January date scrapped in favor of June 29, 2026, after ‘key witness unavailability’ — four years after Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management was first approved by Subdistrict 1 and with the unconfined aquifer still in a historic decline
The San Luis Valley’s highly-anticipated district water court case — the water trial of this century if you will — originally scheduled to last five weeks beginning in January has been pushed back six months to the summer of 2026 due to the departure of a key witness in the fallout from a series of contentious October emails.
The Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management by Subdistrict 1 in the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has lived a precarious life without ever being implemented, going back to 2022 when it was originally crafted by subdistrict managers and January 2023 when it was adopted by Rio Grande Water Conservation District board.
Later came approval by the state engineer, and then after objections were filed against the new amended plan, Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales set a trial date to commence on Jan. 5, 2026, and to last five weeks.
That is, until the week before Thanksgiving when Gonzales scrapped the January date in favor of June 29, 2026, some four years after the plan was first approved at the subdistrict level and the unconfined aquifer still in a historic decline. The judge did so after a series of emails sent by a key expert witness for the main objectors to the plan surfaced.
The effect is that a new plan to recover the Rio Grande’s unconfined aquifer, which has been approved at the local and state levels but still requires sign-off from district water court, remains in limbo.
Following filings by the Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group requesting a six-month continuance to the start of the trial, and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and state Division of Water Resources objecting to the request, Gonzales ruled the two main objectors challenging the new aquifer recovery plan had good reason to ask for a six-month continuance after Taylor Adams, an environmental and water resources engineer for Hydros Consulting in Boulder, resigned from the case due to “personal and family circumstances.”
Adams was set to challenge the Subdistrict 1 water plan on a variety of engineering fronts until a series of emails he sent in October to State Engineer Jason Ullman and Senior Assistant Attorney General Preston Hartmann came to light. In one email, he tells Ullman, “Also, GFY.” In another, he emails that he is “no longer interested in anything other than publicly exploding the rampant corruption at DWR and the AG Office.”
And in an email sent Sunday, Oct. 19, to Attorney General Phil Weiser, Adams writes, “We haven’t met, but I understand that you’re running for governor of Colorado. You should know that if you continue this pursuit without addressing the persistent and laughable perjury that has been carried out in your name by Preston Hatman (sic) and Jason Ullman, you will be the subject of my attention throughout your campaign…”
The Rio Grande Water Conservation District asked Gonzales not to delay the water court proceedings due to the urgency to recover the unconfined aquifer and the lack of “credible evidence that demonstrates that Mr. Adams is unavailable. Rather, they now assert that he ‘should not be pressured into returning to the case at the risk of further harm to his mental health.’”
“In any event,” district water attorneys argued in their objection to a trial delay, “none of this changes the fact that the unconfined aquifer is still over 1.3 million acre-feet below the water levels measured in 1976, and more than 830,000 acre-feet below the water levels previously determined by this Court and the Colorado Supreme Court to be sustainable.”
State Engineer Jason Ullman, consultant Taylor Adams, Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales
Subdistrict 1 is home to the San Luis Valley’s richest crops of potatoes, barley and alfalfa. Without recovery of the shallow aquifer, the state is threatening mass shut down of groundwater pumping wells and requires both a master plan and annual replacement plans to show recovery efforts.
The subdistrict’s proposed Fourth Plan of Water Management is its most drastic effort yet to meet the state’s orders. The new plan, crafted in 2022 and adopted by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in January 2023, is designed to “match the amount of groundwater pumping to the amount of water coming into the subdistrict.”
It does this through a 1-to-1 augmentation, meaning for every acre-foot of water used, an acre-foot has to be returned to the unconfined aquifer through recharging ponds. The amended plan relies on covering any groundwater withdrawals with natural surface water or the purchase of surface water credits.
Farmers in the subdistrict have expressed support for the plan, which includes a $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee that farmers would pay if they exceed the amount of natural surface water tied to the property in their farming operations.
Objections are coming from farmers who do not have natural surface water coming into their property and around the steep fee for purchasing surface water credits from a neighboring operation to offset groundwater pumping irrigation. Both proponents and opponents of the plan say the $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee could put farmers who rely on groundwater pumping out of business.
The five-week water trial will sort through these issues in much more granular detail. With the trial date pushed back six months, any new strategy to recover the Valley’s ailing aquifer will shift into 2027 at the soonest.
San Luis Valley farm. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
The project will be on 480 acres of degenerated land, in between Stanley Road, the 105, and the 106. The property sits within Subdistrict 1, and its water rights, all groundwater access and wells, were sold to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in December of 2024. Credit: The Citizen
Down the Stanley Road looking north in central Alamosa County are the massive solar panels that offer an unusual but common skyline in the high mountain desert west of Mosca. In the foreground of the solar structures, on 480 acres of degenerated land, is a grand new experiment by the Colorado Land Board that promises to offer new insights into carbon, the Valley’s soil, and the growing but complicated “carbon market.”
In September the state land board inked a partnership with Land & Carbon Inc., a carbon project development company, to revegetate and restore the land under an initial 15-year partnership, and then a 40-year monitoring period to determine long-term success.
This is the first contract of its kind in the Valley, but it definitely won’t be the last. With more land and water being retired from irrigation every year, the question of how to revegetate only becomes more urgent. Revegation helps not just to improve carbon sequestration, but also to prevent dangerous dust-bowl conditions that threaten an increasingly dry Valley. The water on the Stanley Road property was retired to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in 2024, and the partnership has committed to using only the allotted 18 inches of water over the first 3 years for revegetation. This project will illuminate the possibilities for revegetation in the Valley, and is likely to lead the way for more innovative partnerships and projects focused on both land restoration and carbon sequestration in the coming years.
The Colorado State Land Board manages lands that were granted to the state in a public trust from the federal government back in 1876. It operates as the second-largest land owner in the state, holding 2.8 million acres of surface land and 4 million acres of subsurface assets. Its land management practices aim to both steward the land and produce reasonable and consistent income, a majority of which gets distributed to the Colorado Department of Education’s Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) program.
The Land Board established an ecosystem services program, focused on generating revenue from nontraditional products, like wetland and carbon credits, as opposed to more traditional products like agriculture, grazing, mining, oil and gas, hunting, recreation and renewables. A few years ago, through this program, the Land Board started exploring the prospect of carbon sequestration and carbon credits.
“We hired a group of consultants to help us enter this market. It’s new and not well understood by most people. It’s kind of on the leading edge of being developed, what we sometimes call an emerging market,” said Mindy Gottsegen, the State Land Board’s Stewardship and Ecosystem Services manager.
The carbon market has emerged as a viable way to simultaneously restore damaged lands, while generating valuable revenue. While there are government regulations around carbon emissions and compliance with certain environmental standards, the carbon market is an entirely voluntary system that operates without large government oversight. Companies buying and selling carbon credits can join the market, and participate, as long as they meet certain standards, set by third-party organizations.
While it is a complicated system, this is generally how it works for soil carbon credits in the Valley: Every piece of land has some amount of carbon in the soil because plants take in CO2 from the atmosphere, photosynthesize, and store it. Through plant roots, and the decay of other organic matter, the soil ends up holding on to a certain amount of carbon. Different land management practices can increase or decrease the amount of carbon sequestered.
To quantify carbon sequestration and sell credits, verified companies (or land owners) must first establish a baseline carbon measurement. Then, carbon gains are estimated over time using a combination of measurements and modeling. These numbers are reviewed, and based on the additional amount of carbon stored, carbon registries issue a proportionate amount of carbon credits. These credits can be sold on the market to entities looking to offset their carbon emissions. The revenue from carbon credits helps to fund and sustain carbon sequestration and land restoration projects.
“The Biological Carbon Program framework that our board approved in April of this year was kind of saying ‘This is how we’re going to get involved in the carbon market,’” said Gottsegen.
The program allows agricultural and land lessees to partner with board-approved Qualified Project Developers (QPDs) to create and implement restorative project plans. These companies work as the middle man between land owners and the carbon market, helping to make successful and sustainable changes, while also navigating the approval and acquisition of carbon credits.
Enter Land & Carbon Inc. Founded by Dave Lawrence in 2023, Land & Carbon is an innovative project development company, restoring highly degraded lands with low-cost, science-driven solutions. The company works to regenerate and revegetate land while offsetting and storing CO2 in the soil, using carbon credits to help pay for the projects.
“I used to — well I still do — drive around the country quite a bit. I’ve observed just how much degraded and barren land there is, without healthy crops or native vegetation — brown trampled land all around the country,” said Lawrence.
Lawrence had previously served as both the chairman of the Yale Climate & Energy Institute and the executive director of the Salk Institute Harnessing Plants Initiative. In these roles, he was actively involved in carbon projects, and realized that reducing atmospheric carbon would require more than just emissions reduction.
“I recognized that there were a number of different solutions available, and that they could be used in combination,” said Lawrence. “I started Land & Carbon with this idea that we would use a combination of practices, and collaborate with communities, ranchers, farmers, land holders, and experts — local, regional, national, and global — pulling all of this together to do the best job that we could restoring degraded land, and at the same time taking carbon out of the atmosphere.”
A significant amount of the degraded land across the West is largely agricultural and sits with different state land boards. Land & Carbon reached out to the Colorado State Land Board with hopes of collaborating to regenerate these lands in a way that was mutually successful, taking advantage of best practices to sequester carbon, restore ecosystem health, and help fund the state’s public education system.
Land & Carbon got approved as the Land Board’s fourth QPD in August and the deal, officially titled Grassland Carbon Ecosystem Services Production Lease, ES 117611, came soon after.
Of the land in the State Land Board’s portfolio, the Stanley Road property was selected because of a combination of factors. The property consists of 480 acres, in between Stanley Road, the 105, and the 106. It sits within Subdistrict 1, and its water rights, all groundwater access and wells, were sold to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in December of 2024. This means moving forward there are severe limitations to the amount of water that can be used to revegetate. The land is highly degraded from decades of agricultural use, and has been barren for years. In that time, a takeover of invasive weeds, along with harsh soil and climate conditions, have prevented any sort of natural recovery.
This property had been a challenge for the Land Board, because of the amount of damage. While this level of degradation can be seen as a deterrent for other QPDs, these types of highly degraded properties are exactly what Land & Carbon seek out. When the Land Board asked if it would be interested in taking on the challenge, the answer was a resounding “Yes.”
In any project for Land & Carbon, the first steps include a “scope and discovery” research deep dive, to better understand what has already been done, and learn how its efforts will be situated in the broader context of work in the region. In the Valley, this means looking at CSU Extension information, published papers, USDA, State Land Board and Conservation District data, conducting their own boots-on-the-ground field visits, and also engaging with the community. All of it is pulled together to assess initial land characteristics.
“We’re a big believer in talking with people and learning from people who are actually doing the work. So we participated in workshops, convened by Colorado State, that allowed us to get to know different individuals and people and groups who were already doing things,” said Lawrence. “We don’t believe we have the corner on the market on all expertise. We really try to tap into as much local knowledge as we can, as to what has worked, what hasn’t worked and why.”
After that, an exhaustive evaluation of all available data and information is done, pulling in literature, field data, and models to create an initial plan, taking into consideration resource availability and supplies. Then they take baseline measurements to determine the starting amount of carbon in the soil that is crucial to then quantify improvements and carbon credits.
The Stanley Road project is still in these early stages, and they are working to collect data, determine land characteristics, and establish a carbon baseline, before considering different solutions and strategies.
“We tailor our solutions to the land. Not everything grows everywhere and not all grazing practices work everywhere. So how can we tailor the best combination to this land?” said Lawrence.
The next steps will come in the spring, at the start of the growing season, when Land & Carbon plans to establish what it has trademarked as Innovation Sites. These five- to 20-acre patches on the property are used to test out new ideas and different combinations, seed mixes, and technologies, in order to learn what works best on this specific land. These experimental sites will run for three to five years, after which the best, most successful techniques will be used on the larger property. Many of the tests will not work, but some will, and those are what get implemented broadly.
In the years to come, these plans will continue to develop. Final decisions around irrigation, and how to use the 18 inches of water allocated for the first 3 years of the project, have not yet been made. Nor have more definitive restoration plans, though in the press release by the Land Board, it was stated that the property is expected to support regenerative grazing within four to eight years.
The project is estimated to sequester greater than 10,000 metric tonnes of CO2 in the first 15 years, which is when the initial contract ends. This will be followed by a 40-year monitoring period to ensure the permanence of the soil carbon storage.
With the state of water in the Valley, and efforts to retire agricultural land for water conservation purposes, the amount of land in need of revegetation and restoration will only continue to grow over the next few years.
Both the State Land Board and Land & Carbon expressed interest in expanding the reach of this project and methodology, once it has been established. But that will take time.
“I always think it’s good to try to do one thing very well, and to kind of get a proof point. We are very focused on this property, and of course we would love to work with others as we move along in this, and show what we have going,” said Lawrence.
“We’re just getting started. The first few take extra time, but we’re hoping that once we get these few under our belt, we’ll be able to expand,” said Gottsegen. “Hopefully we can continue to build the carbon program with more leases in the coming years.”
Lawrence emphasized that Land & Carbon aims to make this project the template for affordable, quality land regeneration using carbon credits, that will work for people in the Valley.
“The idea is that what we learn, we share. We can serve as just advisors if that’s what somebody who has all the capabilities wants, and there’s a ton of people with capabilities, or we can actually do the work,” said Lawrence. “I think we all know the challenges that we face with water in the San Luis Valley. It’s important that we take whatever we learn, in collaboration with others, and work with them to try to implement this at scale.”
Evan Arvizu is a recent graduate of Colorado College with a degree in Environmental Anthropology and minor in Journalism. She is a former intern with the Rural Journalism Institute of the San Luis Valley. More by Evan Arvizu
The Colorado River and its woes tend to get all of the attention, but the Southwest’s “other” big river, the Rio Grande, is in even worse shape thanks to a combination of warming temperatures, drought, and overconsumption. That’s become starkly evident in recent years, as the river bed has tended to dry up earlier in the summer and in places where it previously had continued to carry at least some water. Now Brian Richter and his team of researchers have quantified the Rio Grande’s slow demise, and the conclusions they reach are both grim and urgent: Without immediate and substantial cuts in consumption, the river will continue to dry up — as will the farms and, ultimately, the cities that rely on it.
The Rio Grande’s problems are not new. Beginning in the late 1800s, diversions for irrigation in the San Luis Valley — which the river runs through after cascading down from its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains — sometimes left the riverbed “wholly dry,” wrote ichthyologist David Starr Jordan in 1889, “all the water being turned into these ditches. … In some valleys, as in the San Luis, in the dry season there is scarcely a drop of water in the riverbed that has not from one to ten times flowed over some field, while the beds of many considerable streams (Rio la Jara, Rio Alamosa, etc.) are filled with dry clay and dust.”
San Luis Valley farmers gradually began irrigating with pumped groundwater, allowing them to rely less on the ditches (but causing its own problems), and the 1938 Rio Grande Compact forced them to leave more water in the river. While that kept the water flowing through northern and central New Mexico, the Rio Grande’s lower reaches still occasionally dried up.
Then, in the early 2000s, the megadrought — or perhaps permanent aridification — that still plagues the region settled in over the Southwest. [ed. emphasis mine] Snowpack levels in the river’s headwaters shrank, both due to diminishing precipitation and climate change-driven warmer temperatures, which led to runoff and streamflows 17% lower than the 20th century average, according to the new study. And yet, overall consumption has not decreased.
“In recent decades,” the authors write, “river drying has expanded to previously perennial stretches in New Mexico and the Big Bend region. Today, only 15% of the estimated natural flow of the river remains at Anzalduas, Mexico near the river’s delta at the Gulf of Mexico.” Reservoirs, the river’s savings accounts, have been severely drained to the point that they won’t be able to withstand another one or two dry winters. As farmers and other users have increasingly turned to groundwater pumping, aquifers have also been depleted. The situation is clearly unsustainable.
Something’s gotta give on the Rio Grande, and while we may be tempted to target Albuquerque’s sprawl, drying up all of the cities and power plants that rely on the river wouldn’t achieve the necessary cuts.
Source: “Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin” by Brian Richter et al.
It will come as little surprise to Western water watchers that agriculture is by far the largest water user on the Rio Grande — taking up 87% of direct human consumption — and that alfalfa and other hay crops gulp up the lion’s share, or 52%, of agriculture’s slice of the river pie. This isn’t necessarily because alfalfa and other hays are thirstier than other crops, but because they are so prevalent, covering about 433,000 acres over the entire basin, more than four times as much acreage as cotton.
Source: Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin
This kind of math means farmers are going to have to bear the brunt of the necessary consumption cuts — either voluntarily or otherwise. In fact, they already have: Between 2000 and 2019, according to the report, Colorado lost 18% of its Rio Grande Basin farmland, New Mexico lost 28%, and the Pecos River sub-basin lost 49% (resulting in a downward trend in agricultural water consumption). Some of this loss was likely incentivized through conservation programs that pay farmers to fallow their fields. But it was also due to financial struggles.
Yet even when farmers are paid a fair price to fallow their fields there can be nasty side effects. Noxious weeds can colonize the soil and spread to neighbors’ farms, it can dry out and mobilize dust that diminishes air quality and the mountain snowpack, and it leaves holes in the cultural fabric of an agriculture-dependent community. If a field’s going to be dried up, it should at least be covered with solar panels.
Another possibility is to switch to crops that use less water. This isn’t easy: Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert because it’s actually quite drought tolerant, doesn’t need to be replanted every year, is less labor-intensive than other crops, is marketable and ships relatively easy, and can grow in all sorts of climates, from the chilly San Luis Valley to the scorching deserts of southern Arizona.
Still, it can be done, as a group of farmers in the San Luis Valley are demonstrating with the Rye Resurgence Project. This effort is not only growing the grain — which uses less water than alfalfa, is good for soil health, and makes good bread and whiskey — but it is also working to create a larger market for it. While it’s only a drop in the bucket, so to speak, this is the sort of effort that, replicated many times across the region, could help balance supply and demand on the river, without putting a bunch of farmers out of business.
Photo credit: The Rye Resurgence Project
***
Oh, and about that other river? You know, the Colorado? Representatives from the seven states failed to come up with a deal on how to manage the river by the Nov. 15 deadline. The feds had mercy on them, giving them until February to sort it all out. I’m not so optimistic, but we’ll see. Personally, I think the only way this will ever work out is if the Colorado River Compact — heck, the entire Law of the River — is scrapped, and the states and the whole process is started from scratch, this time with a much better understanding of exactly how much water is in the river, and with the tribal nations having seats at the table.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
There are a bunch of wannabe uranium mining companies out there right now, locating claims and acquiring and selling claims and touting their exploratory drilling results. But there are only a small handful of firms that are actually doing anything resembling mining. One of them is the Canada-based Anfield, which just broke ground on its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley, even without all of the necessary state permits.
Now Anfield says it has applied for a Colorado permit to restart its long-idle JD-8uranium mine. The mine is on one of a cluster of Department of Energy leases overlooking the Paradox Valley from its southern slopes, and was previously owned and operated by Cotter Corporation. The mine has not produced ore since at least 2006. Anfield says it will process the ore at its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which has yet to get Utah’s green light.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
Look! Affordable housing near Moab! Sure, it’s a cave, but it’s only $99,000. Oh, what’s that? $998,000? They’re selling a cave for a million buckaroos? But of course they are. To be fair, it’s not just a cave. It’s several of them, plus a trailer. Crazy stuff.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
A work train in the Animas River gorge just below Silverton. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
San Luis Valley farm. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
November 20, 2025
In November 2023, I stopped by the office of Cleave Simpson, then (and still now, at least for a brief time more), the general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservancy District.
There, in Alamosa, he shared with me his observation that the Rio Grande during the 21st century has had water declines parallel to those of the Colorado River.
Both rivers originate in Colorado, and neither river has been able to deliver the water assumed by any number of diversion projects. Problems began in the 20th century but have intensified greatly in the 21st century because of drought but also rising temperatures.
The Rio Grande has had 17% reduced flows since 2000. The Colorado River flows have declined 20%.
Of the two rivers, the Rio Grande is longer, at 1,900 miles but carries less water, 9.1 million acre-feet/year. The Colorado flows 1,450 miles and has been carrying an average 15.4 million acre-feet. Neither river has delivered water into oceans with any reliability in decades.
Sandhill cranes and a few mallard ducks roost at sunset on a sandbar of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque during January. Photo(and copyright)/WWF-us, Diana Cervantes. Top: The San Luis Valley near Del Norte. Photo/Brian Richter
Despite these parallels, the Colorado has received far more attention, as is pointed out in a new report by Brian Richter of the World Wildlife Fund and nine others from academic institutions in Arizona, California, and other states.
Why is that? The Colorado provides drinking water for about 40 million people compared to 15 million for the Rio Grande. In irrigated agriculture, it’s a similar story: 22,300 square kilometers in the Colorado River Basin vs. 7,800 square kilometers in the Rio Grande.
“However, the water crisis facing the Rio Grande Basin is arguably more severe and urgent than the Colorado River Basin,” Richter and his colleagues contend. They argue for some rethinking and institutional alignments to help ratchet water use down to sustainable levels.
The study is the first full accounting of how water is consumed across the entire Rio Grande Basin. Mexico calls it the Rio Bravo.
Doesn’t Colorado also have a strong accounting system, as necessary to meet requirements of the 1938 compact among states that share the Rio Grande?
Yes, says Richter. However, he adds a “but.” He reports difficulty in getting estimates of how much water is being consumed by each sector and by each crop. He believes he has succeeded.
“To my knowledge, nobody has laid out the numbers at the level of clarity and accuracy that we were able to accomplish,” he said.
Another major contribution of the paper is the estimation of the degree to which water consumption is unsustainable, he said.
“We estimate that 11% of water consumption in Colorado is unsustainable. Natural replenishment from snowmelt runoff, precipitation, and groundwater recharge supplies only 89% of the water being consumed; the remainder (deficit) is being met by depleting groundwater.”
“The Rio Grande basin is at a tipping point, and everyone needs to be part of the solution,” said Enrique Prunes, a co-author and the World Wildlife Fund Rio Grande manager. “These findings will help us rethink how we manage water to secure a future for everyone.”
For the second time in the 21st century, this segment of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque went dry, leaving this image of cracked sediment on a blistering afternoon on Aug. 7, 2025. Photo(and copyright)/WWF-us, Diana Cervantes
Dry cracked sediment from the Rio Grande on a blistering afternoon on Aug. 7, 2025 in Albuquerque, N.M. For the second time in the 21st century the Rio Grande has gone dry in the Albuquerque stretch. (TC) (EDITOR’S NOTE: T/C, to fact check).
Agriculture uses 99.9% of the water in Colorado’s San Luis Valley and 87% in the basin altogether.
Dramatic declines in reservoir storage illustrate the scope of problem. Altogether, 12% of reservoir storage has been lost in the 21st century. The decline is most severe in New Mexico, where 71% less water was stored at the end of 2024 compared to 2002.
Groundwater depletion has been even more drastic. Roughly 15 times more groundwater has declined compared to surface storage. The two are coupled. As surface water supplies decline, groundwater mining grows.
“In the San Luis Valley of Colorado, diminished river flows and aquifer recharge have led to continued over-pumping, causing aquifers levels to decline,” Richter and his team write. “The Colorado state engineer has threatened to shut off hundreds of groundwater wells if the aquifer supporting irrigated farms cannot be stabilized.”
The San Luis Valley is famous for its potatoes as well as the barley to make Coors beer, but potatoes use just 7% of the water and barley 9%. The vast majority of water in the valley produces feedstocks for livestock: 47% for alfalfa, 27% for other hay, and 6% for pasture lands.
The study finds that groundwater in the San Luis Valley has been depleted at a rate of 89,179 acre-feet/year, equivalent to 11% of the annual average of direct water consumption in the valley.
What can be done? Large cities have done more with less. Albuquerque’s population grew 40% while its water use declined by 17%. However, municipal and commercial water consumption account for only 7% of all direct consumption in the three-state and two-country basin.
Strategies for reducing consumption in irrigated agriculture have been proven but must be rapidly deployed at sufficient scale and financially sustained by governments, companies, and credit institutions to rebalance the basin’s water budgets, state, and binational levels.
At the same time, water shortages have contributed to the loss of 18% of farmland in the river’s headwaters in Colorado, 36% in New Mexico, and 49% in the Pecos River tributary in New Mexico and Texas.
Strategies being embraced to curb groundwater drafting in the closed basin of the San Luis Valley have been controversial. A key case is likely to go before the Colorado Supreme Court. In Mexico, cutbacks have led to violence. One protestor died.
The study points to several strategies that could reshape how water is used in the basins. These include restoring river habitats, adjusting dam operations to better support seasonal flows, improving water-sharing agreements, and helping farmers switch to crops that require less water.
That effort to encourage crop-switching has been underway in the San Luis Valley, but with successes only at the margins.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Chart showing water use trends in US and Mexico. Credit: Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin. Map via Springer Nature.
major new study on the nearly 1,900-mile long Rio Grande Basin — from the San Luis Valley into the Gulf of Mexico — shows a “severe water crisis emerging” with total reservoir storage in decline at around 4.24 million acre-feet or 26 percent of capacity.
The study brings together detailed water consumption estimates of surface and ground water use throughout the basin and concludes “a likely outcome will be continued loss of farmland due to financial insolvency from lowered crop production and other factors including the aging of farmers and lack of affordable farm labor,” without urgent action.
“Climate scientists have reframed the long-running drought as the onset of long-term aridification and are forecasting additional river flow diminishment of 16-28% in coming decades as the climate continues to warm,” the study notes.
The authors’ analysis shows that during 2000–2019, Colorado lost 18 percent of its farmland in the Upper Rio Grande Basin, New Mexico lost 28 percent along its Rio Grande sub-basins, and the Pecos River sub-basin lost 49 percent.
Further drying puts farmers and cities who rely on the Rio Grande in an “existential water crisis.”
Brian Richter, one of the authors of the study, says San Luis Valley farmers are central to the development and implementation of solutions for the rapidly drying Rio Grande given that “the vast majority of the direct human consumption of water in the SLV takes place on irrigated farms.”
Researchers estimate that the present level of over-consumption of both surface and groundwater in the Valley is approximately 11 percent. “That means that water consumption needs to be reduced by that percentage,” Richter said.
Richter is president of Sustainable Waters and senior freshwater fellow for the World Wildlife Fund. The two organizations teamed with researchers to provide a full accounting of the consumptive uses as well as evaporation and other losses within the Rio Grande Basin.
The Rio Grande stretches nearly from the San Luis Valley through New Mexico, El Paso, Texas, and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It provides drinking water for more than 4 million in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, and 11 million people in Mexico, the study notes. More than 1.9 million acres of irrigated farmland is tied to the Rio Grande.
The study, “Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin,” relies on data from annual runoff volumes, municipal and commercial consumptive use estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey, and reservoir storage levels, among other data sets.
Snowmelt runoff has decreased 17 percent over the past 25 years, according to the report. At the same time, total direct water consumption has been increasing since 2000, largely due to increasing water usage by farmers in Mexico.
When comparing challenges of Colorado River users to the Rio Grande, researchers say the “water crisis facing the RGB is arguably more severe and urgent than the CRB,” given the fact groundwater in the San Luis Valley has been depleted at a rate of 89,000 acre-feet per year; New Mexico has a water debt to Texas; and Mexico has a mounting water debt to the U.S. under a 1944 treaty that is causing political tension between the two countries.
The Upper Rio Grande here at the end of 2025 is benefitting from heavy October rainsthat materialized across the southwest and provided a stopgap to what were some of the worst summer river flows ever recorded on the river.
Management of the Upper Rio Grande Basin will be back in the spotlight come January 2026 when Colorado Water Court Division Three takes up the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. The new strategy calls for a groundwater overpumping fee of $500 per acre-foot any time an irrigator in Subdistrict 1 exceeds the amount of natural surface water tied to the property of their operation. The rule punishes farmers who do not have natural surface water coming into their fields but instead rely solely on groundwater pumping for their crops.
The whole point of the plan for the agricultural-rich area of the San Luis Valley is to let Mother Nature dictate the pattern of how irrigators in Subdistrict 1 restore the unconfined aquifer and build a sustainable model for farming in the future.
Richter credits Colorado and irrigators in the Valley for taking steps to address the Rio Grande. The proposed $500 fee for overpumping in Subdistrict 1, he says, “is going to set off a lot of change in the Valley, because many/most farmers won’t be able to continue producing the same crops they’ve been growing in recent years.”
“Colorado has definitely taken some important steps, and manages its water resources far better than New Mexico or Texas,” Richter says. “But Colorado still has not been able to reduce pumping to anywhere near the needed degree, so it’s no surprise the aquifer continues to decline.”
The study looks at crops grown along the Rio Grande and how agricultural fields account for 87 percent of direct water consumption.“Overall, agricultural consumption is nearly seven times the volume of all other direct uses combined.”
Alfalfa and grass hay – water-intensive crops that dominate the landscape in the Valley and in Northern and the Middle Rio Grande of New Mexico – account for nearly 45 percent of the irrigation water consumed along the Rio Grande Basin. A shift to less-intensive crops, as the Rye Resurgence Project advocates, and a moratorium on new wells in over-drafted areas of basin in New Mexico and Texas, are necessary first steps to addressing the Rio Grande’s challenges, according to researchers of the study.
“Potatoes might be one of the few crops that remain sufficiently profitable to persist in the Valley,” says Richter. “If those transitions to other crops or to permanent farmland retirement lead to reduced water consumption to the level needed (11 percent), there is hope that the (unconfined) aquifer can be rebalanced with natural replenishment. However, it will require a greater level of pumping reductions to enable the aquifer to recover to the level required by the state engineer.”
San Luis Valley center pivot August 14, 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
The October rains that changed this water year in the San Luis Valley came at a particularly critical time.
