On July 3, Larimer County District Court Judge Michelle Brinegar ruled that commissioners were justified in their decision to approve the application for 10 miles of pipeline through the county…In its lawsuit, Save The Poudre asked the judge to vacate the board’s decision to approve the pipeline. The nonprofit alleged that commissioners didn’t adequately follow the county’s standards for these kinds of applications. Specifically, Save The Poudre contends that commissioners should have required Thornton to present a plan for the so-called Poudre River option, which would have conveyed the water through the Poudre River downstream of Thornton’s current diversion point…But commissioners concluded that while they could encourage the Poudre River option, they couldn’t require it. Brinegar sided with commissioners, saying they can’t compel Thornton to present all possible alternatives, only those that are reasonable.
Chimney Hollow Reservoir Project managers are investigating strategies to mitigate the presence of mineralized uranium that is anticipated to be present in the first fill of the reservoir.
Mineralized uranium was detected in water samples taken from behind the cofferdam at the site following a series of major precipitation events in summer 2023. Further testing through 2024 identified the source of the minerals as being the granitic rock being quarried on the west side of the reservoir for placement in the rockfill shell of the asphalt-core dam. The low-level uranium minerals detected were not anticipated to be the result of leached material at the site.
During dam testing and first fill of the reservoir starting later this summer and continuing through 2027, no releases of water from Chimney Hollow Reservoir are expected. Ongoing monitoring of water quality at the reservoir will help managers develop a mitigation strategy that could include treatment and dilution with the significant sources of other water present in the infrastructure nearby.
As more information becomes available, Northern Water will share it with project participants, partner agencies and the public.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Michael Karik). Here’s an excerpt:
Although she stood by her prior determination that the project permit was unlawful, a federal judge last week decided construction on a major Denver Water infrastructure project should continue for safety reasons…Earlier this spring, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Christine M. Arguello found that, as a result of federal law violations, the expansion of Gross Reservoir and Dam should cease permanently and any further construction on the ongoing project would stop temporarily. The pause on construction, Arguello explained, would give her time to hear from engineers and determine what work would need to occur to make the dam safe…
However, on May 29, Arguello retreated from her prior bellicose tone.
“There is a risk of environmental injury and loss of human life if dam construction is halted for another two years while Denver Water re-designs the structure of the dam,” she wrote in her latest order. “Furthermore, the evidence shows that enjoining dam construction would harm Denver Water and the general public by requiring Denver Water to lay off much of its specialized workforce (which also harms those workers), as well as interfere with Denver Water’s contracts with contractors supplying materials and labor for the Project, which in turn, would significantly increase the costs.”
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
Afederal judge will allow Denver Water to continue work on a $531 million project to raise a dam in Boulder County, dealing a blow to environmentalists who had hoped to stop the construction.
However, Senior U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello in her ruling May 29 prohibited Denver Water from filling Gross Reservoir until federal environmental permits can be rewritten by the Army Corps of Engineers.
“There is no evidence that there would be additional environmental injury resulting from completion of the dam construction. In fact, the opposite is true,” Arguello wrote. “There is a risk of environmental injury and loss of human life if dam construction is halted for another two years while Denver Water redesigns the structure of the dam and gets that re-design approved by” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
FERC is involved because of the hydroelectric plant at the base of the dam.
Denver Water’s general counsel, Jessica Brody, said Friday her agency was pleased the judge recognized the safety issues in leaving the dam half-built.
“We’re relieved that the judge understood and appreciated the safety issues. We are relieved as well that she understood the impact to Denver Water’s customers,” Brody said.
The construction is expected to be completed this year, she said. In the meantime, she said, her agency will move forward in asking a federal appeals panel to rule on whether key environmental permits need to be rewritten, as Arguello has ordered.
If the permits are redone, it could mean that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will determine that the metro Denver water provider, which serves 1.5 million people, needs less water from the Fraser River to fill an expanded Gross Reservoir than the original permit authorized.
Save The Colorado, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said Friday morning that it will defend the portion of the Thursday ruling that could prevent or reduce additional diversions from the Fraser River, a key tributary in the Upper Colorado River system.
“Importantly,” said Save The Colorado’s Gary Wockner, “her original 86-page ruling still stands … so they can’t cut trees and they can’t put water in it until it is all resolved.”
Denver Water is helping ensure its future water security with the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. When the project is complete, it will nearly triple the Boulder County reservoir’s capacity to 119,000 acre-feet. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
How the case progressed
In her April 3 ruling, Arguello said Denver Water had acted recklessly in proceeding with construction in 2022, knowing that important legal questions were being challenged by Save The Colorado, the Sierra Club and others.
The massive construction project to raise the dam 131 feet and triple the capacity of Gross Reservoir has sparked fierce opposition in Boulder County and prompted several legal challenges from Save The Colorado, a group that advocates on behalf of rivers. Though its early lawsuits failed, the group in 2022 won an appeal that put the legal battle back in play. Despite months of settlement talks, no agreement was reached.
Denver Water first moved to raise Gross Dam more than 20 years ago when the water provider began designing the expansion and seeking the necessary federal and state permits. Denver Water has said raising the dam and increasing capacity of the reservoir is necessary to ensure it has enough water throughout its delivery system and to help with future water supplies as climate change continues to reduce streamflows.
After years of engineering, environmental studies and federal and state analyses, Denver received a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and construction began in 2022.
Arguello’s April 3 ruling said, in part, that the Army Corps should have considered whether ongoing climate change and drought would leave the Colorado River and Western Slope waterways too depleted to safely allow transfer of Denver Water’s rights into a larger Gross Reservoir for Front Range water users.
At the same time, she ordered a permanent injunction prohibiting enlargement of the reservoir, including tree removal and water diversion, and impacts to wildlife.
Almost immediately, Denver Water filed for temporary relief from the order, saying, in part, that it would be unsafe to stop work as the incomplete concrete walls towered above Gross Reservoir.
Arguello granted that request, too, allowing Denver to continue work on the dam considered necessary for safety.
The Airborne Snow Observatories plane prepares for takeoff at the Eagle County Regional Airport in April 2023. Photo credit: Mark Schwab, Airborne Snow Observatories Inc.
If you want to know about the snow, the sky is the limit when it comes to collecting data about the mountain snowpack.
That’s why Denver Water, the Colorado Water Conservation Board and other water providers across the state are investing in a high-tech program to measure snowpack using lasers from a plane.
And in mid-May, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill to formally incorporate the program into the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board’s mission is to conserve, develop, protect and manage Colorado’s water for present and future generations.
Monitoring the mountain snowpack is critical for Denver Water because once the snow melts, it becomes the water supply for the 1.5 million people the utility serves in Denver and surrounding suburbs.
Traditionally, Denver Water has tracked the snowpack by sending crews to collect and measure snow samples on the ground and monitoring data from automated backcountry weather stations called SNOTELs.
In 2019, to help improve water supply forecasts, Denver Water began working with Airborne Snow Observatories Inc., or ASO for short, to gain a fuller picture of the snowpack. The company uses advanced technology developed at NASA to measure the snowpack that’s built up across entire watersheds.
“Getting this high-tech information about the snowpack from ASO before the snow starts to melt improves the accuracy of our spring runoff and water supply forecasts for the coming year,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply.
“Having the ASO information in the spring helps us manage our water resources and gives us a better idea of if we’ll need to have watering restrictions for our customers in the summer. The data also gives us a very good idea of how the spring runoff in the rivers could impact aquatic habitat and recreation.”
Space age tech
ASO planes fly with two key pieces of technology and equipment onboard: a lidar and an imaging spectrometer.
The ASO plane uses lidar (the front laser beam under the wings) to measure the depth of the snow. The spectrometer (the rear beam near the tail) measures the amount of solar energy that is reflected by the snowpack. Image credit: Airborne Snow Observatories.
The spectrometer measures how much solar energy is reflected by the snow. This information is used to help determine how fast the snowpack will melt.
Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, uses beams of light to measure distance. To determine snow depth, the plane flies over a watershed in the summer and uses lidar to scan the earth’s surface when it’s free of snow.
Then in the spring, when the landscape is covered with snow, the ASO team flies over the same territory again and measures the distance from the plane to the snow surface below. By comparing the differences in elevation, the ASO team can accurately calculate the depth of the snow.
Digging it old school
To supplement the data collected from the plane, ASO also incorporates three “old-school” sources of data. It uses information collected by automated weather stations called SNOTELs, from snow samples collected and measured by crews at predetermined locations in watersheds, and data from samples collected by the ASO team or partners from snow pits dug in the same watersheds the plane flies over.
Denver Water crews use a special tube [Federal Sampler] to gather snow samples near Winter Park as part of pre-set snow courses. ASO uses these ground measurements to supplement data collected from the planes to determine how much water is in a watershed. Photo credit: Denver Water.
This ground-based data helps to verify the airborne snow-depth measurements. The ground data also provides snow density information, which is used to calculate the volume of water in the snowpack, called the snow water equivalent, or SWE.
“We’re able to use the traditional methods in combination with our next generation technology to measure the mountain snowpack to an accuracy that has never before been possible,” said Jeffrey Deems, ASO’s co-founder.
Cara Piske, an ASO operations scientist, collects a sample of snow from a pit dug in Mayflower Gulch near Copper Mountain in Summit County. The sample is weighed to determine its density, which is used to calculate the amount of water frozen in the snow, called the snow water equivalent. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Deems said the data from the ASO flights is incredibly valuable because the plane can accurately measure the snow across an entire watershed and at high elevations that don’t have automated weather stations and are inaccessible to people.
ASO snow depth measurements in the Blue River Basin above Dillon Reservoir in April 2021. Photo credit: Jeffrey Deems, Airborne Snow Observatories.
In 2023, ASO flew over eight regions in Colorado (including Denver Water’s watersheds in the Upper South Platte, Blue, Fraser and South Boulder Creek river basins.)
During the first set of flights in April, which aimed to capture the peak snowpack, the ASO team calculated that there was 108,000 acre-feet of water packed into the snow in the Upper South Platte Basin, 175,000 acre-feet of water in the Blue River Basin which feeds into Dillon Reservoir, and 104,000 acre-feet of water in Denver Water’s Moffat Collection System located in the Fraser River Basin.
A second round of flights were conducted in late May and early June to capture any new snow and to see how fast the snow melted.
Elder said the ASO snowpack estimates in 2023 turned out to be a very strong prediction of the actual streamflow during that year’s spring runoff.
