutive record lows included Valentine, Nebraska (-27 and -31°F); Pueblo, Colorado (-19°F both days); Tribune, Kansas (-14 and -13°F); and Dalhart, Texas (0 and -8°F). Dalhart’s record-setting lows followed a daily-record high of 73°F on December 16. Similarly and elsewhere in Texas, December 16 daily-record highs of 85°F in Childress, 78°F in Lubbock, and 76°F in Borger were followed 2 days later by daily-record lows of 7°F, 4°F, and -3°F, respectively…
The West
Recent colder storms have significantly improved Western snowpack, especially across the northern Great Basin, Intermountain West, and Pacific Northwest. As a result, areas where the heavy snow has overlapped with dryness or drought—such as northwestern Wyoming and parts of Utah—have experienced some improvement—although it is still early in the season. Meanwhile, California weathered some impressive storminess, although high-elevation snowpack continues to lag normal for this time of year. According to the California Department of Water Resources, the average water content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack stood at 5 inches on December 20—roughly two-thirds of average but less than 20% of the typical April 1 peak. At the same time, basin-average precipitation since October 1 in the Sierra Nevada watersheds has totaled roughly 150 to 200% of normal. Some of the discrepancy is due to the barrage of “warm” storms that hit northern California during October. Despite the lagging snowpack, there has been ongoing drought recovery in much of northern California. Areas not dependent on snowpack, such as California’s northern coastal ranges, have seen the greatest recovery from long-term drought. Even before December’s precipitation, California’s 154 reservoirs held 18.5 million acre-feet of water by November 30, an improvement of nearly 7.6 million acre-feet from a year ago. The end-of-November statewide storage was 88% of the historic average (for this time of year) of 21.1 million acre-feet…
Looking Ahead
Mild weather will continue in many areas of the U.S., following the recent cold snap. During the weekend, however, colder air will engulf the West and return to the northern High Plains. For Thursday, precipitation highlights will include light snow spreading into the Northeast and rain developing in the Southwest. Precipitation associated with the Southwestern storm will overspread portions of the southern and eastern U.S. by Saturday. Meanwhile, a much more potent storm should arrive in northern California on Friday and reach the central High Plains by Christmas Day. Significant precipitation, including high-elevation snow, should occur throughout the West. Wind-driven snow can be expected late in the holiday weekend across the northern and central Plains and upper Midwest.
The NWS 6- to 10-day outlook for December 27 – 31 calls for the likelihood of below-normal temperatures in the West, while warmer-than-normal weather should prevail across the South, East, and lower Midwest. Meanwhile, near- to above-normal precipitation in most of the country will contrast with drier-than-normal conditions across the lower Southeast and portions of the Rockies and High Plains.
Expected snow in the mountains this weekend means the potential for improvement in the state’s snowpack numbers — and it’s already picking up from what we saw earlier this month.
“We were looking at snowpack of about 20 to 25 percent of average. In the past couple weeks, things have started to shift. We started to see a little bit more an accumulation of snow in the high country and that’s really helped to boost those numbers,” Becky Bolinger, Colorado Climate Center Climatologist, told 9NEWS earlier this month.
At the start of December, Colorado’s statewide snowpack numbers averaged about 61-percent.
“It was extraordinarily dry, starting in August,” said 9NEWS meteorologist Marty Coniglio. “August 1st was when things dried up and that stayed the case, really through November and we have turned on the spigot in a big way here in December.”
What a difference it’s made: our snowfall of late is pushing the state’s snowpack to above average: 103-percent.
So what changed? The emergence of La Nina, which is a cooling of the waters in the Pacific Ocean, near the equator.
“La Nina is very much different, where you can be drier at the beginning, drier at the end of the season and then right in the heart of the winter, December/January/February, you have the solid flow from the jet stream and you get more consistent storms – not necessarily huge storms, but more consistent and more reliable,” Coniglio said.
That is good news for the state’s water supply, which relies on snow runoff in the spring to feed reservoirs tapped in the summer.
“I always caution people, though – the only numbers that count are at the end of April and early May. Those are really the only numbers that matter because that’s when the snowmelt begins,” Coniglio said, adding, “As long as you get enough during the winter season, you build up a big reserve, and you don’t melt it off too soon or too fast, you’re still in good shape for the summer.”
Site map for the proposed reservoirs on Castle and Maroon creeks via Robert Garcia and The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.
Here’s the release release from Wilderness Workshop via The Aspen Times:
Wilderness Workshop filed a statement of opposition Wednesday to the city of Aspen’s preliminary intent to build reservoirs on Castle and Maroon creeks, the Carbondale conservation group announced.
The nonprofit joins Pitkin County in opposition to damming the two streams to conserve water for future use. County commissioners voted 3-2 on Tuesday to file a statement of opposition in District 5 Water Court in Glenwood Springs.
“We applaud the city for its record of environmental stewardship and commitment to studying alternatives to building dams in two of Colorado’s most iconic valleys,” said Conservation Director Will Roush in a statement. “The water court process includes a pretrial settlement period which provides an excellent opportunity for us to work with the city to find a solution that both protects these two creeks and ensures Aspen has a long term, reliable water supply.”
Wilderness Workshop said building the two reservoirs would “flood portions of the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness and cause significant ecological damage to the two creeks. … The city’s conditional water rights can be used only for construction of the two dams to store water. They offer no legal protections for the two creeks. Wilderness Workshop supports increasing protections for the two creeks, including an increase in the minimum in-stream flow to include spring peak flows.”
Aspen City Council voted Oct. 10 to renew its conditional water rights on the two rivers. Its filing was made Oct. 31 in water court.
Elected officials and city officials have maintained they must renew the water rights in preparation for 50 years from now when Aspen’s population could be nearly triple what it is today, as well as climate change’s impact on the water supply. Both Maroon and Castle creeks supply the city’s drinking water.
On Monday, the city announced that it is open to exploring alternatives to reservoirs.
An acequia along the Las Trampas in northern New Mexico is suspended on a trestle. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal)
From the Associated Press (Susan Montoya Bryan) via The Colorado Springs Gazette:
The federal government will spend nearly a quarter-billion dollars to finance several dozen projects aimed at easing the effects of drought in the western U.S. and restoring watersheds that provide drinking water to communities around the nation, officials announced Wednesday.
The $225 million in funding will be shared among 88 projects, from California’s Central Valley to centuries-old irrigation systems in northern New Mexico and thousands of square miles of fragmented streams in Maine. More than half of the projects specifically address drought and water quality.
Jason Weller, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, said the federal funding will also generate $500 million more in spending for the projects that will be provided by state, local and private partners.
“That’s important for us because no one organization has the boots on the ground, the financial resources, the technical expertise needed to deal with drought, invasive species, invasive weeds, be more energy efficient and improve the health of their forests,” he said. “It’s really incumbent upon us all to work smarter and more effectively together.”
Weller pointed to the tens of millions of trees that have died in California due to the epic drought there and other challenges faced by communities bordering public and private forests that are overgrown and unhealthy. He said the dry conditions are putting pressure on watersheds and their ability to provide abundant and clean water.
The funding also is aimed at tackling flooding problems in places such as Merced County, California, where storm runoff in recent years has forced road closures and damaged prime agricultural land.
Officials say $10 million will go toward the design and construction of a system that will better capture and use snowmelt and precipitation from foothills while protecting infrastructure in the county.
Local partners are expected to triple the federal investment in the project.
Nearly $18 million is dedicated to projects in New Mexico, where Hispanic families have been using acequias, or earthen canals, for centuries to water their crops.
Acequias are located in 12 of the most impoverished counties in New Mexico and many need repairs. Supporters say revitalization of the historic irrigation systems are a matter of social and environmental justice because of their cultural and spiritual importance for the region.
Acequia San Antonio via Judy Gallegos
In Maine, $6 million is being invested in a restoration project that spans 25,000 square miles. The goal is to reconnect some of the state’s high-value aquatic networks that have been damaged by roads and vehicles. The Nature Conservancy group and 18 other partners will be working on that project.
In all, the regional conservation program has invested $825 million in nearly 300 projects around the country over the last three years. The program was created by the 2014 Farm Bill.
Pitkin County does think it is necessary for the City of Aspen to build a 15-story dam within view of the Maroon Bells. This beaver pond, with Stein Meadow and the Bells in the background, marks the dam site. Site map for the proposed reservoirs on Castle and Maroon creeks via Robert Garcia and The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.
FromAspen Journalism (Brent Gardner-Smith) via the Aspen Daily News:
Jurisdiction planning to file statement of opposition in due diligence application case
The Pitkin Board of County Commissioners voted 3 to 2 Tuesday to file a statement of opposition in two water court cases where the city of Aspen is seeking to extend its conditional water rights tied to potential dams and reservoirs on upper Castle and Maroon creeks.
Commissioners Patti Clapper, Michael Owsley and George Newman voted in favor of a resolution that directs the county attorney to file statements of opposition in the two cases, which were opened in water court last month to review the city’s due diligence applications.
Board members Steve Child and Rachel Richards voted against the resolution, citing a desire to instead work constructively with the city on exploring alternatives to the two potential dams.
The city originally filed for the water rights in 1965, and has periodically informed the state that it still intends to build the dams and reservoirs if necessary. Its most recent such due diligence application was filed on Oct. 31 and seeks another period of six years in which to maintain the water rights.
One of the city’s conditional water rights would allow the city to store 4,567 acre-feet of water behind a 155-foot-tall dam located just below the confluence of East and West Maroon creeks, within view of the Maroon Bells.
The Maroon Creek Reservoir would be on U.S. Forest Service land and would flood portions of the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness.
The other right is for 9,062 acre-feet of water storage behind a 170-foot-tall dam on Castle Creek two miles below Ashcroft in an area dotted with wetlands.