In September the closely-watched unconfined aquifer hit its lowest level ever recorded since monitoring of the troubled aquifer began in January 2002, according to the Davis Engineering report given at Tuesday’s quarterly meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
Knowing that, now imagine the conversations that would be happening in the Valley’s farming and ranching community had there been diminished or no October rains. The year was shaping up to be among the worst for flows on the Upper Rio Grande and readings on the unconfined aquifer reinforced it.
Then October delivered heavy rains across the southwest, which resulted in historic fall seasonal flows on the San Juan and into the Rio Grande and Conejos River systems. The Rio Grande grew by 80,000 acre-feet and the Conejos River by 20,000 acre-feet as a result of the rains, said Craig Cotten, division engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources.
Colorado is now estimating a total annual flow of 470,000 acre-feet on the Upper Rio Grande, up from its earlier estimates for the year at 390,000 acre-feet. Still, the irrigation year on the Rio Grande will likely end on Nov. 1 as scheduled, said Cotten.
“That’s a big amount of water in just a short amount of time,” he said in noting the latest accounting for Rio Grande Compact purposes.
2026 budget hearing set
The Rio Grande Water Conservation District set a 2026 budget work session for Nov. 24; then a public hearing to adopt next year’s budget on Dec. 11. The water conservation agency is proposing a year-over-year increase to its mill levy. It is proposing a 1.75 mill levy property tax, up from 1.6 mills in 2025.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
San Luis Valley center pivot August 14, 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
September 12, 2025
Woes of the Colorado River have justifiably commanded broad attention. The slipping water levels in Lake Powell and other reservoirs provide a compelling argument for changes. How close to the cliff’s edge are we? Very close, says a new report by the Center for Colorado River Studies.
But another cogent — and somewhat related — story lies underfoot in northeastern Colorado. That’s the story of groundwater depletion. There, groundwater in the Republican River Basin has been mined at a furious pace for the last 50 to 60 years.
Much of this water in the Ogallala aquifer that was deposited during several million years will be gone within several generations. In some places it already is. Farmers once supplied by water from underground must now rely upon what falls from the sky.
In the San Luis Valley, unlike the Republican River Basin, aquifers can be replenished somewhat by water that originates from mountain snow via canals from the Rio Grande. The river has been delivering less water, though. It has problems paralleling those of the Colorado River. Changes in the valley’s farming practices have been made, but more will be needed.
In a story commissioned by Headwaters magazine (and republished in serial form at Big Pivots), I also probed mining of Denver Basin aquifers by Parker, Castle Rock and other south-suburban communities.
Those Denver Basin aquifers, like the Ogallala, get little replenishment from mountain snows. Instead of growing corn or potatoes, the water goes to urban needs in one of America’s wealthier areas.
Parker and Castle Rock believe they can tap groundwater far into the future, but to diversify their sources, they have joined hands with farmers in the Sterling area with plans to pump water from the South Platte River before it flows into Nebraska. This pumping will require 2,000 feet of vertical lift across 125 miles, an extraordinary statement of need in its own way.
Like greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere, these underground depletions occur out of sight. Gauges at wellheads tell the local stories, just like the carbon dioxide detector atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa has told the global story since 1958.
Colorado’s declining groundwater can be seen within a global context. Researchers from institutions in Arizona, California, and elsewhere recently used data from satellites collected during the last two decades. The satellites track water held in glaciers, lakes, and aquifers across the globe. In their study published recently in Science Advances, they report that water originating from groundwater mining now causes more sea level rise than the melting of ice.
“In many places where groundwater is being depleted, it will not be replenished on human timescales,” they wrote. “It is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all, by recent generations, at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations. Protecting the world’s groundwater supply is paramount in a warming world and on continents that we now know are drying.”
This global perspective cited several areas of the United States, most prominently California’s Central Valley but also the Ogallala of the Great Plains.
In Colorado, the Ogallala underlies the state’s southeastern corner, but the main component lies in the Republican River Basin. The river was named by French fur trappers in the 1700s, long before the Republican Party was organized. The area within Colorado, if unknown to most of Colorado’s mountain-gawking residents, is only slightly smaller than New Jersey.
A 1943 compact with Nebraska and Kansas has driven Colorado’s recent efforts to slow groundwater mining. The aquifer feeds the Republican River and its tributaries. As such, the depletions reduce flows into down-river states.
Farmers are being paid to remove land from irrigation with a goal of 25,000 acres by 2030 to keep Colorado in compliance. So far, it’s all carrots, no sticks. Colorado is also deliberately mining water north of Wray to send to Nebraska during winter months. This helps keep Colorado in compact compliance. So far, these efforts have cost more than $100 million. The money comes from self-assessments and also state and federal grants and programs.
In some recent years, more than 700,000 acre-feet of water have been drafted from the Ogallala in the Republican River Basin. To put that into perspective, Denver Water distributes an average annual 232,000 acre-feet to a population of 1.5 million.
Hard conversations are underway in the Republican River Basin and in the San Luis Valley, too. They will get harder yet. Sixteen percent of all of Colorado’s water comes from underground.
The Colorado River has big troubles. It’s not alone.
Part II: South Metro cities starting to diversify water sources: Castle Rock and Parker 25 years ago were almost entirely dependent upon groundwater. They are diversifying, and one plan is to import water from far down the South Platte River Valley.
The Republican River basin. The North Fork, South Fork and Arikaree all flow through Yuma County before crossing state lines. Credit: USBR/DOIRio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The San Luis Valley is running out of water and there’s no way around it.
In Saguache County specifically, the amount of water in Saguache Creek has consistently been going down, while the amount needed to irrigate remains the same. This lack of water due to climate change, drought and overuse affects every aspect of life. Impacts on water access and streamflow are making irrigation more complicated and unpredictable, and for a community that has been built around, and economically relies on, agriculture, this is concerning. Millions of dollars are being spent to try to find solutions and mitigate the impacts, but as these challenges persist, a broader discussion is opening up about the future of agriculture in the Valley.
The question at the heart of the issue: how do communities around the San Luis Valley, like Saguache, not only manage and survive this crisis, but sustainably adapt to a landscape with less water?
The answer is complicated.
Saguache Creek in September, 2025. Credit: Ryan Michelle Scavo
Since 2002, the entire American southwest has been experiencing a severe drought. The San Luis Valley is at the center of this crisis, warming faster than any other region. Increased temperatures, inconsistent precipitation, and decreasing snowpack – alongside overpumping and overuse – has created a dire situation in which the amount of water available for use in Saguache County is rapidly decreasing.
There are two ways to access water in the Valley: pulling directly from surface water sources like creeks, rivers, and lakes, or pumping from wells that pull from the aquifer below. The water system is all connected, and the water level of the aquifer contributes to the streamflow of creeks and surface water through groundwater discharge and baseflow.
Currently, the unconfined aquifer is down over a million acre-feet of water, an amount equal to the size of the Blue Mesa Reservoir in Gunnison. The San Luis Valley has both an unconfined and confined aquifer, but the part that is under Saguache in the north end of the Valley is the confined artesian aquifer. With the structure of a confined aquifer, the loss of water, though concerning, does not prevent well users from accessing water.
It does, however, impact surface water. Unlike the aquifer, where there is still water to pull from even with losses, for surface water, significant losses to the water system mean lower streamflow and sometimes a nonexistent water source.
“If the water table drops 3 to 5 feet, suddenly it becomes disconnected from the creek and doesn’t support the streamflows. The streams just start sinking into the ground,” said Tom McCracken, a farmer and former Saguache creek surface water user. “Streamflows are down across the board. It’s really really getting bad, and it’s exacerbated by the fact that the aquifer is so low. The water is just soaking into the ground instead of running out into the Valley like it used to.”
San Luis Valley Groundwater
This means that when the wells are pumping from the aquifer, if the water level drops low enough, they’re inadvertently depleting the flow of the creek, which is water somebody has a right to divert. While this pumping impacts the aquifer as a whole, and is not localized specifically to Saguache County, streamflow of surface water around the Valley feels the impacts. These losses are considered injurious depletions, and they have been disproportionately impacting surface water rights holders, who rely on streamflow to irrigate.
This is especially problematic because water rights in the Valley operate on the concept of prior appropriation, where the longer a water right has existed, the more seniority it gets. In times of water shortage, older water rights have priority over newer water rights.
Saguache rancher George Whitten, owner of Blue Range Ranch and San Juan Ranch. Credit: Ryan Michelle Scavo
“On a creek system like this, there’s a longstanding history of struggles between one ranch and the other because the doctrine of prior appropriation kind of sets up a struggle for water rights right from the very beginning,” said George Whitten, a lifelong rancher in Saguache, who owns Blue Range Ranch and San Juan Ranch. “It’s not a system of sharing but a system of allocation. You have all the water until there’s enough for the next guy and on down. And that changes daily depending on the flow of the stream.”
Generally, in Saguache County, surface water rights are older, and considered senior, often holding numbers that rank priority within surface rights, and well water rights are newer and considered junior.
This has created a unique and challenging problem, spurring tensions in the community, as surface water users, used to having senior water rights, are finding themselves with decreasing water access because of low streamflow, while well water users are able to continue pumping from the aquifer.
“People with surface water rights that are from the 1870s are never happy with the idea that a well that was drilled in 1970 could be flowing when their water right is not there anymore,” said Whitten. “As the Valley starts to dry up, with climate change and a lack of snow fall, surface rights are less and less dependable. We’re set up in this epic struggle for how to deal with that.”
The solution to this problem might seem simple: people just need to pump less water. And while that is true to a degree, addressing this problem is a lot more complicated than that.
“Most people want to restore the aquifer, really, in their heart,” said McCracken. “But it’s like ‘I’m not going to do it if my neighbor’s not going to do it. Why should I be the one to suffer?’”
Under the current state Division of Water Resources model, established with the passing of Senate Bill 04-222, the state provides subdistricts with a maximum amount of predicted depletions for the area annually. Subdistricts then must find enough water to repair those depletions before the growing season starts, mapping it out in an annual replacement plan, which is approved by the state.
That means that for wells to continue operation, the injurious depletions must be remedied, by putting an amount equal to the amount of depletions back into the creek, so that surface water users also have access.
If enough water isn’t located and the plan isn’t approved, users won’t be granted access until it can be figured out. This means water shut off during the growing season. In 2021, Subdistrict 5’s replacement plan was rejected, resulting in about 230 wells being shut off from April 1 through the end of June, when a challenge to the rejection was finally approved, granting water access. Nearly half of the growing season was lost, yielding serious economic consequences.
In order to meet these goals, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District (RGWCD) has been leasing and buying properties and water rights around Saguache County, retiring them from agricultural production, and redirecting the water to repair depletions.
In early 2022, Subdistrict 5 was looking to be in a similar spot as 2021: without enough water to counter the depletions and unable to agree on how to get that water. The RGWCD bought its first big property, the Hazard Ranch, in May of 2022. The purchase consisted of 110 acres of property and 143 acres of water rights from the Hazard family, who had been ranching in the Valley since the 1870s. The water from the Hazard sale was enough to replenish the remaining depletions and got the annual replacement plan approved, allowing other water users to stay in operation. This last-minute purchase ultimately saved Subdistrict 5’s water from being shut down for a second year in a row.
The way the process works is that the subdistricts can purchase water rights and sometimes also the property that those water rights sit on, retiring the land from agricultural use. But finding the right properties and water rights can be tricky. There are limited water rights that are available to be used by the subdistricts, because existing conservation easements along the creek and other factors restrict the locations of potential surface water rights purchases. Each subdistrict also has its own criteria and valuations for what water rights are valuable, and only certain properties meet those criteria.
Currently, Subdistrict 5 is funding projects using loans from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Right now it has two loans worth about $12 million.
Once purchases have been made, the subdistrict files a change of use form that switches the water’s usage designation from irrigation to augmentation. Because this process is usually happening quickly in order to meet depletion needs, this form is often filed as a temporary change of use. A permanent change requires a lengthy court process that can take up to 20 years. As long as the subdistrict has started the court process to get the designation changed, it can continue to operate under the new, temporarily changed designation, until that is officially changed, which allows for more immediate action.
After the change of use, using augmentation wells that pump water to the creek, the water that was previously irrigation and consumptive use (the amount being consumed by the crops) can be redirected and returned, offsetting depletions.
For Subdistrict 5, when it makes this switch to augmentation, it isn’t actually retiring the water rights. The water remains available to be pumped if the subdistrict needs more water to meet requirements in years with large depletions. It is still conserving water because it usually isn’t pumping, and when it is, it isn’t getting anywhere near the historical levels that were pumped when pumping was used for agriculture.
“We all need to pump significantly less or else everybody is going to be shut down. So if we shut down these quarters here, it will allow the other quarters to continue to operate versus everyone being shut down,” said Chris Ivers, program manager for Subdistrict 5. “It’s not that we want to retire productive agricultural land, it’s just that the rules limit how much we can sustainably pump – the rules of nature, I mean.”
Subdistricts must meet both sustainability mandates and injurious depletion mandates from the state. Currently, to meet sustainability goals, Subdistrict 5 must remain within the limits of the historical pumping that took place between 1978-2000 for a 10-year period. Because the district is well within this sustainable range, it has been able to focus on buying water rights without having to prioritize full retirement for sustainability reasons, which is the main focus of some other subdistricts.
“What we’re seeing in the state’s annual measurement under the groundwater rules is that the Saguache response area, the aquifer, is actually recovering in that area at a greater rate than anywhere else in the confined aquifer in the Valley,” said Amber Pacheco, deputy general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
The district’s next big purchase will likely be more of North Star Farm, from whom it has been leasing and buying property for years. North Star, one of the largest water users in the Valley, runs around 30 circles in Subdistrict 5, growing alfalfa for large dairy operations in California. North Star only holds junior, groundwater rights, and its operation consists of a system that pumps water from wells and irrigates using water pivots at the center of every circle.
Farm land in Saguache. Credit: Ryan Michelle Scavo
For surface water users, this purchase is a step in the right direction, as North Star’s water usage has been a point of contention for many years.
“It’s a difficult thing to see a sprinkler running on North Star Farm when the number 10 water right is off in Saguache Creek,”said Whitten, who is vice president of the Subdistrict 5 board of managers. “Seeing them able to pump a full supply of water without any surface rights whatsoever, when the people on the creek, due to the lack of inflows, are sitting there drying up and watching that go on – it’s a hard spot in this community for sure,” said Whitten. “I totally get it. I have a lot of land that is not usable anymore because of North Star.”
This situation acts as a prime example of the cultural clash that exists in the Valley, not only between surface and well water rights holders, but also between a large corporate entity in a sea of family-owned and operated businesses.
But even though North Star is an out-of-state corporation, the situation is complicated because the locals who are employed by North Star are a part of the community as well.
“You know the people who work there, who manage that farm, they live in Sanford, but they have kids in school and they’re part of the community too. If you get too focused on Saguache Creek you lose your perspective,” Whitten said.
Drying up North Star has been a longtime goal of the RGWCD and other community members. They have embarked on several endeavors over the years with the goal of purchasing the whole property and all of its water rights, but the price has always been just out of reach. Ultimately people want the land dried up and revegetated, with all of that water being put back into the creek.
Today, the goal remains the same, but instead of all at once, it’s starting to happen in small pieces. Starting in 2021, Subdistrict 5 was leasing one to three groundwater irrigated sprinkler quarter sections from North Star, negotiating those leases annually. Each quarter contains about 120 acres of irrigated ground. In 2024, Subdistrict 5 purchased the water rights to those three leased quarters, and Subdistrict 2 purchased two quarters as well. Subdistrict 5 is planning to purchase four additional quarters in the upcoming year, using funding from a loan approved in January of this year.
Having recently made big purchases like the Hazard Ranch and parts of the North Star property, Subdistrict 5 has a large quantity of water available to be redirected.
Some wells that already exist work as augmentation wells, but sometimes new augmentation wells need to be built in more optimal locations in order to connect certain groundwater areas to the creek. This is a priority for the subdistrict right now.
“Our current problem isn’t the amount of water. [With recent purchases], we have enough water, but we don’t have enough ability to deliver that water,” said Ivers. “We’re really focused on finding locations for augmentation wells on Saguache Creek.”
While things are moving in a positive direction, the situation will likely only intensify in the upcoming years. When the state model gets updated, predicted depletions change based on the water situation from the prior decade. The new calculations that have come out, which would go into effect in 2026, show a drastic jump in the amount of depletions Subdistrict 5 will have to remedy.
“It’s a pretty significant increase for the subdistrict, which means it’s going to have a significant and kind of an immediate impact on those subdistrict members to try to recover enough groundwater that they can pay for these increased depletions,” said Pacheco. “It’s going to be a big, big challenge for Subdistrict 5 especially, to try to be able to meet those with the limited availability of what they can use in the area. They’re working on it already and I have faith that we’ll be able to do that successfully, but it will be a challenge for sure.”
While the subdistricts operate individually, 1, 4, and 5 all owe depletions to Saguache Creek, and are combining efforts and sharing resources when they can to make sure depletions and goals get met.
“Subdistricts 1, 4, and 5 have agreed to work together as best they can to solve the problem as one. It’s kind of a good opportunity for a more collaborative effort for Saguache Creek,” said Ivers.
While the purchasing and retirement of agricultural land has been regarded as one of the only sustainable solutions to the problem, the strategy has been met with some questions and concerns – both economic and environmental.
The establishment of the state model was controversial in some circles because it created an irrigation season and seasonal restrictions on water access for all water rights holders. It was met with backlash from certain parts of the community, particularly surface water users, who were used to irrigating when they felt it was necessary, even if it was outside of the usual growing season. Many still don’t love it, and a consistent point of frustration has been centered around the impacts of climate change, which is causing fluctuations in the timing of runoff and snowpack melt. Earlier flows, coming down before the start of the state’s irrigation season, means farmers have to watch water go by in the river that can’t be diverted, while struggling with a lack of water later in the season.
How the property retirement and dry-up will impact taxes is another area of concern.
“Saguache County’s tax base could be drastically affected by all this dry-up. The property tax base is based on agriculture mainly, and if we lose that, we gotta find alternative ways to finance the county’s operations. It really should be part of the negotiations to dry up a circle to maintain that tax base, but it’s not at the moment. So I’m really concerned about it,” said McCracken, who serves on the Saguache County Board of Commissioners.
Property taxes are calculated based on how productive the land is, so when it gets dried up and stops, it loses that productivity and therefore also the tax classification. Losing large properties to dry-up, while good for water, could mean a huge loss to county coffers. The Rio Grande Water Conservation District says that this is something it takes into consideration.
“If the RGWCD buys the land and actually controls the land, we do work with the counties to try to continue the tax base for that property, even though it’s now gone to a different taxable classification,” said Pacheco. “We try to keep their budgets as whole as we can when we buy properties, so we pay Alamosa County, we get bills from Saguache County, all to try to minimize the impact on those government services.”
Retiring agricultural land also creates a few environmental concerns. First, putting surface water back into the ground, while sustainable, endangers riparian zones on the creeks going up into the canyons, which are critical wildlife habitats and for regional tourism.
Diverting a property’s water without the proper plan, especially with a persistent drought, can also create the optimal conditions for a dust bowl. Changing weather, with decreasing precipitation and strong, unpredictable winds, alongside the removal of water and crops, causes the topsoil to dry up. With no roots or vegetation to hold the soil in place, the potential for it to blow away increases.
“You potentially have these huge dust storms where you lose an inch of top soil in the storm, and there’s traffic pile ups on Highway 17 and there’s drifts of soil up to the top of the fencelines. I mean it’s just out of control,” said McCracken. “Those circles, if they’re dried up, have to be revegetated. It’s just an absolute necessity.”
The RGWCD, along with other groups in the Valley, is working to make revegetation a priority. Whitten is part of a group, along with Patrick O’Neill and Madeline Wilson from CSU Extension, that has been discussing the best ways to go about revegetation in the area. The goal would be to improve soil health and restore nutrients that have been stripped during prior agricultural use, by bringing in native plant cover and potentially grazing livestock as well. Different plans allow for a few inches of water to be left on retired land to support revegetation efforts in the first few years.
Enforcing revegetation is a problem the RGWCD and county officials are still working to address. If the RGWCD doesn’t control the land, either because it only owns water rights, or because landowners had to dry up land they couldn’t afford to farm, but aren’t connected to a program, the RGWCD can’t force them to revegetate. These situations are complicated, because while people may want those properties to be revegetated for environmental and aesthetic reasons, it’s unclear who has the authority, and whose responsibility it is, to make those decisions or enforce rules.
Many also question whether or not the millions of dollars being spent buying properties could be better allocated toward other sustainability and conservation efforts that impact water. Instead of so much money being used to buy properties, a portion could be going to farmers to help them start practicing more sustainable methods, like sequestering carbon and improving soil health, which naturally help reduce water usage while also restoring the ecosystem.
A view of silos in Saguache. Credit: Ryan Michelle Scavo
This concern is rooted in the idea that, if industrial agriculture practices are going to continue running through water and harming the soil, eventually requiring more and more land to be bought up and retired – which some call a “Band-aid solution” – it might be productive to look into reworking the agricultural system into a more sustainable model.
“We have farmers in the Valley using sustainable farming methods that have reduced their water usage by like 40 to 50 percent. Why aren’t we doing that? Why aren’t we taking the resources we have and spending at least some of them to try to change, not just take land out of agriculture permanently,” said McCracken. “Change their way of farming and maybe change some of the crops and the number of rotations that they do. Maybe we can get that water back if we do this right. Maybe we can keep more people in business. Maybe it doesn’t have to be only the corporations that survive all of this.”
The efforts being made around the Valley by Rio Grande Water Conservation District and other organizations are an important part of the search for a solution to what could be considered an impossible problem, one that communities around the southwest continue to grapple with.
“I’m really proud of the San Luis Valley and the RGWCD and the people here who have tried to figure out a way to mitigate those impacts on surface rights by well pumping,” said Whitten. “I’ve spent most of my life involved in this struggle and we’re way ahead of most people in the West, I think, in dealing with these issues.”
It will likely only continue to get more complex, as climate change, drought, and water availability become more unpredictable. But, it is a Valley-wide and basin-wide issue that affects everyone, and it seems as though, despite certain disagreement points, the community can agree that attempting to adapt and find sustainable paths forward is the only solution.
“What we endeavored to do back in the day was to control the collapse of the agricultural empire that we’ve built here. We’re running out of water and there’s just no way around that,” said Whitten. “So do you let everybody just pump until the last guy who can drill the deepest well is the last one left? Or do you somehow try to control this collapse of our economy and somehow salvage it? The natural world is going to prevail in the end. How do we control this and try to become sustainable and resilient?”
These questions remain at the center of conversations in Saguache County.
1869 Map of San Luis Parc of Colorado and Northern New Mexico. “Sawatch Lake” at the east of the San Luis Valley is in the closed basin. The Blanca Wetlands are at the south end of the lake.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 22, 2025
This is the final part of a series about four groundwater basins in Colorado. The story was commissioned by Water Education Colorado and benefited from editing by Caitlin that organization’s staff. It appears in a variant form in the summer 2025 issue of Headwaters magazine.
The San Luis Valley, like the Republican River Basin, has almost no tax base other than irrigated agriculture. “Nearly everything in the valley is somehow related to agriculture. Our hospital, our schools — everything is dependent on agriculture’s existence in the valley,” says Amber Pacheco from her office in Alamosa. From her office in Wray, Deb Daniel has a parallel observation.
What then constitutes sustainability of the water that is the foundation of agriculture or, in the case of Parker, Castle Rock, and other south metro communities, their economic vitality? What decisions should be made now to foster that vitality through the 21st century?
Smuggler Mine back in the day via GregRulon.com
Thoughts about conservation have shifted over time. When Colorado’s gold and silver miners arrived, they had no goal of conserving. They either mined the veins to exhaustion, or it became too costly to continue. In a sense, that has happened in the Republican River Basin. The only limits to this groundwater mining are those triggered by the interstate compact. Because the Republican River and its tributaries get most of their water from aquifers, pumping must be limited — or supplemented.
In the last 20 years, the Republican River Water Conservation District has done some of both. It has or soon will have committed $86 million to pump water from wells expressly to deliver water to the Nebraska state line. One of the directors, Tim Pautler, has called this a strategy of kicking the can down the road. Other directors have started to agree.
“It’s like the clock is ticking when it comes to sustainability,” said Rod Lenz, the board chair, at the board’s quarterly meeting in May 2025. “What more can we do with the tools we have? Do we dare ask for more tools such [as would be delivered by] statute changes? Do we really want all the groundwater districts in the basin to ask the state engineer to reconsider how much we’re allowed to pump, or do we just stay in compliance until we can’t?”
San Luis Valley Groundwater
In the San Luis Valley, coming off the century-defining drought of 2002, state legislators went in exactly the opposite direction. They said that the unconfined aquifer was to be managed sustainably. Granted, that’s easier said if you have a major river flowing nearby, even if that river has been hammered hard by the warming, drying climate of the 21st century.
Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
The south metro area falls somewhere between these two extremes. State legislators nearly a half-century ago ordered a “slow sip” of the groundwater such as to preserve it for a century. In some places, there seems to be sufficient water to slow sip for another 300 years. In other places, the aquifer might have enough water for a few decades. Some water utilities hope for a completely sustainable water supply in decades ahead. Much work has been done. The harder work lies yet ahead.
What we need are aspirations premised not on entitlement and enrichments solely for today, but instead to build economies and cultures that more comprehensively look several generations ahead. That should be the question in all these meetings, all these court cases, all of these individual actions. Based on what we know and understand today, what should we be doing for the kids, grandkids and their grandkids, too? Are we doing better than kicking the can down the road?
Center pivot in the San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 20, 2025
Center, as its name implies, lies at the center of the San Luis Valley. The valley is among the nation’s two most prominent places for growing potatoes. Among the growers is a fourth-generation family operation, Aspen Produce LLC.
Jake Burris married into the family. In addition to spuds, the family grows barley and alfalfa on 3,500 acres. Some neighboring farmers also grow canola. Burris is president of the board of managers of one of six subdistricts in the San Luis Valley’s Rio Grande Water Conservation District. His subdistrict — called Subdistrict No. 1 — was formed in 2006 in response to a declining water table. What’s known as the unconfined aquifer supports this area, the most agriculturally productive in the San Luis Valley. With just seven inches of annual precipitation, irrigation in the San Luis Valley is everything. And in Subdistrict 1, much of that water comes from 3,617 wells..
Alfalfa grown is quite thirsty, but potatoes get grown on much larger areas of the Rio Grande Water Conservancy District. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Alfalfa is the thirstiest crop, using 24 to 36 inches of water to get three cuttings. The strong sunshine and cooler temperatures found above elevations of 7,000 feet produce a high-quality hay that draws orders from dairies as far as California. Alfalfa is grown on 21,100 acres in the district. Potatoes cover 51,100 acres. Barley is grown on 28,000 acres. Some have replaced barley with rye. Several thousand acres have together been devoted to canola, lettuce, and other crops. A recent census found about 25,000 acres had been fallowed.
The San Luis Valley has two primary aquifers. Lower in the ground, separated by relatively impermeable beds of clay from what lies above, is the confined aquifer. The first well into the confined aquifer was bored in 1887. Because of the pressures underground, it was an artesian well. No pumping was needed to bring water to the surface. Louis Carpenter, a professor at the Colorado Agriculture College (now Colorado State University), estimated the valley had 2,000 artesian wells when he visited in 1891.
The unconfined aquifer lies above the confined aquifer. The unconfined aquifer existed prior to major water development in the valley but water volumes rose greatly when farms began using Rio Grande water in the 1880s. Four ditches deliver Rio Grande water to the farms and hence to the aquifer. Introduction of high-capacity pumps in the 1950s and center-pivot sprinklers in the 1970s accelerated groundwater extraction. In 1972, the state engineer imposed a moratorium on new wells from the confined aquifer, followed in 1981 by a moratorium on new wells in the unconfined aquifer. These moratoria acknowledge that groundwater drafting had to be limited.
Then came 2002, hot and dry, escalating the challenge. Impact to the unconfined aquifer was drastic with rising temperatures causing growing water demand even as snowpack declined.
The unconfined aquifer “has been dropping overall since about 2002,” says Craig Cotten, the Colorado Division of Water Resources engineer for Division 3, which encompasses the San Luis Valley. “We just have not had a real good series of years as far as the surface water.”
In 2004, state legislators passed a law that sets the San Luis Valley’s aquifers apart from those of the Republican River and Denver Basin groundwater stories. That law, SB04-222, explicitly orders both the confined and unconfined aquifers in the San Luis Valley be managed for sustainability. The Colorado law governing the Denver Basin aquifers requires a “slow sip” but does not imagine sustainability. In the Republican River Basin, no law speaks to sustainability. There, only the interstate compact insists upon limits.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
Here’s another difference. Water from aquifers create the Republican River and its tributaries. In the south-metro area, surface streams cause little recharge to the Denver Basin aquifers. In the San Luis Valley, the Rio Grande as well as some surface streams coming off the San Juans contribute water to both the unconfined and confined aquifers. The hydrogeology is more complex.
This 2004 law also encouraged the formation of groundwater subdistricts within the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. The thinking was that very local groups of farmers could work together to figure out how to keep their portions of the aquifers sustainable. They could also be more effective in this pursuit by working together than doing so individually.
Six subdistricts have been created in the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and one in the Trinchera Water Conservancy District. Subdistrict No. 1 began operations in 2012 after the state approved its operating plan.
All these groundwater districts have the goal of reducing water consumption as necessary to replenish the aquifers or by introducing water into the aquifer from the Rio Grande or other sources.
Agriculture constitutes nearly the entire economy of the San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Exactly how much restoration of the aquifers is needed? The state law specified a return to volumes that approximate those of 1976 to 2001 in the confined aquifer. But there’s some guesswork about how much water the confined aquifer had then. Detailed records on Subdistrict No. 1 were not kept until 1976.