The ASO plane flew over the Blue River Basin in Summit County in early May. Scanning the entire watershed takes three to six hours. Photo credit: Kat McNeal, Airborne Snow Observatories.
“Having ASO really helps reduce uncertainty and improve decision making for our water planning, and each flight uncovers new insight into the snowpack that is otherwise unmeasurable,” Elder said. “Our first charge is to ensure we have an adequate water supply for our customers, and the sooner we can make that determination the better.”
Having the additional data helps water planners because traditional snowmelt forecasts can have significant errors or wide ranges, which makes it more challenging to manage water supplies.
Building a statewide program
Recognizing the value of building a statewide ASO effort, in 2021, Denver Water helped coordinate and develop the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement program or CASM.
The CASM program includes agricultural and municipal water providers such as Denver Water, as well as environmental groups and nonprofits with support from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and federal agencies.
In 2025, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed H.B. 1115 into law, which formally integrated the CASM program into the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The bill created a dedicated staff member to administer the program to help coordinate ASO flights, distribute data and manage funding statewide.
ASO flew over eight regions in 2023 as part of the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement, or CASM, program. Two rounds of flights were conducted in April, May and June. Image credit: CASM.
“Having accurate water supply data helps all water users,” said Taylor Winchell, climate adaptation specialist at Denver Water. “Our goal with CASM has always been to create a sustainable statewide program, and this new legislation is a major step in making that goal a reality.”
The Colorado Water Conservation Board will formally coordinate CASM’s planning team, which includes Denver Water, Colorado River District, San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District, Northern Water, St. Vrain & Left Hand Water Conservancy District, Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District, and the Dolores Water Conservancy District, along with ASO and LRE Water.
Benefits today and tomorrow
Winchell said one of the big benefits of the ASO flights is that the data is available within a few days of collecting it, so water managers have a better estimate of how much water supply they’ll have for the coming year — and when to expect the water to end up in mountain streams.
The other benefit is having a wealth of high-quality data covering thousands of square miles to monitor the effects of climate change.
“As our snowpack changes with the changing climate, being better able to measure that snowpack becomes more important as more snow falls as rain, as the timing of the spring melt changes and as snow falls at ever-higher elevations because of warming,” Winchell said.
“We can’t rely as much on historical snowpack datasets to understand the new snowpack reality.”
ASO, which also conducts data collection flights in California, Wyoming, Oregon and internationally, also continues to develop its technology and modeling to help water providers get the information they need.
“We’re really proud of what we’re doing,” Deems said. “We love the snow and feel like we’re making a difference in helping our society better understand our mountain snowpack reservoir.”
Members of the ASO team, (left to right) Jeffrey Deems, Kate Burchenal and Cara Piske, teamed up with Denver Water’s Taylor Winchell (in the black jacket) to dig a snow pit in Summit County. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. An environmental group is now suing the Army Corps of Engineers over a key permit for Northern Water’s proposal. (Save the Poudre lawsuit, from Northern Water project pages)
You might have read recently about how the Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, is contributing $100 million to a fund for projects to improve the Cache la Poudre River in northeastern Colorado. That funding is part of an agreement between the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, known as Northern Water, and the nonprofit group Save the Poudre that will conclude a federal lawsuit against the project.
It’s an outcome that both sides can accept because of the importance of both the Poudre River and a much-needed water supply to communities throughout the region.
The agreement should catch the attention of Denver metro-area water providers that are looking to export existing irrigation water supplies out of northeastern Colorado to serve their future customers.
Brad Wind of Loveland is the general manager of Northern Water, which supplies water to more than 1 million people in northeastern Colorado.
For background, NISP was conceived in the 1990s and early 2000s to provide water to the emerging communities of the northern Front Range. The project will consist of two off-channel reservoirs, one located northwest of Fort Collins and one north of Greeley. It also anticipates exchanges of water with nearby farmers eliminating the dry-up of some agricultural land in the future.
Throughout the lengthy permitting process for NISP, the public has had many opportunities to offer comments and concerns to federal, state and local officials. Some of the concerns were incorporated into mitigation and improvement requirements associated with the project, and all written comments were addressed specifically in the final Environmental Impact Statement produced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The $100 million settlement of the federal litigation identifies even more improvements that can be made in the region beyond those required by permitting agencies.
Unfortunately, actions by certain Denver metro-area water providers that anticipate removing water from northeastern Colorado do not undergo such robust scrutiny. Oftentimes, advocates for water resources in the region learn about potential water transfers only when an item appears on a meeting agenda of a metro-area water provider. By then it is too late to consider the regional economic, environmental and social impacts that such a change could produce.
Frequently, these water deals are brokered by third parties who quietly accumulate water and land assets to present them behind closed doors in neat and tidy packages to thirsty cities. There are few, if any, opportunities to discuss how these water transfers will impact local communities in northeastern Colorado or how these impacts could be mitigated by those who seek to move water to the Denver metro area.
The half-million residents who receive water from NISP participants are going to pay billions of dollars to develop water resources for their communities while addressing concerns in the Poudre River watershed. At the same time Denver metro communities are working to undercut the existing supplies that previous northeastern Colorado residents have invested in and relied upon for decades.
Water providers in the Denver area need to be part of the long-term solution to how our northeastern Colorado communities remain vibrant, not distant parties to single point-in-time transactions that provide a perpetual benefit to communities beyond the horizon.
If native water supplies must depart for the Denver metro area from northeastern Colorado, it is appropriate that the new water user should not just pay for the costs to acquire water but also offset the impacts to northeastern Colorado’s degraded quality of life, and diminished regional economy.
All of our futures are diminished by the loss of water from our region. Public processes and mitigation can lessen, to a degree, the perpetual impacts such a loss will endure.
North Fork Snake River. Melted snow is the primary source of drinking water for the 1.5 million people who rely on Denver Water every day. Photo credit: Denver Water.
News headlines this spring offered a bleak picture of Colorado’s snowpack heading into the spring runoff season. But, as always with headlines, it is best to also read the story that follows.
Because the story for Denver Water isn’t quite so dour.
Snowpack woes hit Colorado’s southern half hard. For Denver Water, positioned farther north, the water supply looks better.
First, let’s do the numbers.
Denver Water had a weak showing in the South Platte River Basin, with peak snowpack hitting just 84% of normal and — most unhelpful of all — peaking on April 6, 19 days earlier than typical.
The news was far better in the Colorado River Basin (north of the South Platte River Basin), which accounts for the other half of Denver Water’s supply. There, peak snowpack clocked in at 109% on April 25, right on the mark for a typical peak date.
“Overall, not great, but not terrible either,” summed up Nathan Elder, water supply manager for the utility.
The best news for Denver Water: The utility is starting the runoff and reservoir-filling season with existing storage levels about 2% above average.
That’s a credit to its customers’ efforts to conserve water and translates into a good chance that Denver Water will be able to fill its storage reservoirs that help 1.5 million people get through the summer hot season.
But “fill” doesn’t mean “spill.” That is, there won’t be excess water to spill into rivers in what can make for dramatic visuals and provide an extra boost to river flows.
“We hope to fill our reservoirs right to the brim, but that’s where it stops,” Elder said.
Denver Water’s planners are concerned about a hot-and-dry trend taking hold in May, and emphasize the need for residents to adhere to the utility’s annual summer watering rules that allow irrigation only in the evening and morning hours (between 6 p.m. and 10 a.m.) and limit irrigation to no more than three days a week — preferably just one or two days when springtime temperatures are lower.
And watch the skies. When we do get a good rainstorm, turn your sprinkler dial to “off” for a few days.
The generally poor snowpack and early runoff in much of the state, including in the South Platte River Basin, also stokes concerns for a rough fire season, as 9News meteorologist Chris Bianchi pointed out in a May 13, 2025, story:
“This year’s snowpack levels resemble those recorded in 2018, 2012, 2002 and 1992. All of which were marked by intense wildfire activity. Three out of those four years saw large-scale fires, raising concerns that 2025 could follow a similar trajectory unless weather patterns shift dramatically.”
And, on a too-long-didn’t-read basis, here’s Bianchi’s tweet that summed up the story:
Denver Water’s watershed experts agree that conditions could increase wildfire risk.
“The risk of wildfire is relatively low when there is snow on the ground. When snowpack melts rapidly, vegetation can dry out quickly and become susceptible to wildfire ignitions,” said Madelene McDonald, a watershed scientist and wildfire specialist for Denver Water.
Though McDonald notes that experts anticipate “average” wildfire behavior in Colorado in 2025, that still means thousands of fires that could collectively affect more than 100,000 acres in the state.
“It’s important to stay vigilant and prepared to experience wildfire under any snowpack conditions or fire outlook scenarios,” she said.
An April pivot
The current outlook is a pivot from what had been looking like a normal year for snowpack as recently as April 1, Elder said.
“For Denver Water, April is typically a month where we build snow,” he said.
But that didn’t happen this year, and by mid-May the snowpack had shriveled to half its typical percentage.
The tepid spring in the South Platte River Basin also highlights the importance of Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Expansion Project, which recently has been slowed in federal court. (Read Denver Water’s recent statement on a May 6 court hearing.)
That project will expand the reservoir and add roughly 80,000 acre-feet of water storage capacity in the utility’s north system, which gathers snowmelt from the Upper Colorado River Basin. That additional water storage will provide a buffer to protect the utility’s customers from the effects of years when the snowpack is weaker, like this year, in Denver Water’s separate and unconnected south system.
“Our system is robust but suffers from significant imbalance,” Elder said.
“We rely too heavily on our south system, on the South Platte, which accounts for 90% of our storage,” he said. “Increasing storage to the north will give Denver Water far more flexibility to handle these weaker snowpack years on the South Platte.”
And years marked by a weaker snowpack in the South Platte River Basin have become more common.
In four of the last five years, the South Platte snowpack above Denver Water’s collection system has peaked below normal. And in that fifth year — last year — it barely cleared the “normal” bar at 101%. All of which amplifies the need for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project.
Raising Gross Dam, seen here on April 8, 2025, will nearly triple the water storage capacity of the reservoir behind it. The project has been in the permitting and review process for 23 years. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Now, as June approaches, water managers will turn their focus to runoff levels, temperatures and fire potential. And come summer, they will once again — as always — hope for a big dose of monsoonal moisture.
Those big rainstorms not only deliver a boost to rivers and reservoirs but prompt attentive customers to turn off their irrigation system and let their grass and plants drink up nature’s soaking bounty.
Remember, the less you pour, the more your water utility can store.