The Castle Creek Reservoir would be on both private and public land and would flood a small corner of the wilderness area.
The city has never completed a feasibility study of either reservoir but maintains both potential reservoirs are still vital components of its municipal water supply system.
Interested parties have until Dec. 31 to file statements of opposition in the two cases. Officials at American Rivers and the U.S. Forest Service have said they intend to file statements and that they will actively oppose the city’s efforts.
Both the resolution passed by the county commissioners Tuesday and a draft statement of opposition attached to the resolution contain statements critical of the city’s conditional water rights and their potential outcomes.
“Both reservoir sites implicate the destruction of sensitive environmental areas as well as impacting the iconic and treasured view sheds of both the Maroon Creek and Castle Creek valleys,” the resolution states. “Additionally, the Castle Creek site will necessitate the acquisition of several private properties and the relocation of Castle Creek Road, a Pitkin County operated and maintained roadway, onto the hillside above the proposed reservoir site.”
The county also points out that while it appreciates the city’s need to provide water to its citizens, “the city’s own water supply availability study and system demands for the future do not indicate any problem with future water supplies …”
The county’s draft statements of opposition also hit on the issue of need, saying “this water right is unnecessary to meet current and future demands within a reasonable planning period using normal population growth assumptions.”
And it said, “the appropriation date of this water right is more than 50 years ago and applicant (the city) appears to be speculating with no reasonable demonstration of need.”
The county’s Health Rivers and Streams Board had recommended that the county oppose the city in water court.
In a Nov. 17 letter to the BOCC, the stream board said “these applications request diligence for reservoirs which appear, by the city’s own calculations, to be wholly unnecessary to meet Aspen’s present and future anticipated water needs.”
It also said, “this board does not support new construction of impoundments on these creeks.”
David Hornbacher, the city’s director of utilities and environmental initiatives, said Tuesday afternoon he could not yet comment on the county’s resolution.
But on Monday the city issued a press release saying “it has been working to compile a preliminary list of potential options to provide the water supply and storage systems that will protect the city into the future.”
“City Council has asked if we are confident that we can meet water need scenarios in the future without these reservoirs,” Aspen City Manager Steve Barwick said in the city’s press release. “The answer is no. We need to develop reliable alternatives to reservoirs or we will end up with reservoirs.”
The city said as part of a new water-planning process it will look at using abandoned mine tunnels for underground water storage, more ways to re-use water, using agricultural water to meet city demands, and other ideas and options.
The city also said it would look at potential changes to Colorado water law, including ways to get around aspects of the state’s “use it or lose it” policy, and that it would explore “collaborative partnerships with trans-basin water diverters to retain additional West Slope source water.”
Vote in special meeting
The county’s vote to file a statement of opposition took place Tuesday in a special meeting of the BOCC scheduled after an executive session where the issue was on the agenda.
During the 30-minute meeting, Clapper said she felt it was important for the county to join the water court case so the county and the city could begin talking about alternatives to the dams and reservoirs as soon as next month.
“I believe moving forward with this statement of opposition is really representing the best interests of the people of Pitkin County,” Clapper said. “For me this is difficult to do because we try to be good neighbors and friends with the city of Aspen, but I think there are bigger issues.
“The thought of those dams in those pristine valleys is an overwhelming concept to me and really needs to have great thought and conversation,” she said. “And I’m hoping this next year or so we can be at that table with the city to look at other options before taking this drastic measure.”
After statements of opposition are filed in water court, parties in the case are asked by a court official to spend time exploring settlement opportunities before the case goes before a water court judge. Such settlement discussions are held in private.
Richards, a former mayor of Aspen, said she was against the construction of the dams but said the issue was about both “resources and relationships.”
“I have hard time seeing two different taxing entities spending money fighting each other and it’s the same taxpayers paying that bill,” Richards said.
The funds from the county to oppose the city would come from the county’s Healthy Rivers and Stream Board fund, county attorney John Ely said. The fund’s revenues come from a countywide sales tax of 0.1 percent, or 10 cents on $100.
Richards also said, “I do not support putting dams in either of those areas, but I think it is about the dams themselves versus the issues of protecting the streams. And I don’t see the effort to get rid of the conditional water rights alone as protecting those streams.”
She said she felt the city would proceed in “good faith” when it came to the potential dams and it was not as if bulldozers were warming up to go build them tomorrow.
“I believe time is on our side to develop good solutions and maintain good relationships and put our dollars toward things that will lastingly protect both of those valleys, as well as stream flows on Castle and Maroon,” she said.
Child made similar points, suggesting that perhaps the city’s conditional storage rights could be transformed in some fashion to help maintain water levels in the Colorado River near Grand Junction or in Lake Powell.
And he said the county and the city could work together on such issues over the next six years after the city’s due diligence applications were approved.
“I don’t have the stomach to oppose the city in water court on this,” Child said.
Editor’s note: Aspen Journalism and the Aspen Daily News are collaborating on coverage of rivers and water. More at http://www.aspenjournalism.org.
A topographic map showing the location of the potential Maroon Creek Reservoir. The map was filed by the City of Aspen in Div. 5 Water Court on Oct. 31, 2016 as part of a diligence application.A topographic map showing the location of the potential Castle Creek Reservoir, downstream of Ashcroft. The map was submitted by the City of Aspen as part of its Oct. 31, 2016 diligence filing.Site of proposed maroon creek reservoir via Aspen Journalism.
Oil and gas development on the Roan via Airphotona
Here’s guest column from David Nickum writing in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel:
For more than a decade, the battle over Colorado’s Roan Plateau — a beautiful green oasis surrounded by oil and gas development — raged in meetings and in courtrooms. At issue: Would the “drill, baby, drill” approach to public lands carry the day and the path of unrestrained energy development run over one of Colorado’s most valuable wildlife areas? Or would “lock it up” advocates preclude all development of the Roan’s major natural gas reserves?
Luckily, this story has a happy ending — and a lesson for Colorado and other states in the West struggling with how to balance the need for energy development with conservation of public lands and irreplaceable natural resources.
The Bureau of Land Management recently issued its final plan for the Roan Plateau, closing the most valuable habitat on top of the plateau to oil and gas leases. The plan, which will guide management of the area for the next 20 years, also acknowledges the importance of wildlife habitat corridors connecting to winter range at the base of the plateau.
At the same time, the BLM management plan allows responsible development to proceed in less-sensitive areas of the plateau that harbor promising natural gas reserves and can help meet our domestic energy needs.
What happened? After years of acrimony and lawsuits, stakeholders on all side of the issue sat down and hammered out a balanced solution. Everyone won. It’s too bad it took lawsuits and years of impasse to get all sides to do what they could have done early on: Listen to each other. We all could have saved a lot of time, money and tears.
The Roan example is a lesson to remember, as the incoming administration looks at how to tackle the issue of energy development on public lands. There’s a better way, and it’s working in Colorado.
The BLM also this month, incorporating stakeholder input, closed oil and gas leasing in several critical habitat areas in the Thompson Divide — another Colorado last best place — while permitting leasing to go ahead in adjacent areas.
That plan also represents an acknowledgment that some places are too special to drill, while others can be an important part of meeting our energy needs.
And in the South Park area — a vast recreational playground for the Front Range and an important source of drinking water for Denver and the Front Range — the BLM is moving ahead with a Master Leasing Plan (MLP) for the area that would identify, from the outset, both those places and natural resources that need to be protected and the best places for energy leasing to proceed.
We have said that we want federal agencies in charge of public lands to involve local and state stakeholders more closely in land management planning — that perceived disconnect has been the source of criticism and conflict in the West regarding federal oversight of public lands.
The MLP process is a new tool that promises to address some of that top-down, fragmented approach to public land management. To their credit, the BLM is listening and incorporating suggestions from local ranchers, conservation groups and elected officials into their leasing plan for South Park.
This landscape level, “smart from the start” approach is one way for stakeholders to find consensus on commonsense, balanced solutions that allow careful, responsible energy development to occur while protecting our most valuable natural resources.
The lesson I take from the Roan? We can find solutions through respectful dialogue—and we shouldn’t wait for litigation to do so. [ed. emphasis mine] Coloradoans can meet our needs for energy development and for preserving healthy rivers and lands by talking earlier to each other and looking for common ground.
David Nickum is executive director of Colorado Trout Unlimited.
Photo from the the recent WEN Symposium in Keystone; it was also the first significant snowstorm of the year. Credit Colorado Foundation for Water Education.
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
Water Availability in Colorado Deliberative Forum Guide Published – Ready for Use with High School and College Students
Two Water Educator Network members, and one member of the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education worked with fellow environmental educators across the country, the Kettering Foundation, and the North American Association for Environmental Education to create a framework for deliberation on national and state-specific water issues. In May 2016, the Colorado team tested their draft Colorado framework with two test forums where high school and college-level stakeholders engaged in deliberative decision-making processes focused around water availability across the state. A comprehensive test forum report was produced to contribute to further developing the Colorado Water Issues Deliberation Framework. The team’s work culminated in September 2016 with the completion of a deliberative forum guide for navigating Colorado water quantity issues in high school and post-secondary learning environments.
To download a free pdf of the Colorado Water Availability Deliberative Forum Guide to use with high school and post-secondary learning environments, and for more information about Environmental Issues Forum visit: http://naaee.org/our-work/programs/environmental-issues-forums.
Sally Jewell , US Secretary of the Interior, signed an agreement allowing the Bureau of Reclamation to manage Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell through 2036.
The meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association in Las Vegas included Arizona governor, Doug Ducey , there to protect Arizona’s banked water supplies, held in reserve for drought use in Arizona.
According to the Arizona Daily Sun critics continue to call Glen Canyon Dam unstable and promote its removal.
Representative Rob Bishop, Utah, Chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, believes the plan shortchanges hydropower in favor of fish.