In August 2024 the unconfined aquifer in Subdistrict 1 was estimated to have averaged almost 1.2 million acre-feet less water during the five preceding years than it had in 1976. The rules approved by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2011 in a document called the Plan for Water Management call for the unconfined aquifer recovery within 200,000 to 400,000 acre-feet of where it was in 1976. That would be deemed sustainable, as ordered by the 2004 law.
To achieve this, the state engineer said that Subdistrict No. 1 would need to recover 170,000 acre-feet each year between now and 2031. Initially, Subdistrict No. 1 aimed to take 40,000 acres out of irrigation per year, or about 80,000 acre-feet of annual groundwater pumping, to allow the unconfined aquifer to recover. That goal is unattainable, say water officials, and hence a rethink is needed. Success has occurred, though. In 2024, for example, roughly 176,000 acre-feet were pumped from the confined and unconfined aquifers in Subdistrict No. 1, the fewest since groundwater metering began in 2009. That’s about a 30% reduction.
More sustained success will be necessary. “You don’t recover that unconfined aquifer through single years of good runoff,” says Ullmann, the state engineer. “There are difficult decisions that have to be made in order to recover and restore the aquifers, but that’s what these subdistricts are trying to do.”
Unlike the Republican River Basin, the unconfined aquifer in the San Luis Valley is fed water diverted from the Rio Grande, seen here at Monte Vista, and into irrigation canals. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
This success is at least partly due to efforts to modify irrigation practices and taking land out of production. Amber Pacheco, deputy general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, explains that it’s difficult to quantify the reductions.
“Some farmers, for example, have simply reduced the number of alfalfa cuttings (and hence the irrigation required), for example. Or they only irrigate when they need to do so. Others have changed the cover crops planted after a potato harvest to reduce the amount of water needed.”
As in the Republican River District, local efforts to take land out of production use the foundation of federal programs, particularly CREP, or Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. The subdistrict provides 20% of funds and the federal government 80%.
As did the Republican district in 2022, the Rio Grande district got an additional $30 million allocation of federal money funneled through the state. That money allows $3,000 in payment per acre-foot of curtailed groundwater use.
More must be done to recover the aquifer. The current proposal assembled by Burris and other directors of Subdistrict No. 1, their fourth iteration, would require aquifer recharge as a condition of pumping on a one-to-one basis. Water for recharge would come from water secured from the Rio Grande or native flows into the unconfined aquifer. This new plan allows subdistrict members with surface water credits to pump from the aquifer, because they are resupplying it.
The pumping allowed under the plan would be cut drastically. The Rio Grande district does not have authority to shut down wells, but it does have authority to assess fees for over-pumping. That fee stands at $150 per acre-foot. The plan would elevate that to $500. And, if aquifer recovery is not achieved, it would rise to $1,000.
Ultimately, the state engineer has authority to curtail wells that do not provide replacement water pursuant to an approved groundwater management plan or some other augmentation plan.
Some farmers in the subdistrict disagree with this plan. Opponents banded together as the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group, or SWAG, and filed a lawsuit to block implementation of the plan. A five-week trial has been scheduled for early 2026. Nobody expects that court’s decision to be the end of it. Whoever loses might well appeal the decision to the Colorado Supreme Court, a process likely to continue into 2028.
Might the problem of the depleted unconfined aquifer be resolved by diverting more water from the Rio Grande? The river has long been over-appropriated. This year, for example, rights junior to 1880 were being curtailed in May. As with the Republican River, water must be allowed to flow downstream as required by the Rio Grande Compact.
For the unconfined aquifer to recover quickly, Mother Nature would need to quickly step up. “It would take multiple years of above-average flows [in the Rio Grande] to recover to the level that we need,” says Pacheco. In fact, 19 of the last 20 years have been sub-average as compared to 1970 to 2000. This year’s runoff in mid-May was forecast to be 61% of the average from 1890 through 2024.
Part IV: “It’s like the clock is ticking when it comes to sustainability,” said Rod Lenz, chair of the Republican River Water Conservation District, at a recent board meeting. This and other parting thoughts about the three groundwater basins examined in this story. Also, a study is underway to provide a better estimate of the groundwater remaining in Baca County.You can also download the entire story here in a magazine format.
Click the link to read the article and listen to the Valley Pod on the Alamosa Citizen website:
July 9, 2025
A draft agreement settling the long-running Rio Grande Compact lawsuit dealing with New Mexico’s delivery of water to the Texas border is on the one-yard line and should be pushed across the goal line come fall, says Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
Weiser was on a two-day tour of the San Luis Valley this week when he gave an update on the lawsuit to members of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable. All three compact states – Colorado, New Mexico and Texas will be party to the settlement.
Earlier this week, Special Master D. Brooks Smith scheduled a hearing for the week of Sept. 29 on the parties motions toward a settlement.
The states had worked out a previous agreement to the 2013 case, only to have the federal government object when the proposed settlement was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. This time, said Weiser, the federal government’s role has been addressed.
“We’re on track,” Weiser said during a recording of The Valley Pod. “We have a settlement that properly has the federal government in its place and resolves the concerns which were mostly between New Mexico and Texas.”
Listen here to the full Valley Pod episode with AG Phil Weiser.
Colorado has nine interstate water compact agreements, including the Colorado River Compact which dominates the headlines. At the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable meeting, Conejos Water Conservancy District Manager Nathan Coombs asked Weiser how the state and local water users could collaborate on more “creative ways” in administering the river compacts.
“We all agree with keeping our compacts whole. But I would ask what are some of the processes we could go through to make them more vehicles for the water users within the state as we see this drying?” Coombs said.
On The Valley Pod, Weiser addressed the Valley’s efforts to recover the Upper Rio Grande Basin’s confined and unconfined aquifers.
“We will have to continue looking at this situation of groundwater and have to keep asking ‘How do we best manage this precious resource?’ I don’t have any immediate views on what to do in the face of the challenging hydrology. I do believe we have to keep thinking hard about a series of strategies that include ‘How are we most smartly storing water, how are we re-using water, and how are we conserving water?’”
Weiser, a two-term attorney general, is a candidate for governor, seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 2026. In The Valley Pod episode he talks more about his candidacy as well as the 27 different lawsuits Colorado has been party to in the past six months in challenging the Trump Administration.
“This is an extraordinary moment unlike any in history,” Weiser said.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
The next time a water exportation project is pitched to move water from the San Luis Valley – and there will be a next time – the speculator will learn the value of that water to the six-county region measures into the billions of dollars.
A new report by American Rivers and senior economist Claire Sheridan of One Water Econ captures for the first time the economic value of the water that runs through the San Luis Valley. It was a study prompted in 2022 by the threat of water exportation from the Upper Rio Grande Basin by Renewable Water Resources.
As part of its proposal to export and sell 20,000 acre-feet of water every year from the Valley, RWR offered to establish a $50 million community fund that it argued would fairly compensate the Valley for its water. The study, “The Economic Value of Water Resources in Colorado’s San Luis Valley,” pegs fair compensation of the RWR proposal at around $1.3 billion per year. (More on that figure below)
“It’s a really complex question to answer. What is the value of water in the San Luis Valley?” said Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District. “The value of water in the San Luis Valley is so much greater than a one-time payment of $50 million.”
Dutton, Sheridan from One Water Econ, and American Rivers’ Emily Wolf presented the findings of the report at the annual Rio Grande State of the Basin Symposium held March 29 at Adams State.
The study goes beyond putting a dollar value to water for the Valley’s agricultural purposes. It also examines the value of water as it relates to the Valley’s outdoor recreation industry and wildlife and natural habitat surroundings.
Boat ramp on the Rio Grande. Credit: The City of Alamosa
And it looks at “water-dependent” industries that are key to the Valley’s economy and their reliance on water for their customers and sanitation services. Those “water-dependent” industries like San Luis Valley Regional Medical Center and Adams State University account for approximately 21 percent of total direct economic output and 23 percent of employment in the Valley, according to the study.
“Capturing the value of water as it is used in homes, businesses, and for environmental purposes can add important information to conversations about the future of the Valley and its water resources,” noted the study’s authors.
The study puts into perspective how valuable water in the Upper Rio Grande Basin is when you apply it to the Valley’s economy and livelihood. According to the report, the San Luis Valley economy generates $4.5 billion in total annual economic output, largely driven by hospitals, electric power companies, insurance, crop farming and cattle ranching. Alamosa and Rio Grande Counties account for 60 percent of the population and 67 percent of total economic output in the region.
Sandhill Cranes
Other insights from the report:
Agriculture in the San Luis Valley, including cattle ranching, generates 10 percent of all output in the region (although this varies significantly by county) and makes up 39 percent of Colorado’s total agricultural output.
Agriculture is the single largest private employer in the SLV, and irrigated agriculture employs 8 percent of the total workforce (an estimated 2,322 jobs per year). Approximately 64 percent of these jobs are in the category of all other crop farming (which represents alfalfa and grass hay) and 34 percent are in vegetable farming (mostly potatoes).
The agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting sector generate over 4,000 jobs each year. This sector also leads in economic output, generating $566 million annually.
The value of clean drinking water in the San Luis Valley is estimated to be over $3,600,000 per day.
The analysis also found that water-related habitat in the Valley is valued at more than $49 million annually and the annual Crane Festival generates $4 million in direct revenue from visitor spending.
“It’s just apparent that just as water flows through this community, so do the dollars that are generated from that water,” said economist Claire Sheridan.
Sheridan did the math for the audience at the Rio Grande Symposium in explaining how far under value RWR’s $50 million community fund pitch was when considering the value of water to residents of the Valley.
She used a model FEMA goes by in its emergency management work that factors in two components in creating a value for water to a community: One component is a willingness to pay for clean and safe drinking water. “If you go to your tap and turn on your water, what are you willing to pay to make sure that you can drink that water? What is that worth to you?” The other component is “avoided replacement cost” that factors in costs if a resident has to go buy water.
For the San Luis Valley and its estimated population of 46,600, those two components combined come out to about $77.23 per person, per day, said Sheridan. When you apply $77.23 to the Valley’s population, the value for clean drinking water in the San Luis Valley is about $3.6 million per day or $1.3 billion annually.
1869 Map of San Luis Parc of Colorado and Northern New Mexico. “Sawatch Lake” at the east of the San Luis Valley is in the closed basin. The Blanca Wetlands are at the south end of the lake.
My friend Joe’s son and the Orr kids at the top of the Crack in the Wall trail to Coyote Gulch with Stevens Arch in the Background. Photo credit: Joe Ruffert
Kevin Fedarko was the keynote speaker at the symposium and he is as inspirational a speaker as you could ask for. It doesn’t hurt that the landscape that he spoke about is the Grand Canyon. He urged the attendees to, “Take your children out into these landscapes so that they can learn to love them.” He is advocating for the protection of the Grand Canyon in particular but really he is advocating for the protection all public lands.
Kevin Fedarko and Coyote Gulch at the Rio Grande State of the Basin Symposium hosted by the Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center at Adams State University in Alamosa March 29, 2024.
What an inspirational talk from Kevin. I know what he is saying when he speaks about the time after dinner on the trail where the sunset lights up the canyon in different hues and where, he and Pete McBride, his partner on the Grand Canyon through hike, could hear the Colorado River hundreds of feet below them, continuing its work cutting and molding the rocks, because the silence in that landscape is so complete. He and I share the allure of the Colorado Plateau. Kevin was introduced to it through Collin Flectcher’s book The Man Who Walked Through Time, after he received a dog-eared copy from his father. They lived in Pittsburgh in a landscape that was industrialized but the book enabled Kevin to imagine places that were unspoiled.
My introduction to the Colorado Plateau came from an article in Outside magazine that included a panoramic photo of the Escalante River taken from the ledges above the river. Readers in the know can put 2 and 2 together from the name of this blog — Coyote Gulch — my homage to the canyons tributary to Glen Canyon and Lake Foul.
Stevens Arch viewed from Coyote Gulch. Photo via Joe Ruffert
Kevin’s keynote came at the end of the day on March 29th after a jam-packed schedule.
Early in the day Ken Salazar spoke about the future of the San Luis Valley saying, “Where is the sustainability of the valley going to come from.” Without agriculture this place would wither and die.” He is right, American Rivers and other organizations introduced a paper, The Economic Value of Water Resources in the San Luis Valley which was a response to yet another plan to export water out of the valley to the Front Range. (Currently on hold as Renewable Water Resources does not have a willing buyer. Thank you Colorado water law.)
Claire Sheridan informed attendees that their report sought to quantify all the economic benefits from each drop of water in the valley. “When you buy a bottle of water you know exactly what it costs. But what is the value of having the Sandhill cranes come here every year?”
Sandhill Cranes Dancing. Photo by: Arrow Myers courtesy Monte Vista Crane Festival
Russ Schumacher detailed the current state of the climate (snowpack at 63%) and folks from the Division of Water Resources expounded on the current state of aquifer recovery and obligations under the Rio Grande Compact.
The session about the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement Program was fascinating. Nathan Coombs talked about the combination of SNOTEL, manual snow courses, Lidar, radar, and machine learning used to articulate a more complete picture of snowpack. “You can’t have enough tools in your toolbox,” he said.
Coombs detailed the difficulty of meeting the obligations under the Rio Grande Compact with insufficient knowledge of snowpack and therefore runoff volumes. Inaccurate information can lead to operational decisions that overestimate those volumes and then require severe curtailments in July and August just when farmers are finishing their crops. “When you make an error the correction is what kills you,” he said.
If you are going to learn about agriculture in the valley it is informative to understand the advances in soil health knowledge and the current state of adoption. That was the theme of the session “Building Healthy Soils”. John Rizza’s enthusiasm for the subject was obvious and had me thinking about what I can do for my city landscape.
Amber Pacheco described how the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable and other organizations reach out to as many folks in the valley as possible. Inclusivity is the engine driving collaboration.
A view of one of the Valley’s major agriculture resources, cattle. Credit: Owen Woods
Click the link to read the article on the Alamosa Citizen website (Heather Dutton and Emily Wolf):
March 27, 2025
Here in the San Luis Valley, water is deeply connected to our way of life. The Rio Grande, its tributaries and connected groundwater support local heritage, agriculture, recreation and the natural environment. Like all of the region’s streams and rivers, the Rio Grande is critical to the livelihood and economies of the communities of the SLV and is a growing recreational and economic asset to communities outside of the Valley as well.
Photo credit: Sinjin Eberle/American Rivers
To help illustrate the critical value water plays across all sectors in the Valley, American Rivers and One Water Econ released a new study this week, The Economic Value of Water Resources in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, which presents the economic benefits of key sectors and services that depend on water in the Valley. The analysis looks at irrigated agriculture, municipal and industrial uses, tourism and recreation, and environmental values like wildlife habitat.
While we all know and understand the intrinsic value of water in the Valley, economic data will further elevate not only the social importance of water, but also the economic contributions the Rio Grande and Conejos River, other streams, and connected groundwater provide to the San Luis Valley. Our community can use this economic data to tell the story of ongoing collaborative water management projects, help fight future threats, including groundwater export schemes, and make the case for multi-benefit river restoration efforts that are a win-win-win for agriculture, communities, and the environment.
San Luis People’s Ditch March 17, 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs
Irrigated agriculture, a key economic driver in the SLV, is reliant on the surface water flowing through the Valley along with the vast number of groundwater wells and is deeply connected to the history of the Valley. The study found that crops supported by surface and groundwater make up 39 percent of Colorado’s total agricultural output, despite the population of the Valley being less than 1 percent of Colorado’s population. Additionally, irrigated agriculture was found to contribute more than $480 million annually in economic output. For every $1 that is spent on local inputs for agriculture production, an additional $1.56 is generated in the regional economy. Potatoes and vegetables are the largest economic generators in the agricultural space, with an annual economic output of $184 million. Not only does irrigated agriculture provide critical economic benefits, but the irrigated fields and wet meadows also support critical migratory bird habitat.
Sandhill cranes stop and gather in a field near the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge during their yearly trek.
Recreation, a growing economic sector for the Valley, is heavily reliant on water flowing from the surrounding mountains into the Valley and provides significant economic value. The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve attracts national and international travelers, as do the world-class birding and wildlife viewing opportunities at the nine state and national wildlife refuges that are made up of wetland, riparian, and open water ecosystems, and support numerous species of resident and migratory birds, including sandhill cranes. Additionally, the Rio Grande and Conejos River draw many visitors for both whitewater boating and world class fishing. The recent economic analysis found water-related recreation provides $213.7 million in benefits annually in the San Luis Valley, and for every $1 spent on recreation, $1.91 is generated through ripple effects within the local economy. The Valley’s riverside lands, wetlands, and wet meadows are a critical part of the natural infrastructure supporting recreation and many species of wildlife. The analysis found that water-related habitat in the Valley is valued at more than $49 million annually and the annual Crane Festival generates $4 million in direct revenue from visitor spending.
Many other industries beyond recreation and agriculture also rely on water – local breweries, distilleries, bakeries, greenhouses, hospitals, and hotels among others – all rely on water. These “water-dependent” industries (WDIs) generally rely on the services of water utilities to support and grow their businesses. Water-dependent industries in the Valley support nearly $1.3 billion annually in total economic output. Water is undeniably a critical resource for the Valley, providing not only economic benefits but other ecosystem services, and intrinsic and cultural values. The economic data from this new analysis provides San Luis Valley communities with information to help protect the Valley from export schemes, further support water projects that conserve the Valley’s precious resources, and illustrate to those outside the Valley why water is so critical to the livelihoods of every person in the SLV.
Partners involved in the creation of the study from American Rivers, One Water Econ, and the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District will present information about the study at the Rio Grande State of the Basin Symposium at Adams State University on March 29. The event is open to the public and all are encouraged to attend. The analysis is also available on American River’s website at www.americanrivers.org/SLVEconomicReport.
Talk Given to Business for Water Stewardship on March 10, 2025
In Colorado, we confront challenges as opportunities. As Wallace Stegner, the famed Western writer, once put it—it’s impossible to be pessimistic in the West; it’s the native land of hope. How we manage our water is a test of that ethos.
There are no two ways to put this: we face significant water scarcity challenges in Colorado and the West. That scarcity is driven, in part, by increasing demands as population booms. And it’s also driven by our changing climate, which is reducing snowpack, changing runoff patterns, increasing evaporation, and drying soils.
While we know that climate change significantly impacts Colorado’s water, its extent and exact impact is presently unknown. That uncertainty, coupled with the unpredictability in rainfall and snowpack, is destabilizing—making it difficult for farmers, ranchers, and even cities to know what to expect each year or how to plan for the future. Unfortunately, the variable weather patterns we are seeing are very likely to be our new normal, creating considerable pressure for us to create more adaptive and resilient systems for water management.
Increased uncertainty and unpredictability in water make planning more important than ever, with an imperative of developing new and innovative strategies for water management. It is no exaggeration to say that the future success of Colorado will depend, in considerable part, on our ability to adapt to scarcity and reduce the uncertainty and unpredictability that come with it. The best and most durable solutions will go beyond individual success and will collaborate with other interests to find win-win solutions.
I know this is important to Business for Water Stewardship, and I’m excited to talk with you about it today. I also want to speak about how our management of water must remain intertwined with respect for the rule of law, as the solutions we craft are only as good as the laws they are built upon and the institutions charged with implementing and upholding them.
I. Moving Toward a Resilient and Adaptive System of Water Management
Adapting to scarcity and creating more certainty will require us to develop innovative and collaborative strategies for water management. It will also require collective action. We cannot focus on individual successes and ignore the community in which these projects occur. I appreciate how you captured this point on your website:
We believe businesses have an opportunity—and a responsibility— to ensure that their operations and investments improve communities and ecosystems where they do business. And in water-stressed regions, that responsibility is deeply rooted in how we value, use, and protect water. That’s why we help businesses work collaboratively with community and policy stakeholders to advance solutions that ensure people, economies, and ecosystems have enough clean water to flourish.[1]
I couldn’t agree more. Each of us, whether as businesses or individuals, has a responsibility to ensure that, wherever we can, we work to improve communities and ecosystems where we live and work. Let me begin by focusing on a few projects that have done that. And I want to contrast those with projects that do not.
The Maybell Diversion Project is a wonderful example of a project that has multiple benefits. Updating and modernizing the Maybell Diversion Project improved efficiency for irrigation, increases resiliency to drought, and benefitted threatened and endangered species.[2]
Before the project was completed in 2024, irrigators from Maybell Irrigation District had to trudge two hours through steep, rugged sagebrush country to manually open and close the rusted and broken metal headgate.[3] It was an arduous, yet crucial task because Maybell is one of the largest irrigation diversions on the Yampa.[4]
The Nature Conservancy worked with numerous partners to help fund the $6.8M project. Funding partners include: the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART program; the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation; the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program,[5] and the Colorado Water Conservation Board.[6]
Today, the opening and closing of the Maybell headgate can be controlled remotely and is determined by a combination of water user needs and available flows into the Maybell Ditch. The Maybell Irrigation District also coordinates with the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program and the Division of Water Resources to guide water use in the Lower Yampa.[7]
As I said previously, this project promises mutual benefits. It allows continued irrigation of historical lands, which supports local farmers and the economy. At the same time, it also improves fish habitat and removes barriers to boat passage, supporting the environment and secondary economic benefits like river recreation.
In 2021, I spoke to the Colorado Water Congress about “The Imperative of Investing in Water Infrastructure.”[8] In that speech, I highlighted important water infrastructure projects around the state, including a plan to replace the aging Grand Valley Hydroelectric facility with a new more efficient plant capable of producing 1.5 times as much power. Like the Maybell Diversion Project, that plan brought multiple benefits. In addition to producing more clean electricity, their continued use of the water right will ensure that water flows into the 15-mile Reach, a critical stretch of river for four species of endangered fish. Many local irrigators will also benefit from increased diversions at an upstream diversion point supplying the plant.
In that speech, I also emphasized the importance of developing funding sources and investment opportunities in water infrastructure. I mentioned a few success stories, like Proposition DD, HB 21-1260, which provides $20 million in funding for implementation of the Colorado Water Plan, and HB 21-240, which provides $30 million for watershed restoration in response to wildfires, including funding for flood prevention and mitigation. But those are not enough. With continued growth on the horizon, our commitment to fund projects laid out in the Colorado Water Plan is imperative. That plan is the roadmap for investing in our future and fulfilling the Plan’s vision will take billions of dollars.
Photo credit: Rye Resurgence Project
B. Rye Resurgence Project
The Rye Resurgence Project in the San Luis Valley supports continued farming, while reducing water use, improving soil health, and helping the community flourish.
During this time of drought, it is critical that we find ways to use less water without sacrificing economic opportunities. This can help build resilience in the face of shrinking water supplies. Crops, like rye, can use far less water—up to 40%—than other similar crops like barley or oats.[9] This difference is huge in a region that is trying to conserve water in order to balance Rio Grande water use with supply. Data in 2024 shows the San Luis aquifer at its lowest recorded level in history.[10]
An important element of the Rye Resurgence Project is that it recognizes that switching to crops that require less water will only succeed if there is a market where farmers can sell those new crops at a profit. The project helps build a market for Colorado rye by investing significant effort and resources in marketing, branding materials, and personnel to develop relationships between the growers and the end users of rye such as brewers, distillers, millers, bakers, and consumers.[11] Building the market for San Luis Valley Resurgence Rye gives farmers an option to reduce their impact, earn a living wage, and support the local community. By keeping farmers farming, the future health of the community will be sustained.
II. Two Cautionary Tales to Avoid in the Future
The above two projects reflect effective strategies for managing water during this challenging time. There are, however, examples that have proven to be ineffective that are important to learn from. I will discuss two such cautionary case studies, highlighting some pitfalls of mismanaging water.
A. Alfalfa for Saudia Arabia
The growing of alfalfa in Arizona to ship to Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most glaring example of a project whose success comes at the expense of the community in which it occurs.[12] The short story of this project is that Saudi firms bought up 9 square miles of land in Arizona for irrigating and growing alfalfa grass.[13] The firms grew alfalfa in Arizona to export to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because they had already drained their own aquifers.[14]
Alfalfa is an incredibly water-intensive crop. Growing it in a desert climate drastically impacts the surrounding communities. The Saudis were using the same amount of water to grow hay just for export as what a million people in the state use for water every year.[15] The Saudis invested a huge amount of water into the crop which they couldn’t grow at home because they don’t have the water. Essentially, this is exporting Arizona’s water.
By transporting the alfalfa overseas instead of selling it domestically, this also eliminated all future economic returns on that water. If that alfalfa stayed in Arizona, for example, it could have been sold to domestic cattle producers and benefited local communities and businesses. None of those domestic gains were achieved once the alfalfa left our shores.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
B. Buy and Dry Schemes
In Colorado, we have seen before what is now labelled a “buy and dry” scheme. This scheme involves the sale of relatively all the water from a community, shipping it to a thirsty urban community and destroying a local agricultural economy. That is, in short, the tale of what happened in Crowley County.[16] As captured in Colorado’s Water Plan, it is an approach that we are committed to avoiding in the future.[17]
For an example of a buy and dry project now on the table, consider the case of the (improperly named) Renewable Water Resources. That project would buy out wells that are currently used to irrigate lands in the San Luis Valley and, rather than using that water for irrigation and farming, it would be piped to the front range for new suburban houses.[18] This has several direct and indirect negative economic impacts as well as cultural impacts on the San Luis Valley. This project makes one rural community suffer while a suburban community prospers.
In contrast to the Rye Resurgence Project, which invests in farmers to help them adapt to new markets, this project disregards farmers and eliminates the economic driver for their community. Proponents say the water is necessary to ensure other communities have enough water supply to secure their future. But we can’t let ourselves be tricked into believing that economic prosperity or managing our water resources is a zero-sum game.
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
C. Perkins County Canal
For another example of approaching our water management challenges as a zero-sum game, take the case of Nebraska’s proposed Perkins County Canal project. In a zero-sum game, there can be some winners, but at a high cost to others. In this case in particular, there will be many more losers and lots of wasted time and money. Rather than pursue such a costly path, we can find shared goals and interests and build solutions to help achieve those.
Under Nebraska’s plans, it will invest the time, money, and effort to build a canal to divert water in Colorado for use in Nebraska under the 1923 South Platte River Compact. If Nebraska does that, then Colorado water users will likely build countermeasures to offset impacts of the canal. Under this scenario, both Nebraska and Colorado would end up investing hundreds of millions of dollars, but almost all water users in each state would end up in a position that is no better than they were before Nebraska proposed the canal.
A better approach to the issue is one that recognizes that the agricultural economy and the communities it supports doesn’t observe state boundaries. The economy is regional. Farmers own land in both states. An individual farmer might buy supplies in Nebraska and farm in Colorado. And the reverse is likely true. Durable solutions need to benefit the region and not make the success contingent on the failure of the other. I will continue to do all I can to work towards such a solution.
See Article 7.
III. The Importance of the Rule of Law in Water Management
As we adapt to changing hydrology and look for flexible and collaborative solutions, it will also be important to stand firm on certain principles. Our success not only relies on our adaptability, but also on a solid foundation of laws that are consistently enforced with predictable results.
Colorado’s framework for managing water is based on state-level oversight and ultimate responsibility. This is bolstered by significant reliance on regional and local partnerships to facilitate solutions that are tailored to the water supply needs of local communities. The Colorado model prioritizes respect for and collaboration with regional bodies, such as water conservancy and conservation districts, with a norm of deferring to local expertise and solutions whenever possible. Nonetheless, the ultimate responsibility of managing Colorado’s water and ensuring compliance with compacts, laws, and regulations falls to the State. This is especially true when we talk about compliance with interstate water compacts.
Governor Clarence J. Morley signing Colorado River compact and South Platte River compact bills, Delph Carpenter standing center. Unidentified photographer. Date 1925. Print from Denver Post. From the CSU Water Archives
A. Interstate Compact Compliance
Compliance with Colorado’s nine interstate water compacts, two international treaties, and three equitable apportionment decrees is exclusively the responsibility of the State. This authority is established by the compact clause of the U.S Constitution that allows States, as sovereigns, to enter into agreements to apportion water between them to avoid conflicts over water.
Once ratified by Congress, interstate compacts become federal law. That does not mean, however, that the federal government controls state water resources. The power to control uses of water is an essential attribute of State sovereignty.[19] When states compact with each other to apportion the waters of interstate streams, those compacts also bind the federal government.[20] As we negotiate or litigate over our interstate compacts, I am dedicated to defending Colorado from federal overreach and protecting Colorado’s compact apportionments.
To the extent a state fails to comply with its interstate compact obligations, the State—and not individual water users, conservation or conservancy districts, or local governments—is held solely liable and responsible for complying or possibly paying damages out of the State’s General Fund.[21] In 2006, for example, the State was required to pay nearly $35 million in damages and legal costs to Kansas for violating the Arkansas River Compact.[22] When there is a challenge to State actions under the terms of these agreements, it is the State that is on the hook and local and regional entities are precluded from participating as parties to help defend the State in such litigation.[23] That is because interstate water disputes, reserved to the “original and exclusive jurisdiction” of the Supreme Court,[24] necessarily invoke States’ sovereignty, with each representing “the interests and rights of all of her people in a controversy with the other.”[25]
Elected officials in charge of managing Colorado’s water are accountable to taxpayers who, as noted above, will ultimately bear the cost of any failure to comply with interstate compacts. If the State manages water in a way in which constituents do not approve, they are able express their views directly to their elected officials or engage in the election process to have their voices heard. It is critical for the State to retain full authority to administer and distribute the waters of the State arising there to comply with interstate compacts as the sovereign with the exclusive authority to do so.