And it’s never a bad time to consider transforming your landscape, or even parts of it.
Denver Water has a new guide to help: the DIY Landscape Transformation Guide, and it includes ways to eradicate grass in the areas where you want to remodel your landscape with native plants and other changes.
Denver Water relies on a network of reservoirs to collect and store water. The large collection area provides flexibility for collecting water as some areas receive different amounts of precipitation throughout the year. Image credit: Denver Water.
The Cache la Poudre River flows through Bellevue, Colorado on May 12, 2025. Water from the river will be used to fill the nearby Glade Reservoir once it’s built. The cost to build the new water storage project has grown from $400 million to $2.2 billion. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
May 15, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
There’s a stretch of highway in Larimer County where prairie grasses sway with each passing vehicle. Cars, horse trailers and semi trucks zip through the valley on their way between Fort Collins and Laramie. Soon, it’ll be under more than 200 feet of water.
U.S. Highway 287 runs through the future site of Glade Reservoir. The Larimer county Board of County Commissioners approved the 1041 Land Use Permit for NISP in September, 2020. Photo credit: Northern Water
It’s the planned site of Glade Reservoir, the cornerstone of a massive new water storage system designed to meet the demands of fast-growing towns and cities in Northern Colorado. After more than two decades of permitting, planning and environmental lawsuits, it’s closer than ever to breaking ground.
But along the way, some things changed. Over the years, costs to build the reservoir system — and reroute seven miles of U.S. Highway 287 — have ballooned. Price estimates for the Northern Integrated Supply Project, often referred to as NISP, went from $400 million to $2.2 billion. Because of that, some of the towns that signed up to use its water are cutting back on their involvement before the reservoir system stores a single drop.
Northern Water, the agency building NISP, has projected confidence that it will still get built as planned. The long road from idea to construction, and the things that have changed along the way, can tell us a lot about how Northern Colorado uses water, and how much it costs to keep taps flowing.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. (Northern Water project pages)
Rising costs
When it was first pitched, in the early 2000s, NISP garnered support as a way to make sure small towns with fast-growing populations could host new housing developments without going dry.
For a tiny town like Severance, that was an attractive proposition. Just 11 years ago, about midway through the NISP planning process, the town had a population of about 3,000. That’s when Nicholas Wharton took the job as town manager. Since then, he’s overseen the installation of the town’s first stoplight, the from-scratch development of its own police department and a homebuilding boom that has nearly quadrupled Severance’s population.
Signing on to NISP, he said, was a way to make sure Severance had enough water for all that growth.
“I think for smaller towns,” he said, “It was a great idea back when it was affordable to us.”
Wesley Lavanchy, the town administrator for Eaton, Colo., poses outside of his office on April 15, 2025. His town is one of four water agencies that reduced the amount of water it would store in NISP, and the amount it would pay to keep it there. Alex Hager/KUNC
Since then, Severance has cut back on the amount of water it will store in NISP, and the amount it will pay to be a part of the project. At one point, the town held 2,000 shares of the project. In 2024, it sold off 1,500 of those shares. Wharton said the town council might try to sell off even more.
And Severance isn’t alone.
Due West, in Eaton, town officials also got cold feet. They were one of four NISP shareholders to offload a portion of their involvement in the new reservoir project on the same day in July 2024.
For years, the water agencies that were part of NISP were mostly focused on paperwork — making sure the project had the permits it needed to get built. Then, there was a lawsuit from environmentalists standing in the way. But after NISP’s proponents were mostly seeing green lights on permits and decided to settle a major lawsuit, the focus shifted to money.
“I think the question for us now is, how do we afford this?,” said Wesley Lavanchy, Eaton’s town administrator. “Moving forward, how much can we afford? It’s like chocolate cake. You like it, it tastes great, but you can’t eat the whole thing.”
Ultimately, Eaton decided to sell off more than half of its NISP shares.
“I suspect that more entities would have been able to hold their commitment had the permitting process not drug on so long, the cost escalated, the litigation kind of wrapped things up,” Lavanchy said.
Cheaper alternatives
While the cost to build NISP has gone up, the cost of other water sources has gone down. Eaton and Severance said it’s getting easier to afford shares of the Colorado-Big Thompson project, which was a big motivator in their pullback from NISP.
That project, referred to as CBT, pipes water from the Colorado River across the continental divide. It flows underneath Rocky Mountain National Park and into major reservoirs along the Northern Front Range, such as Horsetooth Reservoir near Fort Collins and Carter Lake outside of Loveland.
Water from the Colorado-Big Thompson project is managed by Northern Water, the same agency building and operating NISP.
Boats cruise across Horsetooth Reservoir near Fort Collins, Colorado on May 12, 2025. The reservoir holds water from the Colorado-Big Thompson project, which has seen prices level off in recent years. Glade Reservoir is expected to be even larger than Horsetooth. Alex Hager/KUNC
For years, the CBT system was the main way for growing cities in Larimer and Weld Counties to get water for residential development. Typically, farms have sold their portion of CBT water to cities, towns, or developers. Occasionally, they are taken to auction, where cities bid against one another for water stored in those big reservoirs.
The cost of that water skyrocketed between 2010 and 2022. Estimated prices, adjusted for inflation, went from less than $20,000 per share, to around $100,000 per share, according to data from the consulting firm Westwater research. Since 2022, that soaring rise has leveled out.
“We believe that’s largely driven by a softening in the home construction sector,” said Adam Jokerst, a Fort Collins-based regional director for Westwater. “A lot of CBT purchases are by municipalities and developers who dedicate them to municipalities. And when new home construction slows, we see less demand for those shares.”
How did NISP get so expensive?
Northern Water said the price to build NISP has been climbing for about 15 years. Brad Wind, the agency’s general manager, cited inflation and rising interest rates as major drivers. He doesn’t, however, expect that to stop or significantly change the reservoir project.
“It’s an expensive project,” Wind said. “We and the participants advancing the project like it was envisioned.”
The lengthy process to get the project’s two reservoirs — Glade, and a smaller one called Galeton reservoir — from concept to construction gave time for the winds of economic change to shift direction. It’s not uncommon for a massive dam project like NISP to take more than fifteen years to attain a laundry list of environmental permits.
The project also faced opposition from local governments and nonprofits. At one point, Fort Collins voted to oppose the project. The most significant roadblock came from the environmental nonprofit Save the Poudre.
The group rallied local support and took legal action to try and stop NISP. At a 2015 event, Save the Poudre director Gary Wockner told a crowd of supporters that he would “fight to stop the project for as long as it takes.”
In late February, Wockner’s group settled for $100 million dollars. Northern Water will pay that sum into a trust over the course of the next two decades, and the money will be used to fund river improvement projects. In the intervening time, though, the price tag to build NISP likely grew significantly.
Wind said Northern plans to hire a contractor that could find ways to bring down the price by changing construction methods, but doesn’t expect “substantial reductions” to building costs, especially with rising prices of imported construction materials.
Over the years, the towns and water agencies that wanted to use NISP signed periodic agreements to stay part of the project. Now, time is ticking for those participants to sign a binding contract.
Eaton’s Lavanchy said that upcoming contract made his town take a harder look at their water needs, and whether those needs would be satisfied by NISP.
“We’re not dating anymore,” he said, “We’re getting married, and there’s no way out. Divorce is not an option. So it’s like, ‘Let’s be smart and think about, what are these obligations going to run us?’”
‘Demand continues to increase’
Even as some entities cut back on their financial ties to NISP, the project still has momentum.
For one, those towns and water agencies looking to sell their shares found a willing buyer. Eaton, Severance, Fort Lupton and the Left Hand Water District all sold their shares to the Fort Collins Loveland Water District.
Vehicles drive on U.S. Highway 287, near Bellevue, Colo. on May 12, 2025. The highway will be rerouted to make way for a massive new reservoir. Alex Hager/KUNC
The Fort Collins Loveland Water District, which serves an area roughly between Harmony Road and State Route 34, declined to be interviewed for this story.
Second, NISP has a total of 15 participants, and many of them are still on board for the same amount of water they signed up for years ago.
“No matter what,” Severance’s Wharton said, “In one way, you’ll see those 15 probably still continue to be a part of it no matter what, because everybody does realize how precious that water is and how this will be one of the last [big reservoirs.] I don’t think anybody’s discouraged.”
Even the towns that reduced the amount of water they’ll pay to use from NISP are keeping some. Severance and Eaton said they want to make sure they’re getting water from a diverse group of sources, especially with climate change and political bickering threatening their main source of water — the Colorado River via the CBT.
Ultimately, the fast-growing region served by Northern Water — from Boulder County to Fort Collins, and east to Fort Lupton — will keep needing water for a future that will likely see plenty of new home construction.
“It doesn’t appear that folks are shying away from moving to Northern Colorado,” Brad Wind said. “Either from within our state or from outside of our state, so the demand continues to increase for a high quality water supply, which NISP will produce.”
Following a day of testimony on May 6, Denver Water has been asked by U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello to provide the court with the utility’s final summary highlighting its position following the witness testimony and exhibits. There isn’t a specific timetable set for this yet.
The focus of the hearing was for the judge to determine if construction can safely stop while Denver Water moves forward on an additional permitting review as the court ruled on April 3. Here is Denver Water’s statement on the risk presented by delaying construction:
Denver Water has already started the appeal process with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. As part of this, the project has been allowed to continue (under a temporary stay) while legal proceedings are underway.
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
The Palisades Fire, photographed here from Palisades Drive, ignited Jan. 7, 2025, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles County. It spread rapidly because of hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, burning for 24 days, consuming more than 23,000 acres and destroying 6,837 structures. Photo credit: Ariam23, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
One of the initial concerns during the series of tragic Los Angeles wildfires that burned in January 2025 was whether fire hydrants were ready to combat the inferno that left so much destruction in its wake.
To be clear, and as Denver7 highlighted in January, public water systems are designed to help firefighters battle urban fires.
For instance, Denver Water’s system includes built-in redundancies to ensure it can meet water demand, and the utility continually invests in the system to keep it that way.
Denver Water’s distribution system includes 31 treated water storage tanks across the metro area (many of which have been upgraded in recent years), more than 3,000 miles of pipe and 22,000 fire hydrants, along with dedicated mechanics who focus on maintaining those hydrants and keeping them in top condition.
During a fire in the Denver Water service area, its operators can analyze and adjust the operation of the distribution system so that firefighters have the water pressure they need to fight the blaze. The utility also will send experts to the scene to help maintain pressure.