Bishop predicts that higher cost power generation will cause consumers to suffer.
Jewell pointed out that the agreement received five years of study about economic, technical, social and environmental factors, and was supported by states, the National Parks Conservation Association, Western Area Power Administration, the Navajo Nation and six other tribes, Grand Canyon river rafting groups and the public.
Jennifer Gimbel via the State of the Rockies Project
Here’s the release from Colorado State University (Jim Beers):
A former Department of Interior undersecretary and Colorado Water Conservation Board executive director has joined the Colorado Water Institute at Colorado State University. Jennifer Gimbel will serve as CWI’s Senior Water Policy Scholar, where she will be working with key policy stakeholders in the Colorado River Basin to find solutions for shortages that are occurring.
Gimbel was the principal deputy assistant secretary for water and science for the U.S. Department of Interior from 2014 to 2016, during which time she oversaw the department’s water and science policies and was responsible for the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Geological Survey.
Water supply and demand
Gimbel’s experience working with the water community at the state, regional and federal level has proven to be a valuable asset as water managers work to address the widening imbalances between water supply and demand.
“As the drought in the Colorado River basin continues, it is clear that additional measures need to be taken to sustain the system, including demand management,” said Reagan Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute, a unit of the Office of Engagement. “Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Jennifer Gimbel brings unique skills and knowledge that could advance possible solutions, including the development of an Upper Basin Colorado River Water Bank. An Upper Basin Water Bank would assist in creating a market-based system that could help to sustain the health of the river while protecting existing water uses.”
Gimbel believes in a proactive and creative approach to problem-solving, especially in the highly contentious area of water.
“It is imperative that Colorado lead with the other Upper Basin states to address the challenge of sustaining the Colorado River and meeting Colorado River Compact obligations, while dealing with a 17-year drought,” said Gimbel. “The states and their constituents are having many conversations and finding unique ways to work constructively. We need to keep pushing those conversations forward.”
Work with CWCB
Gimbel also served as director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board from 2008 to 2013, where she carried out policies and directives relating to conservation, development and utilization of the state’s water resources. CWCB is widely considered Colorado’s most comprehensive water information resource. She represented Colorado in several interstate activities, including being the governor’s representative for the Colorado River and as one of his appointees to the Western States Water Council.
“The Colorado River Basin is at the foundation of federal law and policy for water issues in the West, and any strategy on sustaining the river must necessarily be cognizant of implications throughout the West,” said Waskom. “Using lessons learned from other large water basins is important in exploring market-based solutions for the Colorado River. The Colorado Water Institute at Colorado State University has extensive experience in conducting stakeholder research and engagement for positive outcomes.”
Water law expert
Gimbel’s career includes experience with the Colorado attorney general’s office and the Wyoming attorney general’s office, where she advised and represented the attorney general and other state officials regarding interstate water matters, water law and administrative law.
She has a bachelor of science and Juris Doctorate from the University of Wyoming and a master of science from the University of Delaware, and has authored numerous articles and presentations on water law, federal reserved water rights and the Endangered Species Act.
Temperatures may rise to as high as 55 F [31 C] above average on December 22nd over sections of the Arctic near the North Pole. Note that this dynamic will tend to drive colder air out over the Continents — especially, in this case, toward Siberia. Also note that global temperatures remain well above average even when compared to the warmer than normal 1979 to 2000 time-frame. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer.From RoberScribbler.com:
A storm in the Greenland Strait is predicted to strengthen to 940 mb intensity on the 20th and 21st. This system is expected to dredge warm air from the tropical North Atlantic and then fling it all the way to the Pole…
As a result, temperatures in the polar region are expected to rise to near or above freezing. According to GFS model runs, the thermometer at 90 North is expected to hit around -0.3 C (31.5 F) at 0400 UTC on December 22. Meanwhile temperatures on the Siberian side of the Pole at 88 North, 109 East are predicted to hit 0.6 C or 33 F during the same time period.
Interior Secretary Jewell and Deputy Secretary Connor announcing milestones for smart western water management December 15, 2016. Photo credit USBR.
Here’s the release from the US Bureau of Reclamation (Interior_press@ios.doi.gov):
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and Deputy Secretary of the Interior Michael L. Connor today celebrated milestones for two collaborative efforts the Interior Department has spearheaded to help secure sustainable water supplies for future generations. They made the announcements at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas.
Glen Canyon Dam releases. Photo via Twitter and Reclamation
First, Secretary Jewell finalized the framework to adaptively manage the Glen Canyon Dam over the next 20 years, with the goal of creating certainty and predictability for water and power users while protecting environmental and cultural resources in Grand Canyon National Park and the Colorado River ecosystem.
“The Colorado River is foundational to the Western economy, and the issues facing it are complex,” said Secretary Jewell. “I applaud the diverse set of partners that came together to develop a plan that will deliver water and power from Glen Canyon Dam, while also protecting the incredible natural and cultural resources that call the Colorado River Basin home.”
Second, the Interior Department released a report showing that projects initiated from 2010-2016 under the Department of the Interior’s WaterSMART program are expected to result in savings of 1.14 million acre-feet of water per year upon completion, the annual household usage of 4.6 million people.
“The WaterSMART program is about collaboration on new ideas and creative solutions to stretch finite water supplies, increase drought resilience, improve environmental conditions, and address the effects of climate change,” said Deputy Secretary Connor. “Through the water conservation and reuse projects funded by WaterSMART across the West, we expect to save enough water to meet the needs of Phoenix annually.”
To develop the Long-term Experimental and Management Plan (LTEMP) for Glen Canyon, the Interior Department conducted a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement involving the Bureau of Reclamation and the National Park Service, along with 15 cooperating agencies, the Navajo Nation and all seven Colorado River Basin States. The Department carefully weighed economic, technical, social and environmental considerations among seven possible alternatives evaluated by the Final Environmental Impact Statement.
The final plan also includes a number of important improvements to enable successful dam operations in compliance with the Grand Canyon Protection Act and other federal statutes and regulations. The plan provides more even monthly volume releases and continues protocols for the High Flow Experiments. As was seen last month, these experimental releases are designed to restore sand features and associated backwater habitats to provide key fish and wildlife habitat, potentially reduce erosion of archaeological sites, restore and enhance riparian vegetation, increase beaches and enhance wilderness values along the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand Canyon National Park.
The LTEMP will not affect the amount of water available annually for communities and agriculture based on the annual water flow between Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Colorado River Basin water allocations are unchanged by the LTEMP Record of Decision. Those allocations and annual deliveries will continue consistent with the Colorado River Compact and other existing statutes, treaties, regulations and agreements governing Colorado River water allocation, appropriation, development and exportation.
The Colorado River Basin is just one area where the Department is working with its partners to address water conservation and other water-saving strategies. Today’s WaterSMART report and data visualization tool details progress made since 2010 to improve water conservation and help water-resource managers narrow the gap between water supply and demand. The WaterSMART Progress Report illustrates in detail how WaterSMART provides a framework through which water managers can develop and adopt innovative solutions that provide a more reliable water supply in a changing climate.
“Reclamation has more than 100 years of experience addressing the water supply and demand needs of the Western United States,” Reclamation Commissioner Estevan López said. “Through collaboration with our partners under WaterSMART, we hope to help ensure water sustainability for another 100 years and beyond.”
As part of WaterSMART, Reclamation provides funding for projects and studies that increase water and energy efficiency, plan for and mitigate drought, develop scientific information and tools to plan for future water needs, and facilitate the creation and advancement of watershed groups.
You can find a fact sheet with accomplishments under the WaterSMART program here.
Here’s the abstract from the USGS (Steven M. Peterson, Amanda T. Flynn, and Jonathan P. Traylor):
The High Plains aquifer is a nationally important water resource underlying about 175,000 square miles in parts of eight states: Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. Droughts across much of the Northern High Plains from 2001 to 2007 have combined with recent (2004) legislative mandates to elevate concerns regarding future availability of groundwater and the need for additional information to support science-based water-resource management. To address these needs, the U.S. Geological Survey began the High Plains Groundwater Availability Study to provide a tool for water-resource managers and other stakeholders to assess the status and availability of groundwater resources.
A transient groundwater-flow model was constructed using the U.S. Geological Survey modular three-dimensional finite-difference groundwater-flow model with Newton-Rhapson solver (MODFLOW–NWT). The model uses an orthogonal grid of 565 rows and 795 columns, and each grid cell measures 3,281 feet per side, with one variably thick vertical layer, simulated as unconfined. Groundwater flow was simulated for two distinct periods: (1) the period before substantial groundwater withdrawals, or before about 1940, and (2) the period of increasing groundwater withdrawals from May 1940 through April 2009. A soil-water-balance model was used to estimate recharge from precipitation and groundwater withdrawals for irrigation. The soil-water-balance model uses spatially distributed soil and landscape properties with daily weather data and estimated historical land-cover maps to calculate spatial and temporal variations in potential recharge. Mean annual recharge estimated for 1940–49, early in the history of groundwater development, and 2000–2009, late in the history of groundwater development, was 3.3 and 3.5 inches per year, respectively.
Primary model calibration was completed using statistical techniques through parameter estimation using the parameter estimation suite of software with Tikhonov regularization. Calibration targets for the groundwater model included 343,067 groundwater levels measured in wells and 10,820 estimated monthly stream base flows at streamgages. A total of 1,312 parameters were adjusted during calibration to improve the match between calibration targets and simulated equivalents. Comparison of calibration targets to simulated equivalents indicated that, at the regional scale, the model correctly reproduced groundwater levels and stream base flows for 1940–2009. This comparison indicates that the model can be used to examine the likely response of the aquifer system to potential future stresses.