For a cautionary tale of how a state mismanaged its water consider what happened in Nebraska, when it faced an issue of how to manage its groundwater. In short, Nebraska delegated its regulatory authority over groundwater to local Natural Resource Districts instead of the state’s Department of Natural Resources.[26] Those local districts represented only the interests of their own water users, and they faced no direct liability for falling out of compact compliance. As a result, the districts failed to make the difficult policy and enforcement decisions necessary for Nebraska to comply with the compact, and Nebraska was forced to pay nearly $6 million in damages to Kansas after the U.S. Supreme Court found that Nebraska had violated the Republican River Compact.[27]
B. Developing Adaptable and Resilient Strategies for Colorado
Projects like the Maybell Diversion and Rye Resurgence are important to help individuals and communities adapt to variable water supplies. We will also need statewide strategies—and legal institutions—to allow those types of water users to occur while ensuring compliance with our interstate compact obligations. Together, we are well positioned to start a broader conversation on what adaptability and resilient strategies—and what legal tools—can help us achieve this critical goal.
Stakeholders have started to suggest different possible tools that can enable Colorado to better manage our water in an adaptive and resilient manner. One suggested strategy is to create a statewide conservation program that compensates people who forego use of their water rights, particularly at times of great demands on a particular system. The Rio Grande Conservation District is implementing such a system to protect its groundwater resources, for example.[28]
A second concept that some have suggested is to create a strategic reserve of water that Colorado could release to protect its water users from mandatory curtailments that might otherwise result from a shortage of water to downstream states. Under this model, the state would acquire and manage “slack capacity,” putting the state in position to navigate shortages and times when there is more demand for water than available.
Whatever strategies are ultimately developed, they are sure to be more successful if they can be built and tested before we need them. Given the pressures we are seeing on multiple fronts, the time to develop and test such ideas is now. As we know from lessons from other countries, the stakes are high and adopting an imperfect system can give rise to most unfortunate consequences.[29]
* * *
Our ability to adapt to the scarcity of water in Colorado and reduce uncertainty and unpredictability is critical to ensuring a promising future for our state. As I have explained, the best and most durable solutions will go beyond individual success and will collaborate with other interests to find win-win solutions like the Maybell Diversion and Rye Resurgence Projects. As we adapt to changing hydrology and look for flexible and collaborative solutions, it is also imperative to ground solutions in the rule of law and an admirable system. This is a formidable challenge, but one we can undoubtedly meet in the native land of hope.
[19] Tarrant Regional Water Dist. v. Herrmann, 569 U.S. 614, 631 (2013).
[20] Texas v. New Mexico, 602 U.S. 943, 962 (2024).
[21] Kansas v. Nebraska, 574 U.S. 445, 459 (2015) (finding local district boards bore no responsibility for complying with compact and assumed no share of the penalties Nebraska would pay for violations).
[22] Kansas v. Colorado, 533 U.S. 1, 20 (2001) (remanding the case to the Special Master for a determination of damages); Fifth and Final Report of Arthur L. Littleworth, Special Master, at 3, Kansas v. Colorado, No. 105 Orig., vol. II (Jan. 31, 2008).
[23] Texas v. New Mexico, 583 U.S. 913 (2017) (denying motions to intervene by local water districts in compact dispute between states).
[25] Wyoming v. Colorado, 286 U.S. 494, 508-09 (1932); New Jersey v. New York, 345 U.S. 369, 372 (1953); see also South Carolina v. North Carolina, 558 U.S. 256, 267 (1953) (“In its sovereign capacity, a State represents the interests of its citizens in an original action, the disposition of which binds the citizens.”); Nebraska v. Wyoming, 515 U.S. 1, 21 (1995) (“A State is presumed to speak in the best interests of [its] citizens. . . .”).
[26] Neb. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 46-702 (“The Legislature also finds that natural resources districts have the legal authority to regulate certain activities and, except as otherwise specifically provided by statute, as local entities are the preferred regulators of activities which may contribute to ground water depletion.”).
Rio Grande, looking south near Cole Park. The Alamosa Riverfront Project is among several that received funding last week under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Credit: The Citizen
Conservationists focused on the Rio Grande Basin signal it as an initial win in a battle for federal dollars to address the impacts of drought and the need for a sustainable water supply.
They’ve seen how the federal government has kicked into gear to address the same issues on the Colorado River Basin, and have wondered why the Rio Grande Basin largely has been ignored.
Until now.
The U.S. Department of Interior and Bureau of Reclamation announced last week in the final days of the Biden Administration a $24.97 million award to support water conservation and habitat restoration efforts in the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the billions that have been awarded to projects on the Colorado River, but it’s a start.
“Today’s announcement provides a critical down payment that will make the headwaters of the Rio Grande better prepared to handle the ongoing impacts of drought, while supporting state and local efforts to sustainably manage water supplies for future generations,” said Alexander Funk, Director of Water Resources, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.
The money came through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and was among the final announcements by the Biden Administration of funding awarded through the federal legislation.
The significance of that is nobody in the agriculture, conservation, and water world knows if the incoming Trump Administration will carry on with the Inflation Reduction Act, or if that particular federal legislation and the $369 billion approved by Congress falls to the wayside.
“We’re shocked we got anything,” said Amber Pacheco of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and member of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable. She described a rush at the end to send to the Bureau of Reclamation “shovel-ready” projects that could earn IRA funding.
“It was a ‘quick overnight, send some projects that we can fund,’” said Pacheco.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Out of the award comes funding for a variety of projects in the San Luis Valley as well projects for the middle Rio Grande in New Mexico. Overall, $18 million will go toward Rio Grande Basin projects in Colorado and $7 million for Rio Grande restoration efforts in New Mexico.
The San Luis Valley and Conejos Water Conservancy Districts, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and the Rio Grande National Forest in southern Colorado are among the eight recipients selected under one cooperative agreement to receive $24.9 million for several drought resiliency activities in the Upper Rio Grande Basin, the Bureau of Reclamation said in announcing the money.
For the Valley, those projects will include the Alamosa Riverfront Restoration project; Rio Grande Reservoir Low Flow Valve; Pine River Weminuche Pass Ditch Turnback Structure; Lower Conejos River Restoration Project; Platoro Reservoir Restoration and Wildfire Risk Mitigation Project – Phase 1; Saguache Creek Multi-benefit Restoration at Upper Crossing Station; and Rio Grande Confluence Restoration Project, among others.
“This announcement shows that when Colorado and New Mexico work together, big things can help that benefit fish and wildlife, support local economies, and tackle some of the region’s most pressing water challenges,” said Funk.
“The Rio Grande is the underpinning that supports the economic and ecological health of the region. This funding allows conservation partners to critically address and relieve the challenges this habitat and community have experienced from long-term drought and sustainability insecurity,” said Tracy Stephens, senior specialist for riparian connectivity at The National Wildlife Federation. “We applaud the Bureau of Reclamation’s investment and recognition of the importance of riparian health and habitat connectivity. This funding is an important step forward in a collective effort to achieve well-connected and functional riparian corridors to protect the wellbeing of people, plants, and wildlife in the Upper Rio Grande.”
Screen shot from the Vimeo film, “Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project: Five Ditches,” https://vimeo.com/364411112
Alamosa never gets 16 inches of total precipitation in a year. Never. Ever. Except that it did in 2024.
Turns out, 2024 was among the wettest on record across the San Luis Valley going back to 1895, with all six counties registering historic levels of precipitation. Here are the precipitation totals by county, according to data from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information:
Alamosa County, 16.75 inches
Conejos County, 24.29 inches
Costilla County, 22.53 inches
Mineral County, 32.60 inches
Rio Grande County, 19.66 inches
Saguache County, 21.86 inches
The headscratching is how so much moisture was realized in a year when the unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin dropped to near its lowest level, which became problematic for irrigators who are under orders by the state of Colorado to reduce their groundwater pumping to help recover the ailing aquifer.
“Two things,” said Cleave Simpson, general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and local hay grower. “We didn’t have continuous steady snowpack in the winter months that put us in a good position, and then the volume of snow we got was on top of drier conditions last fall where moisture, instead of showing up in a stream, ends up in the ground in soil conditions.
“So to that end, this year at my farm in October, I get an inch and a half of rain, in October. That never, ever happens. So the hope is then, that nice soil moisture that we got in October will set us up for success.”
Craig Cotten, division engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources, said the wet 2024 was a boon to local farmers and their efforts to recover the Valley’s aquifers. What it didn’t do was increase the amount of water stored in reservoirs.
“The reservoirs in the Rio Grande Basin in Colorado typically store water in winter when the senior priority ditches are shut off. The reservoirs can also store during the irrigation season, but only if there is a significant amount of water in the rivers to serve not only the irrigation ditches but the reservoirs as well,” said Cotten.
“This typically requires very high river flows, which did not occur in 2024 even with the rain events that were the primary reason for the high precipitation total in 2024. The significant rains in the Rio Grande Basin did increase the river flows, but not enough to get the reservoirs into priority. The increase in reservoir storage in 2024 was about typical of what occurs in an average year.”
Without the high levels of precipitation in 2024, the critical unconfined aquifer was in danger of falling to a level of storage nobody was expecting to see after years of irrigators working to reduce their groundwater pumping.
Colorado precipitation for the 12 months ending January 15, 2024. Credit: High Plains Regional Climate Center.
“The large amount of precipitation in the Rio Grande Basin during the summer of 2024 helped the unconfined aquifer in multiple ways,” said Cotten. “This precipitation increased the streamflow in the Rio Grande throughout the summer, allowing the ditches and canals to divert more water than they otherwise would have.
“This increased diversion in turn allowed delivery of a higher amount of water into recharge pits and the aquifer. The precipitation also helped to meet the irrigation needs of the crops, allowing the farmers to not pump their wells as much as they would otherwise.”
The hope among local farmers is that the wet fall months of 2024, when October and November delivered more than 11 inches of snow, will translate into an above-average spring runoff and give a boost to surface water coming into the Valley in 2025.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
DENVER — Colorado Parks and Wildlife is seeking applications for wetland and riparian restoration, enhancement and creation projects to support the Wetlands for Wildlife Program.
This year, CPW will award over $1.1 million in funds from Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) and Colorado Waterfowl Stamps to projects in Colorado that support the Wetlands Program Strategic Plan’s two main goals:
Improve the distribution and abundance of ducks, and opportunities for public waterfowl hunting. Applications supporting this goal should seek to improve fall/winter habitat on property open for public hunting (or refuge areas within properties open for public hunting) or improve breeding habitat in important production areas (including North Park and the San Luis Valley in Colorado, and other areas contributing ducks to the fall flight in Colorado).
Improve the status of declining or at-risk species. Applications supporting this goal should seek to clearly address habitat needs of these species. See the identified threats, recommended conservation actions, and progress to date for these species in the Colorado State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) Conservation Dashboards.
Wetlands for Wildlife application guidance and instruction is available at: cpw.state.co.us/wetlands-wildlife-grants. The application deadline is Monday, Feb. 10.
About the program The Colorado Wetlands for Wildlife Program is a voluntary, collaborative and incentive-based program to restore, enhance and create wetlands and riparian areas in Colorado. Funds are allocated annually to the program and projects are recommended for funding by a CPW committee with final approval by the Director.
“Wetlands are so important,” said CPW Wetlands Program Coordinator Brian Sullivan. “They comprise less than two percent of Colorado’s landscape, but provide benefits to over 75 percent of the species in the state, including waterfowl and several declining species. Since the beginning of major settlement activities, Colorado has lost half of its wetlands.”
Since its inception in 1997, the Colorado Wetlands Program and its partners has preserved, restored, enhanced or created more than 220,000 acres of wetlands and adjacent habitat and more than 200 miles of streams. The partnership is responsible for more than $40 million in total funding devoted to wetland and riparian preservation in Colorado.
Swim class on the San Juan River. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
On Sunday, Dec. 29, the daytime high of 57 degrees in Alamosa established a new record for the date, making December 2024 one of the warmest Decembers this century. | Credit: The Citizen
A mild December caps a year of unusual weather for Alamosa and the greater San Luis Valley. Or maybe it’s just the new normal in a century of changing climates and chaotic weather patterns.
The month of December brought 10 different 50-degree weather days, and an average temperature of 45 degrees – or 10 degrees above what’s been historically normal, according to figures from the National Weather Service.
On Sunday, Dec. 29, the daytime high of 57 degrees in Alamosa established a new record for the date, making December 2024 one of the warmest Decembers this century.
The summer and late fall were strange as well this year. Between May and August, the Valley floor received 6.14 inches of rain, making it one of the wettest four-month periods on record this century.
For perspective, the San Luis Valley typically experiences 7 inches of total precipitation and around 30 inches of measurable snow each year. In 2024, Alamosa experienced 11.36 inches of precipitation and 37 inches of snow.
Those late spring and summer rains came off a record amount of total snow in March when 14.5 inches fell, way above the 4 inches of snow that is typical for the month. Indeed, 2024 was a strange, wet weather year.
Yet, the Upper Rio Grande Basin continues to struggle and local irrigators remain under state pressure to reduce their groundwater pumping and retire more fields. In August alarm bells went off for water managers when readings of the unconfined aquifer storage levels shockingly showed the critical aquifer near its lowest measurable point.
“You’re always under pressure and the sense of urgency is always there,” said Cleave Simpson of the stress farmers and ranchers in the San Luis Valley face to recover the ailing aquifers of the Rio Grande. He works as general manager for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and represents the Valley and most of southwestern Colorado as a state senator.
In his role as state legislator, Simpson sponsored legislation that resulted in $30 million committed to pay Valley irrigators to retire more groundwater wells to reduce their groundwater pumping. Over the past dozen years, payments made to either temporarily or permanently fallow agricultural fields and reduce the amount of groundwater pumped in the Valley have totaled $100 million, according to figures Simpson cited on this episode of The Valley Pod.
The podcast episode with Simpson looks back on the century and how the new millennium, now 25 years in, has been dominated by the effects of climate change.
U.S. Drought Monitor July 23, 2002.
“From climate, in particular, 2002 was this critical moment in time for us. That’s when the whole paradigm shifted for the San Luis Valley and Colorado and really the western U.S.,” said Simpson. “That was the worst drought in our recorded history. The Rio Grande had never seen those kinds of diminished flows, ever, since we started recording it.
“It’s basically since 2002 till today, that’s 22 years of this drying, this no snow pack, this change in how runoff occurs, and the timing and the volumes.”
Simpson and others who closely follow the weather patterns of the San Luis Valley say it’s no longer drought but aridification settling into the soil that the Valley will wrestle with as the 21st century proceeds.
We’ll see now what 2025 has in store.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Call it a meeting of the minds – Willem A. Schreüder, the CU computer scientist behind the groundwater modeling of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, and a group of San Luis Valley irrigators who are racing against time to reduce groundwater pumping in what state water engineers call “one of the most productive irrigated farming areas in the state.”
Schreüder spent more than an hour at a Dec. 4 meeting with farmers who form the governing board of Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. They wanted to know if the subdistrict’s upcoming Fourth Plan of Water Management, which calls for irrigators to limit their groundwater pumping to the amount of surface water that naturally flows in, is going to work.
It’s called one-for-one pumping, and while the plan has been approved by the Subdistrict 1 board, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District board and the state engineer, it still needs sign off from the state water court, which likely won’t happen until 2026.
While all the Valley’s farmers face pressure to reduce groundwater pumping in the face of a changing climate, it’s the crop producers in Subdistrict 1 who are on the clock and under state orders to recover groundwater levels of the unconfined aquifer and maintain a sustainable irrigation water supply by 2031.
It’s Schreüder’s mathematics’ modeling that clues in the Colorado Division of Water Resources to the response the river system and aquifers are having through a steady reduction of groundwater pumping over the past two decades.
Schreüder’s expert witness testimony explaining the Rio Grande Decision Support System (RGDSS) model has been the subject of state water court proceedings and undoubtedly will be again in upcoming cases.
His session with Subdistrict 1 managers yielded a few insights, notably:
The recharge of streams should occur as close to the point of where the groundwater pumping occurred, a problem that has particularly come to light around Saguache Creek and the groundwater pumping that occurs in that area of the Valley.
As much as the RGDSS model can be useful in showing the response of the river to less groundwater pumping, there is always an imbalance even if irrigators are perfectly recharging the same amount as they’ve pumped out.
What follows is a partial, edited transcript of the conversation to get at some of the more pertinent questions. Jake Burris, president of the Subdistrict 1 board of managers, opened the discussion:
Burris: The first question I would throw at you is, the anchor of the amended plan, should we be successful, is that we would only pump imported water as it’s brought in. Live within our means, sort of speak. If that is the case, is it unreasonable to assume that we would not be generating any new depletions at that point?
Schreüder: New depletions anywhere, or a particular stream?
Burris: Anywhere, any stream.
Schreüder: So the short answer is ‘No’ in the sense that yes, we probably still will have the depletions, and what it comes down to is that the one-for-one plan essentially is one that deals with an average. So we’re looking at a districtwide or subdistrict-wide average balance, whereas when we talk about stream depletions, we’re talking about time, place, amount. And so it’s very easy to construct a hypothetical situation where if you look at where the pumping occurs and where the recharge occurs, that those recharges in pumping are not exactly coincident and as a result, the distance between where you recharge and where you are pumping basically directs depletions to a particular direction. And so what could very likely occur is that on one stream you actually have an accretion and on another stream you have depletion. So on average you tend to be sort of in balance with the surface network, but the people on the stream that is depleted, are not going to be happy. . .So unless the way that the one-for-one works is that the recharge occurs in exactly the place where the pumping occurs, you likely will have depletions to some streams.”
Burris: So it’s not just simply an issue from an administrative standpoint of us utilizing our recharge on an average. That’s irrelevant. It is a logistics and timing problem, regardless?
Schreüder: There’s both a temporal and spatial component to that. Think about for example, the depletions to the Rio Grande and I’m making up numbers here, but just to make the argument easier, let’s say 50 percent of your depletions occur in year one and then 30 percent in year two and 10 percent in years three and four. So it’s front-loaded as far as when the depletions occur, and you’re working on a five-year average and let’s say for those first five years, or first four of the five years, let’s say there’s negative 25,000 acre-feet of pumping to managed recharge. . .and then in the last year, year five, we basically have a 100,000 acre-feet of pumping in excess of recharge. So because half of that occurs in year one, and the offsets from two years and three years and four years and five years ago are lesser amounts, even though on the five-year average you are in balance, you could have a situation that on the Rio Grande in that first year after the big pumping you do not have an impact. So it’s both the temporal scale at which things happen, as well as the spatial scale. It’s also a reflection of where did that recharge occur and where did the pumping occur. If you average it out, they don’t fall right on top of each other.
Burris: The way the model then is I guess essentially looking at it for lack of a better way, but from a temporal and spatial standpoint, Sub 1’s aquifer itself is irrelevant. It’s not looking at it from a form of recharging an aquifer as a whole and recharging for all the wells as a conglomerate. It’s looking at the individual wells and the areas around each well?
Schreüder: As far as the model is concerned, yes.
Burris: I think that’s our big disconnect, or at least I should speak for myself there. The way Sub 1’s structured is with the way the aquifer system is and the way we treat the wells and recharges, it’s in totality. It’s as a conglomerate, and so you can’t take that perspective in any way to the model?
Schreüder: That’sright? And so there’s actually three parts to this. The first is as far as Subdistrict 1’s one-for-one is concerned, to a large part that’s going to address sustainability because what you put in and what you take out balances, that should be sustainable. So that’s the one part. The other part then, of course, is the groundwater modeling, which tries to figure out just exactly where the spring depletions occur. And then the third part to that is well, we need to calculate these response functions and the response function needs to capture the essential behavior of the model so that we have a simpler way of actually applying the inputs and predict what the depletions are. The problem that we are going to face in the future is that so far the response function approach has actually worked pretty well because what we found is that if you simply look at what the imbalance between pumping and recharge is in the ’90s and early 2000s, it did a pretty good job of predicting where the stream depletions would be if all you do is to calculate the net consumptive use and you run it through that function, and then you get the stream depletion prediction. But what if we go one-for-one and the next CU (consumptive use) is zero a lot of time, how are we going to figure out a response function that we can then use to predict what the stream depletion is?
Burris: It is a possibility to reconsider conceptually how the model is I guess, the framework of the model? Or are we pretty much stuck with how the system is now, if that makes sense?
Schreüder: I think we are fairly confident in the framework of the model because it is able to reproduce what has happened historically pretty well. The question that we’re struggling with is ‘How do we ask the what-if question?’ Had there not been wells or had the wells only operated in a way where the pumping matched the recharge, what would the stream depletions have been? And that’s a little bit more tricky question that we need to answer now. In the past, because there was always an imbalance between pumping and recharge, it sort of worked out. But if we are actually finding that we are leaving the response function zeros a lot, and if the model does all of the superimposition of individual wells in terms of one answer, and then we average things and we run that sort of the response function, we don’t come up with that same answer, that’s the problem, right? That’s the definition of non-linear. Linear means if you have a function that translates an input to an output, all you have to do is average the inputs and the function will give you the same average on the outputs. Whereas in the non-linear system, if you run the individual items through the function and you then average the results, you don’t get the same answer. And that’s what we are struggling with. Will we be able to properly linearize that?
Burris: I’ll throw one more question at you and then I’ll let somebody else talk. What is the difference in impacts specifically, I’ll say, to Saguache Creek as far as the model sees them between unconfined wells and confined wells? Is the classification different in the model? Is the impact different, or are those treated the same sort of like we treat them the same in Sub 1?
Schreüder: They’re different in the sense that, because in the confined aquifer you typically have lower storage co-efficients, the columns of depression that accumulate for those tend to spread out wider and faster than they do in the unconfined aquifer. And so since the model basically just stacks all of those on top of each other and then calculates the total, it takes into consideration the fact that confined and unconfined wells behave differently. But as far as, can you tell me exactly how confined wells are, what the total is from confined wells and what’s the total from the unconfined wells? I’ve not tried to make that separation. We always just consider it in total because again, this is a non-linear system. So how you evaluate individual wells versus all of the wells in the subdistrict as a whole, if you add up all the individual wells, it doesn’t add up to the total for the subdistrict as a whole. So it’s a little difficult to make that clear distinction between the two.
Credit: Rio Grande Water Conservation District
The seventh iteration of the RGDSS model is being finalized by Schreüder, which led to this exchange with another of the Subdistrict 1 managers. The conversation also then delved into the new Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District.
Sub1 Board: When will we have, ‘This is the final seven version?’ Do we need to take action soon or can we wait a month or two for you to finalize it?
Schreüder: So I am hoping, we have a meeting on Dec. 17, I think is the date, and I’m hoping to finalize the model for that, or at least get people’s agreement that this is good enough that we should be moving on to the application of the model. So now we start asking the model questions, and it’ll probably be several months if not a year before we go from OK, we now have a model’ translating that into, do we ask the right question for each zone and then what are the response functions that are coming out of that? So it’s probably going to be at least a year before we have the answer that will apply for the next five or 10 years.
Sub 1 board member, on the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group known as SWAG: SWAG forming their own subdistrict and I guess trying to do it alone, how would you see that changing those fields and their new conservation district now outside of our subdistrict. Would that impact this data set?
Schreüder: Well, I guess to the extent that they do their own thing, they give us more site-specific information, we’ll try to incorporate that into the model. The difficult thing that we need to figure out is, ‘How do we deal with it separate from the rest of Sub 1?’ And that’s not going to be easy.
Sub 1 board member: Just clipping those wells out of our dataset, you’re saying it’s not just as straightforward as, ‘Hey, these ones are closer to Saguache and they’re no longer in the map.’ Does that help the math?
Schreüder: Well, and I mean that’s part of the problem, right, is it’s sort of obvious that yeah, those guys are probably having a bigger impact on Saguache Creek than the rest, but how do we actually run the model in such a way that we can actually quantify that? And that’s one of the problems that you have an nonlinear system, is if you start breaking it up into lots of little parts, the answer doesn’t sum up to the total and that becomes problematic in terms of how do you figure out what the total impact on the stream is and how to distribute that back to individual people? And it’s something that we’ve worked very hard to avoid, but they’re sort of forcing our hand and I don’t know exactly what the answers can be.
Sub 1 board member: You mentioned the substantial decrease in pumping over the last 10, 15 years in Subdistrict 1. Is there a scenario where if that were to continue or if wells were continuing to be retired in Sub 1, that that cone of depression would no longer reach Saguache Creek or we would no longer have applications in any scenario?
Schreüder: It’s that balance, right, between where the recharge occurs and where the pumping is. So if we basically do one-for-one and we can put the recharge exactly where we’ve pumped, then there should be no net cone of depression. And so that’s the problem, right? There’s always an imbalance, and so even if you are perfectly recharging the same amount as you are pumping, it’s always going to push the cone of depression in one direction.
Jake Burris: I once again will reiterate how appreciative I, and we are, that you’re willing to make the trip down here and talk to us. It was hugely helpful, at least for me, just the general perspective o,f it’s drastically different how we treat Sub 1 and administer it versus how the model sees it, I guess is how I’ll put it. But we do appreciate you taking the time.
Schreüder: Well, and again, let me just reiterate. The sustainability requirement, there’s the model’s predictions of impact, and then the response functions themselves, and the way that the response functions work right now, by definition, if you had no net CU (consumptive use), there would be no depletion. But that’s the existing response functions, and that’s one of the things that we need to figure out at the end of phase seven is, OK that particular model of response function is probably not going to work again. So what are we going to do to fix that?
A new water conservancy district is taking shape on the western end of the San Luis Valley that will compete for groundwater purchases to keep farms in operation and add to the complicated efforts to restore the underground aquifers of the Upper Rio Grande Basin.
Winding its ways through Colorado Division 3 Water Court is an application from a group of Valley irrigators to form the Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District and Groundwater Management Subdistrict.
The farming operations that would belong to the new conservancy district would include 77 parcels of irrigated lands with an assessed valuation of $13.3 million, according to documents filed with the application. The parcels show up in Saguache, Rio Grande and Alamosa counties.
The application to form a new conservancy district comes from the same farm operators who formed the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group. Last year, SWAG filed for an alternative augmentation plan in state district water court in effort to avert a groundwater management plan approved by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and its Subdistrict 1.
In essence, SCWCD has replaced SWAG in the fight for sustainability of farming and ranching in the western end of the Valley. The formation of a new conservancy district also signals a push away for these farm operations from the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and its strategies.
Once operational, Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District will find itself working with the Colorado Division of Water Resources to get its water management plans approved just as the Rio Grande Water Conservation District does for its members.
“Again, the primary objective of the SCWCD will be to obtain and operate a decreed plan or plans for augmentation, and/or a groundwater management plan, to allow landowners in the District to continue to operate their groundwater wells in accordance with Colorado law,” the group said in its application filed with Division 3 water court.
The next district water court hearing on the application is scheduled in November.
Asier Artaechevarria, Willie Myers and Les Alderete – all three of whom formed the SWAG board of directors – would be the initial board of directors steering the Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District, according to court filings.
SCWCD would impose a mill levy tax upon the farms operating within its boundaries to pay for operations and strategy to adhere to the state’s groundwater pumping rules. The conservancy district would include approximately 250 wells, and the group said it plans to invest another $40 million to obtain approximately another 6,000 acre-feet of water to “achieve and maintain a sustainable water supply.”
In the case of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, two conflicting conditions can both be true at once. On one hand, the year has brought much more rain than is typical. With more than an inch of rain over the weekend, the San Luis Valley has seen more than 10 inches of total precipitation so far in 2024, or 3 inches above what’s normal, according to the National Weather Service. On the other hand, low snowpack in the San Juans and Sangre de Cristos from a winter ago left Valley farmers with less than a normal water year for irrigation. On May 6, the Rio Grande Basin had half of the typical snowpack, according to the Colorado Climate Center, and we know the unconfined aquifer relied on by so many irrigators remains a major problem. The state currently has a five percent curtailment on groundwater wells in the San Luis Valley. In calculating its downstream water obligations to New Mexico under the Rio Grande Compact, Colorado is anticipating the Rio Grande to finish the irrigation season at 78 percent of what’s normal for flows and 80 percent on the Conejos River, according to Craig Cotten, division engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
New conservancy district forms
Winding its way through Colorado Division 3 Water Court is an application from a group of Valley irrigators to form the Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District and Groundwater Management Subdistrict. The initial board of directors would be Art Artaechevarria, William Meyers, and Les Alderete, according to the application submitted to state water court in Alamosa. The formation of a new water conservancy district will allow the group of farmers to manage their own affairs when it comes to meeting Colorado’s rules governing groundwater pumping in the San Luis Valley. Like the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and its subdistrict formations, the new SOCO Water Conservancy District would impose a mill levy tax upon the farms operating within it to pay for its operations and strategy to adhere to the state’s groundwater pumping rules. The Southern Colorado Water Conservancy District has membership among farmers in Saguache, Rio Grande and Alamosa counties. The new water conservancy district will include approximately 250 wells, and in its application it tells the water court that the subdistrict plans to obtain approximately 6,000 acre-feet to augment depletions from wells and estimates it will cost $40 million to obtain the water. There’s a lot more to this developing water story. More in the coming week.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Hearing this week on Rio Grande Compact case
The decade-long Rio Grande Compact case of Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado will have a hearing before retired Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith on Wednesday, Oct. 23, in Denver. Smith, who retired as chief judge of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021, was appointed new Special Master in the case by the U.S. Supreme Court in July. The appointment came after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the U.S. Department of Interior and denied a consent decree that the states had negotiated which would have settled the case. Smith now takes over the case and is expected to set a course of action during the hearing this week.
hen the state of Colorado created the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund with $30 million earmarked for recovering the aquifers of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, there was an intention to steer a good portion of the money toward irrigators working in Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
Whether the strategy will work is under question. Last month’s reading of the unconfined aquifer storage levels shockingly showed it at its lowest point, despite millions in tax dollars that have been spent to retire groundwater wells.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
The motivation behind Senate Bill 22-028 was to use state tax dollars to continue to dry out farming fields located in the most productive area of the San Luis Valley because that’s where the depleted unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin runs through. For the past two decades the state Division of Water Resources has been working with Rio Grande Water Conservation District and the farmers and ranchers who operate in Subdistrict 1 to reduce the amount of groundwater they pump each growing season to help recover the struggling aquifer.