The system of hydrants is not designed, however, to provide sufficient flows for a long enough period to effectively battle long-lasting, wind-driven, large-scale wildfires. Hydrants are pressurized and are crucial to fighting structure fires, but they can only do so much. And when many hydrants are in use in the same area at the same time, water pressure is going to weaken.
While Denver Water can store millions of gallons of drinking water in dozens of large water storage tanks around town to accommodate increases in demand, there are limits — like being able to provide enough water to fight a wildfire.
Fortunately, much of Denver Water’s service area is in a different environment compared to Los Angeles. But that doesn’t mean the area is immune, as there are portions that blend wildland environments with urban communities.
In fact, just last summer a string of wildfires ignited during the same week in the foothills along the Front Range. The fires required aggressive coordination from fire departments up and down the corridor, alongside state and federal agencies, to extinguish, with a focus on wildland firefighting. Wildland fire responders cleared fire lines and fought the fires from the air.
A plane pulls in water from Chatfield Reservoir to help fight the Quarry Fire, a wildfire that ignited in summer 2024 in Jefferson County, Colorado. The fire required a multi-jurisdictional effort to extinguish. Photo credit: Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Urban fire hydrants were not the focus.
Ultimately, when a fire like the tragic blazes in Los Angeles occurs, it is always going to require a coordinated, multijurisdictional effort, often across city, state and even international lines.
So, what can be done?
Colorado Public Radio in January spoke with Colorado State Forest Service wildfire mitigation program specialist Chad Julian, who discussed the importance of focusing on the right topics when analyzing any fire.
“If we focus on increasing budgets, more water storage, more fire trucks, it’s not going to change the outcome of the next event. It would take the engagement of homeowners to really work on the resistance to ignition and hardening those buildings, the vegetation and the yards,” he said.
“Ninety-five percent of it was likely still caused by land use patterns, how we build, how we interact with the ecosystem, whether we adapt to it or not. And unfortunately, that’s not the focus at the moment,” he said.
But this was the focus in Colorado after the devastating Marshall Fire of 2021, leading to new legislation:
In Louisville, an ordinance took effect in December 2024 requiring implementation of wildfire-resistant measures in buildings. (Boulder is considering something similar.)
Many new construction sites in Denver include 5-foot vegetation barriers around new structures in their landscape planning.
The Wildfire Resilient Homes Grant Program, created by Colorado’s state legislature, encourages homeowners to make their properties more resistant to wildfire.
Julian says these are the types of changes that can make a real difference.
Denver Water has long focused on investing in the resiliency of its watersheds and system, and plans to invest about $1.8 billion over the next 10 years.
When customers pay their water bill, the money goes to building a reliable system, which includes regular infrastructure inspection and maintenance programs to ensure pipes, hydrants and storage tanks are ready to protect communities during urban fires.
Water bills also fund watershed resiliency projects that protect the lands and facilities that collect and store Denver’s drinking water.
The From Forests to Faucets partnership alone has committed more than $96 million to reduce wildfire risk in critical areas, from 2010 through planned work into 2027. Half of that money has come from Denver Water. The risk of wildfire in Denver Water’s watersheds remains the greatest risk to Denver’s water supply, making this investment crucial to the resilience of the system.
A Ponsse tree harvester works to thin a 40-acre section of forest in Breckenridge in August 2020, as part of the From Forests to Faucets partnership. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water’s 10-year investment plan also includes expanding Gross Reservoir in western Boulder County, which will improve water supplies on the north side of the metro area and make the system more balanced and resilient in the face of increasing impacts from climate change, drought and wildfire.
This improvement on the north side of the metro area will prove pivotal should wildfire inhibit resources that deliver water on the south side of the region, via the South Platte River, where wildfires have struck consistently over the past 20 years.
These are just a few examples of investments and partnerships already underway, but challenges lie ahead.
As Salazar noted in his column published in The Denver Post (which can also be found on Denver Water’s TAP news site), climate change continues to impact the environment and, as the wildland-urban interface continues to merge, even more investment and collaboration will be crucial.
Denver Water is helping ensure its future water security with the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. When the project is complete, it will nearly triple the Boulder County reservoir’s capacity to 119,000 acre-feet. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Adam engineer who designed a major expansion of Gross Reservoir Dam in Boulder County told a federal judge Tuesday that the raising of the dam, facing a potential halt due to an April federal court ruling, needs to proceed to protect public safety.
Mike Rogers, the civil engineer who designed the $531 million expansion of the dam, said bad weather could create flood conditions that would lead to a catastrophic failure similar to what occurred with the Oroville Dam failure in California in 2017.
But Stephen Rigbey, a Canadian dam safety expert testifying for Save The Colorado, said any issues with putting the construction project on hold, even in its partially-complete state, could be addressed, and that the risk of a catastrophic failure was “negligible.”
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Rogers’ and Rigbey’s testimony Tuesday came during a federal hearing in Denver, after which U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello will determine whether to allow construction to move forward on the Denver Water project or whether the construction will be paused until new federal reviews she has ordered are completed and legal questions are answered.
But at the end of Tuesday’s hearing, Arguello said the parties to the case had not provided enough information for her to make a decision and ordered them to submit more data later this month.
The massive construction project has raised fierce opposition in Boulder County and prompted several legal challenges from Save The Colorado, a group that advocates on behalf of rivers. Though its early lawsuits failed, in 2022 the river defenders won an appeal that put the legal battle back in play. Despite months of settlement talks, no agreement was reached.
Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann was unmoved by Rogers’ testimony, saying she hopes the judge halts the work to prevent further environmental damage in Boulder County and to protect the Fraser River, a tributary to the Upper Colorado River. The Fraser has served as the source of water for Gross Reservoir since the 1950s, when it was built.
“It’s incredibly disappointing that Denver has chosen to move forward,” Stolzmann said. “With climate change, it really is a time for different entities to work together to repair the climate. I want to see Denver seek alternative solutions.”
Denver Water first moved to raise Gross Dam more than 20 years ago when the water provider began designing the expansion and seeking the necessary federal and state permits. Denver Water has said raising the dam and expanding the reservoir is necessary to ensure it has enough water throughout its delivery system and to help with future water supplies as climate change continues to reduce streamflows.
The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project involves raising the height of the existing dam by 131 feet. The dam will be built out and will have “steps” made of roller-compacted concrete to reach the new height. Image credit: Denver Water
After years of engineering, environmental studies and federal and state analyses, Denver received a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and construction began in 2022. It has involved taking apart a portion of the original dam and raising its height by 131 feet to nearly triple the reservoir’s storage capacity to 119,000 acre-feet from 42,000 acre-feet.
The case took center stage again April 3, when Judge Arguello put a temporary halt to construction of the higher dam, at Save The Colorado’s request.
In that high-profile ruling, Arguello said, in part, that the Army Corps should have considered whether ongoing climate change and drought would leave the Colorado River and Western Slope waterways too depleted to safely allow transfer of Denver Water’s rights into a larger Gross Reservoir for Front Range water users.
At the same time, she ordered a permanent injunction prohibiting enlargement of the reservoir, including tree removal and water diversion, and impacts to wildlife.
Almost immediately, Denver Water filed for temporary relief from the order, saying, in part, that it would be unsafe to stop work as the incomplete concrete walls towered above Gross Reservoir.
Arguello granted that request, too, allowing Denver to continue work on the dam considered necessary for safety.
Denver Water has also filed an appeal with the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of appeals, seeking to permanently protect its right to continue building the dam. The appeals court is expected to wait for the lower court to rule, before considering Denver Water’s request.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
What’s 4-feet deep, 6-feet wide and 26-miles long? The original City Ditch — one of Colorado’s earliest and most influential irrigation canals, constructed between 1864 and 1867 by the Capitol Hydraulic Company to bring much-needed water to the dry, dusty lands of the Denver metropolitan area. This hand-dug canal, also known as Smith’s Ditch, was engineered by Richard S. Little and financed by businessman John W. Smith, according to local historian Larry Borger. It stretched from its headgate near present-day Chatfield Reservoir, above Littleton, and ran roughly 26-to-27 miles northeast to Capitol Hill in Denver, relying solely on a 100-foot drop in elevation to move water without pumps. When it opened in 1867, the ditch enabled the growth of trees, sugar beet crops and neighborhoods, providing Denver with its primary irrigation source for more than 25 years. The ditch also supported a network of more than 1,000 lateral ditches, greening up city parks and supplying water to offshoots that irrigated cropland and street trees. Its construction and operation were so significant that the ditch is often called the “oldest working thing” in Denver, predating paved streets and railroads. Today, the City Ditch is mostly hidden from view. About 2.5 miles of the ditch remain open-channel, while the rest is mostly piped and buried. In Littleton, the portion of the ditch that runs along Santa Fe Drive from Slaughterhouse Gulch Park to the C-470 highway is owned by the City of Englewood. Englewood plans to convert the remaining open channel between Chatfield Reservoir and the Charles Allen Water Treatment Plant into a buried pipe, a move that would end the historic open flow through the area.
The City of Englewood’s City Ditch Piping Project map. Courtesy of the City of Englewood.
Englewood is giving Littleton a chance to save the historic flume structures — man-made, open channels designed to carry water, usually sloping downward and with raised sides above the surrounding ground — at Lee Gulch and Slaughterhouse Gulch Park. Ryan Germeroth and Brent Soderlin, deputy director and director of Public Works & Utilities presented Littleton City Council with options for the Slaughterhouse Gulch Flume — which Englewood would start construction on first this summer — at the study session on April 22.
The Town of Kiowa has good news to report, including a new Main Street Board and progress towards funding the Water Well Redundancy Project…After some starts and stops, the Kiowa Water and Wastewater Authority is making headway on its Water Well Redundancy Project, thanks in part to Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. On March 20, Boebert visited with Town of Kiowa staff and town trustees…Boebert pledged to write letters supporting road improvement and parks projects, and also agreed to write Kiowa Water and Wastewater Authority a congressional letter of support for the Well Redundancy Project, [Kim] Boyd said. Boyd further explained that the Town of Kiowa currently relies on a single 66-foot alluvial groundwater well to meet the community’s water needs.
“This infrastructure is insufficient for current demands and poses a significant risk in the event of mechanical failure or environmental stress,” she shared. “It limits the town’s ability to grow and sustain essential services, including domestic water supply and fire protection.”
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) mandates that municipal water systems maintain at least two wells to ensure redundancy and protect public health.