Mean calibrated recharge for 1940–49 and 2000–2009 was smaller than that estimated with the soil-water-balance model. This indicated that although the general spatial patterns of recharge estimated with the soil-water-balance model were approximately correct at the regional scale of the Northern High Plains aquifer, the soil-water-balance model had overestimated recharge, and adjustments were needed to decrease recharge to improve the match of the groundwater model to calibration targets. The largest components of the simulated groundwater budgets were recharge from precipitation, recharge from canal seepage, outflows to evapotranspiration, and outflows to stream base flow. Simulated outflows to irrigation wells increased from 7 percent of total outflows in 1940–49 to 38 percent of 1970–79 total outflows and 49 percent of 2000–2009 total outflows.
Following a closed-door session on Longmont’s water supply, the City Council tabled some of the water rate increases that were slated to start on Jan. 1.
The water rates were slated to increase by 17 percent in both 2017 and 2018, 8 percent of which in both years would go toward financing Longmont’s 10,000 acre-feet participation level in the Windy Gap Firming Project. However, on Tuesday, council decided rates will rise 9 percent in both years.
The council voted unanimously to table the water rate increase, which was on second reading Tuesday, until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issues a 404 permit for the Windy Gap Firming Project.
While design work is ongoing for the Windy Gap Firming Project, no construction work can start until the Corps issues the permit, Dale Rademacher, Longmont general manager of public works and natural resources, told the council Tuesday. While staff hoped it would come before the end of 2016, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Colorado’s economy depends on water: where it is, where the people who need it live and work, who has rights to it. Fights over those needs are a core part of the state’s history, and they tend to follow a pattern. So in some ways, the fight over the Fraser River in Colorado’s Grand County is familiar.
Denver Water holds unused water rights on the river, which starts in the shadow of Berthoud Pass and courses down the western side of the Continental Divide past Winter Park, Fraser and Tabernash to join the Colorado River outside of Granby.
Workers pose for a photo in the Moffat Water Tunnel in this 1930 photo.
The agency, looking at the booming population and economy in Denver, now wants to exercise those rights. That means taking more water from the river, piping it under the Indian Peaks and sending it into Gross Reservoir near Boulder.
Some conservationists and environmental groups are crying foul, saying that the river has already been overtaxed (about 60 percent of its existing flow is already diverted to slake Denver’s growing thirst) and it’s time to let the river alone.
But the fight’s pattern is taking some unfamiliar twists and turns. Influential groups like Trout Unlimited and American Rivers, who’ve historically fought diversion projects, support this one. In exchange, Denver Water says it will will help protect and enhance what’s left of the Fraser River.
That compromise has fractured traditional lines in Colorado’s conservation and environmental advocacy community, and fostered new alliances. While these organizations more or less agree on their ultimate goal — to protect and restore the environment — the strategies they use are very different. The big question that divides them: When to compromise?
Denver Water Extends An Olive Branch
Decades ago, environmentalists were not at the top of list of Denver Water’s concerns when it would try to build dams and add capacity. In the 1980s, environmental groups pushed back on a huge proposed dam called Two Forks.
“[Denver Water] told us in so many words: ‘We’re the experts. You’re little environmentalists. Get out of the way,’ ” Dan Luecke, then head of Environmental Defense Fund’s Rocky Mountain office, told High Country News in 2000.
Then, in 1990, an EPA veto torpedoed the project at the last minute.
“That was really a turning point for our organization,” said Kevin Urie, a scientist who’s worked for Denver Water for nearly 30 years. “I think we realized with the veto of Two Forks that we needed to think about things differently.”
He believes that while Denver Water has long taken environmental impacts into consideration with its plans, it didn’t engage with local stakeholders — like conservation and environmental groups and Western Slope governments — until after the Two Forks project died.
There’s a demographic change underway as well: Many of the Denver metro area’s new residents also want to play in Western Slope rivers on the weekends. That has pushed Denver Water leadership to put a larger emphasis on environmental stewardship, Urie said.
But all those new residents still need water. Denver Water delivers water to about 1.4 million people across the metro, about double what it did some 60 years ago. Conservation efforts have kept overall demand relatively low in recent years. But with more people moving to Denver every day, Denver Water expects its demand to rise 37 percent by 2032 from 2002 levels.
The Fraser River is key to Denver Water’s plan to head off a shortfall in the relatively near future. The agency wants to divert half of the remaining flows from the Fraser and its tributaries through the Moffat Tunnel to Gross Reservoir near Boulder. (The proposed expansion of Gross has started its own fight, which CPR News’ Grace Hood chronicled last month.) It would be treated at the agency’s plant in Lakewood, and eventually delivered to customers across the metro.
The agency expects to have all of its necessary permits by 2018 and construction could begin in 2019 or 2020. But to get those permits, Denver Water has agreed to be part of a group that includes Grand County officials and environmentalists called “Learning by Doing.” These different players are often at odds when it comes to water issues.
Urie said Denver Water’s participation shows its desire to do right by the environment and local stakeholders. They’ve helped fund an ambitious project that will engineer the Fraser River’s flow on a nearly mile-long stretch between Fraser and Tabernash, squeezing it to make it narrower, deeper and colder — and thus healthier.
But is that what’s best for the river?
Urie thought about that question for a minute, and then chose his words carefully:
“Clearly the system would be better if we weren’t using the water resources for other uses. But that’s not the scenario we are dealing with,” Urie said.
Trout Unlimited Sees Opportunity
The Fraser River project’s biggest booster is Kirk Klancke, president of the Colorado River Headwaters Chapter of Trout Unlimited. For him personally, it’s a way to help a river that he’s lived near and played in for 45 years.
“I can’t talk about it without getting all emotional. My life’s been spent on this river,” he said.
He sees it as a chance to restore a part of the river popular with anglers called the Fraser Flats. Here, the brush-lined river levels out after tumbling through the pine forests of Berthoud Pass.
His playground is popular with others, too. Grand County is a short one- to two-hour drive from Denver. From fly fishing to alpine and nordic skiing to snowmobiling, it’s a tourist-based economy. And in Klancke’s eyes, all of that rests on the health of its water.
He’s watched the river dwindle and get warmer as more water has been pulled out of it. And that’s changed how his family has used it. When his children were young, they could stay in the river for only a minute or two.
“They’d come out and their lips would be purple and they’d be squealing,” Klancke said. “Now I throw my grandchildren in the river and they’re not in a hurry to get out. We spend up to an hour in a pool in the river.”
He’s watched this river that means so much to him get sicker and sicker; warm, shallow channels aren’t suitable for native fish and bugs. For years, he blamed the deteriorating environment on the Front Range and its water managers.
“I was a little radical because I urinated in diversion ditches. It’s about all I knew to do. I’ve matured quite a bit since then,” he said.
His turning point came when he got involved with Trout Unlimited.
“I loved their approach,” he said. “They were able to look at it in someone else’s shoes, which is what all mature people do. And then, move forward with opening up conversation.”
Such conversations are what led to the Fraser Flats project, Klancke said. When flows are low, like they were this fall, the river is shallow as it stretches across its native bed. The new channel will allow the river to recede and stay deeper — and cooler.
Essentially, that stretch of river will be turned into a creek. On its face, downsizing a river doesn’t sound like a big victory for environmentalists. But that’s not how Klancke looks at it. During peak flows in the spring, Klancke points out, the river will be nearly just as wild as it is now.
And moreover, Denver Water has to stay involved in the Learning by Doing group. So if environmental issues arise down the road, Klancke said the agency will be there to help solve them.
Is it a compromise? Yes, Klancke admits. But water managers own water rights in the upper Colorado Basin that they’ll use — with or without his blessing. The right to divert water for “beneficial uses” is enshrined in the Colorado Constitution.
“We have to face reality here,” Klancke said. “There is no more mighty Upper Colorado. There’s only keeping what’s left healthy.” [ed. emphasis mine]
WildEarth Guardians Stakes Out Moral High Ground
Like Klancke, Jen Pelz, wild river program director for WildEarth Guardians, has had her own evolution in thought toward environmental causes. Earlier in her career, she was a water lawyer in Denver who represented clients like the city of Pueblo that were taking water from Western Slope rivers.
But eventually she felt a pull toward environmental advocacy. Pelz credits that with childhood days spent on the banks of a tributary to the Rio Grande in New Mexico.
“It was kind of the place that I could go just be myself,” she said. “I developed a really strong connection to the river there.”
She was drawn to the confrontational, no-holds-barred approach used by WildEarth Guardians. The group is known for its headline-grabbing lawsuits. Most recently they sued the federal government over haze in Western Colorado and leases to coal mines.
The approach seems to be working, at least by WildEarth Guardian’s measure. The haze lawsuit ended in an agreement where a coal mine and coal-fired power plant in Nucla, south of Grand Junction, will shut down in the next six years. A power plant in Craig, Colorado will shut down one of its units too.
“We’re willing to not be liked by the general public, or by particular industries,” Pelz said. “And I think it takes that kind of moral integrity and just knowing where you stand on the issues, to really push the envelope.” [ed. emphasis mine]
Pelz is not interested in compromise on the Fraser River. She faults Trout Unlimited for starting negotiations at the wrong place. In her view, the baseline shouldn’t be where the river is now with about 60 percent of it being diverted. The conversation needs to start with the river at its natural flows, she said.
“The harm has already been done,” Pelz said.
If the Fraser River is going to be saved, she says, it’ll happen by letting more water back into the river — not by taking more out. As the climate warms, she says the river will need all the help it can get.
“Let’s start dealing with it now. Let’s have that hard conversation now, not 50 years from now when there’s no water left to have a conversation about,” she says.
Pelz says her organization, and another group called Save the Colorado, are considering litigation once final permits are approved. That could happen in 2018.
Such tactics doesn’t make Pelz a lot of friends. She said she’s been ostracized from her former clique of water lawyers. It’s hard for her to get meetings with government regulators.