The 2022 state senate bill would bring new money into the effort. Of the $30 million allocated from Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund to the Upper Rio Grande Basin, nearly $14 million has been directed to retire 44 more groundwater wells in Subdistrict 1, with more money likely to come to further the strategy.
The state monitors the amount of groundwater pumped with flow meters tied to center pivot sprinklers which water the fields. The meter reading will tell the farm operator how many acre-feet of water they’ve used during the irrigation season, and each fall figures from those flow meters are reported to the state.
The assumption has been that by reducing the amount of groundwater pumped from the unconfined aquifer, the aquifer would recharge over time. Over the past decade, it appeared the strategy had validity with the aquifer at times showing a bounce back.
Then came the reading from this August which showed the unconfined aquifer storage near its lowest level, and state and local water managers found themselves scratching their heads in disbelief and frustration.
“It is disappointing to see that the aquifer has dropped lower this year. We had hoped to see an increase in aquifer levels, but another lower-than-average river flow year meant that less water was available to recharge the aquifers,” said Craig Cotten, the state division water engineer in the San Luis Valley.
The continued decline in unconfined aquifer levels is the reason the state engineer this year approved a new Groundwater Management Plan that is included in the Subdistrict 1 Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management. The plan was more than a year in the making and still needs approval from the state water court to go into effect. That won’t happen at the earliest until sometime in 2026.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
“It is very concerning, especially given that Subdistrict #1, under its current plan, has just seven more years in which to recover the unconfined aquifer to a sustainable level. If the aquifer has not recovered by then, and if the subdistrict is still operating under its current Groundwater Management Plan, then the State Engineer will have no choice but to curtail all of the non-exempt wells in this area,” Cotten said.
There are several “ifs” in that scenario, all of which should get addressed when the state water court takes up the new Groundwater Management Plan for Subdistrict 1. But again, that’s not until 2026, and the clock, as Cotten mentions, is ticking.
Amber Pacheco, deputy general manager for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, said there are 3,614 wells included in the Subdistrict 1 annual replacement plan. The idea that the state would come in and shut those down because farmers couldn’t recover the unconfined aquifer to a sustainable level is the constant worry Subdistrict 1 farm operators work under.
“There is no specific timeline in which the Subdistrict will meet its objective to reach a Sustainable Water Supply by reaching an Unconfined Aquifer Storage Level between 200,000 and 400,000 acre-feet below that storage level that was calculated to exist on January 1, 1976, but it may be 20 years or less depending on the hydrologic conditions following the period the new plan is implemented,” Pacheco said.
Take a drive down County Rd E or any of the other country roads that cross through Rio Grande and Alamosa counties and you’ll notice the Valley’s potato harvest in full swing. Take a bit closer look, and in the midst of the harvested fields is a growing amount of agricultural acreage once productive that is now intentionally dried out to save on the groundwater below.
The last days of the potato harvest. Photo credit: The Alamaosa Citizen
With the unconfined aquifer showing little to no bounce back after years of attempted recovery, the expectation is that the western and northern ends of the San Luis Valley will see more dry fields in the growing seasons to come. The money spent through the state’s Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund to retire more groundwater wells will begin to show up in the 2025, 2026 planting seasons and beyond.
As Cotten said, Subdistrict 1 is “one of the most productive irrigated farming areas in the state.”
Farming with a struggling aquifer is making it less so.
The biggest water trials facing the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and local farmers are set for 2026.
Peter Ampe, attorney for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, told board members Tuesday that three major water cases are set for trial in 2026. The cases are:
The fourth Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1 scheduled for six weeks starting Jan. 2, 2026
Sustainable Water Augmentation Group and its proposed alternative augmentation plan for a group of irrigators in Subdistrict 1 set for a six-week trail starting June 29, 2026
The city of Alamosa and its confined aquifer case set for a three-week trial starting on Oct. 19, 2026
Each of the cases is subject to settlement ahead of any trial. Ampe said the city of Alamosa’s case to guarantee itself more water for future expansion has the best chance of agreement before a trial would begin.
The fourth Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1 is a key document that outlines future strategies to recover the unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin. Farmers in the subdistrict, which covers parts of Alamosa County around Mosca-Hooper and Rio Grande County, are under pressure from state water managers to restore the aquifer.
The subdistrict’s updated water management plan has been approved by the state engineer and needs approval from the District 3 Water Court to go into effect.
The alternative augmentation plan proposed by the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group had the start of a water trial in 2023 only to have the trial come to a sudden end when the group withdrew its application. The application withdrawal came after the town of Del Norte terminated an agreement to lease water to the SWAG farmers as a replacement source for groundwater pumping by SWAG members.
Greg Higel, board chair of Rio Grande Water Conservation District, said the board will have to prioritize spending on attorney fees in its annual budgets. MORE: Alamosa Citizen maintains an extensive archive of water stories.
Corn in Baca County. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
Unanimous votes in the Colorado Legislature are rare, but they do happen. Consider HB24-1435, the funding for the Colorado Water Conservation Board projects.
The big duffle bag of funding for various projects was approved 13-0 by the Senate Water and Agriculture Resources Committee. It had bipartisan sponsors, including Rep. Marc Catlin, a former water district official from Montrose.
“Colorado has been a leader in water for a long, long time, and this is bill is an opportunity for us to stay in that leadership position,” said Catlin, a Republican and a co-sponsor.
“This is one of my favorite bills,” said Rep. Karen McCormick, a Democrat from Longmont and former veterinarian. She is also a co-sponsor.
This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo
The bill has some very big-ticket items, including $20 million for the Shoshone power plant agreement between Western Slope interests and Public Service Co. of Colorado, better known by its parent company, Xcel Energy. Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River District, called the effort to keep the water in the river “incredibly important” to those who make a living in the Colorado River Basin.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
Mueller also pointed out that keeping water in the river will benefit of four endangered species of fish that inhabit what is called the 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River near Grand Junction.
Another $2 million was appropriated for the turf-replacement program in cities, a program first funded in 2022. Another mid-range item is telemetry for Snotel sites, to keep track of snow depths, the better to predict runoff. It is to get $1.8 million.
Among the smallest items in the budget is a big one for Baca County, in Colorado’s southeast corner. The bill, if adopted, would provide the Colorado Water Conservation Board with $250,000 to be used to evaluate the remaining water in aquifers underlying southeastern Colorado. There, near the communities of Springfield and Walsh, some wells long ago exhausted the Ogallala aquifer and have gone deeper into lower aquifers, in a few cases exhausting those, too. Farmers in other areas continue to pump with only modest declines.
What exactly is the status of the underground water there? How many more decades can the agricultural economy dependent upon water from the aquifers continue? The area is well aside from the Arkansas River or other sources of snowmelt.
A study by the McLaughlin Group in 2002 delivered numbers that are sobering. Wes McKinley, a former state legislator from Walsh, at a meeting in February covered by the Plainsman Herald of Springfield, said the McLaughlin study numbers show that 84% of the water has been extracted. That study suggested 50-some years of water remaining. If correct, that leaves 34 years of water today.
Tim Hume, the area’s representation on the Colorado Groundwater Commission, has emphasized that he believes this new study will be needed to accurately determine how water should be managed.
How soon will this study proceed? asked Rep. Ty Winter, a Republican from Trinidad who represents southeastern Colorado. Tracy Kosloff, the deputy director of the Colorado Division of Water Resources, answered that the technical analysis should begin sometime after July. “I would think it is reasonable to finish it up by the end of 2025, but that is just an educated guess.”
She said the state would work with the Baca County community to come up with a common goal and direction “about how they want to manage their resources.”
Unlike the Republican River area of northeastern Colorado, where farmers also have been plunging wells into the Ogallala and other aquifers, this area of southeastern Colorado has no native river. In the Republican Basin, Colorado is trying to remove 25,000 acres from irrigation by the end of 2029 in order to leave more water to move into the Republican River. See story. A similar proposition is underway in the San Luis Valley, where farmers have also extensively tapped the underground aquifers that are tributary to the Rio Grande. See story.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
The closest to critical questioning of the bill came from Rep. Richard Holtorf, a Republican who represents many of the farming counties of northeastern Colorado. He questioned the $2 million allocated to the Office of the Attorney General.
He was told that $1 million of that constantly replenishing fund is allocated to the Colorado River, $110,000 for the Republican River, $459,000 for the Rio Grande, $35,000 for the Arkansas and $200,000 for the South Platte.
Then there’s the litigation with Nebraska about the proposed ditch that would begin in Colorado near Julesburg but deliver water to Nebraska’s Perkins County. Colorado hotly disputes that plan.
Lauren Ris, the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said Colorado is “very confident in our legal strategy.”
Holtorf also noted that the severance tax provides 25% of the funding for the water operations. The severance tax comes from fossil fuel development. As Colorado moves to renewable energy, “what happens to this Colorado water if we kill the goose that lays the golden egg?”
Ris replied said future declines in the severance tax is a conversation underway among many agencies in Colorado state government.
The South Platte Hotel building that sits at the Two Forks site, where the North and South forks of the South Platte River come together. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Hundreds of growers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley could see their water costs nearly quadruple under a new plan designed to slash agricultural water use in the drought-strapped region and deflect a potential legal crisis on the Rio Grande.
A new rule approved by the area’s largest irrigation district, known as Subdistrict 1, and the Alamosa-based Rio Grande Water Conservation District, sets fees charged to pump water from a severely depleted underground aquifer at $500 an acre-foot, up from $150 an acre-foot. The new program could begin as early as 2026 if the fees survive a court challenge.
“It’s draconian and it hurts,” said Sen. Cleave Simpson, a Republican from Alamosa who is also general manager of the Rio Grande water district.
The region, home to one of the nation’s largest potato economies, has relied for more than 70 years on water from an aquifer that is intimately tied to the Rio Grande. The river begins high in the San Juan mountains above the valley floor.
Both the river and the aquifer are supplied by melting mountain snows, but a relentless multi-year drought has shrunk annual snowpacks so much that neither the river nor the aquifer have been able to recover their once bountiful supplies.
And that’s a problem. Under the Rio Grande Compact of 1938, Colorado is required to deliver enough water downstream to satisfy New Mexico and Texas. If the aquifer falls too low, it will endanger the river’s supplies and push Colorado out of compliance. Such a situation could trigger lawsuits and cost the state tens of millions of dollars in legal fees.
Subdistrict 1 has set state-approved goals to comply with the compact. Within seven years, it must find a way to restore hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water to the aquifer, a difficult task.
Rio Grande River, CO | Photo By Sinjin Eberle
An acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons of water, or enough to cover an acre of land with water a foot deep.
The specter of an interstate water fight is creating enormous pressure to reorganize the valley’s farming communities in a way that will allow them to use less water, grow fewer potatoes, and still have a healthy economy.
For more than a decade, valley water users have been working to reduce water use and stabilize the aquifer. Many have already started experimenting with ways to grow potatoes with less water by improving soil health, and to find new crops, such as quinoa, that may also prove to be profitable.
But the pumping plans, considered innovative by water experts, haven’t been enough to stop the decline in aquifer levels. The Rio Grande Basin is consistently one of the driest in the state, generating too little water to make up for drought conditions and restore the aquifer after decades of over pumping.
With the new fees, the region will likely have some of the highest agricultural water costs in the state, said Craig Cotten, who oversees the Rio Grande River Basin for Colorado’s Division of Water Resources.
Perhaps not as high as water in the Colorado-Big Thompson Project on the northern Front Range, where cities and developers and some growers pay thousands of dollars to buy an acre-foot of water.
Still it is much higher than San Luis Valley growers and others have paid historically. Fees at one time were just $75 an acre-foot, eventually reaching $150 an acre-foot. The prospect of the fee skyrocketing to $500 is shocking.
“That is high,” said Brett Bovee, president of WestWater Research, a consulting firm specializing in water economics and valuations. Typically such fees across the state have been in the $50 to $100 range, he said.
But Bovee said the water district is taking constructive action while giving growers opportunities to find their own solutions to the water shortage. “It’s putting the decision-making power into the hands of growers and landowners, rather than saying ‘everybody take one-third of your land out of production.’”
Third hay cutting 2021 in Subdistrict 1 area of San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Chris Lopez
Subdistrict 1 is the oldest and largest of a group of irrigation districts in the valley, according to Cotten. Its $500 fee has triggered a lawsuit by some growers, who believe the district is applying the new fees unfairly.
“The responsibility for achieving a sustainable water supply is to be borne proportionately based on (growers’) past, present and future usage,” Brad Grasmick, a water attorney representing San Luis Valley growers in the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group and the Northeast Water Users Association, said, referring to state water laws. “But we believe the responsibility is being disproportionately applied to our wells.”
Those growers are now trying to create their own irrigation district and they are suing to stop the new fee.
“I think that more land retirement and more reduction in well pumping is needed and that is what my group is trying to do,” Grasmick said. “No one wants to see the aquifer diminish and continue to shrink. If everybody can do their part to cut back and make that happen, that is the way forward. My guys just want to see the proportionality adhered to.”
To date, tens of millions of dollars have been raised and spent to retire wells in the San Luis Valley, with Subdistrict 1 raising $70 million in the last decade, according to Simpson. And in 2022 state lawmakers approved another $30 million to retire more wells.
Lawmakers are closely monitoring these efforts to reduce water use while protecting growers.
Sen. Byron Pelton, a Republican from Sterling, said the combined money that is going to the Rio Grande and Republican basins is critical. But the potential for legal battles, he said, is concerning.
“Agriculture is key in our communities,” Pelton said. “But the biggest thing is that we have to stay within our compacts. Sometimes you’re backed into a corner and that is just the way it has to be. I hate it, but we have to stay in compliance.”
How much irrigated land will be lost as wells are retired isn’t clear yet. Simpson said growers who have access to surface supplies in the Rio Grande will still be able to irrigate even without as many wells or as much water, but the land will likely produce less and farms may become less profitable.
And it will take more than sky-high pumping fees to solve the problem, officials said. The Division of Water Resources has also created another water-saving rule in Subdistrict 1 that will force growers to replace one-for-one the water they take out of the aquifer, instead of allowing them to simply pay more to pump more.
Cotten said the hope is that the higher fees combined with the new one-for-one rule will reduce pumping enough to save the aquifer and the ag economy.
Valley growers are already shifting production and changing crops, said James Ehrlich, executive director of the Colorado Potato Administrative Committee in Monte Vista, an agency involved in overseeing and marketing the region’s potato crops.
“There are a lot of creative things going on down here,” Ehrlich said. “But we have to farm less and learn to survive as a community together. And Mother Nature has not helped us out. We’ve stabilized but we can’t gain back what (state and local water officials) want us to gain back. It is just not going to happen.”
More by Jerd SmithJerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
A bill moving through the Colorado General Assembly would require local jurisdictions to amend their landscaping codes to eliminate use of thirsty species of grasses from alongside roads such as this streetscape in Arvada. CREDIT: ALLEN BEST/BIG PIVOTS
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 30, 2024
Minor pushback to proposed limits on new water-thirsty grasses in areas that get little or no foot traffic
This story was produced as a collaboration between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism — two nonprofit news organizations covering Colorado’s water. It follows a five-part series that examined the intersection of water and urban landscapes in Colorado.
Colorado legislators in 2022 passed a bill that delivered $2 million to programs across the state for removal of turf in urban areas classified as nonfunctional. By that, legislators mean Kentucky bluegrass and other thirsty-grass species that were meant to be seen but rarely, if ever, otherwise used.
Now, they are taking the next step. The Colorado Senate on Tuesday voted in favor of a bill, Senate Bill 24-005, that would prevent thirsty turf species from being planted in certain places that rarely, if ever, get foot traffic, except perhaps to be mowed.
Those places include alongside roads and streets or in medians, as well as in the expansive areas surrounding offices or other commercial buildings, in front of government buildings, and in entryways and common areas managed by homeowners associations.
The bill also bars use of plastic turf in lieu of organic vegetation for landscaping.
“If we don’t have to start watering that turf in the first place, we never have to replace it in the future,” state Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, a co-sponsor, said in making the case for the proposed new state standard.
Roberts stressed that the prohibition would not apply to individual homes or retroactively to established turf. “It applies to new development or redevelopment. It does not apply to residential homes,” he said. “This is about industrial, commercial and government property across the state.”
Kentucky bluegrass and other grass species imported from wetter climatic zones typically use far more water than buffalo grass and other species indigenous to Colorado’s more arid climate. The bill, however, does allow hybrids that use less water as well as the indigenous grass species.
Originally reviewed by an interim legislative committee in October, the bill was subsequently modified to provide greater clarity about what constitutes functional versus nonfunctional turf, while giving towns, cities and counties greater flexibility in deciding which is which within their jurisdictions. If the bill becomes law, local jurisdictions will have until Jan. 1, 2026, to incorporate the new statewide standard into their landscaping code and development review processes.
After being approved on a third reading by the Senate by a 28-5 vote on Wednesday morning, the measure now moves to the House.
Advocates do not argue that limits on expansion of what the bill calls nonfunctional turf will solve Colorado’s water problems. Municipalities use only 7% of the state’s water, and outdoor use constitutes roughly half of municipal use.
“One more tool in the toolbox,” Roberts said.
State Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, said if the standard had been adopted 20 to 30 years ago, perhaps 10,000 acre-feet of water could have been saved annually.
“As a percentage, it is minimal,” he conceded. “It’s closing the gaps in small increments as best you can as opposed to large sweeping change.”
The backdrop for this is more frequent drought and rising temperatures since 2002, what Simpson called the aridification of the West. The climatic shift is forcing harder choices.
“We are all trying to figure out how to live and work in this space,” Simpson said.
In a Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee meeting Jan. 25, Simpson also said he was motivated to help prevent water grabs by Front Range cities from the San Luis Valley, what locals sometimes call Colorado’s south slope. Three separate attempts have been made in the past 35 years to divert water from the San Luis Valley, a place already being forced to trim irrigated agriculture to meet requirements of the Rio Grande Compact.
“That’s largely my motivation to be part of this conversation and do everything I can to reduce that pressure on my rural constituents and our way of life,” Simpson said in the committee hearing. The bill passed the committee on a 4-1 vote.
Developing water for growing cities — particularly along the Front Range but even in headwaters communities — has become problematic as the climate has veered hotter and, in most years of the 21st century, drier.
The result, as was detailed in a five-part collaboration in 2023 between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, has been a growing consensus about the need to be more strategic and sparing about use of water in urban landscapes.
Agriculture uses nearly 90% of the state’s water, as was noted by state Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver. At Tuesday’s Senate hearing, he chided Roberts, Simpson and other legislative sponsors for not addressing efficiency in agriculture.
Hansen, who grew up in a farm town in Kansas near the Colorado border, applauded the bill but questioned why the interim committee hadn’t come up with legislation to improve efficiency of agricultural water use. He cited the use-it-or-lose-it provision of Colorado water law that he suggested discouraged farmers and ranchers from innovating to conserve water.
“I feel the interim water committee let us down by not bringing forth anything that advances conservation on what is by far the largest category of use, almost 90%,” he said. “I want to know what is next on that front.”
The San Luis Valley is one of several areas of Colorado where irrigated agriculture must be curbed in order to meet interstate river compacts. Top: Grassy areas along a street in Arvada. Photos/Allen Best
Hansen got strong pushback. Simpson responded that agriculture in the San Luis Valley has already been forced to change. To comply with the Rio Grande Compact, his district is trying to figure out how to take 10,000 to 20,000 acres out of agricultural production. On his own farm, he said, water deliveries that traditionally lasted until mid-July have ended as early as May 20. “I have to figure out a way to grow crops that are less water-consumptive, more efficient and ultimately take irrigated acreage out of production,” Simpson said.
State Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling, also took the occasion to cite incremental gains in irrigation efficiency and the loss of production in the Republican River basin. There, roughly 25,000 acres need to be taken out of production for Colorado to meet interstate compact requirements.
As had been the case several days before at the bill’s legislative committee hearing, most of the limited opposition in the Senate was against the notion that cutting water used for landscaping is a statewide concern. It’s a familiar argument — a preference for local control — used in many contexts.
A representative of the Colorado Municipal League (CML), a consortium of 270 towns and cities, told the Senate committee that the proposal constituted state overreach in a one-size-fits-all approach.
Heather Stauffer, CML’s legislative advocacy manager, cited the regulations of Aurora, Greeley and Aspen as examples of approaches created to meet specific and local needs. “We would advocate that the state put more money into funds that address turf removal programs that have been very successful among municipalities across the state,” Stauffer said.
In 2023, Boulder-based Resource Central completed 604 lawn-replacement projects along the Front Range. With aid of state funding, it plans to expand its turf-removal and popular Garden In A Box programs to the Western Slope this year.
No representatives from any towns or cities showed up to oppose the bill. But representatives of three local jurisdictions, including Vail-based Eagle River Water and Sanitation District and the water provider for unincorporated Pueblo West, testified that the bill filled a need.
Denver is behind the bill. Denver Water, which provides water to 1.6 million people, including the city’s 720,000 residents as well as many suburban jurisdictions, has committed to reducing the water devoted to urban turf in coming years by 30%, or roughly the turf covering 6,000 acres. Utility representatives have said they don’t want to become frugal with water devoted to existing landscapes only to see water used lavishly in new development.
Andrew Hill, government affairs manager for Denver Water, called the bill a “moderate approach” in creating a new waterwise landscaping standard, one in which imported grasses are not the default.
“It makes real changes statewide, but it’s narrow enough to only apply to areas [where] I think a consensus exists,” Hill said at the committee hearing.
Sod last autumn was removed from this library in Lafayette. Many local jurisdictions in Colorado have participated in sod-removal programs. Photo/Allen Best
Local governments can go further, and many have already. Thirty-eight local governments and water providers in Colorado offer turf-replacement programs. Western Resource Advocates found last fall that 17 of the jurisdictions already limit new turf while another nine plan to do so.
Aurora and Castle Rock, late-blooming municipalities in the metropolitan area, have adopted among the most muscular regulations in Colorado, taking aim at water devoted to new homes’ front yards. Both expect to continue growing in population, and together they plan to pursue importations of water currently used for farming along the South Platte River in northeastern Colorado. Aurora also still owns water rights in the Eagle River basin that it has been trying to develop for the past 40 years.
In the full Senate debate, Republican leaders argued for incentives, such as the expanded buy-back program for turf removal, instead of a statewide thou-shalt-not approach.
The Colorado River Drought Task Force recommended legislators allocate $5 million annually for turf-removal programs. Key legislators have already indicated they plan to introduce legislation to do just that.
But is this the answer? Such programs are “inefficient and not cost-effective” if water-thirsty grass species continue to be planted in questionable places, the policy manager for municipal conservation at Western Resource Advocates said in the committee hearing last week.
The policy manager, Lindsay Rogers, said passing the bill would build the momentum to “help ensure that Coloradans live within our water means and particularly in the context of a growing state and worsening drought conditions.”
The Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado, which represents 400 Colorado landscape and supplier companies, testified in support of the bill but hinted at future discussions as the bill goes through legislative sausage-making. Along with sod growers, they quibble over the dichotomous phrasing of nonfunctional versus functional turf. They prefer the words recreational and utility.
On the flip side of these changes, some home gardeners might find buffalo grass and other indigenous grasses more conserving of water but less appealing. Buffalo grass, for example, greens up a month or so later in spring and browns up a month earlier in fall.
Water in urban landscapes is also on the agenda for three programs this week at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Congress, the state’s preeminent organization for water providers. Included may be a report from a task force appointed by Gov. Jared Polis last February that met repeatedly through 2023 to talk about ways to reduce expansion of water to urban landscapes.
Fund will retire approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water
When Colorado Senate Bill 28 was adopted during the 2022 legislative session, it created the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund with $30 million earmarked for irrigators in the Upper Rio Grande Basin.
The state money derived from Colorado’s share of federal COVID dollars that came through the American Rescue Plan Act would serve to incentivize local farmers to permanently retire more groundwater wells. Doing so would further reduce groundwater pumping and translate to fewer irrigated acres in the Valley as a whole.
Seven months after opening applications to the fund, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has enough contracts to spend nearly the entirety of the $30 million. The contracts represent the full retirement of approximately 34 crop circles and partial restrictions on 28 circles, according to an accounting from the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
When it’s all said and done, the $30 million will have paid for the retirement of approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water. An acre-foot represents around 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre of land.
Each application submitted to the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund was reviewed by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and Colorado Division of Water Resources. So far six applications representing $4,772,204 have been closed and the RGWCD now owns those water rights, according to deputy general manager Amber Pacheco.
The remaining applications have to be approved or rejected by March 31.
The senate bill also directed $30 million to sustainability efforts on the Republican River Basin in the eastern plains. Like the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, the Republican River Water Conservation District has been successful in administering the program, Pacheco said.
“We’ve been pretty successful,” she said at the Jan. 16 board meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. “It’s pretty shocking that in six months that amount of money was obligated.”
A small amount of funding will likely remain after current applications are all reviewed, Pacheco said.
The RGWCD received a total of 27 applications. Here’s a breakdown of applications by subdistrict. The applications represent 11,296 acre-feet of past annual withdrawals that would be retired.
Applications total approximately $29,000,000
14 applications in Subdistrict 1* – $11,700,000 2 applications in Subdistrict 3* – $1,200,000 1 application in Subdistrict 4 – $500,000 4 applications in Subdistrict 5 – $5,100,000 2 applications in Subdistrict 6 – $1,300,000 4 applications in Subdistrict 7 (Trinchera Subdistrict) – $9,300,000
*SD1 and SD3 both offered some type of incentive on top of the SB28 program.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
State Engineer Kevin Rein is retiring at year’s end and agreed to join The Valley Pod podcast for an interview with host Chris Lopez before he departs. We’re calling it an exit interview.
In it, Rein talks about the importance of bringing sustainability to the unconfined aquifer of the Rio Grande Basin, how the economic future of the San Luis Valley and its agricultural industry is at stake without a sustainable aquifer system, the unique nature of the Rio Grande compared to the Colorado River Basin and others, and the urgency of achieving sustainability in the face of prolonged drought and climate change.
“I wish there was enough water for everybody, but we developed agricultural and municipal uses in a state that is largely a desert and it often has an abundance for a couple months out of the year,” Rein said. “I think it’s good for us to at least feel comfortable that we have that structure in place. But the other thing we need to know, as I alluded to, is that that structure is going to cause us to make difficult decisions, especially as we see climate change, the effects of climate change reducing our water supply, and we see our demands grow.”
Here’s an edited version of the conversation. The full Valley Pod episode is here.
ALAMOSA CITIZEN: Thank you again for giving us some of your time as you exit. And again, congratulations on your retirement. Is the stress of the job starting to subside?
KEVIN REIN: No. The stress, if we can call it that, is not subsiding at all. This trepidation that I face with the idea of retirement and ending a job that I really love doing, weighs pretty heavily on me and wanting to get in every last bit of good work I can do. That’s weighing on me. Yes. Yeah, it’s very important for me to try to finish this. We’re doing as much as I can.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
AC: We want to start with some local issues with you of the Rio Grande Basin and then stretch more into the role of the state engineer for Colorado, if you don’t mind. First, can you sum up the importance of the upcoming year 2024 and the influence upcoming water court trials will have on the Rio Grande Basin? And we’re thinking specifically of the water trial around Subdistrict 1 Plan of Water Management, the alternative plan for operating in that particular subdistrict with the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group court filing, and then the idea of the U.S. Supreme Court weighing in on a new settlement between Texas, New Mexico and Colorado when it comes to the Rio Grande Compact. 2024 seems like a significant year in water court.
REIN: It’s going to be very significant that affects the people in the Valley to greater or lesser degrees depending on those three items that you just mentioned. And so that is critical. And Chris, I’ll apologize to you and the listeners that I’m going to be very cautious about my comments on these because of the legal implications and the fact that it’s really active litigation in three areas and regarding the lawsuit on the Rio Grande Compact with Texas and New Mexico. And then as you mentioned the United States, I will probably not say much at all about that because the facts are there and I don’t want to step in front of our good legal staff and say something that is not quite true to the case in terms of the legal implications of what’s going on. But when it comes to SWAG and that case and the groundwater management plan containing the plan of water management for Subdistrict 1, those are very important issues. And I will admit that I’m going to be a little guarded in my comments about those two because pardon me, as you know, the SWAG case was dismissed, but they have re-filed and we may see that play out in a similar fashion. And without saying too much about that and the groundwater management plan for the subdistrict, from my perspective as a state engineer, there’s one critical aspect of that for both cases and that is the sustainability of the unconfined aquifer. As we know, that’s a difficult component of groundwater management in the Valley because we have a statutorily required sustainability objective. And that has found its way into the rules and into the groundwater management plan for the subdistrict. And I’ll speak to the existing groundwater management plan that’s in place right now that has a deadline of 2031 to meet the objectives, the sustainability objectives, that that very plan sets out. As we all know, and I’ve been on record through letters and public comments, that it’s going to be very difficult to meet that sustainability objective under that existing plan of water management. And I know that the subdistrict has worked hard toward an alternative in this current plan that I approved and is before the court and the way that plays out is going to be so important to the irrigators in the Valley under the rules under their annual replacement plans. And I look forward to seeing the resolution of that. Obviously I won’t be the state engineer at the time and I’m not certain to what extent I personally will stay involved in that, but it is critical to get resolution on that for the irrigators. And since we are under active litigation, if I can use that term for the groundwater management plan component of the plan of water management, I’ll stop right there, but I will mention that as we know, the SWAG applicants have also attempted to address sustainability, at least in their previous application they did. That was dismissed. And for this upcoming application, I’ll admit that I have not reviewed that in detail yet, but that will be also very important to properly review and respond to sustainability objectives in the upcoming SWAG case.