The discussion will focus on the Juchem Ditch and the Farmers Highline Canal and review how early settlers dug ditches by hand to support mining and agriculture. The event is free to the public and is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. to noon on May 17 at the Arvada Elks Lodge in Olde Town, at 5700 Yukon St. Panelists will include local historians Ed Rothschild, Tom Fletcher and Bob Krugmire. The event will be moderated by Arvada City Councilmember Sharon Davis. Arvada Historical Society President Judith Denham said the idea for the first History Speaks lecture — which will potentially be part of a larger series of talks — came when the organization was planning last year’s Cemetery Tour, which centered on the early pioneers who built the city’s ditches.
“We thought it would be a great idea to expand on this story and find a way to talk more about this crucial part of Arvada’s history,” Denham said. “I think people are going to really enjoy hearing about this large piece of Arvada’s history. It’s a panel and we’ve invited water experts and ditch company representatives to talk about how water influenced Arvada’s early history.
“They’re going to tell us the fascinating stories about how early settlers Wadsworth, Swadley and Jochem dug ditches with hand tools and mules so they could provide water for their farms,” Denham continued. “And add in the stories about the early conflicts over water usage and how that whole complicated system of water rights and water law started.”
Registration for the event can be completed at historyarvada.org. The Arvada Press and Colorado Community Media are partnering with the Arvada Historical Society for this project.
Farmers Highline Canal near the Tuck Ditch Headgate April 30, 2019. Day 30 of the #30daysofbiking challenge.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Denver Water to share information with the environmental groups who successfully challenged a reservoir expansion project in Boulder County, as both sides prepare for a hearing to determine how much additional construction is necessary to stabilize the structure…Days later, Arguello allowed for necessary construction to temporarily resume, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has since extended that window while it reviews Arguello’s order. However, last Wednesday, the groups that challenged the project’s legality asked Arguello to intervene on another issue related to the upcoming hearing about how much stabilizing work is warranted…In response to the groups’ questions about risk management plans, spillway capacity and failure modes — plus a request for project documents — Denver Water told the petitioners that disclosure “poses Dam security risks.”
“The fact remains that Denver Water is the only party that currently has available to it extensive documentation that bears directly on the specific safety issues that this Court ordered all parties to address at the hearing,” the environmental groups added in their court filing.
The dam raise process begins at the bottom of the dam using roller-compacted concrete to build the new steps that will go up the face of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water vowed this week to take the high-stakes battle over a partially built dam in Boulder County to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary to defend what it sees as its well-established right to continue construction and deliver water to its 1.5 million metro-area customers.
“It would be irresponsible not to do that,” Denver Water’s General Manager Alan Salazar said in an interview Tuesday as a tense month of legal maneuvering continued.
Senior U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello on April 3 put a halt to construction of the $531 million Gross Reservoir Dam raise nearly four months after Denver Water and the river-defending nonprofit Save the Colorado failed to negotiate a settlement that would add new environmental protections to the project. When settlement talks stalled, Save the Colorado asked for and was granted an injunction.
Almost immediately, Denver Water filed for temporary relief from the injunction, saying, in part, that it would be unsafe to stop work as the incomplete concrete walls towered above Gross Reservoir in western Boulder County.
Arguello granted that request, too.
Now the water agency, the largest utility in the Intermountain West, has filed an emergency request with the federal appeals court, seeking to permanently protect its right to continue construction as the legal battle continues.
A decision could come as early as this week as a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel considers Denver Water’s emergency request, according to environmental advocate Gary Wockner. Wockner leads Save The Colorado, a group that has financed and led litigation against Denver Water and many other agencies seeking new dams or river diversions. Wockner said he is ready to continue the fight as well.
“We are prepared to defend the district court’s decision,” Wockner said, referring to the construction halt.
Alan Salazar, who became Denver Water CEO/Manager in August 2023 Photo credit: Denver Water
The high-profile dispute erupted in Denver just weeks after Northern Water agreed to a $100 million settlement with Save The Colorado and its sister group, Save The Poudre, to allow construction of the Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, to proceed.
The money will be used to help restore the Cache la Poudre River, including moving diversion points and crafting new agreements with diverters that will ultimately leave more water in the river. Northern Water, which operates the federally owned Colorado-Big Thompson Project for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, is overseeing the permitting and construction of NISP.
But two years of talks and negotiations between Save The Colorado and Denver Water failed to yield a similar environmental settlement over the Gross Reservoir Dam expansion project. It was after the talks failed that Federal District Court Judge Arguello agreed to halt construction on the dam.
Whether a new environmental deal will be forthcoming now isn’t clear. Both sides declined to comment on whether settlement talks had resumed.
Salazar also declined to discuss whether a deal similar to the $100 million NISP settlement would emerge over the Gross Reservoir lawsuit.
“I don’t want to get into the cost of a settlement,” Salazar said. “But the impact on ratepayers would be significant.”
Case sets the stage for future water projects in Colorado
Across the state, water officials are closely watching the case play out.
For fast-growing Parker Water and Sanitation, the preliminary injunction to stop construction, though temporary, is worrisome.
Its general manager, Ron Redd, said he wasn’t sure how his small district, which is planning a major new water project in northeastern Colorado, would cope with a similar injunction or a U.S. Supreme Court battle.
“In everything permitting-wise you need consistency in how you move projects forward,” Redd said. “To have that disrupted causes concern. Is this going to be the new normal going forward? That bothers me.”
Denver Water first moved to raise Gross Dam more than 20 years ago when it began designing the expansion and seeking the federal and state permits required by most water projects.
After years of engineering, studies and federal and state analyses, construction began in 2022. It has involved taking part of the original dam, built in the 1950s, and raising its height by 131 feet to nearly triple the reservoir’s storage capacity to 119,000 acre-feet from 42,000 acre-feet. An acre-foot of water equals 326,000 gallons, enough to serve up to four urban households each year.
The giant utility has said it needs the additional storage to secure future water supplies as climate change threatens stream flows in its water system, a key part of which lies in the Fraser River, a tributary to the Upper Colorado River in Grand County. The expansion was also necessary to strengthen its ability to distribute water from the northern end of its system, especially if problems emerged elsewhere in the southern part of its distribution area, as occurred during the 2002 drought.
And the judge agreed climate change is a factor but she said it’s not clear the water would ever even materialize as flows shrink. She overturned Denver Water’s permits because she said the Army Corps had not factored in Colorado River flow losses from climate change, and whether Denver would ever actually see the water it plans to store in an expanded Gross. Arguello also ruled the Army Corps had not spent enough time analyzing alternatives to the Gross Reservoir expansion.
Wockner said forcing Denver Water and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to re-analyze water projections under new climate change scenarios, as his group has asked, is critical to helping protect the broader Colorado River and stopping destructive dam projects.
Whether the questions the case raises about permitting and environmental protections ultimately make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t clear yet.
But James Eklund, a water attorney and former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s lead agency on water planning and funding, said Denver Water has the expertise and financial muscle to take it there.
“They have really sharp people over there,” he said. “I would say they are not only willing, they would have the facts to present a case they believe would be successful.”
The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project involves raising the height of the existing dam by 131 feet. The dam will be built out and will have “steps” made of roller-compacted concrete to reach the new height. Image credit: Denver Water
On a picture perfect, late-March bluebird day in the Colorado mountains, Rob Krueger and Jay Joslyn gear up for a unique job at Denver Water — venturing into the wilderness to measure snowpack.
Boots? Check. Gloves? Check. Hats? Check. Jackets? Check. Very special metal tube and a scale? Check, check. All of it is loaded into their winter travel vehicle, a snowcat.
Denver Water owns a snowcat that is used to access facilities and remote locations during the winter months in Grand County. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“We’re heading up to Vasquez Creek to one of our snow courses,” Krueger says as he fires up the Tucker 2000XL and starts rolling. “It’s around 10 miles up to our destination, and it takes about 30-40 minutes in the snowcat.”
The journey starts at Denver Water’s Grand County office just west of Fraser and heads into the Arapaho National Forest.
“The snowcat is kind of like a truck with tank-like tracks on it,” Krueger said. “We use it throughout the winter to reach our remote buildings and dams and to get to our snow courses.”
The journey would be impossible in a regular car or truck. But the snowcat, designed to tackle this type of terrain, easily powers over the snow.
“We’re a 24/7 operation so we need a vehicle like this in the winter,” he said. “Whether it’s snowing, sleeting, raining or we have 60-mile-per-hour winds and it’s negative 6 degrees out, we still have to get around. So that’s what makes the snowcat such an important piece of equipment for us.”
Rob Krueger drives the snowcat through a snow-covered road near Winter Park. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Krueger drives the snowcat through the trees on a snow-covered U.S. Forest Service road and into Denver Water’s collection system.
The collection system is the area where Denver Water captures melting snow during the spring runoff. The water then flows through creeks, canals, tunnels and reservoirs to treatment facilities on the Front Range where it’s cleaned for delivery to 1.5 million people in metro Denver.
After reaching their destination, Krueger and Joslyn get ready for their task of measuring the snowpack.
Snowshoes are strapped on and equipment, including a snow measuring tube, is assembled for the trek across Vasquez Creek to reach a “snow course.”
“A snow course is basically a preset path where we take samples to measure the snowpack,” Joslyn said. “We do these same courses four times over the winter.”
The courses are set up across Colorado’s mountains and managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation Service, also known as the NRCS, to monitor snowpack. The data from these courses are used by cities, farmers, ranchers, water utilities and recreationists to help predict the amount of water that will flow down the mountains during the spring runoff.
Joslyn and Krueger snowshoe across Vasquez Creek to reach the snow course. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water partners with the NRCS to do snow courses in Grand, Park and Summit counties where the utility collects its water.
In Grand County, there are five locations where Denver Water samples snow.
The Vasquez snow course starts a few feet from the creek and is surrounded by a canopy of spruce and fir trees. On this trip, the snow on the course ranged from 4 to 5 feet deep.
Joslyn stabs the snow with the measuring tube to collect a snow sample. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Joslyn carries the measuring tube [Federal Snow Sampler], then stabs it into the snow and checks the reading. He calls out “53,” which is the depth of the snow in inches. Then he takes a closer look at the slots on the tube and calls out a second number; this one is the length of the snow core captured inside.
Next up, Joslyn uses a handheld scale to weigh the tube with the snow inside. “42,” he calls out. This time referring to the weight in ounces.
Krueger records this number, then subtracts the weight of the empty tube from the total, which gives the water content in inches of the snow core sample. They also calculate the density of the snow.