WildEarth Guardians’ relationship with the greater environmental community is similarly strained. She said Denver Water is more willing to meet with environmentalists now because they’ve softened. And she’s upset with what Trout Unlimited has become in the eyes of regulators.
“Trout Unlimited has been deemed by Denver Water and the state of Colorado as being the environmental voice,” Pelz said. “They get invited to the table because they have this role in communities, which I don’t think is a bad thing, but they don’t necessarily represent all of the different interests in the environmental community.”
As a result, she said, groups like hers are being left out of the conversation.
“They don’t talk to us. They don’t ask us what we think. And I’ve called them. And I’ve had meetings with them. I’ve asked them what they think. And they’ve told me they don’t like our approach. And I understand that. But I think that it works both ways.”
Pelz said it can be hard to be out “towing the left line.” Everybody likes to be liked, she said. But she’s decided that over the long run, her methods are what will make a difference. To do anything else would be surrender.
“I don’t want to have to explain to my kids that I gave up the fight for this river that is the namesake of our state, the state they were born in, because I was willing to compromise,” she said. “We may not win, but damn we are going to try.”
American Rivers Finds Room To Maneuver
When Matt Rice, Colorado River basin director for American Rivers took the job a few years ago, he made the decision to put aside his dreams for what he really wanted. Instead, he focuses on what he thinks he can actually pull off.
“In a perfect world, I’d like to see all the wild rivers in this country and in this state flowing freely and filled with fish, doing what rivers should do,” Rice said. “It’s not realistic.”
But he acknowledges that groups like WildEarth Guardians can make his job easier at times. When Guardians files a lawsuit and makes a bunch of people mad, a group like his can step in and talk with state regulators and businesses. Guardians essentially provides cover for groups closer to the political center, he said.
“Their advocacy pushes everybody, not just conservation organizations, kind of further to the left. And I think that’s good,” Rice said.
But there’s a downside. Lawsuits and sharply worded press releases can sting, and are not easily forgotten. And Rice worries that aggressive tactics from far-left groups lead to skeptical parties like ranchers or Front Range water managers lumping all environmentalists together.
“That has the potential to undermine the progress we’re making,” he said.
Looking To The Future
A screenshot from the website for Colorado’s Water Plan.
With the publication of last year’s Colorado Water Plan, a first for the state, officials are trying to turn the page on Colorado’s long fight over water. The plan, which officials describe as a roadmap to sustainability, stresses collaboration between competing interests and conservation of the increasingly precious resource.
“Now is the time to rethink how we can be more efficient,” Gov. John Hickenlooper said at the water plan’s introduction in November 2015.
Diverting more water should be the last-possible solution, Hickenlooper said. That’s welcome news to environmentalists like Matt Rice of American Rivers.
Rice said they are supportive of the Fraser River diversion plan for the same reasons Trout Unlimited is, though they aren’t part of the Learning by Doing group. But he hopes the Fraser diversion, and another major project in the works called Windy Gap, are the last trans-mountain diversion projects.
There just isn’t enough water on the Western Slope, he said. And if another one comes up, Rice said they’ll fight it with everything they have.
“We’re kind of at the cliff right now in the Colorado River Basin,” he said.
Collaboration and compromise will certainly be part of environmentalism’s future in Colorado. But as groups like WildEarth Guardians continue to find success in the courts, the advocacy ecosystem has room for other strategies too.
A long-term plan for protecting Lake Mead and preventing severe shortages in deliveries of Colorado River water to Arizona and two other states won’t be approved before the Obama administration ends, throwing more uncertainty into the outlook.
While the three states keep discussing a drought contingency plan, Arizona water officials say they’ve reached general agreement with water users here for a shorter-term fix for Lake Mead’s chronic declines.
The Arizona plan calls for cities, farms and Indian tribes to keep enough water in Mead through 2019 to lower the risks of the first round of shortages of Central Arizona Project water deliveries. Such shortages would hurt agriculture significantly, although not enough to threaten viability of the CAP, which delivers drinking water to Tucson and Phoenix and irrigation water to central Arizona farmers.
Federal and state water officials announced at [the Colorado River Water Users Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas] last week that too many issues remain unresolved to wrap up the major regional drought plan, in the works for three and a half years. They’re optimistic agreement can be reached next year and perhaps in the first few months. They said they hope that if they’re close to agreement, the new Trump administration won’t want to change it radically.
The Arizona plan can act as a bridge, helping the over-allocated Colorado River water system until a long-term plan is in place, said Arizona Water Resources Department and CAP officials at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference.
Standing in the way of the short-term fix, however, is money. It will cost up to $60 million to compensate Arizona users who give up their CAP water to make the short-term plan work, said Terry Fulp, Lower Colorado regional director for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the river reservoir system.
Asked how confident he is of finding that money in the next few months, Fulp replied, “That’s a really good question. I don’t know if we have a really good answer. All I can tell you is that we’re working hard to do that.”
Meanwhile, standing in the way of the long-term fix are two longstanding water disputes in California. One is the fate of the Salton Sea in the southern California desert, which in January 2018 is slated to lose 200,000 acre feet of water that’s to be transferred to San Diego under a 2003 agreement.
At that point, many authorities are worried that the exposed playa’s salt and heavy-metal tainted soils will blow around, triggering massive air pollution.
The sea’s water is runoff from the neighboring Imperial Valley Irrigation District, which controls huge amounts of Colorado River water and is reluctant to give up more under the proposed drought plan unless something can be done to shore up the sea. It wants to see a detailed “road map” outlining what California will do to fix the looming problems there.
The other is a $15 billion proposal to build twin tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to improve the reliability of water deliveries from northern to southern California.
The Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles wants to see progress toward building the tunnels — which are heavily opposed by other groups — to ensure that it will have enough other water if it gives up Colorado River water under the drought agreement.
Sally Jewell signing the Long Term and Experimental Management Plan Record of Decision for Glen Canyon Dam December 15, 2016.
From the Associated Press (Ken Ritter) via The Washington Post:
The federal government is committing to at least another 20 years of use of a huge Colorado River dam that officials call crucial to states in the West, but that critics say is unstable and should be removed.
“Politics belong out of this, because water is life,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at a conference of key water managers in Las Vegas. She signed an agreement that allows the federal Bureau of Reclamation to manage Glen Canyon Dam and the Lake Powell reservoir in Arizona through 2036.
The agreement “provides certainty and predictability to those that use water and power from the dam,” Jewell said, while also providing environmental protection for fish and wildlife in the Grand Canyon, through which the dam sends water to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam near Las Vegas…
Jewell told reporters the agreement received five years of study about economic, technical, social and environmental factors, and was supported by states, the National Parks Conservation Association, Western Area Power Administration, the Navajo Nation and six other tribes, Grand Canyon river rafting groups and the public…
She said the so-called Long-term Experimental and Management Plan won’t change water allocations for the basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — or Mexico.
But drought might. Jewell spoke several times of a 50-50 chance that a drought declaration will be made next August, forcing cuts in water deliveries beginning in January 2018 to Arizona and Nevada.
Under various treaties, regulations, statutes and agreements including the Colorado River Compact of 1922, seven states are promised a share of about 15 million acre-feet of water the river was projected to take in annually from rainfall and snowmelt. Drought has cut that figure, and officials acknowledge the available supply today falls short of promised amounts.
Anne Castle, a former assistant Interior Department Interior secretary who spent years working on Colorado River issues and now heads a research program at the University of Colorado, called the decision that Jewell signed important for the West. She said revenue from power produced at the dam pay for endangered species, environmental management and reclamation programs.
Several months ago, managers of water agencies in California, Arizona and Nevada were expressing optimism they could finalize a deal to use less water from the dwindling Colorado River before the end of the Obama administration.
Now that Jan. 20 deadline no longer seems achievable and parties to the talks acknowledge they likely won’t be able to finish an agreement until at least several months into President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
With Lake Mead’s water level hovering near record low levels, representatives of the three states, water agencies and the federal government say they’ve made progress in negotiating the so-called Drought Contingency Plan, which would involve temporarily drawing less water from the reservoir near Las Vegas to avert a more severe shortage. The deal is being held up by complications, though, and one of the major sticking points is the Salton Sea.
Managers of the Imperial Valley’s water district, which is the largest single user of Colorado River water, are demanding California officials first present a detailed plan for addressing the Salton Sea’s accelerating decline. They say they want to see a credible “road map” for dealing with the thousands of acres of lakebed that will be left exposed in the coming years and that could turn their valley into a dust bowl, posing a serious public health hazard.
So far, they say they’re still far from satisfied.
“There has got to be a going-forward plan we can believe in at the Salton Sea,” said Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District. “We remain willing, but we’ve got to be able to answer this open question at the Salton Sea.”
Kelley has been voicing that stance for months, and he reiterated his concerns on Thursday in Las Vegas, where he and other managers of water districts from across the West were attending the annual conference of the Colorado River Water Users Association.
“We’ve had more progress at the Salton Sea in the last 14 months than we’ve had in the last 14 years,” Kelley said in a telephone interview. “So we’re closer than we’ve ever been to a breakthrough that the region could believe in. But that isn’t going to be enough. We need to cross the finish line together. And it may be that time’s run out with the current administration and that it extends into the next one.”
After substantial progress in negotiations on the proposed Colorado River drought plan, “the outline of a deal is there,” Kelley said, and IID would like to participate by temporarily storing some of its water in Lake Mead. “But we have this problem at the Salton Sea, that we’ve got to have a clear path forward on in order to participate.”
His district’s unresolved concerns reflect the complexity of the negotiations on the over-allocated and drought-stricken Colorado River. Recalibrating water flows to keep more water in Lake Mead and boost its levels will inevitably lead to less farm runoff flowing into the Salton Sea, which will further accelerate its decline at a time when the Imperial Valley is already transferring increasing quantities of water to cities in San Diego County and the Coachella Valley.