AC:Why is it important for the water court to be dealing with these particular issues now? Can you address the importance of the court doing its work in 2024 and what’s the best scenario in terms of how the court adjudicates these trials or deals with these cases?
REIN: The importance of the water court’s involvement now is because the issue is important now in 2024. The reason it’s important right now is because we’re currently working under the 2031 deadline, and that seems, it doesn’t just seem it is seven years away, it seems like a lot of time, but as we know, we’re under sustained drought in the valley and obviously the economic future is at stake. We can’t just shut down production. So we need to find that way to address sustainability now. And as I said, we’re under sustained drought. There’s no confidence I think from anyone in saying that that will turn around and end. You have to assume a difficult case scenario. And with that seven years is not a lot of time to make up the perhaps 1 million acre-foot gain that would be necessary to get to the sustainability standard. Therefore it is timely.
AC: Do you think groundwater users as a whole in Division Three are making good or reasonable enough progress in solving our water security challenges and what stands out for you there?
REIN: Yeah, so a broader water groundwater availability use challenges, and I need to break away from this sustainability discussion for a minute and just talk about the efforts of all the water users through seven subdistricts under the rules in the Rio Grande Basin. And as we know, the rules that became final in 2019 and are now completely applicable do hold the water users to a high standard. It’s a standard that we have statewide. It’s a standard that came out of our 1969 water right Determination and Administration Act that we need to administer groundwater in conjunction with surface water in the prior appropriation system. That’s what came upon the water users in the Rio Grande gradually over the last 10 to 15 years, but again, in 2019 and certainly a couple years later, finally hit them. And what they have done is developed very comprehensive, very complex annual replacement plans that allow them to pump and comply with the law. What is compliance with the law? Basically it means replacing depletions to the stream system in time, location and amount to prevent injury to senior surplus water rights, and obviously the stay of compliance with a compact. And let me just say quickly, we have a unique situation in Division Three, the Rio Grande Basin, that instead of replacing depletions, they can enter into forbearance agreements to just compensate financially for that. But that’s what they have done to respond to this groundwater challenge is they have developed these annual replacement plans, they have gotten their sources of replacement water, they operate according to the Rio Grande decision support system to ensure that their depletions are properly recognized at the time, location, and the amount so that they can be replaced. I think it’s very gratifying. I wish I could take more credit, but I think it’s very gratifying that the water users, excuse me of the basin, have responded as they’ve needed to, but responded in such a complete and detailed and verifiable way. And I really can’t say that without also addressing the division of water resources staff in our Alamosa office, Craig Cotton and his highly competent staff, they’ve just put in countless hours to analyze and verify and approve these annual replacement plans. Without those, the wells just simply are not pumping.
AC: I want to ask you one more question about 2024 and the Rio Grande Compact because there’s a lot of people scratching their heads around the federal government’s opposition to the negotiated agreement between Texas, New Mexico and Colorado is also a party, too. And I just wonder if you’ve figured out the federal government’s motivation in that case?
REIN: Chris, that’s a very good question and if you don’t mind, I’d like to just not answer that because of the legal implications and I leave those questions to our attorney general staff.
AC: No, I appreciate that. One of the issues or one of the programs right now is the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund and the $60 million that was put into that fund through Senate Bill 28. What should be the overall outcome of that $60 million for both the Rio Grande Basin, the Republican River Basin as it’s spent? What’s the expectation and what is the advantage gained by spending that money on those two basins?
REIN:The ultimate outcome for both basins is similar but distinct and the mechanism by which those outcomes are realized is also pretty similar. But let me just start with the end game. The outcome for the Republican River Basin, first of all, is to assist in the retirement of irrigated acres to comply with a 2016 resolution entered into by the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. And it’s tempting to get into great detail, but just let me say at a high level that part of compact compliance in the Republican River Basin is operating a compact compliance pipeline to deliver water at the state line to make up for overuse of Colorado’s allocation in the Republican River Basin. That works well except for a detail that not all the water is delivered exactly where it should be. And to deal with that, the three states entered into a resolution that among other things, allows a consideration that Colorado is meeting the compact. If Colorado retires 25,000 acres, this began in 2016, by the year initially 2027 but now 2029, with that background, how to retire 25,000 acres, it’s very difficult because people own land, they have water rights, they want to continue irrigating. So it’s through funding. The funding is difficult, you’re assessing fees, you are asking people to help fund this out of their economic development. Senate Bill 28 for the Republican (River Basin) then brought that $30 million in to help fund the irrigated acres, the reduction of irrigated acres, and it’s just purely economic incentive. People want to do the right thing, but it’s very helpful to have that economic incentive. So thank you for letting me go into some detail, but that is the outcome. The desirable outcome is to stay in compact compliance by tying that 25,000 acres in the south port and it’s working well. We’ve met an intermediate goal for the Rio Grande. It is a similar situation as you know, with great interest toward meeting sustainability obligations in the unconfined aquifer, but in general throughout the basin, reducing groundwater usage. And then to do that, and let me just go back specifically to our sustainability discussion in the unconfined aquifer. Subdistrict 1, reduce those irrigated acres. Their current plant of water management has a goal of reducing 40,000 irrigated acres. Reduce that and then you’re going to reduce groundwater consumption. That helps the water balance so that the aquifer can begin to, and they can meet their sustainability obligation. But we have to say that it’s not limited to Subdistrict 1 or the unconfined if we are reducing groundwater usage throughout the basin. The endgame again is to meet the sustainability obligations and also it makes it easier to comply with a compact if we do that, but reduce the pumping from the aquifers and reduce that groundwater usage.
AC: Does it look to you now that that money, all $60 million, $30 million for each basin will get appropriated at this point? Does it look like the conservation districts have put in place enough of the programs for that money to get spent?
REIN: I believe first of all on the Republican (River Basin) that since they had a structure in place and were already retiring acres in the south, just not at the pace they wanted, that with that structure in place, they are on a good pace to use that funding. For the Rio Grande, they did not have as much of a structure in place and have developed that. But with that development, I believe they have the interest, the applications, I can’t quantify that or go into detail on that, but they certainly will have the interest. And I believe that I would have to really check in with some of the district and subdistrict folks to see what their projection is. But certainly the need is there and the funding is there. So we would hope those come together to see the effective use of all that funding to accomplish the goals.
AC: When you think of the work that’s been done and being done both on the Rio Grande Basin and then Colorado River Basin, what lessons, if any, can be learned from those efforts as we work to bring sustainability to our water resource, our water supply? What are the lessons or what is the work that stands out for you now.
Map credit: AGU
REIN:My role as state engineer, I like to keep my eyes on a few different things just to ensure balance. And we need to look in both the Rio Grande Basin and the Colorado River Basin, first and foremost at the importance of agriculture and how important that is in the Rio Grande Basin. It’s the culture, it’s the economy, it’s a way of life. That’s what sustains that basin. And that’s also true in the Colorado River Basin, but in different ways for the Rio Grande. We just need to balance that attention to the importance of agriculture, to compliance with the law, balance those and balance the importance of agriculture with a compact. And that’s why we have to make these difficult decisions to reduce irrigated acreage because with drought and with demands, the water is just not there. We can’t achieve a water balance. And so that’s how we do that. And I can’t therefore go to the Rio Grande Basin and encourage as much beneficial use as they can possibly accomplish because that would run counter to this effort to comply with the Arps and to achieve sustainability in a slightly different way. I have to deliver a message to the Colorado River Basin that says, yes, our balance is important to the way we regard agriculture and it’s important. And my message to them is, if you have water available and you have a beneficial use and you have the right to water as your water administrator, I’m going to tell you to divert it. I don’t have a basis to tell you to try to conserve, to try to curtail because this is important. I deliver a message of beneficial use on the Colorado River Basin. Now that’s within their water right. And within our system of prior appropriation and in consideration of the fact that in the Colorado River Basin, those tributaries in Colorado and the other three upper basin states, we use less than our allocation under the compact. But there’s no basis to tell people as the state engineer, I want you to conserve. That might be a message from someone else, but not from me. And that’s the message I have to deliver there. But at the same time, we need to be mindful of what other obligations could be put on Colorado in the future. And perhaps you or others who’ve heard me talk about that in the Colorado River Basin right now, we are well in compliance with a compact 75 million acre-feet over every running 10 years. Well in compliance. I spoke to the task force about it just a couple days ago, and we have to be mindful of that number. And if we ever do drop below that number as four upper basin states, the next question is ‘Did we cause it?’ Which really goes to the language of the compact. So it’s very complex and it’s inquiry based. I can’t really project in the near future that we would be out of compliance with a compact. So that’s that different message. But still responsible water usage is the same.
AC: I want to switch to another general topic here, and that’s water for the state of Colorado and the Front Range communities as a whole. In your judgment, have Front Range communities secured enough water for their future or what has to happen for the Front Range to be able to maintain any of its population growth?
REIN: I’m going to give you some quick background as far as our role, and then I’ll be giving you a couple of thoughts on your question. But first of all, it’s good to understand that the role of the Division Water Resources from a statutory standpoint is somewhat limited. And certainly when there’s a development in an unincorporated area, we have a statutory responsibility to provide an opinion to the county, whether the water supply for that developing area is adequate and can be delivered without causing injury. So we do that and that really helps the developments incorporated areas take the steps to ensure that they don’t overextend themselves so that they don’t develop land that has no reliable water supply. When we look at the big municipal and quasi-municipal water providers along the Front Range, it’s a different approach because we don’t have that role or that authority to review their portfolio, review their developments, and ensure that they have enough water. And my observation, even though it’s not a statutory obligation, is that their approach is to develop their water supplies, look closely at their developments, and then they have their role, to things like water and restrictions or other steps. They might take incentives for turf removal, conservation measures, funding conservation measures, or encouraging conservation measures. And that’s how they, and by they I mean greater minds than mine, run municipal water systems. That’s how they keep that balance and ensure that they’re able to provide the water they need to, for their communities in the future.
AC: We’re used to associating you with the enforcement of groundwater rules in the San Luis Valley and Rio Grande Basin. But in reality, that’s just a portion of what the state engineer’s responsible for. Explain the larger role and where the majority of the focus is in the state engineers position.
REIN:The state engineer’s role is just so interesting, and I can’t help but go back about 140 years to 1881 when the position of the state hydraulic engineer was created. And that was created largely to major stream flows so that we could implement these tenets of our prior appropriation system and know the stakes of our 10 newly appointed water commissioners, how to administer water rights that called for the state hydraulic engineer. And over time some of those responsibilities developed to approving bridge design and highway design and reviewing county surveys. But it has both narrowed and expanded in the last 140 years and actually, beginning a hundred or more years ago, to administering these water rights in prior appropriations statewide and supporting our local staff that does that. And of course our dam safety and our water information program. But to answer your question more directly, it is that oversight and support of on-the-ground, bread-and-butter water administration. We have a hundred, 120 water commissioners on the ground that do this work and do it well. What do we need to do to support them? That’s often engineering and technical support. And that comes to a large degree through our involvement in water court, ensuring that we have decrees that are administrable that can be implemented through proper accounting. And then one other facet of that that is very significant, Chris, that I’d like to highlight is what I call or what are known as administrative approvals. And those administrative approvals substitute water supply plans or in the case of the Valley, annual replacement plans, or in the case of the Arkansas, replacement plans. And these are plans that allow water users to use water out of priority, which otherwise would just be disallowed, and recognize their efforts to quantify their impacts to the stream and mitigate those impacts usually through replacement water. This is a significant matter, particularly in the South Platte, the Arkansas and the Rio Grande Basin, and it’s much of what we talked about earlier.It is recognition that groundwater, our formal recognition in 1969, groundwater impacts surface water diversions and we need to account for that in prior appropriation. So since we talked about that in depth before, I will say that much of our staff is actively reviewing the engineering and the administration and the legal aspects of these plans to use groundwater out of priority with replacement to the stream to keep the stream and therefore the other water users whole.
AC: What should the general public know about water as a resource when you think of the years ahead?
REIN: First, I would say that we’re very fortunate in Colorado that we started 150, 160 years ago with a structure in the system called prior appropriation that although it can be very rigid and very harsh, gives us structure and order in what we do so that people have a reasonable ability to project how their water supply may or may not be affected by future conditions and how it might be administered. That structure is so important. I wish there was enough water for everybody, but we developed agricultural and municipal uses in a state that is largely a desert and it often has an abundance for a couple months out of the year. I think it’s good for us to at least feel comfortable that we have that structure in place. But the other thing we need to know, as I alluded to, is that that structure is going to cause us to make difficult decisions, especially as we see climate change, the effects of climate change, reducing our water supply, and we see our demands grow.Those two curves have unfortunately crossed and when they cross, we call it over-appropriation. So we’ve got to implement that. But I think people should also know that Coloradans are smart, they’re creative, they’re solution-oriented. So a lot of these areas where we do see that crossing of those curves, that conflict of the water balance between demand and supply, we’re trying to solve that in ways that address people’s needs. And that may be, or it is so well articulated in our Colorado water plan, but it also is what you see daily on the ground as people maybe seek new initiatives to the general assembly on ways to do things or just creative ways to share water with each other all within the legal structure of our prior appropriation system. Of course. And that’s what I see for the future of Colorado water. We’ve got a difficult balance to achieve, but people are being creative within the system to achieve it.
Water sustains the San Luis Valley’s working farms and ranches and is vital to the environment, economy and livelihoods, but we face many critical issues and uncertainties for our future water supply. (Photo by Rio de la Vista.)
AC: What is the effect of these drought periods and the warming temperatures that we definitely are feeling in the San Luis Valley and across Colorado?
REIN:Let me be very specific and then work my way out to a more geographically diverse answer to that. But let’s go back to the unconfined aquifer again. Why are we struggling? The fact is that with the prolonged at this point, 20-plus year drought, oh, we’ve had a couple of good years, but the trend is, it’s a 20-year drought that reduced inflows into the unconfined aquifer. There are sources that recharge either through import or through natural inflow. These sources recharge the unconfined aquifer and provide water for the wells to pump, plain and simple. When that inflow is reduced, there’s less water to pump. And that’s also made more difficult by the fact that under these drought conditions, higher temperatures, drier climate, then those crops are going to demand more water. So we get hit twice by that climate impact, and that’s just the unconfined aquifer. If we look at the Rio Grande Basin in general and the reduced snowpack and the San Juans and the Sangres, then we’re going to see less water in the rivers available for diversion. And of course, the compact is somewhat complex in the way that flows are indexed within the state and result in the need to deliver a certain amount to the state line. That’s of course more difficult because of the prolonged drought and the climate change. That’s the impact in the Rio Grande statewide, because we are this headwater state, because we rely so heavily on snowpack that occurs in our central mountains and flows out of the state, then that reduced snowpack is a big part of what’s going to impact us and we’ll get less runoff typically. And that reduced runoff also may occur later, earlier in the season, more likely earlier, and that changes the dynamics. But then the crops are going to demand irrigation at different timing. And again, like I said, for the Rio Grande, the crops have a higher demand if we have a hot or drier climate, so we get hit twice. Again, all in all, it’s that reduced supply generally from snow, excuse me, generally from snowpack that’s going to impact our water users. Now you’ve noticed my focus is really on agriculture because as most Coloradoans know around 85 percent of our diversions go toward agriculture. Now consumption is always a different, more complex matter, but at least 85 percent or so of our diversions go toward agriculture. The municipal supplies are being managed, but that’s where we see the big impact, our lion’s share of diversions.
AC: What is the most worrisome aspect you see when it comes to water as a natural resource?
REIN: I would say that the most worrisome aspect is, again, watching your irrigators. Let me say our irrigators in the Valley. I’ve spent enough time and I seem to know those folks and have a high regard for them. So hopefully they’ll let me say our irrigators in the Valley and the impacts it has on them as they try to deal with this reduced water supply. It’s happening in the Republican River Basin, it’s happening on the South Platte, all of our irrigators in their diversions in the Colorado River Basin. And when I say that, I mean all the tributaries from the YM of the white, the Colorado main stem, the Gunison, the San Juan Animas, La Plata, Dolores, all those areas on the west slope that contribute to the Colorado River. Their irrigation diversions are incredibly important to them. They’re necessary. It’s part of the economy on the west slope. So I spent a lot of time thinking about their need for solutions and strategies and initiatives. That’s an answer to your question of what is worrisome to me. But again, I need to go back to what I said earlier, it’s worrisome but then I also watch creative people with creative solutions. So maybe that takes away some of my worry.
AC: Are there improvements that have to happen so Colorado and the Division of Water Resources get a better at reading snowpack levels with what we’re seeing in the changes of the environment? Because you hear different things about the snowpack itself and is it really as strong as it appears?
REIN:I think that Colorado can benefit from more measurement. I won’t say that Colorado has to get better because Colorado does so many things so well, but I’ll be geographically specific and address the Rio Grande Basin. Due to the nature of the compact and the way Craig Cotton has to administer the compact, I know that he is uniquely interested in good snowpack data because he needs literally to forecast amounts of water so that he knows how much will need to be delivered to the state line on a year-to-year, sorry, maybe I should say on a month-to-month basis. And in order for him to do that, he is actively curtailing water rights again, just to ensure that he comes close to hitting that target and that target is so dynamic based on the types of flows that are occurring. So he has that unique interest in being able to see what’s up in the mountains early on and what could occur as runoff around the state in general, we do have an interest in that. It helps our water users, our municipalities, our producers, forecast what they’re going to see and maybe they can make their own economic decisions too. More data is always good, so I won’t deny that, but I’ll fall short of saying Colorado needs to do better.
AC: Fair enough. Again, we really appreciate all the time you’ve given us. Let me ask you, what’s the advice you leave for your successor when dealing with the Rio Grande Basin and Colorado River issues moving forward?
REIN:My advice for my successor in the Rio Grande and the Colorado River Basin probably applies statewide, but you are right on target that those are two very sensitive areas. And my advice is we really need to give our water users the assurance that the structure I described – prior appropriation, water court decrees – are in place and they’re there for a reason. They’re there for us to abide by them, but we also need to keep one eye on solutions that are based on flexibility, technical innovation that you described, new ways of looking at old problems and being very thoughtful and deliberative about those potential solutions. Can we, under our very rigid system, entertain those solutions? And of course, the answer should be yes, but it requires a character that is willing to say, let me look at that. Let me consider, even though I have concerns right now, let me consider whether there are ways that we can make that work and not injure other water users and not step outside of our very important legal tenants that we have to follow.
AC: What’s next for you?
REIN:Oh boy. I am so looking forward to doing more things with my wife, who, of course, she’s my bride all that time and love in my life, and I have kids and a grandson. And so to have so much of my time opened up to do that is important. Will I step away from water? That would be very hard to do. Do I have a specific plan? No, but I do intend to, either as an observer or something beyond a passive participant, I plan to stay mentally engaged in water.
“I can’t downplay the frequency of the ‘bad water years’ and the fact that persistent drought has impacted both surface water users and groundwater users; that impact is felt across the Basin.” – Kevin Rein, director of the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Photo credit: Alamosa CitizenKevin Rein, Colorado state water engineer, explains why Colorado needs stepped-up measuring of water diversions in the North Park and other rivers in Northwest Colorado while Erin Light, Division 6 engineer, looks on during a meeting in Walden on Oct. 22, 2021. Credit: Allen BestThe Colorado Water Conservation Board is hoping the nine basin roundtables adopt their code of conduct. From left, back row: Steve Anderson, Dan Gibbs, Kevin Rein, Jim Yahn, Heather Dutton, Russell George, Curran Trick, Greg Felt; front row: Jessica Brody, Gail Schwartz, Celene Hawkins, Jaclyn Brown, Becky Mitchell.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISMKevin Rein. Photo credit: Aspen Journalism
Months of discussion on who will help decide the future of water supply in Douglas County have come to an end now that county leaders have chosen 11 members of a new volunteer board…The forming of the new volunteer board — the Douglas County Water Commission — comes against the backdrop of a controversial proposal to pump about 22,000 acre-feet of water per year to Douglas County from the San Luis Valley in the southern part of the state…Last year, county leaders Abe Laydon and Thomas joined together in deciding not to move forward with that project, while elected leader George Teal has continued to support it. [Sean] Tonner, one of the principals of Renewable Water Resources, attracted news media attention for throwing his hat in the ring to serve on the water commission…The water commission is expected to help create a plan regarding water supply and conservation, among other aspects of water in the county. It’ll consist of unpaid volunteers, according to the county…The main members of the water commission, named on Nov. 6, include the following.
Representing District I, or northeast Douglas County:
• James Eklund, who had worked on the state’s water plan, according to county staff.(Removing the requirement for being a landowner or a resident of Douglas County allowed for choosing Eklund, who told county leaders he is “in the city and county of Denver.”)
• Jack Hilbert, formerly one of Douglas County’s elected leaders.
• Donald Langley, who serves on the Parker Water board.
Representing District II, including central and south Douglas County:
• Clark Hammelman, a former Castle Rock town councilmember.
• James Maras, a Perry Park Water and Sanitation District board member.
• Roger Hudson, a Castle Pines city councilmember.
Representing District III, or northwest Douglas County:
• Frank Johns, who said he has worked on various water plans for communities over the years. Johns serves on the board of the Centennial Water and Sanitation District, which serves Highlands Ranch.
• Evan Ela, a longtime water attorney.
• Harold Smethills, a member of the Dominion Water and Sanitation District board and a developer of the Sterling Ranch area in northwest Douglas County.
Appointees “at large,” meaning from the county as a whole, include Tonner and Tricia Bernhardt, who has a bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics from Colorado State University and a master’s degree in environmental policy and management from the University of Denver, according to a LinkedIn page.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
Questions raised whether retirement of Trinchera wells would help reduce groundwater use
Monty Smith, president of the Trinchera Groundwater Management Subdistrict, raised objections at last week’s Rio Grande Water Conservation District quarterly board meeting with how two applications to retire groundwater wells from the Trinchera subdistrict are being reviewed through rules the water conservation district adopted to administer the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund established under Colorado Senate Bill SB22-028.
Smith and Trinchera subdistrict engineer Jason Lorenz said Trinchera irrigators are not getting the same consideration as irrigators in the Valley’s other subdistricts to access the $30 million in the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund due to how the subdistrict allocates groundwater each irrigation season.
“I’m kind of feeling like our applicants are being treated unfairly because they happen to be part of a subdistrict that took the bull by the horns from the beginning and did something that makes a real difference for the subdistrict as a whole,” said Smith.
The Trinchera subdistrict operates within the Trinchera Water Conservancy District and away from Rio Grande Water Conservation District governance. Two farmers operating in the Trinchera subdistrict have applied to be compensated through the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund for retiring groundwater wells under the rules the Rio Grande Water Conservation District adopted to access money in the fund.
“You’re changing the rules for Costilla County, you are,” said Lorenz, who designed the water allocation formula the Trinchera subdistrict uses to tell farmers how much they can use each irrigation season. Like irrigators in the six subdistricts of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, irrigators in the Trinchera subdistrict have to contribute to the overall sustainability of the aquifers under state groundwater pumping rules.
The debate centers around whether the retirement of the groundwater wells in the Trinchera subdistrict will actually contribute to the state’s overall goal to reduce the amount of groundwater pumped by Valley irrigators.
“We have not denied those applications. They are still in the line for the money,” said Amber Pacheco, deputy general manager for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
She said the review of the two applications from the Trinchera subdistrict are ongoing in consultation with the Colorado Division of Water Resources, which has to also approve each application to the state’s Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund.
“The state engineer does have the same concerns as the (Rio Grande Water Conservation District) board in general,” said Craig Cotten, the state water engineer in the Valley. He said State Engineer Kevin Rein is concerned whether the applications from the Trinchera subdistrict farmers will withstand state audits of the money since there are questions whether the retirement of the Trinchera wells would lead to a cutback in groundwater use.
Smith said each of the applicants is nearing retirement and could use the money to help retire farm debt since they likely won’t continue on with farm operations.
“If you don’t approve these funds, it sucks for them. You’re just hurting them. You’re not hurting the subdistrict,” said Smith. “By reading the rules, we think they are eligible for this money. The rules are clear. I think you did a good job. They are very straight forward. But when it came to the application of them, it feels like the rug got pulled back from us.”
The Rio Grande Water Conservation District has approved at least two contracts with crop producers worth $1.2 million through the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund. While it reviews additional applications submitted initially, it has opened up a second-round of applications that allows crop producers to submit proposals to get compensated through the fund by retiring groundwater wells.
Fields in the Humboldt River Basin in Lovelock on Oct. 3, 2023. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent)
Click the link to read the article on Nevada’s only statewide nonprofit newsroom The Nevada Independent website (Daniel Rothberg):
The Pershing County Water Conservation District’s headquarters in Lovelock sits off Interstate 80 a few miles before the Humboldt River disappears into a desert sink. Farmers here have priority rights to water in times of drought, according to the laws that govern the Humboldt River, which rises in northeastern Nevada and cuts a meandering blue line through valleys of sagebrush.
But despite their high-priority rights, these irrigators face shortage after shortage.
In three of the past 20 years, Lovelock farmers received no water from the river. In nine of those years, they received less than 50 percent of their allocations, according to a presentation the water district gave to state lawmakers in May. For some farmers, it meant no crops that year. Lovelock is a town of about 2,000 and the consequences were felt across the local economy.
Recent droughts have hit the Humboldt River hard, yet drought alone is not to blame. Officials with the district point to another factor that’s depleting the river’s flows: groundwater extraction.
As is true across Nevada and the West, groundwater and surface water — rivers, streams and springs — can act as one interconnected supply. In certain parts of the Humboldt Basin, thirsty wells intercept water that would have otherwise flowed into the river, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which is working to model and quantify how underground pumping captures surface water.
All the while, farmers downstream are getting less water. Ryan Collins, the general manager of the water district, said that the pumps have stayed on, even in years of drought and in places where groundwater use exceeds what is considered sustainable.
When the district’s water allocations are cut to zero, “they’re still getting their full allocation,” Collins said.
Ryan Collins, manager of the Pershing County Water Conservation District in Lovelock on Oct. 3, 2023. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent)
Since the mid-1900s, extensive groundwater pumping has become stitched into the Northern Nevada economy. It’s the backbone of vast upstream agricultural fields, drinking water supplies and the massive gold mines along I-80. State water regulators have long struggled to keep pumping in check.
The problem extends beyond the Humboldt River watershed. Groundwater stretched far beyond its limits is a nationwide issue, causing the ground to sink in some places, springs to disappear in others and river tributaries to run drier than usual.
After prodding, lawsuits and rulings (many of which have generated more litigation), the state is trying to do something about the issue of groundwater depletion in the Humboldt and elsewhere, from the Walker River Basin to central Nevada. Exactly how to curtail groundwater pumping has proven to be a headache. Regulatory rules are often contested, and the law is far from settled.
Now, armed with $25 million in federal funds, the state is trying a different tack: Pay irrigators to voluntarily cut back.
Following a handful of other states, Nevada officials are now looking to fund entities that want to facilitate the buyback and retirement of state-issued water rights. Where there is simply not enough water to go around, policymakers want to take water allotments off the balance sheets.
Six entities, from the Southern Nevada Water Authority to the Nevada Land Trust, applied to the state program earlier this month, requesting a total of just over $65 million in funding.
An advisory committee plans to review the applications and provide feedback to the state’s natural resources agency and Conserve Nevada, which is responsible for allocating the grants. The state expects to issue the grants shortly after the advisory board meets Oct. 26.
The grant applications exceed the funding budget by $40 million, demonstrating the high interest in addressing groundwater overuse across the state. In Southern Nevada, the water authority and Clark County are looking for $18 million to address water rights involved in the Lower White River Flow System, which feeds the Muddy River, a tributary to the Colorado River. The area is the subject of a contentious groundwater dispute before the Nevada Supreme Court.
What happens next is being closely watched by water users in overextended aquifers. Many water managers see the program as a test for a permanent buyback program.
Entity
Project Name
Funds Requested
Central Nevada Regional Water Authority
Water Right Retirement Program
$15,000,000.00
Nevada Land Trust
Forest Legacy Eastern Sierra
$950,000.00
Humboldt River Basin Water Authority
Water Right Retirement Program
$10,000,000.00
Nevada Land Trust
Carson River – Ricci Ranch
$3,091,500.00
Walker Basin Conservancy
Walker Groundwater Retirement
$15,292,570.00
Southern Nevada Water Authority
LWRFS Water Rights Retirement
$3,000,000.00
Nevada Land Trust
Red Rock Water Retirement
$3,150,000.00
Clark County Desert Conservation Program
Muddy River Acquisition
$15,000,000.00
Grant requests totaled more than $65 million. (Source: Department of Conservation and Natural Resources)
“This is an opportunity to demonstrate that it’s an effective tool for addressing water shortages in the state,” said Jeff Fontaine, who submitted applications on behalf of the Humboldt River Basin Water Authority and Central Nevada Regional Water Authority, two organizations that he leads.
“We’re looking at the long-term here,” he added.
The concept of using public funds to retire water rights is not new. Colorado, Kansas and Oregon have set up similar programs. Such buyback programs are meant to provide financial incentives to willing sellers, what Sen. Pete Goicoechea (R-Eureka) has referred to as a “soft landing” for irrigators in areas where groundwater tables are dropping.
When lawmakers met in Carson City earlier this year, Goicoechea introduced legislation to create a permanent water buyback program. It received little formal opposition and backing from a coalition of agricultural and environmental interests. Even though legislators failed to advance the proposal, the state was able to fund a temporary program using $25 million in conservation funds, allocated to Nevada as part of the federal American Rescue Plan.
“There’s probably a number of different scenarios” that would motivate an agricultural user to participate in a program, according to Doug Busselman, who leads the Nevada Farm Bureau.
One scenario could be a farmer close to retirement, looking to cash out as they wind down their operation. Another might be someone who sees an opportunity to continue farming with less water. Another reason looming in the background: state action. If the water rights are at risk of being cut-off as state regulators crack down on overuse, irrigators might be willing to sell now.