Joslyn weighs the tube with the snow inside. The process is used to determine the water content and density of the snowpack. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The pair does the same process 10 times at 25-foot intervals on the course. On this trip, the snowpack was in good shape, coming in at 118% of normal for the end of March 2025.
“Denver Water has a long history in this valley, and we’ve been doing snow courses in Grand County dating back to 1939,” Krueger said. “With decades worth of data, we can get a really good idea of how much water we’ll see during the spring runoff.”
The data is sent to Denver Water’s planning department and the NRCS. Planners combine the snow course information with data from SNOTEL sites and high-tech flights over the mountains to predict how much water will flow into the utility’s reservoirs where water is stored for customers.
“The information from the snow courses is critical to our planning, as it gives us boots-on-the-ground information about the snowpack,” said Nathan Elder, water supply manager at Denver Water. “Our crews in the mountains often have to brave a lot of harsh weather to get the data we need, so we’re thankful for their hard work.”
Working for Denver Water in Grand County involves a variety of jobs that change throughout the seasons, with the snow courses being one of the most unique.
“The snow courses are interesting and of course being out in the snow and driving the snowcat is pretty fun,” Krueger said. “Our work feels valuable to Denver Water as a whole to understand what kind of water resource we have to send to the city.”
The city of Denver along with Jefferson County, The Mile High Flood District and the city of Wheat Ridge presented options for potential upgrades to the Clear Creek Trail during an open house in early April at Centennial Elementary School.
A section of the trail near Inspiration Point may get an upgrade for people that bike and walk. Currently, trail-users headed west must cross over West 52nd Avenue and then travel down about 1,100 feet of Gray Street, a residential street, before reaching the trail again.
The new plans unveiled at the open house offered five different options for new routes to avoid going down Gray Street, and all of them included under passes or bridges so trail users won’t have to cross West 52nd Avenue at grade anymore.
All of the options presented include new bridges or underpasses and involve several different routes that meander between Marshall Street and West 53rd Avenue. All of the proposed routes are west of the residences on Gray Street and south of Interstate 76. A study of the trail is expected to be completed in the fall.
At the meeting, residents were given the option to rank the five options and pick their favorites and least favorites. To learn more and give input on the potential routes, people can visit https://bit.ly/ClearCreekTrail. A current survey is open until April 18. [ed. emphasis mine]
Straight line diagram of the Lower Arkansas Valley ditches via Headwaters Magazine
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 6, 2025
Colorado Springs’ latest annexations, now under challenge, have left Arkansas River communities wary
As a worker maneuvered a massive leveler in the fields behind their house, Alan and Peggy Frantz pondered the future of their Rocky Ford farm — and their larger agricultural community strung along the Lower Arkansas River east of Pueblo. The collapse of it all doesn’t feel too far out, too improbable, Alan Frantz said. Maybe not in their lifetimes, the couple said, but they’ve made sure to send their kids to college in case it all goes away.
“At some point, the cities just have to stop growing,” Alan Frantz said. “If you want a Dust Bowl like the ’30s, go ahead and take all the water, dry this all up.”
Flood irrigation in the Arkansas Valley via Greg Hobbs
Colorado Springs is one of the cities Frantz and many of his neighbors worry most about — and now they fear a proposed 6,500-home annexation to that city will increase pressure on its utilities to source more water from the Arkansas. The farmers use the river to irrigate more than 220,000 acres of farmland, the economic backbone of the region. Already, Colorado Springs Utilities estimates it will need 34,000 more acre-feet of water — or 11 billion gallons — annually to meet population growth for when the city fully develops inside its current boundaries, estimated to occur around 2070. Every annexation of land into the state’s second-largest city adds to that future gap. Without water, there is no farming. And without farming, Frantz said, there would be no towns along the Lower Arkansas as it stretches from Pueblo to the Kansas border…
The controversy around the Colorado Springs annexation is the most recent flashpoint illustrating one of the central tensions in the state: Colorado’s cities do not have enough water to meet projected growth and climate change is shrinking the finite amount of water available. Where should the cities go for more supply? Who will give up their water? The decades-old battle plays out across the state as growing Front Range communities seek new water sources. Communities on the Western Slope fear more of their water will be routed east across the Continental Divide, especially as the region’s largest river shrinks. Farmers and ranchers in the San Luis Valley successfully fought off an attempt by a company to pipe water from the valley’s depleting aquifer to ever-growing Douglas County. Aurora’s $80-million purchase of Otero County water rights last year rankled water leaders in southeastern Colorado, prompting threats of litigation.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:
April 7, 2025
On or around April 17, six landowners in Sedgwick County will face a decision: whether to sell their land to the state of Nebraska for a canal that will be at least partially constructed in Colorado, or face what is likely to be an unprecedented land grab…The history of the proposed canal dates back more than 100 years, to the compact between Colorado and Nebraska regarding water from the South Platte River. Article VI of the compact states that Nebraska can divert 500 cubic feet per second during the non-irrigation season, as well as any additional available flows, into the canal. That non-irrigation season runs from Oct. 15 to April 1…
However, Nebraska claims that Colorado has increased its own diversions and related water uses during the non-irrigation season, leaving Nebraska with no choice but to construct the canal and claim its non-irrigation season water. The canal would start just east of Ovid, in Sedgwick County, and continue into Perkins County, just across the state line in Nebraska. The 1923 compact allows Nebraska to build the canal, using eminent domain, and to seek it in federal court if necessary.
People work on the Perkins County Canal in the 1890s. The project eventually was abandoned due to financial troubles. But remnants are still visible near Julesburg.
Perkins County Historical Society
For one state to grab the land of another is unprecedented, Attorney General Phil Weiser told Colorado Politics earlier this year. While Colorado agreed to the canal in 1923, that’s not how Weiser sees it now. Weiser sent a letter to the Sedgwick County commissioners in January, stating that he is opposed to Nebraska’s potential action. He wrote that he had advised Nebraska’s attorney general that the project would provide little to no benefit to the state of Nebraska. However, if Nebraska moves forward, Colorado will defend its rights, he added.
Perkins canal drawing showing the Colorado portion, courtesy Nebraska Department of Natural Resources.
F Street in Salida February 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
April 8, 2025
Federal funds for climate-change-related projects in Colorado have started arriving in almost perfect concert with the spring thaw.
Among the applications for the hundreds of millions of dollars will be:
energy efficiency work in southwestern Colorado communities,
curbing methane emissions from old coal mines west of Carbondale, and,
preparation of a climate action plan for the Yampa Valley.
Among the smaller grants, $187,605 went to Salida and Chaffee County. The money will fund a staff position shared by the two jurisdictions to create a greenhouse gas inventory, a climate action plan, and then the means to implement what the city and county decide to do.
That grant and seven others for rural Colorado jurisdictions from the U.S. Department of Energy totaling $1.865 million were announced in August 2024. The federal program had received key funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.
The awards were temporarily frozen by President Donald Trump.
The money is largely to be used for staffing for climate action planning but also for workforce training in communities where extraction and combustion of fossil fuels has been fading.
“Capacity is an essential component of local climate action, and these new awards will play an important role in enabling this work in Colorado’s rural and mountain communities,” Christine Berg, senior policy advisor for local governments in the Colorado Energy Office, said in the August 2024 announcement.
A far larger grant of $200 million to the Denver Regional Council of Governments, or DRCOG, had been announced in July 2024.
That money, a product of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, was to have been used for retrofits of buildings in the nine-county metropolitan area. DRCOG did not respond to repeated requests as to whether the money has been unthawed or is expected to be.
The Colorado Energy Office had been awarded $129 million. A spokesperson confirmed the money has arrived. It will be used:
To deploy advanced methane monitoring technology to produce data that will inform regulatory policy concerning methane emissions from landfills and coal mines, including those in the Redstone-Paonia area.
For energy efficiency and electrification upgrades in large commercial buildings that are otherwise hard to decarbonize.
To help local governments to implement projects that help reduce emissions from buildings, transportation, electric power, waste and other economic sectors. The money is to be administered through a new program, the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator.
Part of the $129 million received by the Colorado Energy Office will be used to work on large commercial buildings that are hard to decarbonize. Photo/Allen Best
What melted the ice?
The Trump administration’s budget office on Jan. 20 had ordered a pause on previously promised funds if they helped advance the “green new deal,” as the Congressional laws adopted when Joe Biden was president have been called. A federal court issued a temporary restraining order in late January, but the Trump administration seemed to ignore it.
Colorado in early February joined 21 other states and the District of Columbia in asking the court to require the federal agencies to release the money.
Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, at the time declared that the federal government had signed contracts granting more than $500 million to Colorado through the 2021 and 2022 federal laws. “By not meeting these contractual obligations, the federal government is inflicting real harm on our state,” he said in a statement posted on the CEO website.
The Trump administration seemed to ignore the legal requirement, and a federal court judge on March 6 ordered the administration to comply.
Judge John J. McConnell Jr., of the Federal District Court for the District of Rhode Island, said the case amounted to executive overreach. The directive from the White House budget office, he said in a New York Times story, “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” Without his action, he said, “the funding that the states are due and owed creates an indefinite limbo.” A federal appeals court on March 26 upheld that decision.
On March 28, Colorado Energy Office spokesman Ari Rosenblum reported that the $129 million in funding announced last summer for the state agency has been unfrozen.
“We are moving forward with work on all projects funded through this grant,” he wrote in an e-mail in response to a query from Big Pivots. “We expect to launch the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator this summer.”
What melted the ice?
The Trump administration’s budget office on Jan. 20 had ordered a pause on previously promised funds if they helped advance the “green new deal,” as the Congressional laws adopted when Joe Biden was president have been called. A federal court issued a temporary restraining order in late January, but the Trump administration seemed to ignore it.
Colorado in early February joined 21 other states and the District of Columbia in asking the court to require the federal agencies to release the money.
Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, at the time declared that the federal government had signed contracts granting more than $500 million to Colorado through the 2021 and 2022 federal laws. “By not meeting these contractual obligations, the federal government is inflicting real harm on our state,” he said in a statement posted on the CEO website.
The Trump administration seemed to ignore the legal requirement, and a federal court judge on March 6 ordered the administration to comply.
Judge John J. McConnell Jr., of the Federal District Court for the District of Rhode Island, said the case amounted to executive overreach. The directive from the White House budget office, he said in a New York Times story, “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” Without his action, he said, “the funding that the states are due and owed creates an indefinite limbo.” A federal appeals court on March 26 upheld that decision.