Last month, Kelley laid down a deadline and called for the state to present a plan for the Salton Sea by Dec. 31.
A week ago, the Imperial Irrigation District received an internal draft of the state’s 10-year plan. Kelley said it’s too soon to pass judgment on the unfinished document, but based on his initial review, “it still lacks the specificity that we called for.”
The document, which was obtained by The Desert Sun, summarizes the state’s proposals for a “smaller but sustainable lake” and lays out broad goals for building new wetlands along the lake’s receding shores to cover up stretches of exposed lake bottom and provide habitat for birds.
The document says an estimated 50,000 acres of “playa” will be left dry and exposed around the lake by 2028. The construction of “water backbone infrastructure” is to begin with ponds where water from the lake’s tributaries will be routed to create new wetlands. According to the 24-page document, which describes the Salton Sea Management Program, initial construction will start on exposed lakebed west of the mouth of the New River “to take advantage of existing permits.”
The draft says that in addition to building wetlands, the state also will use “waterless dust suppression” techniques in some areas. Those approaches can include using tractors to plow stretches of lakebed to create dust-catching furrows, or even laying down bales of hay on the exposed lake bottom as barriers to block windblown dust.
Kelley said the document lacks key details on funding and timing. He pointed out that it also doesn’t mention the proposed Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan, or DCP.
“The milestones are, I think, still ambiguous and certainly not enforceable,” Kelley said. “As it stands today, based on what we’ve seen in this response from the state, we cannot participate in a DCP.”
Bruce Wilcox, who was appointed last year by Gov. Jerry Brown to lead the state’s efforts at the Salton Sea, said he expects more details will be added to the plan before it’s publicly released later this month. He pointed out that the plan does include a schedule for the construction of projects, with the aim of keeping up with the rate at which the lakeshore recedes.
“I’m sure IID wants more. It’s difficult to give them more,” Wilcox said. “The next level of detail is where you actually start construction drawings.”
After years of delays, state officials budgeted more than $80 million this year to start building canals and wetlands at the Salton Sea. The federal government announced $30 million this year to support projects at the sea, and newly passed federal water legislation includes an additional $30 million. The state’s 10-year plan will likely cost much more, and it’s not clear where the money will come from.
Wilcox said state officials will prepare an analysis of the costs and funding in the next several weeks.
The Salton Sea was accidentally created between 1905 and 1907, when Colorado River water broke through irrigation canals in the Imperial Valley and flooded into the basin. Since then, the lake has been sustained largely by runoff from the Imperial Valley’s farms, which produce hay, wheat and vegetables like carrots and Brussels sprouts.
A 2003 water transfer deal is sending increasing amounts of water out of the Imperial Valley, and flows of “mitigation water” to the sea will also be cut off after 2017, accelerating the lake’s decline.
Kelley said the state’s plan, as it stands now, seems too ambiguous at a time when the lake is about to shrink so dramatically. The Imperial Valley is already struggling with high asthma rates, and the sea’s decline threatens to release more dust laden with salt, heavy metals and pesticides.
“This is about an existential threat to the public health of the region that we all live in,” Kelley said. “It is unsustainable, untenable that we continue to transfer these large volumes of water outside the region at the same time that we lack any coherent plan – or have any confidence in the clear obligation that we see the state having at the Salton Sea.”
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also attended the conference, where she met with representatives of states across the Colorado River basin. She expressed optimism that the states will keep making progress toward a deal, and that the U.S. and Mexico are close to finalizing an agreement to replace a Colorado River water accord that expires in 2017.
“We have an agreement that is pending with Mexico that we need to get across the finish line in order to address our water needs between the two countries and a balancing of that, and that has to take first priority,” Jewell told reporters. As for the negotiations between the states, she said, “we want to get as far as we possibly can, and that’s what we’re going to be urging everybody to do.”
Jewell signed a new 20-year framework for managing Glen Canyon Dam and touted government programs that have produced significant water-savings across the Colorado River basin in recent years.
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
Storage Continues Above Average
December 1 water storage levels in the Colorado Big-Thompson Project remain above average, with total C-BT Project storage at 540,028 acre-feet (Dec 1 average is 444,533 AF). With statewide snowpack slightly below normal, above-average C-BT storage is good news.
WWith the prospect of reduced Colorado River deliveries as early as 2018, U.S. and Mexican negotiators have been in a race against the clock to forge an agreement that involves sharing any future shortages — and are hoping for a signing before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20th.
Water managers on both sides of the border say the accord will be crucial in spelling out how the United States and Mexico would take cuts when a shortage is declared on the river, a lifeline for some 40 million people in both countries.
The draft also contains provisions for continuing the restoration of wetlands in the Colorado River delta and extending agricultural water conservation programs in the Mexicali Valley, as well as allowing Mexico to continue storing water in Lake Mead.
The proposed agreement, known as a “minute” is an extension of the 1944 U.S.-Mexico water treaty on the Colorado River that allots Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet annually — enough for up to 3 million households. The agreement would succeed an existing bilateral agreement, Minute 319, that is set to expire at the end of 2017.
“We’re trying to build on the trust that we had in Minute 319,” said Edward Drusina, who as head of the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) is the chief U.S. negotiator. The proposed minute “is good for the United States and good for Mexico, and we will do what we can to move it forward,” Drusina said in remarks delivered in Las Vegas on Friday at a conference organized by the Colorado River Water Users Association.
Because many of the key players at the federal level are expected to leave office next month, there is rising uncertainty over how much support for such an agreement can be expected under future Trump appointees. Beyond that, some are fearful that the collaboration between the United States and Mexico on the issue could be tainted by the politically heated rhetoric that the new administration has brought to other bilateral issues with Mexico such as trade and immigration.
“This great example of binational cooperation should not be derailed by unrelated political issues,” said Anne Castle, a former assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Interior, and now a senior scholar at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado.
“The collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico on binational management of this river that we share is extraordinary, and that is something to be celebrated and continued and supported,” Castle said.
While a shortage has never been declared on the river, water managers say that this could happen as early as 2018 if the levels in Lake Mead continue to drop. Earlier this year, the reservoir fell to its lowest level since the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.
“These are two countries that badly need each other at a time of water shortage on the Colorado,” said Stephen Mumme, a political science professor at Colorado State University and an expert on water and environmental issues on the U.S.-Mexico border. With treaty rights to its water, “Mexico has a pretty good hand to play, but it wants to cooperate with the United States, and it needs the storage upstream,” Mumme said.
The talks between the United States and Mexico, which have been taking place since 2015, are being led by the IBWC and its Mexican counterpart, Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas (CILA). “The minute will have the same basic sections as Minute 319 but will be updated appropriately,” said Sally Spener, foreign affairs officer for the IBWC.
Signed in 2012 in Coronado, Minute 319 involved unprecedented binational cooperation on the Colorado River and for the first time in the treaty’s history recognition of the environment as a water user. Its provisions included a “pulse flow” of a large volume of Colorado River water during an eight-week period in 2014 delivered to wetlands in Mexico that have been getting little water due to diversion upstream for urban and agricultural users.
Another component of Minute 319 involved a collaboration among three U.S. water agencies — the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Central Arizona Project and the Southern Nevada Water Authority — and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to pay $18 million for water conservation projects in Mexico. In exchange, they were to receive 124,000 acre-feet of Mexican water being stored at Lake Mead.
“The value of working with Mexico is key,” said Bill Hasencamp, Colorado River Resources manager for the Metropolitan Water District. “If we’re not done by January, that doesn’t mean we still don’t have an agreement with Mexico. We want to make sure it’s done right rather than done fast.”
Approving the agreement before the end of January “is going to be a challenge, because we’re running up against the clock,” said Tina Shields, the water department manager of of the Imperial Irrigation District. “Obviously people are moving very quickly now.”
The outcome of the talks is being followed with equally intense interest by the San Diego County Water Authority, which imports two-thirds of the region’s supply from the Colorado River.
The lower Colorado basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada are working on their own drought contingency plan which must be approved before the water scarcity provisions in the binational agreement can be made effective.
The states’ agreement would parallel the binational water scarcity provision with Mexico under the new accord, so that if the lower basin states take cuts under their contingency plan, so would Mexico, said Tanya Trujillo, who is representing California in the bilateral talks.
Trujillo, who is executive director of the Colorado River Board of California, was doubtful Friday that all the different provisions would be worked out before January. “There’s still a lot of us working on a lot different components.”
The IBWC’s Spener said “we think there is a path forward that would not require the drought contingency plan” among the lower basin states to be adopted before the binational agreement can be signed.
Spener could not say whether the work on the agreement will be concluded by the time Trump takes office. “We don’t have a specific timeline, but we continue to work,” Spener said. “Commissioner Drusina has instructed his staff to continue to work, and that’s what we’re continuing to do.”
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
This year has been an exciting one, and the Hutchins Water Center is looking forward to continued progress in 2017 in pursuing our mission to perform and facilitate interdisciplinary and collaborative research, education, outreach, and dialogue to address the water issues facing the Upper Colorado River Basin.
We got a tremendous response to our spring screening of the documentary River of Sorrows: Inheriting Today’s Dolores River. The reception, screening and panel discussion created the kind of convivial, entertaining and thoughtful atmosphere we seek to create as we enlarge the community of informed water thinkers in the region.
Flood irrigation in the Arkansas Valley via Greg Hobbs
Here’s a guest column from James Eklund and Russ George that’s running in the The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel:
One year ago, Gov. Hickenlooper presented Colorado’s Water Plan, the result of unprecedented statewide collaboration over 2½ years to ensure sufficient water supplies to keep our cities, farms and environment thriving even as Colorado is expected to add millions of people in coming decades.