Photo from the Smith Valley, Walker River, Yerington area with a focus on the Anaconda copper mine site taken on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2019. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent)
Infrastructure associated with a groundwater well in the Lower White River Flow System on Aug. 13, 2020. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)
The federal funding is a one-time allocation, and even supporters acknowledge that $25 million is not enough to fix the larger problem. State officials are going to have to make difficult choices about how to prioritize the limited funding. Still, Peter Stanton, executive director of the Walker Basin Conservancy, said the program could ease some pressures groundwater overuse puts on a watershed.
“I see this largely as a demonstration program,” Stanton said . “It’s going to take more work like this — with local solution, state support and probably bringing in federal support — to make long-term movement on the withdrawal [of water] within these groundwater basins.”
The goal of the conservancy is to secure water to restore Walker Lake, and addressing groundwater overuse is a part of those efforts. The Walker River starts in the eastern Sierra and flows through the Nevada communities of Smith Valley, Yerington and Schurz, until it reaches Walker Lake. Once a critical habitat for birds and a tourist draw for Mineral County, the lake has shrunk to a fraction of its former size due to agricultural diversions.
Over time, groundwater withdrawals have depleted water stored underground and affected the river’s efficiency. That could make it harder to move water downstream in the future.
“We want to work with farmers and ranchers who are already at points of transition [and] are facing increased pressure — whether we’re talking about economic development or climatic variation and challenges in farming — to identify willing sellers” of groundwater, Stanton said.
Several other conservation groups have backed the concept of water buybacks.
If the pilot program is well-executed, the Nature Conservancy’s Laurel Saito said she sees an opportunity to develop a permanent and long-term program in the state. Saito, the group’s water strategy director for Nevada, has advocated for a program that considers ecosystems naturally dependent on the way groundwater interacts with wetlands, springs, playas, rivers and streams.
“If it’s done right, it could be a stepping stone,” she said.
There are many ways in which future programs could address overuse while prioritizing ecosystem restoration. Oregon’s program in the Harney Basin, just north of the Nevada border, includes incentives for retiring water rights that affect groundwater-dependent ecosystems — a structure she said that the nonprofit could potentially help seek funding for in Nevada.
In this pilot phase, though, those larger conversations are constrained by a key factor: time.
With limits on federal funding, the $25 million must be spent on a tight turnaround. The state is aiming to have seller contracts in place for the transfer of water rights by next fall.
One year might sound like a lot of time, yet in the world of water rights, that deadline is already fast-approaching. Once awarded the grant, entities will have to work on developing a price for the water. They will also have to conduct outreach to get the word out that a program is in place. Then they will have to prioritize how to divide up funds.
Figuring out the value of water can be extremely hard, said Fontaine, whose organizations have looked to what other states have done and have worked with a consulting group to model prices.
“That’s the tricky part here,” Fontaine said. “We have to be good stewards of these dollars … We need to make sure we’re not overvaluing the water and paying more than they’re really worth. On the other hand, we want to be fair and respectful to those who are considering selling their water rights — and purchase water rights so we can make a difference in these basins.”
In recent years, state and federal agencies have often looked to publicly funded conservation as a way to address water shortages in the West, particularly in the Colorado River Basin. Many of these programs have implemented temporary conservation measures, such as paying irrigators to fallow their land or to improve farming efficiency when drought conditions were most severe.
What makes buyback programs different is that they are permanent cutbacks to supply in places where there is a structural imbalance, with more rights to water than there is water to go around.
Low-elevation sprinklers irrigate a field in Diamond Valley in August 2020. Under a management plan, farmers in the valley are required to cut use. (Daniel Rothberg/The Nevada Independent)
Springs on the north side of Diamond Valley on Aug. 26, 2020. The state allowed for pumping water to offset losses to the spring’s natural flow. (Daniel Rothberg/The Nevada Independent)
Taking water rights off the books, Goicoechea said earlier this year, is “better than just ignoring it and looking the other way, and that’s what we’ve kind of been doing over the last 40 years.”
In many places, state and federal officials allowed for excessive water use by issuing rights that exceeded the supply and incentivizing farmers to move to areas where water was scarce. Even when the issue was identified, state regulators sometimes turned a blind eye, deferring action.
This was particularly pronounced in Diamond Valley outside of Eureka. In 2015, Diamond Valley was designated the state’s first critical management area, and irrigators had to come up with a plan to cut back. Some are eyeing the buyback program as one way to get there.
“They see this as an opportunity to reduce some of the conflict, where the state buys back the water and they are out of the game,” said Jake Tibbitts, who serves as the natural resources manager for Eureka County. “But it’s all going to come down to the dollars and cents.”
Some groundwater users in Diamond Valley are waiting to see what price the buyback program offers and have voiced different opinions about what their water rights are worth. Tibbitts noted that there’s also “concern from quite a few of the agricultural water rights holders about establishing a value for water outside of a typical real estate transaction.”
As for the Humboldt River, the Pershing County Water Conservation District has backed water buyback programs as one potential solution for reducing groundwater use.
During the drought, the district petitioned the state to regulate upstream groundwater overuse, linked to diminishing streamflow in the Humboldt River. But it has also continued to pursue its case through the courts, said Collins, the district’s general manager.
Sitting at a conference room table in the district’s office building — filled with old maps and a bulletin board displaying the ever-important amount of water held in upstream reservoirs — he was hopeful that the buyback program could be one part of the solution.
“It can be a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “But it’s not the silver bullet.”
Union Canal in Lovelock on Oct. 3, 2023. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent)
Map of Nevada’s major rivers and streams via Geology.com.
San Luis Valley center pivot. Photo credit: Chris Lopez/Alamosa Citizen
From email from the Alamosa Citizen (Chris Lopez):
When it meets this week, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District Board will announce it has closed on its first two deals with crop producers to purchase groundwater wells that will be permanently retired. The deals are part of the $30 million earmarked to the Rio Grande Water Conservation District under state Senate Bill 28, which was adopted to pay Valley irrigators for their groundwater wells as part of Colorado’s efforts to reduce groundwater usage among Valley farmers and save the Rio Grande Basin. The Rio Grande Water Conservation District is paying $1.2 million to two crop producers in the first of the deals. The district opened up a second-round of applications on Oct. 10 that allows crop producers to submit a proposal for the state dollars. The second-round application period ends on Dec. 29.
One of the large bodies of water in Douglas County, the Rueter-Hess Reservoir is a drinking-water storage facility owned and operated by the Parker Water and Sanitation District, the entity that provides drinking water to much of Parker and some nearby areas. Photo credit: Parker Water & Sanitation
More than 50 people applied to serve on the Douglas County Water Commission, a new entity that is expected to help shape the future of water supply in a continually growing county. After county leaders narrowed the pool of applicants down to 12 whom they wanted to bring in for interviews, the applicants fielded questions, including ones about their connections and any conflicts of interest they might carry. The water commission is expected to help create a plan regarding water supply and conservation, among other aspects of water in the county. It’ll consist of unpaid volunteers, according to the county’s elected leaders.
The forming of the new body comes against the backdrop of a controversial proposal to pump about 22,000 acre-feet of water per year to Douglas County from the San Luis Valley, a region of Southern Colorado. Renewable Water Resources is the private company that proposed the project. Last year, county leaders Laydon and Lora Thomas joined together in deciding not to move forward with that project, while county leader George Teal has continued to support it.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
In response to claims by principals of Renewable Water Resources, officials this week with the Colorado Division of Water Resources reiterated that the Upper Rio Grande Basin is over-appropriated and has no surface or groundwater available for a new appropriation.
The reply from state water officials came in response to questions from Alamosa Citizen after the Douglas County Future Fund made a series of claims in a recent newsletter it publishes to influence decision-makers in Douglas County.
RWR principals, who include former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and political strategist Sean Tonner, have been working to convince Douglas County commissioners that there is water available in Rio Grande Basin that Douglas County could own and pump into the Front Range bedroom community.
The search for a future water source by suburban communities like Douglas County is one of the pitched battles of the climate-influenced 21st century. The storyline goes like this: Sprawling suburban communities that blew up during the 1980s and ’90s and first decades of the 21st century are on the hunt for new water sources as periods of extreme drought and intensified changes to surface temperatures reduce the availability of water as a natural resource.
The agricultural corridors of America, meanwhile, are working to reduce their own consumption of water through technological advances and through reducing the amount of acreage used to grow crops.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
It’s a classic new battle: population centers vs. rural regions, and there is no clearer example of the conflict than Renewable Water Resources and its efforts to export 22,000 acre-feet of water from the Upper Rio Grande Basin to Colorado’s Front Range on a perpetual basis.
“The San Luis Valley has 1.02 billion acres of unused water, because it sits over the second-largest aquifer in the United States,” is one of the claims RWR made in a Douglas County Future Fund newsletter in September.
Another claim it made as fact: “The RWR project proposes to use 22,000 acre-feet. This water would come from the confined aquifer in the San Luis Valley, which is fully renewable within five days of runoff from the San Luis Valley mountain ranges.”
Neither is the case and both claims fly in the face of state groundwater rules governing irrigators’ use of water in the Valley. The lack of recharge and dropping levels of the confined and unconfined aquifers of the Rio Grande Basin have pushed state water engineers to develop specific groundwater usage rules in an effort to restore the aquifers and save the Rio Grande Basin. Each irrigation season, the state curtails water usage along the Rio Grande Basin, which impacts farming and ranching production in the Valley as Colorado works to control the water availability and meet its own obligations to New Mexico and Texas under the Rio Grande Compact.
“At this time the Division of Water Resources is not going to comment on the specific details included in the newsletter produced by the Douglas County Future Fund. However, due to the over-appropriated nature of our water system, there is no surface or groundwater available for a new appropriation in Water Division 3, the Rio Grande Basin in Colorado,” said state water Division 3 Engineer Craig Cotten.
Douglas County recently created a 12-member water commission to advise it on water issues. The new committee includes Tonner, who uses the Douglas County Future Fund newsletter to make the case for Renewable Water Resources’ water exportation proposal.
The Douglas County water commission members include:
District 1 Merlin Klotz, James Myers, Donald Lagley
District 2 Clark Hammelman, James Maras, Roger Hudson
District 3 Frank Johns, Evan Ela, Kurt Walker, Harold Smethillis
At-large Seats Sean Tonner, Tricia Bernhard
Water managers on the Rio Grande Basin continue to monitor the efforts in Douglas County. The county government in Douglas County is not set up to be a water provider and is dealing with its own conflicts.
The Douglas County commissioners have been advised by attorneys that the Renewable Water Resource concept is littered with problems and would have difficulty gaining traction in state district water court.
Any effort to export water from the San Luis Valley would get tied up for years in state water court. The six counties in the San Luis Valley also recently banded together to create local planning rules that local officials believe would block a water exportation plan from moving forward.
“Whether we had a good (water) year or not, we know there’s a lot to address and deal with … I encourage you to continue with your discussions and continue talking.” Those were the final words from District 3 Water Court Judge Michael Gonzales just before adjourning court last Thursday in the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group case. The water court trial may have ended suddenly, but the issues surrounding the unconfined aquifer do not, and therein lies the problem. The irrigators in Subdistrict 1, who are responsible for restoring the unconfined aquifer and feel the pressure of the clock running on a state engineer order to make it happen by 2031 or else, just did adopt and the state engineer approved, a new strategy to recover the aquifer. Problem is the plan, called the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1, will undoubtedly end up in District 3 Water Court due to objections. And once it lands there, it’s likely to be a couple of more years before the chief water judge makes a decision on whether to approve, according to the experts. In the meantime, expect more retired acres to permanently retire water. It seems to be the only way.
WHEN the town of Del Norte terminated its agreement this week to lease water to the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group, it effectively killed the SWAG’s efforts to get an alternative augmentation plan through state District 3 Water Court.
Sustainable Water Augmentation Group withdrew its application Thursday for its own augmentation plan separate from Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Conservation District, whose rules SWAG operators have been following and now will continue to follow in the irrigation seasons ahead. The owners of SWAG irrigate 17,255 acres in Alamosa, Rio Grande and Saguache counties and had proposed fallowing 5,014 under the plan.
The withdrawal of SWAG’s application was a sudden end to a water court trial that had been scheduled to last five weeks by Chief District Water Court Judge Michael Gonzales due to the technical and complicated issues of managing the supply of water for irrigators in the San Luis Valley.
Gonzales’ ruling earlier in the day Thursday, in which he denied a motion by SWAG on how it wanted to address the loss of the Del Norte water in its application, convinced members of SWAG to withdraw.
Since it had lost the Del Norte water as a replacement source for groundwater pumping, SWAG attorneys had proposed that they be allowed to update their application with data from the 2023 water year to demonstrate how the SWAG plan never really needed the Del Norte water to begin with.
Gonzales ruled that wouldn’t be fair to water users and the state Division of Water Resources opposing the plan. Gonzales said SWAG knew going into the water trial that the Del Norte water may not be legally available to it and could have anticipated that before Del Norte actually took the water away.
“The Del Norte lease went away on the second day of trial through no fault of the applicant. I realize that,” Gonzales said. SWAG at that point, he said, had an option to “simply remove reference to the Del Norte water” from its application and provide updated numbers for the trial to move forward.
Instead, said Gonzales, “the applicant made what may be a strategic decision … to amend their disclosures to not only reflect that they would no longer be relying on the Del Norte water, but in addition to that to incorporate the 2023 numbers from the subdistrict and to ultimately change their theory of the case. I think that’s the best way to summarize it.”
“That I find significant. That is significant and substantial,” Gonzales said.
The district court judge told applicants and opposers that it was unfortunate for the trial to come to such a sudden end given the important and complicated issues facing irrigators in Subdistrict 1 as they work to restore the unconfined aquifer of the Rio Grande Basin.
“I’m sorry we’re at this point … I think our issues that we as a community and we as a district number three have to address, those don’t end today. We know that full well. Whether we had good (water) year or not, we know there’s a lot to address and deal with … I encourage you to continue with your discussions and continue talking.”
THE eyes of the San Luis Valley water world will be on state District 3 Water Court on Monday, where District Water Court Judge Michael Gonzales begins to hear testimony on an augmentation plan filed by a group of ag producers in Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
The group of 12 – umbrellaed under the name SWAG or Sustainable Water Augmentation Group – is seeking the first group augmentation plan filed under the Colorado Division of Water Resources’ 2015 Groundwater and Irrigation Season Rules. The rules govern groundwater withdrawals in the San Luis Valley and are a constant source of state government oversight on the Valley’s groundwater and surface water users.
Opposing the SWAG application is the influential Rio Grande Water Conservation District, which applies the state groundwater rules through a formation of subdistricts with oversight from farmers and ranchers who own water rights and wells within a subdistrict. The Colorado Water Conservation Board and host of local water users have also filed objections to the SWAG plan.
The fact Chief Water Court Judge Gonzales set five weeks to hear from the applicants, and water managers and users in opposition, speaks to the weight of the case, both in substance and precedence, to the arguments and the sheer volume of court documents associated with the SWAG case.
There are 1,946 scanned documents and over 1,000 exhibits in the voluminous court file – all part of a water augmentation plan that has the potential to upend the years of collaboration that Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser applauded during a recent trip to the Valley.
“This community has shown the state of Colorado what collaboration looks like,” he said. “The Rio Grande Basin issues related to groundwater really have called for people figuring out how we work together.”
That notion of collaboration and everyone-in-it-together gets flipped on its head with the SWAG case.
What it’s all about
SWAG producers are part of Subdistrict 1, the Valley’s most lucrative for crop sales of the six subdistricts, but also the most challenged when it comes to reaching the state engineer’s order to achieve and maintain a sustainable water supply.
In this case that means bringing stability to the unconfined aquifer of the Rio Grande Basin, a directive the subdistrict has been working on since it first formed in 2006 only to find itself continuing to fight an uphill battle.
Here’s the problem: The state engineer has given the subdistrict until 2031 to reach the sustainable benchmark, but during the past 12 years that subdistrict irrigators have been reducing groundwater pumping and retiring once-productive land, the bar to water sustainability has hardly moved.
OW time is ticking and Subdistrict 1 has moved to adopt even more restrictive groundwater pumping measures under its Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management, which the state engineer blessed on June 20, some 13 years after approving the first plan. It’s an amended document the farmers and ranchers in the subdistrict spent the past 18 months discussing, crafting and sending to the full Rio Grande Water Conservation District board and state engineer’s office for review and approval.
It’s also the document that pushed the SWAG to develop and file its own augmentation plan in state District 3 Water Court. Its big objection to the Subdistrict 1 plan is a new groundwater overpumping fee of $500 per acre-foot, up from $150 and the subject of lengthy debate during formation of the plan.
Farm operators would pay the hefty overpumping fee any time they exceed the amount of natural surface water tied to the property of their operation. The whole point of the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management is to let Mother Nature dictate the pattern of how irrigators in Subdistrict 1 restore the unconfined aquifer and build a sustainable model for farming in the future.
The plan relies on covering any groundwater withdrawals with natural surface water or the purchase of surface water credits, which is a game-changer particularly for farm operations like those in SWAG which have little to no natural surface water coming into their land.
SWAG says it owns 257 member wells covering 17,317 irrigated acres. Its augmentation plan relies on purchasing land for the surface water and retiring the acres. The finer arguments – on whether SWAG is contributing its “proportional” share to creating a “Sustainable Water Supply” and not interfering with the state of Colorado’s obligations under the Rio Grande Compact – will define the case.
Members of the SWAG Board of Directors attend the Rio Grande Water Conservation District Board meeting on July 14: Les Alderete, left, Asier Artaechevarria and Willie Myers.
The finer arguments to be made
To wade a bit deeper into the mud, the state engineer’s 2015 groundwater rules added more responsibility to the Valley’s groundwater users beyond making sure senior surface water rights aren’t harmed. The rules also require augmentation plans like the one being sought by SWAG to “bear proportionally the obligation to replace or Remedy Injurious Stream Depletions and for achieving and maintaining a Sustainable Water Supply.”
And the rules say groundwater irrigators can’t “prevent unreasonable interference with the State of Colorado’s ability to fulfill its obligations under the Rio Grande Compact.”
The directive to bear proportional share in achieving and maintaining a “Sustainable Water Supply” and not interfering with the state’s obligations under the Rio Grande Compact to New Mexico and Texas is what makes the SWAG application and the preceding weeks of testimony and evidence a water case to watch.
“This will be up to the court to finally figure out what do these (augmentation plans) look like going forward?’” said Cleave Simpson, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District General Manager and state senator representing the SLV. “As expensive as it is and as divisive as it is, it’s kind of a necessary step I guess.”
STORY GLOSSARY
Augmentation Plan: Historically required of junior water users on over-appropriated streams, like those in the Rio Grande Basin, to obtain sufficient replacement water to offset any injurious depletions to senior water rights. Under the state Department of Water Resources 2015 Groundwater and Irrigation Rules, an augmentation plan also must help achieve and maintain a sustainable water supply and not interfere with Colorado’s obligations under the Rio Grande Compact and annual water delivery to New Mexico and Texas.
Subdistrict – A defined territory within the Rio Grande Water Conservation District that helps promote local interests and accomplish improvements within that defined “special improvement district” or “subdistrict.” Currently there are six subdistricts, numbered consecutively as they were created. Subdistrict 1 was formed in 2006, and others subsequently after. Participation among crop producers is voluntary. Each subdistrict has a board of managers. Their decisions are voted on by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District’s Board of Directors.
SWAG – A group of groundwater users within Subdistrict 1 who have crafted their own augmentation plan rather than participate in the subdistrict’s Plan of Water Management and Annual Replacement Plan that have been approved by the state. The group says it has 257 member wells covering 17,317 irrigated acres.
Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management – Specific to Subdistrict 1, it establishes how irrigators will meet the state Division of Water Resources order to recover and create a sustainable unconfined aquifer. The first Plan of Water Management was approved in May 2010, and there were subsequent amendments to the plan approved in June 2017 and August 2018. The fourth amended plan was approved by Colorado Division of Water Resources in June 2023 and final by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District Board on July 14. There is a 10-day period from when the RGWCD board gave final approval that allows irrigators to challenge the plan in district water court and there are already challenges, meaning it won’t go into effect until it’s approved by the water court.
From the “Monday Briefing” newsletter from the Alamosa Citizen:
The start of an El Niño period was acknowledged in June by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the World Meteorological Organization. As it forms in July and August we’ll have a better sense of the impacts to the Valley lands and the Rio Grande Basin. Some global experts are beginning to suggest a moderate to strong El Niño increases the chance that 2024 will be the warmest on record. We’re paying attention to the condition of the Rio Grande Basin and in particular the change in the unconfined aquifer storage after what’s been a strong runoff from the winter snowpacks. It’s a critical indicator on the overall health of the Rio Grande Basin and one that ultimately determines the state of agriculture in the SLV.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
It is irrigators in Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District who shoulder the greatest responsibility for recovering the ailing unconfined aquifer. To that end, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District Board of Managers will hold a public hearing this week on the Subdistrict 1 Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management to manage groundwater pumping in the unconfined aquifer area. It’s been a year or so in development with lots of difficult conversations on how to reduce groundwater irrigation in the Valley’s most lucrative agricultural subdistrict. The state Division of Water Resources has signed off on the plan and now comes the final public comments. The idea of a lawsuit challenging the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management also hangs out there. The meeting is scheduled for 1 p.m. on Friday, July 14.
The Rio Grande Water Conservation District is moving forward on two major fronts: It’s ready to open the application window for Upper Rio Grande irrigators to apply for some of the $30 million set aside under state legislation, SB 22-028, to permanently retire irrigated acres in the San Luis Valley. The money sits in the Groundwater Compact Compliance and Sustainability Fund, and Valley farmers can submit applications beginning Thursday to access it. The RGWCD is also moving to implement its Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management for its Subdistrict 1. The board of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District is accepting public comments on the amended plan, with a public hearing slated for July 14. Both the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund and the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management are key to the Valley’s efforts to restore and bring sustainability to the Rio Grande Basin.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
2. Douglas County plans for water commission
Up north, Douglas County commissioners this week will continue their discussions around establishing a Douglas County Water Commission to assist in the broader effort to bring more water into the sprawling Front Range county. Douglas County has been reaching out to water providers and residents to pitch the idea and plans this week to continue those conversations around initially establishing a Technical Advisory Committee. In the background of it all is Douglas County’s interest in Renewable Water Resources and the Rio Grande Basin as a source of water. We’ll keep tracking to see where it all goes.
Graphic credit: Alamosa Citizen
3. The Valley’s water checkmate
The various county commissions in the San Luis Valley have been working to put in place their own checkmate when it comes to pumping water out of the Upper Rio Grande Basin like the RWR proposal to Douglas County. We first told you about it back in January, and now Alamosa County last week adopted the “Intergovernmental Agreement to Protect Water Resources” and the Valley’s other county and municipal governments are expected to become signatories to the agreement as well. The agreement establishes the San Luis Valley Joint Planning Area to protect surface water and groundwater resources. The essence of the agreement is that anyone looking to transfer water out of the San Luis Valley would have to apply for a 1041 permit from each of the county and municipal governments and get sign off from all local governments to move a project forward. “This might be our best opportunity to stop water exportation,” Saguache County Commissioner Tom McCracken, who chairs the San Luis Valley Regional Council of Governments board, said at the time of our first article. “I’m feeling really excited about it.”
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Real estate developers interested in exporting water they own from the San Luis Valley to fast-growing, water-short Douglas County have contributed thousands of dollars to candidates for the Parker Water & Sanitation District Board, one of the largest water providers in the county.
Last month, Robert Kennah won a seat on the Parker water board and had received two donations from partners in Renewable Water Resources, a real estate development group whose principals include former Colorado Governor Bill Owens. The contributions were made by RWR principals John Kim and Hugh Bernardi, according to filings at the Colorado Secretary of State’s office.
A second RWR-backed candidate, Kory Nelson, also received $10,000 in donations from RWR, but did not win a seat on the Parker water board. Nelson is contesting the results of the election. If Nelson had won, RWR would have ties to three members of the five-member board, according to Parker Water and Sanitation District Manager Ron Redd.
Parker board member Brooke Booth is related by marriage to RWR principal Sean Tonner, Redd said.
Big money
Neither Booth, Kennah nor RWR responded to a request for comment. Nelson could not be reached for comment.
Such large contributions are unusual in low-profile water district board elections, where candidates often provide their own funding for their campaigns of a few hundred dollars, rather than thousands, according to Redd.
“That’s a lot of money for a water board race,” Redd said.
The donations come after Douglas County Commissioners last year declined to invest in RWR’s controversial $400 million San Luis Valley pipeline proposal using COVID-19 relief funding. Douglas County Commissioners Lora Thomas and Abe Laydon voted against the funding, while Commissioner George Teal supported the proposal.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
Among other objections, the county said that RWR’s claim that there was enough water in the San Luis Valley’s aquifers to support the export plan, was incorrect, based on hydrologic models presented over the course of several public work sessions.
The county’s attorneys also said the proposal did not comply with the Colorado Water Plan, which favors projects that don’t dry up productive farmland and which have local support.
Opposition to the proposal in the San Luis Valley is widespread. The Rio Grande Water Conservation District in Alamosa argues that no water should be taken from the San Luis Valley because it is already facing major water shortages due to the ongoing drought and over-pumping of its aquifers by growers. The valley faces a looming well shutdown if it can’t reduce its water use enough to bring its fragile water system back into balance.
Out of compliance
That lack of compliance means that Douglas County would likely not win any potential state funding for the export proposal.
Last year, after the county rejected the San Luis Valley proposal, RWR said it would continue to work with Douglas County to see if its objections could be overcome. It has also maintained that the agricultural water it owns in the San Luis Valley would be pulled from a portion of the valley’s aquifer system that is renewable, minimizing any damage that might occur from the project, and that even though farmlands would be dried up when the water is exported, the valley’s water situation would benefit from a reduction in agricultural water use.
RWR’s water rights, however, have not yet been converted to municipal use, as is required under Colorado law. That process could take years to complete and would likely be fiercely contested by farm interests in the San Luis Valley, as well as other opponents.
Still RWR continues to deepen its ties to Douglas County water districts. RWR principal John Kim, one of the contributors to the Parker water board elections, won a seat last year on the Roxborough Water and Sanitation District Board, according to the district’s website. Kim lives in that district. He declined a request for comment.
Douglas County government does not deliver water to its residents, but relies on more than a dozen individual communities and water districts to provide that service. Fast-growing towns and water districts early on simply drilled wells into aquifers, but the aquifers have been declining and water districts have been forced to implement aggressive water conservation programs, water reuse programs, and use of local surface supplies to meet their needs.
Lawn sizes in Castle Rock are sharply limited to save water, with some homeowners opting to use artificial turf for convenience and to help keep water bills low. Oct. 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News
No support
Two of the largest water providers in Douglas County, Parker Water and Sanitation District and Castle Rock Water, have said they would not support the RWR proposal because they had already spent millions of dollars developing new, more sustainable, politically acceptable projects. Those projects include a South Platte River pipeline that is being developed in partnership with farmers in the northeastern corner of the state.
A host of politicians across the political spectrum came out against the RWR proposal as well, including Gov. Jared Polis and Rep. Lauren Boebert, who represents the San Luis Valley.
Still, Douglas County’s Teal, who has also received funding from RWR principals, said he believes the RWR water could have a role to play in helping ensure the county has enough water to grow over the next 50 years.
“I don’t know [if we have enough water,]” Teal said. “That is part of what makes me wonder if we do have enough. Water projects take time. There is no snapping your fingers and then delivering 10,000 acre-feet of water.”
But Douglas County Commissioner Lora Thomas says the county’s water providers are well prepared for the future and there is no need to spend money on a project that has little public support and which may never come to fruition.
“We are secure without it,” Thomas said. “But I think that RWR is doing everything it can to get Douglas County to buy into their scheme.”
Long shot?
Floyd Ciruli, a pollster and veteran observer of Colorado politics who has done extensive work in the past for Douglas County water providers, said the RWR initiative faces an uphill battle.
“They have resistance at both ends,” Ciruli said, referring to opposition in the San Luis Valley and in the metro area. “It’s interesting that [RWR] is contributing to these boards. It’s is a real long shot.”
Parker Water and Sanitation District says it plans to continue its development of the South Platte pipeline project in northeastern Colorado and to craft deals with farmers so that agricultural water won’t be removed from farmlands, helping preserve the rural economy there. Most of Parker’s water rights have already been approved for municipal use, according to Redd.
“We’re concerned because Parker water has no interest in the RWR project and we basically stated that a year ago when Douglas County was looking at their project. It has no clear path to being done. It’s years if not decades before they could even get started,” Redd said.
“We have a clear path. We already have the water. I am not sure what the intent was to try and get people on our board. It is just concerning.”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
COLORADO is estimating 750,000 acre-feet on the Rio Grande and 405,000 acre-feet on the Conejos River, both dramatically up from a year ago thanks to healthy snowpack in the San Juan Mountains, State Engineer Kevin Rein told the Rio Grande Compact Commission on Friday.
“Forecasted river flows are much better this year, especially for the rivers starting in the San Juan Mountains,” Rein said. “Streamflows from the San Juan Mountains are estimated to be 130 to 250 percent of the last 30-year average.”
The Sangre de Cristo Mountains are at near average snowpack conditions, but still better than recent years, Rein said.
Streamflows on the Trinchera, Culebra, and Crestone creeks are forecasted at 90 to 120 percent of the last 30-year average, he said.
In 2022, the Rio Grande had 442,000 acre-feet and the Conejos 266,000 acre-feet for a third straight year of below average stream flows.
Rein’s presentation to the Rio Grande Compact Commission, which manages water on the Rio Grande for the states of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, included a report on the San Luis Valley’s subdistrict system and Colorado’s groundwater pumping rules that Valley irrigators have to follow.