On March 28, Colorado Energy Office spokesman Ari Rosenblum reported that the $129 million in funding announced last summer for the state agency has been unfrozen.
“We are moving forward with work on all projects funded through this grant,” he wrote in an e-mail in response to a query from Big Pivots. “We expect to launch the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator this summer.”
Projects in rural Colorado
The $1.8 million grant — this is in addition to the program for local assistance that the Colorado Energy Office created with its $129 million — funded projects for Salida and Chaffee County and these additional rural communities:
$240,000 for Lake County to support a new position to lead development of the county’s first climate action plan and implement the county’s climate initiatives in and around Leadville. These and other similar positions are for three years.
$240,000 to the Colorado River Valley Economic Development Partnership, which has representatives of municipalities from New Castle and Silt on the east and Parachute and Battlement Mesa, as well as parts of unincorporated Garfield County. The project has a strong emphasis on workforce development and new job training in a county that formerly had a strong component of fossil fuel extraction.
$264,100 to the Routt County Climate Action Plan Collaborative. The money is to scale up electrification in Hayden, Oak Creek, Steamboat Springs and Yampa as well as other parts of Rout County. As with the Colorado River communities, there will be a workforce development and job training component as two coal-burning units at Hayden will close in the next several years. The coal for the plant comes from Twentymile Mine.
$240,000 to Pueblo and Pueblo County for a staff position for implementing city and county sustainability projects.
$240,000 to the City of Durango for a staff position to be housed within the Four Corners Office for Resource Efficiency to work with La Plata Electric Association and the city government to implement energy efficiency and so forth.
$191,100 to EcoAction Partners, a consortium of San Miguel and Ouray counties along with the towns of Telluride, Mountain Village, Ophir, and Norward. This money is to provide staffing to assist the 10 jurisdiction members with climate action plan projects and programming implementation.
$262,194 to Larimer County to help with staffing to develop a climate action plan for Estes Park and ensure alignment with Larimer County climate Smart Future Ready plan.
A $240,000 grant was awarded to the City of Durango to work with the a local non-profit group, the Four Corners Office for Resource Efficiency, and La Plata Electric Association on energy efficiency. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Salida tree grant
Salida will also receive another $250,000 to cover the costs of planting trees in a somewhat newer but lower-income neighborhood during the next five years.
The older part of Salida that can be seen along F Street, the town’s older commercial corridor, has many tall shade trees. The town’s southeast corner, though, is an area converted from light industrial and commercial into manufactured and other housing. It has a paucity of trees.
Sara Law, Salida’s sustainability coordinator and public information officer, explained that Salida expects to get hotter during summer months in coming decades because of accumulating greenhouse gases. The goal was to get medium- to low-tree covers to help provide cooling on those hot days of summer.
Awardees of that grant program, including Salida, are now able to work on their tree projects and submit for reimbursement.
Teddy Parker-Renga, associate director of communications and communities for the Colorado State Forest Service, reported on March 31 that awardees of that particular grant program, including Salida, had become eligible that day to submit reimbursements for their work. The money comes from the U.S. Forest Service and grants are administered by the Colorado State Forest Service.
At an elevation of 7,400 feet, Salida has a climate warm enough to accommodate rattlesnakes. They can be encountered on hiking trails of nearby Methodist Mountain, the northernmost peak in the Sangre de Cristo Range. Salida’s all-time high temperature record of 102 degrees was set in July 2019.
The construction site at the bottom of Gross Dam with equipment used to place concrete and build the new steps. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 7, 2025
The state’s largest water utility will have two weeks to complete any necessary work on its $531 million dam expansion project before a court-ordered construction halt takes effect, a federal judge ruled Sunday. The granting of a temporary window for construction follows an order late Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello blocking Denver Water’s expansion of Gross Reservoir outside Nederland and barring further construction work to raise the height of the dam…In response to the order, Denver Water asked the judge to allow dam construction to continue while the utility appealed her decision.
“Denver Water faces enormous irreparable harm from the order stopping ongoing project construction, which may threaten the safety of the half-constructed dam; require Denver Water to quickly lay off hundreds of construction workers; impose millions in additional materials and equipment costs on Denver Water and its ratepayers; and increase the risk of water shortages,” lawyers for the utility wrote in their request.
Arguello denied the utility’s request to allow construction to continue during the appeal but granted the 14-day stay on her order blocking all construction. After a yet-to-be-scheduled hearing, she will decide exactly how much more construction to allow to make the existing dam structurally sound…Arguello in her Sunday order reiterated her criticism of Denver Water’s decision to start construction even though it faced challenges to the legality of the project.
“The financial concerns argued by Denver Water do not outweigh the irreparable injury of environmental harm,” the judge wrote. “Denver Water took a calculated risk when it decided to move forward with construction despite the lawsuit.”
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. Credit: Northern Water project pages
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
March 5, 2025
Two new bodies of water in northern Front Range will boost water supplies for 15 communities
Plans for a $2 billion water supply project in northern Colorado will move forward after the communities supporting it agreed to pump $100 million into improving the health of the Cache la Poudre River — a settlement ending decades of dispute over the water infrastructure plans. Leaders from the Northern Integrated Supply Project and the nonprofit environmental group Save the Poudre finalized the settlement on Friday, clearing the way for two new reservoirs. The deal will funnel $100 million over 20 years into a fund to sustain 50 miles of the river from the mouth of the Poudre Canyon, northwest of Fort Collins, to the river’s confluence with the South Platte. The Poudre River Improvement Fund will pay for projects to enhance the river’s flows, water quality, ecosystem and recreational opportunities. The settlement ends Save the Poudre’s 2024 lawsuit alleging the Army Corps of Engineers did not adequately consider the environmental impacts of the Northern Integrated Supply Project when it issued a Clean Water Act permit for its construction. Environmentalists with the group have opposed the project for decades because it would drain the river and damage its ecosystems…
Northern Water, the utility that’s spearheading the project, and other water suppliers have pursued the water infrastructure improvements since 1980, stating they are critical to meeting the needs of the growing region. When complete, the Northern Integrated Supply Project will include Glade Reservoir northwest of Fort Collins, Galeton Reservoir northeast of Greeley, 50 miles of buried water pipelines and five pump plants. The project will send more than 40,000 acre-feet of water annually to the participating water suppliers in Boulder, Weld and Larimer counties — enough water for about 80,000 households.
“This is a milestone day for the communities participating in the project,” Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind said in a news release. “The settlement agreement will close the permitting process for the project, open the door to constructing a project that will deliver much-needed water supplies to vibrant communities, and allow for dozens of large-scale riverine investments in and along the Poudre River.”
Construction of Glade Reservoir is expected to begin in 2026. It will hold about 170,000 acre-feet of water from the Poudre River — a capacity slightly larger than that of Horsetooth Reservoir, according to Northern Water’s release. Construction of 45,600-acre-foot Galeton Reservoir will begin after the first reservoir is complete, and it will store water from the South Platte. An acre-foot of water is enough to support two Colorado households for a year. The project will support water supplies for 15 towns and water districts in northern Colorado, including the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, the Left Hand Water District, Fort Morgan and Erie.
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
From email from Denver Water:
April 4, 2025
Denver Water is gravely concerned about this ruling and its ramifications for the future of metro Denver and its water supply. We plan to appeal and seek an immediate stay of this order that leaves a critical project that is 60% complete on hold and puts at risk our ability to efficiently provide a safe, secure and reliable water supply to 1.5 million people. Denver Water will do everything in its power to see this project through to completion.
It’s impossible to reconcile the judge’s order with what is clearly in the broader public interest.
We view this decision as a radical remedy that should raise alarm bells with the public, not only because of its impacts to water security in an era of longer, deeper droughts, catastrophic wildfire and extreme weather, but because it serves as an egregious example of how difficult it has become to build critical infrastructure in the face of relentless litigation and a broken permitting process. In this case, the order is even more appalling with the project so deep into construction.
Denver Water will abide by the judge’s order and temporarily halt construction on the dam pending a hearing with the judge and will rapidly appeal the decision. Work for the spring season was scheduled to begin April 10, and the final part of the dam raise was to be completed this year. Leaving the project incomplete creates ongoing safety and water supply issues, as Denver Water cannot fill the reservoir to capacity during construction and, as we have testified to the judge, the original gravity dam has been deconstructed and its foundation excavated, exposing steep rock slopes that depend on bolts to temporarily shore them up. These are among the issues that we will address with the judge in an upcoming hearing.
This order is also exacting a significant human cost, as it comes just as Denver Water and its contractors were preparing for spring construction season. With an extended freeze on construction, hundreds of men and women will be thrown out of work, many with specific skillsets who relocated to the region to work on this specific project. It also required enormous effort over years from Denver Water and its contractors to build the workforce for this complex project. All of that now stands in jeopardy, causing immediate harm to our valued workers, their families, the dozens of business partners, and our local economy.
It’s crucial to understand that Denver Water was granted all required local, state and federal permits to move ahead with the project after a regulatory oversight process stretching over nearly two decades, dating to 2002. Further, Denver Water has committed more than $30 million to over 60 environmental mitigation and enhancement projects on the Front Range and West Slope. The utility proceeded with construction on the expansion in 2022, under an order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to complete the project by 2027.
On top of that legally binding FERC order, Denver Water has an enormous sense of urgency surrounding the project, considering increasingly variable weather and water supply patterns, how close we have come to falling short of water on the north side of our system in years past, our harrowing experiences with the threats and impacts of wildfire in our collection area and the need for system flexibility to ensure we can provide a critical public resource under crisis conditions.
To be clear, these are not theoretical matters. Denver has seen the impact of drought and catastrophic wildfire before. The starkest example came in 2002, when extended drought and fast-moving wildfire struck the region in dramatic fashion. Denver Water came very close to being unable to provide our northern customers with safe, clean drinking water – an absolute human health and safety priority, and the responsibility of this utility, as the region’s water provider.
Denver Water is also missing opportunities to store additional, critical water supplies. Had the expansion been complete in 2013, for example, Denver Water could have easily filled Gross Reservoir, including storing additional storm water during the catastrophic flooding that year. In 2015, water flowed out of state because existing Denver Water reservoirs were full and there was no place to capture and store it. In the hot, dry 2018 summer, we would have been able to provide extra water to the Fraser River or Williams Fork River basin to help enhance the conditions of these dry rivers.