Since that time, the Colorado Water Conservation Board and its many partners have started the work of implementing the plan, a process that will unfold over years and be carried forward by all those involved in our water future: ranchers, farmers, cities, water utilities, environmentalists, anglers, developers and many more who care deeply about water’s central place in our beautiful state.
Colorado’s Water Plan includes a series of actions, processes and metrics that put the state and its eight major river basins on a more collaborative path to manage our water in the face of constrained supplies and rising population. These include criteria to guide new storage projects, goals to more smartly share water between farms and cities without the dry-up of agricultural lands, steps to improve degraded streamways and methods and benchmarks for water conservation.
The public has been a full participant in the development of Colorado’s Water Plan, with more than 30,000 comments helping shape the document. Direction from nine basin roundtables representing local interests within each river basin formed the backbone of the document. With such deep public involvement to craft the plan, it’s important Coloradans stay engaged in the work so many are doing to implement it. Through a website, http://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cowaterplan, and updates like this one we are devoted to sharing progress on the plan. Among our many steps forward:
Storage: CWCB is financially supporting a variety of water storage innovations, including a study of options in the South Platte Basin, exploring groundwater storage technology and a spillway analysis to identify places where existing storage could be expanded; water representatives across jurisdictions began work to streamline federal permitting while maintaining strong environmental protections.
Agriculture: The CWCB and other stakeholders are continuing to explore creative ways to support the temporary transfer of agricultural water that protects farming and meets the water plan goal of sharing 50,000 acre of water by 2050. Workshops and conferences geared toward this end continue and a pilot project in the Arkansas River Basin is in its second year with favorable results.
Environment and recreation: CWCB is securing $5 million for work with basin roundtables and other groups to develop watershed restoration and stream management plans to improve waterways and water quality. The CWCB, in partnership with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Denver Water and The Greenway Foundation, is funding a large “environmental pool” at Chatfield Reservoir to improve flows and fisheries in the South Platte River through the metro area.
Supply and Demand Planning: The update for the latest Statewide Water Supply Initiative began this year and will refresh Colorado’s baseline information on water supplies, data critical to work outlined in the water plan. CWCB and the Interbasin Compact Committee are revising Water Supply Reserve Fund criteria to ensure funding requests for water-related projects meet a standard that aligns with water plan goals and measurable outcomes.
These examples serve as only a sampling of the work launching in 2016 to implement Colorado’s Water Plan. Other activities across the state, including major storage projects that won the state of Colorado’s seal of approval using water plan criteria and a near-term funding plan to support storage, education, conservation, reuse and agricultural actions called for in the plan, also signal initial implementation steps.
The CWCB is moving on many fronts to ensure Colorado’s Water Plan unfolds in a way that assures we manage our precious water supplies to preserve the best of Colorado while allowing cities, farms and our environment to flourish amid continued growth. In the same way the CWCB, General Assembly, water providers, agricultural organizations, environmental groups, local governments, business and the public at large collaborated to build Colorado’s Water Plan, we look forward to our continued work together to put the plan to work.
James Eklund is the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Russ George is chairman of the 15-member board governing CWCB staff.
Click here to to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
Summary
During the first half of the U.S. Drought Monitor week, one low pressure system tracked from the North Dakota/Minnesota border towards James Bay, Canada to the mouth of the St. Lawrence Valley, while a second low pressure system raced from the Lower Tennessee Valley to the mid-Atlantic coast. The first storm system brought moderately heavy snow to the Great Lakes region (especially downwind areas) and gusty winds to North Dakota and Minnesota, while the second storm was accompanied by widespread rainfall. During the second half of the Drought Monitor week, another frontal system moved across the central and eastern Lower 48 states, bringing additional precipitation to those regions…
Northern and Central Plains
Recent snowstorms across the northern Plains justified the removal of abnormal dryness (D0) across much of south-central North Dakota. This is clearly supported by the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS) 60-day Percent of Normal Precipitation (PNP) map, which shows precipitation amounts have ranged from 150-300 percent of normal. Having made substantial revisions to the South Dakota depiction last week, no changes were deemed necessary. The one exception was the Impact Label, which was modified to include both short-term and long-term impacts (SL), to be more representative of conditions across the Black Hills region…
Southern Plains
Primarily deteriorations were made to the depiction in Oklahoma and Texas this week. Severe drought (D2) was expanded across the Panhandle region and into adjacent counties of northwestern Oklahoma. Severe drought was also expanded across central portions of the state, while moderate drought (D1) areas were merged across central Oklahoma. In extreme eastern Oklahoma, lack of rainfall and dry ponds warranted a one-category degradation across central and northeastern portions of Wagoner County, and across much of Mayes County. The impact lines and labels were reassessed this week across these areas, based on departure from normal precipitation (DNPs) out to 180-days, and on the latest drought blends…
Rockies/Intermountain Region
No alterations were made in these areas this week. Idaho experts note there is still some low snowpack in the far eastern county of Clark and environs, while, in contrast, conditions in the Owyhee Mountains (located in the southwestern part of the state) have improved. Some improvements in the Idaho depiction may be forthcoming in the weeks ahead, especially if the current wet pattern continues…
Pacific Northwest and California
Water Year to Date (since Oct 1) PNPs are well above-normal (mostly 125-200 percent) in much of Washington, western Oregon, and a large fraction of the northwestern half of California. Across the far southeastern California deserts, practically no rain has fallen since Oct 1, with PNPs ranging within the lowest 25 percent of normal. As this is still fairly early in the Water Year (WY), and reservoirs and groundwater supplies are still being assessed and evaluated, no changes were deemed necessary to the regional depiction this week…
Looking Ahead
Expected precipitation in the next five days (December 15-19) is expected to be moderate to heavy (1.0-2.5 inches) from the central Gulf Coast area north-northeastward across the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys, the Great Lakes region, the mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast. Though this will be beneficial to these regions, it may not be quite enough to justify a one-category improvement for next week. For South Dakota, precipitation amounts are anticipated to range between 0.5-1.0 inch. In the higher elevations of the northern and central Rockies, and for the Mogollon Rim in central Arizona, precipitation amounts are forecast to range from 1.5 to 3.5 inches (liquid equivalent). Coastal California is also anticipated to receive significant precipitation during this period, on the order of 1.5-2.5 inches. Higher amounts (perhaps up to 10-inches, liquid equivalent) are forecast in the climatologically wetter areas of far northwestern California, and the Sierras. For the ensuing five-day period (December 20-24), above-median precipitation is favored for the Lower Mississippi and Tennessee Valleys, the Southeast and southern mid-Atlantic, the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies, and nearly all of Alaska. Odds favor below-median precipitation from California eastward across the Four Corner states, continuing northeastward across the northern and central Plains, and Middle and Upper Mississippi Valley.
Delph Carpenter’s 1922 Colorado River Basin map with Lake Mead and Lake Powell
I’m heading to to DIA for an early flight to Las Vegas for the Colorado River Water Users Association Annual Conference. Follow @CRWUAwater on Twitter for live updates. Coyote Gulch posts may be infrequent until Saturday when I’ll start catching up.
Here’s what John Fleck has to say about the conference:
Colorado River managers will be converging on Las Vegas this week for the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association with uncertainty over their tortuously negotiated Drought Contingency Plan hanging in the smokey casino air of Caesar’s Palace. The basic structure of the deal has been done for a year (the basics of the deal are here). The catch has always been in the details of how each state would internally manage shortfalls. Phoenix municipal water agency staff will be briefing their city council staff this week, and their agenda report provides a nice description of Arizona’s approach. Indian users and farmers in Pinal County will be paid to reduce their use, leaving water in Lake Mead.
I’ll be at CRWUA, speaking on a panel on communicating about drought – Wednesday, 2:30 p.m. Come say “hi”!
Strontia Springs Reservoir started spilling on May 2, 2015. Between 1,200 and 1,700 cubic feet per second has been flowing out of the spillway since that time.
Colorado environmental officials are planning to spend tens of thousands of dollars studying the state’s 400 “high hazard” dams to map where floodwaters might go in the event of heavy rain and snow melt.
The dams are classified by the state as high hazard not because they are in poor condition or likely to fail, but because a failure would likely cost people their lives.
State officials say the dams are all well-maintained and inspected, but flooding in 2013 and 2015 linked to historic heavy rains and snow melt pointed out a vulnerability in the state’s dam safety system.
“We found that the spillways flowed, the dams operated just fine, they performed as we expected them,” explained Bill McCormick, chief of the state’s dam safety branch. “But the flows that went through the spillways in some cases created dangerous conditions and did damage downstream anyway.”
McCormick said the state does not have maps that predict where such overflows might go in the future, but hopes to address that problem with the study.
“People downstream might not expect the flows. They think the dams are flood control dams, but really these dams are storage reservoirs — they store the snow melt that we see, they’re going to store this for use next year. And so the owners of those like to keep those full,” McCormick said.
By the end of the six-month study, the state hopes to rank and prioritize which dams and reservoirs could cause the most problems, and how to address those potential problems.
State officials are still seeking a vendor to conduct the study, but expect the project will cost less than $100,000 from both state and federal funding sources.
Proposals to conduct the study are due by Dec. 16.
Here’s an interview with Luzma Nava from Matt Weiser and Water Deeply. Click through and read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:
IF THERE’S EVER been a river at the mercy of international politics, it would have to be the Rio Grande.
The river begins in southern Colorado, flows the length of New Mexico, then forms the entirety of the border between Texas and Mexico. As such, the Rio Grande (known as the Rio Bravo in Mexico) is not only the subject of water battles but also disputes involving public access, legitimate international trade, illegal drug trafficking and, of course, illegal immigration…
Several treaties govern the flow of water in the Rio Grande, as well as trade and travel across the international border. Because of intense water development and diversion, parts of the river are completely dry and fishless for hundreds of miles during much of the year. The treaties ensure that everyone who is entitled to water gets their share, on both sides of the border.