Subdistrict 1, which is the biggest land subdivision in the San Luis Valley with 3,000 water wells and where farmers hold contracts with entities like Coors, Walmart and Safeway, has submitted a fourth plan of water management to Rein and the Colorado Division of Water Resources in its effort to meet the sustainability requirements for Upper Rio Grande’s unconfined aquifer.
“It is struggling with meeting its sustainability requirements in the unconfined aquifer,” Rein told the Rio Grande Compact Commission.
The proposed fourth plan of water management by Subdistrict 1 would require irrigators to cover groundwater withdrawals with natural surface water or through the purchase of surface water credits. The plan calls for a 1-to-1 augmentation, meaning for every acre-foot of water used, an acre-foot has to be returned to the unconfined aquifer through recharging ponds.
In the San Luis Valley, well owners must replace their injurious river depletions by participating in a subdistrict or by getting a court-approved augmentation plan. The subdistricts, governed by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, must get state approval for annual replacement plans that show how farmers and ranchers are covering their water depletions.
There are three upcoming state water court cases involving irrigators in Subdistrict 1 who filed their own augmentation plans in an effort to stay out of the subdistrict.
The largest of the three cases involves the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group (SWAG), which consists of 17,000 irrigated acres in Subdistrict 1. That case is set for a five-week trial in July and will be closely watched to see how a proposed augmentation plan this large is reviewed by state water court.
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THE federal government’s Closed Basin Project reared its head at Thursday’s special meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District board.
In question was whether Closed Basin water could be included in annual replacement plans as a potential resource for subdistricts to help offset winter depletions to the Rio Grande and Conejos River basins.
The majority of the board answered in the affirmative, with some dissent, and approved resolutions to that effect and then separately approved the respective annual replacement plans of the six subdistricts. Those now get filed with the state Division of Water Resources for review and sign-off and are key plans to show the state how Valley irrigators are replacing the water they pump out in efforts to bring sustainability to the Upper Rio Grande aquifers.
The meeting drew a crowd of water users along the Rio Grande and Conejos River basins, who had heard the subdistrict annual replacement plans were in jeopardy of not being approved because the plans included potential use of Closed Basin water. Without a board-approved annual replacement plan in place, irrigators wouldn’t be able to begin groundwater pumping, hence the turnout and pleas to the board to vote for the plans.
No annual replacement plan, no groundwater pumping, no Valley ag economy was the message the Rio Grande Water Conservation District board members heard.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation-managed Closed Basin Project, positioned in the northern end of the Valley, pools surface water and groundwater and pumps the water into a canal to meet Rio Grande Compact and Treaty of Mexico requirements.
In rulings from the Colorado Supreme Court, the water also can be prioritized for private use if there’s water left after meeting annual downstream obligations to New Mexico, Texas and Mexico, and delivering water to the Valley’s wetlands and wildlife refuges.
But rarely is that the case.
With the persistent drought conditions, the Closed Basin Project has reduced its pumping to about 12,500 acre-feet of water a year, said Amber Pacheco, acting general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. Of that, about 4,000 acre-feet is used to protect the wetlands areas and the rest of the water, or around 8,000 acre-feet, heads downstream.
The Closed Basin has an absolute water right of 42,000 acre-feet annually if conditions allow for it, and pumping is constantly monitored because under federal statute the Closed Basin Project cannot withdraw water to a level two feet below the area being pumped.
“They can’t pump it dry,” Pacheco said. “The Closed Basin Project can’t operate that way.”
Pacheco said the Rio Grande Water Conservation District cannot use Closed Basin water for anything other than wintertime depletions. “We pay all our irrigation-season depletions by other means. We don’t use the Closed Basin for that.”
And despite there being plenty of water users who would like to see the Closed Basin Project shut down and the water kept in the San Luis Valley, including some members of Rio Grande Water Conservation District board, a vote to shut it down isn’t within the boards power.
“This board can’t shut down the Closed Basin. It’s a federal project. They can ask and make comments, but they can’t vote to shut it down.”
But the Rio Grande Water Conservation District can approve an annual replacement plan for a subdistrict that includes the option of using Closed Basin water to offset winter depletions. The meeting at least made that clear.
SLV WATER
Find more coverage of the RWR plan and other Valley water issues HERE
The headwaters of the Rio Grande River in Colorado. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
IRRIGATED agricultural land in the San Luis Valley is worth $250,000 for 160 acres, or $2,000 per acre-foot of groundwater withdrawn.
At least those are the valuations on irrigated acres that the Rio Grande Water Conservation District board agreed to during a special meeting Tuesday when it debated requirements for farmers and ranchers to apply for a $30 million pool of state money.
The water conservation district board will meet again on Friday, March 3, to formally adopt the requirements.
Developing the criteria to access the $30 million tied to state law SB22-028 and its Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund was a painstaking process for the water conservation district board, which has met for hours and hours over a series of meetings to hash out the requirements.
Cleave Simpson, the architect of SB22-028 and general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, always said drafting the requirements would prove to be more difficult than getting the legislation adopted, and he was right.
“This whole plan is not easy to understand,” said board member Peggy Godfrey in her pleas for simplicity in drafting the requirements.
The state law is intended to help irrigators in the Upper Rio Grande Basin and Republican River Basin meet their water obligations by retiring irrigated acreage. Each basin has an earmark of $30 million. In the case of San Luis Valley farmers and ranchers, the money has to be spent to permanently retire groundwater pumping wells to help the Upper Rio Grande meet the state’s groundwater pumping regulations and stabilize the two aquifers in the San Luis Valley.
David Robbins and J.C. Ulrich (Greg Hobbs) at the 2013 Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention
David Robbins, the water conservation district’s long-standing attorney, emphasized that the requirements have to result in a “verifiable reduction in groundwater wells.” The state program is essentially a $30 million “buy and dry” for irrigated acres in the Valley, Robbins has said.
Once adopted, the Colorado Division of Water Resources will review the requirements before they go into effect. The state takes at least a month to review and approve the requirements adopted by the water conservation board, according to Robbins.
That means it would be sometime in April and into the spring that the Rio Grande Water Conservation District would begin to accept applications and start to spend down the $30 million earmark. Amber Pacheco, acting general manager, said the water conservation district is already getting phone calls from groundwater well irrigators looking to apply for the money.
Under the state law, any of the $60 million not spent by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and Republican River Conservation District by Aug. 15, 2024, goes into the state’s kitty for spending. The money is part of Colorado’s federal appropriation of COVID-19 relief funding.
In opting to establish a “base payment” that values a quarter section of irrigated land (160 acres) at $250,000, the board knew that it may overpay on some properties and underpay on others.
“We’re going to hear that,” said board member Steve Keller. “This is where simplicity works against accuracy.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s debate when some revisions were made to the draft, Robbins advised board members to be careful not to advocate for criteria that could benefit their own farm operations. That prompted board member Mike Kruse to recuse himself from the deliberations. Kruse has said he plans to submit an application for some of the $30 million.
The water conservation district board had to account for different sizes of farming operations that may apply for the money. The section on land compensation reads, in part: “Applications that seek to include parcels of property that are either larger or smaller than a standard quarter section (160 acres) will receive a prorated base payment that will rely on the decreed and/or permitted irrigated acres for the serving well(s), using $250,000 for 160 acres as the base. [For example: a half quarter at 80 acres would have a base payment of $125,000 or a parcel of 240 acres would have a base payment of $375,000].”
“I don’t want this $30 million to go away. I want to spend it all,” said Greg Higel, president of the Rio Grande Water Conservation Board.
Once the state approves the requirements, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District will publicize them on its website. A draft of the requirements is posted here, but note that this draft was slightly modified in language in a few sections during Tuesday’s special meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and is not the final draft.
Farmer Kyler Brown in front of a small dam on the Rio Grande at a farm outside of Monte Vista, Colorado. “I’ve ranched. I’ve cowboyed. Now I’m farming and ranching,” Brown said. “You quickly learn in the West how important water is.” (Photo By Diana Cervantes for Source NM).
RIO GRANDE RESERVOIR, Colo — After 15 miles of pockmarked dirt road, the Rio Grande spreads wide in the shadows of the San Juan Mountains. It glitters, aqua, whitecaps whipped up by the wind. But even in the birthplace of the river lay the stark stains of climate change.
Deep, bald scars pucker the mountaintops, shorn of trees. In older burn scars, grass grows, flowing in the first summer breezes. In the newer scars, the thin rows of trees list, blackened and cracked, only a skirt of green growth at their base to mark the passage of time.
Crisis on the Rio Grande is a multi-part series that travels along the river from Colorado through New Mexico and into Texas. Read more: A river wounded
The Rio Grande meanders south and east through Colorado’s San Luis Valley, a region of about 8,000 square miles spanning six counties, tucked between two mountain ranges. Agriculture drives the economy. More than 46,000 residents rely on $370 million generated by alfalfa, barley, potatoes, wheat, beef cattle and sheep.
“Now you just really feel that that’s all on a collision course with climate, and that may have some severe ramifications,” said valley farmer and rancher Kyler Brown as he passed over the low Rio Grande that cuts across his father-in-law’s farm in Monte Vista, Colorado. The valley’s way of agricultural life is imperiled.
The San Luis Valley depends on water, for the herds, the crops, for next year’s planting. And for mortgages, farm insurance, sometimes for the shareholders, sometimes for keeping the business in the family.
Average rainfall is only 7 inches to 9 inches annually.
Three-fourths of the water in the Rio Grande instead starts as snow, folded into the crevices of the mountains, slowly seeping through soil or streaming down to the riverbed.
The river pools into the Rio Grande Reservoir at the base of the San Juan Mountains, fed mostly by snowmelt. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
The snowpack acts like a bank, a savings — water frozen for the future. In past decades, that meant cold snowmelt would start filling the rivers in April, peaking in June, eventually slowing through the autumn.
But warmer temperatures, less tree cover due to wildfires, more dust and thirsty soils from years of compounded drought prevent the just-melted snow from ever reaching the riverbed. Over the years, the smaller snowpack is becoming liquid earlier and changing the rhythm of the river.
In scarcity, relationships change
Though the San Juans had all of the snow they usually would in early spring 2022, it didn’t translate to a full river. Brutal May winds stripped away snowpack.
“There was a tension in my gut,” said Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District. “Because as the winds were howling, we knew we were losing snowpack. Every day, we were losing our opportunity to have flows in the river and put water in our aquifers.”
Threats are present. Farmers pump groundwater to make up for the river’s shortfalls, but that means falling groundwater levels. Populations swell on the Front Range around Denver, and downriver, too. And there’s always potential for devastating wildfire.
“We’re living on the knife’s edge with water,” Dutton said.
An old train depot captured June 22, 2022 outside of La Jara, Colorado. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
Water managers talk of new efforts to curb water use. They’re trying to change relationships between conservation groups, environmental nonprofits, farmers and the quasi-governmental irrigation districts.
Nathan Coombs, who manages the Conejos River District, said years of trust-building with groups typically at odds means there’s a greater willingness to face issues.
“Once we took down barriers of communication between project partners, we could start clearly seeing problems,” Coombs said. “If you want to solve those problems, you’ve got to talk to people you have never wanted to talk to before.”
It’s not perfect.
“Look, there’s always going to be a skunk at the picnic. I’m not saying everything is always totally kumbaya, but the biggest players for the vast majority are engaged.”
San Luis Valley Groundwater
Hidden waters
SAN LUIS VALLEY, Colo — Groundwater made the valley green, but climate change and over-pumping across time has depleted those water sources.
There are two aquifers underlying the valley. One is called the “confined aquifer,” trapped under an impermeable clay layer deep down, concentrated centrally. The other is a shallow “unconfined aquifer” generally found between 15 feet to 100 feet underground across most of the valley.
Artesian well Dutton Ranch, Alamosa 1909 via the Crestone Eagle
In certain spots in the valley, water used to gush out in artesian wells from the unconfined aquifer. But in recent decades, levels declined steeply after years of too many wells and too little recharge from the river or precipitation.
And the aquifers, explained Colorado State Engineer Mark Rein, take a double hit.
“There’s less water flowing naturally into aquifers that the wells rely on. At the same time,” he explained, “due to the lack of surface water, the wells are going to be more reliant on the aquifers.”
Farmers in the San Luis Valley have just eight years to stop the freefall of groundwater levels, or face the state shutting off wells.
In the valley’s most affluent district stretching between Alamosa and Saguache Counties, the aquifer declined 1.3 million acre feet by 1976, most of that over just 20 years. District officials submitted a plan to replenish the aquifer.
Rein acknowledged the efforts of Valley residents to reduce pumping, saying in June that it was too soon to tell if they could succeed in replenishing the aquifer before the 2031 deadline.
A sprinkler waters barley in a farm at Monte Vista. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
There’s a nexus Subdistrict 1 is dealing with, Rein said.
“We have this very rich culture in the San Luis Valley of irrigation, crops — and the economy is so dependent on it,” Rein said. “And at the same time, they’re facing a reality of less water.” One push to curb use might not go far enough. Another may go too far and erode culture and economy. “That’s what makes success more or less possible.”
All across Colorado, farmers have to offset any groundwater they pump either by submitting plans to water court for individual wells or joining a conservancy district in any of Colorado’s river basins.
Self-governance
People in the Rio Grande basin went further, carving up the basin into seven hyper-local subdistricts with a role in restoring the “balance between available water supplies and current levels of water use.”
Dutton, 36, brims with verve when she speaks about the river. Growing up on a potato farm, both her father and grandfather took on water leadership positions.
She said decisions at the local level were how changes were made to water policy.
The entities, the districts, the boards, they’re all made up of people that have a dog in the fight, she said. “They live and work in the community. They’re water users.”
Farmers in the valley taxed themselves, paying an additional fee for every acre-foot of groundwater they pumped to fund conservation measures.
Rio Grande and River Conejos conservation districts use the money to pay farmers to stay off their wells, to retire them, to retire fields, to purchase farmland. Or the funds go to creating a system of “water credits,” allowing farmers who need more water to buy from farmers who returned excess flows to the aquifer.
In 2022, the Colorado Legislature chipped in another $30 million out of federal coronavirus relief funds to buy land and retire irrigation wells along the Rio Grande.
The efforts are unique. Hundreds of wells were shuttered by the state in northeast Colorado in 2011.
“There were large-scale wells shut-offs, and those wells are still shut off,” Dutton said. “But here, we took the initiative as a community, and we said, ‘We want to regulate ourselves. We want to work together to make this work.’”
Even as the valley had record-breaking monsoon rainfall in 2022, it isn’t enough to recharge the aquifers, which face decades of pumping more water than is sinking in. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
Recent cycles have not been kind, either. After a few frugal years of farmers cutting pumping recharged the aquifer some, bad drought struck again. Without much replenishment from the struggling river, the past three years nearly erased those gains for groundwater.
Even when, in 2021, the district’s farmers pumped the least they had in a decade — the aquifer still dropped to a new historic low.
“It was incredibly disheartening,” Dutton said.
When a near-record monsoon season doused the valley in the summer of 2022, with some places receiving double the annual average rainfall, the river still ran at only 67% of its long-term average.
“It really wasn’t a great year as far as streamflow goes,” Dutton said. “Hopefully enough people saw what was happening in May and made some choices to change their farming plan for the year.”
Time is running out. Subdistrict 1 has to replenish the unconfined aquifer by more than 900,000 acre feet, or face the state capping wells.
Despite all their efforts and sacrifices, Dutton said, “we’re anticipating seeing a significant drop in the aquifer.”
Click the link to read the article on the Alamosa Citizen website (Chris Lopez):
SOMETIMES playing defense can be your most effective offense.
Anticipating another eventual push to export water from the San Luis Valley aquifers and the headwaters of the Upper Rio Grande, officials in each of the six counties are drafting an intergovernmental agreement and specific planning regulations they hope will legally block any water exportation project.
Through an intergovernmental agreement, the counties would look to establish a “Joint Planning Area” to protect the Valley’s water resources and then adopt specific 1041 planning regulations that address protecting the Valley’s water resources from exportation.
“This might be our best opportunity to stop water exportation,” said Saguache County Commissioner Tom McCracken, who chairs the San Luis Valley Regional Council of Governments board. “I’m feeling really excited about it.”
It’s through the San Luis Valley Regional Council of Governments that county officials and city officials have been meeting to draft the intergovernmental agreement and eventually establish 1041 regulations specifically around water exportation proposals. Any proposal that would aim to take water out of the Valley, such as the Renewable Water Resources plan, would have to satisfy all the regulations in applying for the required county permits.
The city of Alamosa and the city of Monte Vista are expressing interest in being part of the water resources intergovernmental agreement as well.
In a speech last April where he addressed the RWR plan, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser encouraged the use of 1041 regulations so that communities have a “seat at the table in shaping the water projects that impact them.”
“Broadly speaking, a local government can use its 1041 powers to limit the negative impacts associated with the development of certain ‘areas’ or ‘activities of state interest.’ Such areas or activities might be related to everything from water infrastructure to buy-and-dry projects. Overall, these powers are intended to allow local governments to protect our lands, their value, and their use,” Weiser said.
CONVERSATIONS among county commissioners began in earnest early last summer following interest by Douglas County in the Renewable Water Resources proposal to pump 20,000 acre-feet every year out of the Valley to the Front Range bedroom community.
A visit by Douglas County Commissioner Abe Laydon last year to talk to RWR supporters in the San Luis Valley heightened concerns among county commissioners. Following Laydon’s visit, local county commissioners began conversations on how to counter both Douglas County’s interest and the ongoing efforts by Renewable Water Resources to export water from the Valley.
“I do still see a need and I feel good about the movement that’s been made,” said Alamosa County Commissioner Vern Heersink, who has been involved in the discussions from the beginning.
“I didn’t think we would have this much of a voice,” Heersink said, “and so it’s exciting to be working together with the other counties on a common goal.”
As headwater counties in the Upper Rio Grande Basin, there’s strength in numbers when it comes to battling water projects with smaller counties banding together to counter efforts by a large suburban county like Douglas County.
The Northwest Colorado Council of Governments offers a template to the approach in how that region battled the Two Forks project in the 1990s.
“The only way a region like the San Luis Valley can be successful and have a real say in the water world is if it bands together,” said attorney Barbara Green. Her law firm, Sullivan Green Seavy, is advising the San Luis Valley Regional Council of Governments in the drafting of the intergovernmental agreement. The agreement itself has no regulatory effect but simply forms the “Joint Planning Area,” Green explained to commissioners at a meeting last week in Alamosa.
It’s the 1041 regulations that provide the teeth.
THE strategy could also provide a checkmate to Douglas County’s own interest to get into the business of being a water provider, which it currently is not.
At a recent Douglas County Commissioner work session, Laydon raised the idea of creating a volunteer water commission, similar to a county planning commission, to help Douglas County plan forward on securing water for its future needs.
“We know that the state does not have a concrete water plan. I think that’s to come,” Laydon said. “In the west and certainly in Douglas County we know that water is a top priority issue, a scarce resource that we need to have some long-range, thoughtful planning around.
“I think we’re overdue in Douglas County to really activate a water commission and have a comprehensive plan much like we do in transportation and our comprehensive master plan in land use.”
Bill Owens, former Republican governor of Colorado and RWR pitchman, has been courting Douglas County to buy into Renewable Water Resources. Attorneys hired by Douglas County have outlined the significant legal and logistical hurdles to the RWR proposal.
Having each of the San Luis Valley’s six counties adopt specific planning regulations around water exportation and enter into intergovernmental agreements adds another layer of local regulation around water projects.
The effort is not so Valley counties can meddle in each other’s business, said Heersink, but a specific response to any plans for water exportation.
“We want to prevent a diversion that takes the water out of the Valley,” he said.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
Supermoon over the San Luis Valley August 11, 2022. Photo credit: Chris Lopez/Alamosa Citizen
From the “Monday Briefing” newsletter from the Alamosa Citizen:
The new year likely will bring a new amended Plan of Water Management for irrigators in Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. The subdistrict’s board of managers in December approved a new amended plan that ties the allowable groundwater pumped to the natural surface of water of the property. This is a huge change that values snowpack, and if there isn’t any, irrigators can expect to pay a handsome fee to get surface water from a neighbor. The plan will get a hearing and vote before the Rio Grande Water Conservation District on Jan. 17. If approved there, as is likely, the amended Plan of Water Management then gets filed with Colorado Division of Water Resources for its blessing, or not.
We frequently note the activity of farmers in Subdistrict 1 because it is the subdistrict that pulls from the unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin and is under state watch to reduce its groundwater pumping to recover water flows in the unconfined aquifer. It’s also the Valley’s most lucrative corridor for irrigated agriculture, and as such, the bellwether for farming in the Valley. The amended Plan of Water Management is a way for farmers in the subdistrict to try to stay in business while making gains in recovering the unconfined aquifer. More to come in 2023.
WHEN State Sen. Cleave Simpson reports for duty at the Colorado Capitol this week, he does so representing a newdistrict that was carved out as part of the 2021 Colorado redistricting process.
What isn’t changing is his legislative focus and the issues he plans to continue working on. He also has some serious thinking to do, specifically on what his political future may look like entering 2024.
Colorado redistricting shifted Simpson into Senate District 6 which consists of the San Luis Valley’s six counties and then lower southwest Archuleta, Dolores, La Plata, Montezuma and counties north to Montrose County. In 2020, when he was first elected, he represented state Senate District 35 which included the San Luis Valley and counties of southeastern Colorado.
“It’s really about people, and honestly it will still be about water,” Simpson told Alamosa Citizen ahead of the 2023 legislative session. “Folks on the Rio Grande and the Arkansas (River) worry about water. The folks on the Western Slope, given the condition of the Colorado River and how much water gets moved out of that transbasin to support front range interests, that similarity will continue and that sense of urgency may even escalate more going west.”
AS a Republican in a Colorado Senate controlled by Democrats, Simpson finds himself in an oddly comfortable spot. In his two years as state senator, he’s managed to carve out a reputation as a leading bipartisan legislator who Republicans and Democrats alike can work with.
He has major pieces of bipartisan legislation to his name, including Colorado’s 988 Crisis Hotline in 2021 and the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund which remarkably sailed through both the state senate and state house with no opposition in the 2022 session. He’s also focused his early legislative work on behavioral health legislation and sits on the legislature’s influential Capitol Development Committee and his favorite, Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee.
“I like to think I spent two years building some credibility where folks will listen to what’s important to me, which is hopefully what’s important to rural Colorado,” he said.
“It’s been very intentional,” he said of his bipartisan approach, “but it’s also who I am. I didn’t change who I was when I got elected to the legislature. It feels like I’ve built that reputation in two years and folks on the other side of the aisle are always willing to engage with me.”
Not always the case with the Colorado Republican Party. He still smarts about the time the party chair wouldn’t help when he was rallying state leaders to oppose the proposed transbasin diversion of water from the Rio Grande to Douglas County that former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a fellow Republican, is behind through Renewable Water Resources. Owens himself has called out Simpson. “When the attorney general and state Sen. Cleave Simpson claim they will do all they can to stop the voluntary selling of water rights, they are saying to Coloradans that they know better than you do what to do with your private property,” Owens penned in an op/ed published just a year ago.
Will he run again?
Simpson finds himself uncomfortable with the politics of the time and wonders if he will run again when his state senate term expires in two years. His job as general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and farming with his dad and son provide him with more than enough to do. When he travels north for legislative work he thinks about the work he’s leaving behind and wonders if being a gentleman legislator it’s what he truly wants to do.
Friends back home in the Valley are in his ear about running again in 2024, some even suggesting he challenge Rep. Lauren Boebert to represent the 3rd Congressional District. He’s heard the calls and understands the water issues he cares so much about will find their way to the nation’s capital.
Like others in the water community he’s frustrated by Boebert’s apparent lack of engagement on the critical issues of the Colorado and Rio Grande basins. There was frustration at the Rio Grande Water Conservation District that a federal House bill called the Rio Grande Water Security Act was introduced last session by New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury without their knowledge and without Boebert, their congressperson’s, involvement.
The bill actually made it out of the House but was detoured through the U.S. Senate through political maneuvering to make sure it wouldn’t advance into law. Simpson and his team at the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, along with staff in U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s office, helped bring attention to the flaws they saw in the bill.
If Simpson is tempted to challenge Boebert it would be because of the water issues on the Colorado and Rio Grande basins.
He’s vowed to work the 2023 legislative session and then give more thought to his political future. He has a new state senate district to represent and spent the summer traveling to Telluride, Cortez, Durango and other communities west of the San Luis Valley which coincidentally aligns to the 3rd Congressional District.
“They are definitely different, but they are also similar in a lot of respects,” he said of representing communities west of the San Luis Valley versus his travels east the past two years.
“It’s still rural Colorado,” he said. “The southeast is dominated by irrigated agriculture. There is certainly an abundance of some of that going west but not to the same level. There will be more ranching and there’s a lot more public land going west.”
And there’s the Colorado River and its troubles, which Simpson is deeply attuned to given his work at the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and efforts to recover the Upper Rio Grande Basin.
It’s the water issues on the Colorado and Rio Grande that Simpson said are most critical and where he plans to continue to focus his legislative attention.
“There’s just such a compelling and growing concern on my part and others about where water is going to push this state, and I think legislators need to be better engaged and better informed,” he said.
Heading into this third legislative session he enters the Capitol more confident and with friends, as they say, on both sides of the aisle.
Colorado State Capitol. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
The Citizen’s 2022 Year in Water compilation will help you see more of the big picture – both with the unconfined aquifer and the confined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin. It’s important to see the fuller landscape, and we think the 2022 year in review does the trick. We would also direct you to our most recent podcast with state Sen. Cleave Simpson, who talks both about the upcoming 2023 legislative session and the critical time we’re in when it comes to water and irrigated ag in the San Luis Valley.
WHEN you’re working on an enormous issue like water – in this case how to recover the Upper Rio Grande Basin and the two aquifers of the San Luis Valley – you have to stretch your mind to find new approaches.
The idea that groundwater pumped to irrigate crops could be restricted through a conservation easement is one of those moments when something that’s never been tried bubbles to the top and provides a new way to look at an urgent problem.
On Nov. 8, Valley farmer Ron Bowman signed the first-ever groundwater conservation easement to restrict the use of groundwater on his nearly 1,900-acre ranch in Mosca. The commitment also set a timeline for Subdistrict 4 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District to purchase the ranch for $2.6 million, a deal it will be looking to close in 2023 with a loan from the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
The subdistrict’s acquisition of the entire ranch not only saves groundwater from being pumped, but importantly helps Subdistrict 4 achieve its sustainability requirements for the confined aquifer as well as offset stream depletions to nearby San Luis Creek from groundwater pumping that occurs in Subdistricts 4 and 5.
“How the law is written and works, we’ll hold those water rights and they’ll still be water rights but we won’t pump them ever again,” said Chris Ivers, program manager for Subdistrict 4 and one of the architects of the deal. “That protects those water rights from being abandoned and somebody else coming in and saying ‘Because these water rights have been abandoned, I can pump water over here.’ So we’re holding their place in line but saying, you can’t pump this water, this is our water to pump.”
Bowman’s groundwater pumping has accounted for about 10 percent of that being pumped by irrigators across Subdistrict 4. The farm has been operating with 12 center-pivot irrigation circles, growing mostly forage crops including some alfalfa.
“If by discontinuing irrigation on my farm, it means that my neighbors may be able to keep their multigenerational farms in their families, then it feels like the right thing to do,” Bowman said. He and his wife, Gail, purchased the property about five years ago.
The reduction in groundwater pumping and the fact the water is being placed in a conservation easement so it’s never pumped again creates a new way for the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and the state agencies and nonprofit land trusts it partners with to address depletion in the aquifers.
“The nice thing about a groundwater conservation easement is each one can be tailored to that property,” explains Sarah Parmar, director of conservation at Colorado Open Lands.
Parmar has been instrumental in helping create a framework for the groundwater conservation easement that Bowman entered into. She credits Cleave Simpson, the general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and state senator representing the Valley’s six counties, with the initial brainstorm.
From there it was getting other smart water people in the room, like Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District; local farmers Sheldon Rockey and Nathan Coombs; and state division engineer Craig Cotten to lend their expertise to determine if groundwater could be placed in a conservation easement.
The concept also went through a rigorous exercise with water attorneys to determine the legality of such a move, and Colorado Open Lands and the Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust in Del Norte lent support to the project. There was also the matter of figuring out how to appraise the land given the new construct of groundwater being placed in an easement as part of a sale.
Over 20 years ago conservation easement work began to grow in the San Luis Valley largely with the establishment of the Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust, which was formed primarily out of concern for the surface water provided by the Rio Grande and its tributaries,” Colorado Opens Lands noted. “Now through this new application of a conservation easement on the Valley’s groundwater resources, the land trust community in the Valley is reinforcing its commitment to supporting the community in protecting its most precious resource: water.”
More common in the Valley are announcements of land conservation easements, where a portion of agricultural land is placed in an easement to prevent future development and preserve the land as a natural habitat.
Now water managers like Simpson have figured out that groundwater can also be placed in a conservation easement, which creates a new way for farmers to think about their operations as they continue to reduce the amount of water they use to farm to meet the state’s groundwater pumping rules.
“We are used to keeping water rights in irrigation through conservation easements, so it feels wrong to intentionally dry a farm, but by drying this particular farm, we are ensuring that the other farms in the subdistrict are sustainable and we ensure that this groundwater stays in the aquifer and out of the hands of anyone who might want to try to move it outside of the basin,” said Parmar.
Other approaches to a groundwater conservation easement may be different, she said. Instead of a farmer putting all the groundwater in a conservation easement as Bowman did, maybe only a portion of it is conserved through an easement and the rest continues to be used for crop production.
“Our hope is to work with landowners across subdistricts to avoid the state stepping in to shut off wells,” said Parmar. “I am continually amazed by the willingness of farmers and ranchers to step up to the challenge and grateful to work with irrigators like Ron Bowman, who want to be part of the solution.”