Forgotten in all this is what’s best for the river itself – its wildlife and its habitats – and for the people who simply want to enjoy a wet river. Luzma Nava recently explored this problem in a study published in the journal, Water. The study was completed while Nava was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, an independent think-tank based outside Vienna, Austria.
Nava, a native of Guanajuato, Mexico, is now completing a doctoral degree in international studies at Laval University in Quebec. For the Rio Grande study, Nava conducted more than 70 interviews with people involved in Rio Grande water management, on both sides of the border, and concluded that it is possible to amend the Rio Grande treaties to free up water for environmental purposes. Nava spoke recently with Water Deeply about her work…
Water Deeply: What is the condition of the river today?
Rio Grande Silvery Minnow via Wikipedia
Nava: If I have to answer in one word, I would say fragile. The main issue is the lack of water. Also the water quality is in danger. And when water quality of the river is not good enough, then we have ecological issues as a consequence.
The fact we don’t have enough water translates into other issues that depend on the quantity of water. There is a loss of habitat, water quality degradation, pollution, salinization, sedimentation. The community of fish is very, very low. In terms of water quality, the more fish we find in the river, the better the quality of the water. But in the case of the Rio Grande, it doesn’t work like that because there are no fish in the river. They have disappeared because there is not enough water.
A Colorado Water Conservation Board proposal, sent to state lawmakers last week, recommends the stream-saving action to meet state environmental and economic goals. It remains unclear who would enforce the community watershed plans.
But there’s little doubt streams statewide are strained by thirsts of a growing population expected to double by 2060, according to state officials. And a Denver Post look at the latest water quality data found that 12,975 miles of streams across Colorado (14 percent of all stream miles) are classified as “impaired” with pollutants exceeding limits set by state regulators.
Creating local watershed plans to save streams is essential, said James Eklund, the CWCB director and architect of the year-old Colorado Water Plan. Eklund pointed to low-snow winters and drought in California’s Sierra Nevada, where 2015 snowpack at 5 percent of average forced a declaration of a state of emergency requiring 25 cuts in urban water use.
“When our Colorado mountain snowpack drops below 60 percent of average, we get nervous. If it happens in the Sierras, it can happen in the Rockies,” he said. “We need to protect certain streams before a crisis. We have got to get on this quickly.”
No single agency oversees waterway health. State natural resources officials monitor flow levels in streams and rivers. They run a program aimed at ensuring sufficient “in-stream flow” so that, even during drought, streams don’t die.
Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment sets standards on maximum levels of pollutants that people and companies are allowed to discharge into waterways. In 2015, only 51.6 percent total stream and river miles in Colorado met quality standards, and 30.1 percent of lake surface acres met standards, according to a CDPHE planning document.
“If stream flows are low, there is less dilution in the stream to handle the addition of pollutants through permitted discharges,” CDPHE water quality director Pat Pfaltzgraff said in responses sent by agency spokesman Mark Salley.
Yet CDPHE officials do not make recommendations to natural resources officials about water flows necessary to improve stream health.
The health department has made separate “watershed plans.” CDPHE officials “are considering broadening the division’s watershed plans to include ecosystem health that might be more consistent with stream management plans.”
Pfaltzgraff declined to discuss stream health…
CWCB chairman Russ George supported the push to create local watershed plans, to include detailed maps covering every stream.
“Every stream and tributary needs to be inventoried. … It should have been done a long time ago,” George said in an interview last week.
“We have kind of hit the population and demand place where we have to do it. We didn’t have to do it for the first part of history because the population was small and there wasn’t the impact of all the issues we are getting into now,” he said.
The CWCB voted unanimously last month to ask lawmakers to approve $5 million a year for up to five years to launch local stream planning.
Basin roundtable boundaries
The plans are to be developed within the eight river basin “roundtable” forums that Colorado has relied on for addressing water challenges. These groups draw in residents with interests in stream health who helped hash out the Colorado Water Plan, which was finalized last year and calls for statewide cuts in per person water use by about 1 percent a year.
Conditions along Colorado streams vary, said Bart Miller, healthy rivers program director for Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates. “There are plenty of streams that have problems.”
While state natural resources officials run the program aimed at keeping at least some water in heavily tapped streams, survival in a competitive environment is complex. Leaving water in streams for environmental purposes often depends on timing, when the mountain snowpack that serves as a time-release water tower for the West melts, the amount of snowpack, and needs of cities, pastures and farms.
Collaborative local forums to find flexibility to revive streams “is a great approach.” However, state officials eventually may have to play a central role converting plans into action, Miller said.
“The state should help both in funding the planning but also in implementing the plans,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do. This matters because this is about ‘the Colorado brand.’ Everyone depends on healthy rivers.”
The roundtable forums in communities draw in diverse stakeholders from cattlemen to anglers.
Irrigators and other water users west of Aspen already have created a “stream management plan,” for the Crystal River, seen as a model local effort. Their planning included an assessment of watershed health that found significant degradation above the confluence with the Roaring Fork River. They set a goal of reducing the estimated 433 cubic feet per second of water diverted from the river by adding 10 to 25 cfs during dry times. They’re developing “nondiversion agreements” that would pay irrigators to reduce water use when possible without hurting agriculture, combined with improving ditches and installation of sprinkler systems designed to apply water to crops more efficiently.
Enforcement of plans hasn’t been decided. “We’d like to see more enforcement” of measures to improve stream health, Rocky Mountain Sierra Club director Jim Alexee said. “We definitely think there’s room to do more. We also want to be respectful of the governor’s watershed process.”
Colorado has no history of relying on a central agency to enforce water and land use, CWCB chairman George pointed out.
“When you have a system designed to have everybody at the table, what you’re doing is recognizing there is a finite resource that is shared by everybody. And impacts are shared by everybody statewide. In order to keep from having some force dominate in ways that would not account for all statewide impacts, you need to diffuse the conversation into all areas. That is what roundtables do,” he said.
“When you do that, you’re going to get a better statewide result over time. … It is a process that is designed to get as many interests into the decision-making as you can. … It gets harder, of course, as the supply-demand makes pinches. For the rest of our lives, it is going to be that way.”
Click here to read the discussion. Here’s the synopsis:
ENSO Alert System Status: La Niña Advisory
Synopsis: La Niña conditions are present, with a transition to ENSO-neutral favored during January-March 2017.
La Niña conditions persisted during November, with negative sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies present across most of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. The Niño indices remained negative during November, except for the Niño1+2 index which reflected near-average SSTs in the extreme eastern Pacific late in the month. Also, the upper-ocean heat content remained below average in association with cooler temperatures at depth, although this cooling lessened somewhat during the month. Atmospheric convection remained suppressed over the central tropical Pacific and enhanced over part of Indonesia. The low-level easterly winds remained enhanced in the west-central tropical Pacific, and upper-level westerly winds persisted across the tropical Pacific. However, these signals were masked at times by intra-seasonal activity. Overall, the ocean and atmosphere system during November reflected a continuation of weak La Niña conditions.
The multi-model averages favor La Niña (3-month average Niño-3.4 index ≤ -0.5°C) to continue through December – February (DJF) 2016-17. Given the current conditions and the model forecasts, the forecaster consensus also favors the continuation of weak La Niña conditions through DJF 2016-17.
In summary,LaNiñaconditionsarepresent,withatransitiontoENSO-neutralfavoredduring January – March 2017 (click CPC/IRI consensus forecast for the chance of each outcome for each 3- month period).
La Niña is anticipated to affect temperature and precipitation across the United States during the upcoming months (NOAA’s 3-month seasonal outlook will be updated on Thursday December 15th). The current seasonal outlook for DJF 2016-17 favors above-average temperatures and below-median precipitation across much of the southern tier of the U.S., and below-average temperatures and above- median precipitation in portions of the northern tier of the U.S.
Upper Colorado River Basin precipitation as a percent of normal November 2016 via the Colorado Climate Center.
Click here to read the latest briefing. Here’s an excerpt:
Latest Monthly Briefing – December 8, 2016
November was drier than normal for most of the region, with wetter spots in central and southern Wyoming, southern Utah, and eastern ColoradoWestern US Seasonal Precipitation. Statewide, Wyoming was in the 32nd percentile for precipitation, Colorado was in the 39th percentile, while Utah was in the 52nd percentile.
November continued what has been an extremely warm fall seasonWestern US Seasonal Precipitation, with most of the region coming in at 4-8°F above normal for the month. Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming each had their 3rd-warmest November on record.
Since early November, there has been some additional degradation of drought conditions in eastern Colorado and southern and eastern Wyoming US Drought Monitor. Colorado has D1 or D2 conditions over 38% of the state, compared to 15% in Utah and 14% in Wyoming.
The pattern change in mid-November finally opened the door to more storms and a big boost in snowpack conditions. As of December 8, most basins across the region have 55-80% of median SWE Western US Seasonal Precipitation. Central and southern Utah and northeastern Wyoming have near- or above-normal SWE.
Weak La Niña conditions are just hanging on in the tropical Pacific ENSO Nino Regions Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies. The ENSO forecast models are now tipped towards a return to ENSO-neutral conditions by late winter ENSO Prediction Plume. NOAA CPC seasonal forecasts show a wet tilt in the odds for Wyoming over the next three months 1-month precip forecast, 0.5-mo lead 3-mo precip forecast, 0.5-mo lead.
![Temperatures may rise to as high as 55 F [31 C] above average on December 22nd over sections of the Arctic near the North Pole. Note that this dynamic will tend to drive colder air out over the Continents — especially, in this case, toward Siberia. Also note that global temperatures remain well above average even when compared to the warmer than normal 1979 to 2000 time-frame. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer.](https://i0.wp.com/coyotegulch.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gfstanomalycentigradeforecastfor12222016climatereanalyzerorg.png?ssl=1)