The expansion of Gross Reservoir is intended to protect the people who rely on us, now and in the future. The Gross Reservoir expansion reduces the significant pressure on our southern system, which delivers 80% of our water supply, depends heavily on the South Platte River and has seen a series of wildfires that threaten water delivery, water quality and water treatment. In both 1996 and 2002, sediment loads from deluges following the Buffalo Creek and Hayman fires created impacts to our southern system that challenged our ability to ensure water supply to our customers; we are still addressing these impacts to this very day.
Denver Water is responsible for providing a safe and secure water supply for 1.5 million people in Denver and portions of the surrounding metro area and has understood the urgency of the Gross Reservoir expansion since the 1990s, when the environmental community recommended expansion of the reservoir as part of a plan to address future supply and water security.
To repeat: The utility began working on permitting for this project in 2002, more than 20 years ago. The project has been analyzed and permitted in various forms by no fewer than seven state and federal environmental agencies, and Denver Water has consulted extensively with environmental organizations, nonprofits, the public and other stakeholders to identify efforts to enhance and reasonably restore resources on both the West Slope and Front Range. Denver Water is operating under a legally mandated deadline for project completion in 2027 from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is not part of this current lawsuit.
Throughout the permitting process, Denver Water has been driven by these values: the need to do this expansion the right way and the safe way, by involving the community; upholding the highest environmental standards; providing a sustainable, high-quality water supply to our customers; and protecting and managing the water and natural environment that define Colorado. In keeping with these values, Denver Water designed and implemented the project to provide a net environmental benefit to impacted local watersheds.
Denver Water looks forward to working with the agencies and the courts to move this critical project toward completion.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 4, 2025
Colorado’s largest water provider must stop construction on a $531 million dam expansion already underway in Boulder County after a federal judge found that assessments of how the project would impact the environment were flawed. U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello in an order late Thursday blocked Denver Water from enlarging Gross Reservoir east of Nederland until major federal environmental permitting processes are redone. The judge found that allowing the reservoir expansion to continue without redoing the permits would cause irreparable environmental damage that cannot be compensated for by monetary payments. That harm would outweigh any financial costs Denver Water would incur from halting construction, she wrote.
“Environmental injury is often the very definition of irreparable harm — often permanent or at least of long duration,” Arguello wrote. “All parties agree that there will be environmental harm resulting from completion of the Moffat Collection System Project, including the destruction of 500,000 trees, water diversion from several creeks, and impacts to wildlife by the sudden loss of land.”
She issued a preliminary injunction ordering Denver Water to halt construction on the dam until a further hearing when engineers can explain how much further construction is needed to make the partially built dam safe and structurally sound. Denver Water planned to raise the height of the dam by 131 feet, allowing the utility to store more water. She will then issue a permanent injunction on how much more construction will be allowed. The order is a huge victory for environmental groups that for years have opposed the controversial project. A coalition of environmental groups first filed suit in 2018 to stop the expansion of the reservoir, which they say would harm the health of the Colorado River system — where the reservoir’s water is sourced.
Snowfall in March has helped decrease the likelihood of drought developing this spring in Colorado’s northwest mountains. However, a warm and dry spring could still change the tide heading into summer. The National Weather Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, released its latest seasonal drought outlook on Thursday, March 20. It showed that drought conditions are unlikely to develop in most of northwest Colorado through June…Brad Pugh, a forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate prediction center, said these outlooks predominantly take into account the current conditions, climatology temperature and precipitation outlooks over the next three months.
“In northwestern Colorado at this time of year, you know going into the springtime, mountain snowpack is a critical factor,” Pugh said.
As of March 18, much of northwest Colorado was in line with, or just above, normal snowpack. This has continued to improve in the state’s north-central mountains since January. According to OpenSnow, as of Monday the snow totals and percentage of normal on the season so far were as follows:
Winter Park – 315 inches (117%)
Copper Mountain Resort – 303 inches (113%)
Vail Mountain – 292 inches (101%)
Breckenridge Ski Resort – 284 inches (107%)
Steamboat Resort – 279 inches (108%)
Aspen Highlands — 267 inches (88%)
Loveland Ski Area – 261 inches (108%)
Snowmass – 243 inches (83%)
Keystone Resort – 239 inches (107%)
Beaver Creek – 227 inches (108%)
Arapahoe Basin Ski Area – 225 inches (112%)
Aspen Mountain – 210 inches (92%)
Ski Cooper – 206 inches (106%)
Buttermilk – 147 inches (89%)
Colorado Drought Monitor map March 25, 2025.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor for Colorado reported no drought in many of the northwest counties including Summit, Grand, Routt and Jackson counties as well as the eastern reaches of Eagle and Moffat counties. Heading west, the monitor shows abnormally dry conditions in Pitkin County and the eastern portions of Garfield and Rio Blanco counties. Conditions continue to get progressively drier the further west toward the border.
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.”).
Fort Morgan has never fully owned its water supplies. The small farm town on the Eastern Plains has always leased its water from whomever had some to spare.
But with the late February settlement of a lawsuit that will allow construction of the $2 billion Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, to move forward, Fort Morgan’s 10,564 residents will rest easier, knowing that for the first time, they will own the water that flows from their taps, according to City Manager Brent Nation.
“It has been our intention all along to own our water,” Nation said. “With this settlement, we can finally move forward. It’s a good thing for us.”
Fifteen water districts and cities in northern Colorado have banded together to build the massive project, which will take water from the Cache la Poudre River and create two dams and reservoirs and a sprawling pipeline system.
Participants include Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Erie, Fort Morgan, Left Hand Water District, Central Weld County Water District, Windsor, Frederick, Lafayette, Morgan County Quality Water District, Firestone, Dacono, Evans, Fort Lupton, Severance and Eaton.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. Credit: Northern Water
When completed, sometime after 2030, according to Northern Water, which is NISP’s sponsor, it will deliver 40,000 acre-feet of water annually to some 80,000 families. One acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons, enough to serve two to four urban households each year.
But before then, and for years to come, the settlement will begin reshaping and restoring the Poudre.
Why the fuss?
Concern over the river has been rising for years.
According to Save the Poudre, nearly 400,000 acre-feet of water flow out of Poudre Canyon, but some 300,000 acre-feet are taken out by farmers and others almost immediately, leaving the river shallow, stressed and over heated as it flows more than 100 miles to its confluence with the South Platte River east of Greeley.
According to the settlement agreement, the $100 million will pay to move water diversion points farther downstream, leaving more water in the river as it flows east, rather than taking the water out higher up and reducing its flows.
Water-sharing arrangements between cities and farmers will be written to enhance recreation and stream improvements. New fish and boat passages will be installed around existing dams on the river. A new network to track the health of the river, its temperature and water quality, will also be added…
New dams and reservoirs must go through extensive permitting and environmental reviews to win approval from federal and state regulators. It took NISP about 15 years to win its final permit. That permit already includes requirements that will help the river, according to Northern spokesperson Jeff Stahla.
Under the federal permit, for instance, one-third of the total water delivered by the project must be delivered at specific volumes to boost stream flows in the winter and in the summer to aid fish and cool water temperatures, Stahla said.
Help delivered through the new settlement will come in addition to the federal and state requirements.
“It’s going to make a significant difference to the Poudre,” Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind said.
The settlement has also taken a lot of the heat out of the rooms where water planners and environmentalists…fought for more than a decade…
Dan Luecke is a well-known hydrologist and environmentalist who led the successful fight to stop Two Forks dam southwest of Denver in the 1980s. That too was a long, tortured battle, which largely ended when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with backing from the White House, rejected the proposal in 1990. There was no financial settlement then, Luecke said. But the $100 million Poudre agreement, though not as large as others in the American West, such as the $450 million Klamath River settlement, is noteworthy.
“$100 million is a pretty substantial number. It’s impressive in my mind,” Luecke said. “And the complexity of it, that they have to pump water in these reservoirs and use long pipelines to get the water back out to the urban areas. … It’s monumental.” (Luecke is a board member of Water Education Colorado, which founded Fresh Water News.)
The Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, which serves parts of both cities, is the largest participant in the NISP project, and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its share of the project and the settlement. And that’s OK with Stephen Smith, a member of the district’s board.
The Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, which serves parts of both cities, is the largest participant in the NISP project, and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its share of the project and the settlement. And that’s OK with Stephen Smith, a member of the district’s board.
“I feel comfortable with that,” Smith said, adding that he was speaking as a private individual, not a board member. “This money is going to go into the Poudre. If the money were going to buy off Save The Poudre, that would be a negative to me, but to have this six-member committee and to have an opportunity to put $100 million into the river, I consider that to be outstanding, I couldn’t be happier.”
Mid-February’s weeklong series of storms that dropped 4-to-5 feet of snow in areas of Denver Water’s collection area could be termed a “Sweetheart Surprise,” followed by a dumping of “Presidents Day Powder” that just kept going.
“It was an impressive week of snow with a bullseye right on our collection area,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply. “After a couple dry weeks to start out the year, it was nice to see stormy winter weather return to the mountains.”
Elder said mountain snowpack in the parts of the South Platte and Colorado River basins where Denver Water collects its water jumped significantly due to the storms.
From Feb. 14-21, snowpack in the Upper South Platte River Basin climbed from 84% of normal up to 108%. During the same time period in the Upper Colorado River Basin, the snowpack jumped from 105% of normal up to 120%.
Snow piles up along the banks of Tenmile Creek near Copper Mountain in Summit County on Feb. 19. The creek is one of the main tributaries of Denver Water’s Dillon Reservoir. Photo credit: Denver Water.
However you look at it, all the snow in the second half of February has been great news for our water supply. And there’s an interesting trend happening during the 2024-25 snow season in Colorado: The major storms keep hitting on the holidays.
The February storm cycle started just in time for Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, continued dumping through Presidents Day, Feb. 17, and then another storm delivered a bonus round of snow Feb. 20-21.
The snow is good news for Denver Water, which relies on mountain snow to supply water to 1.5 million people in the metro area.
Just take a look at the snow totals from the weeklong series of storms that spanned Feb. 14-21, as reported by the ski resorts located in Denver Water’s collection area:
Arapahoe Basin: 43”
Breckenridge: 47”
Copper Mountain: 45”
Keystone: 47”
Winter Park: 62”
A snowboarder enjoys fresh powder at Winter Park in Grand County. The ski resort reported 62” of snow between Feb. 14-21. Photo credit: Winter Park Ski Resort.
It’s been a great winter so far at Winter Park and Copper Mountain, which have seen 257” and 255” of snow respectively as of Feb. 21, making them the two snowiest ski resorts in the state.
Snowpack is a measurement of the amount of water in the snow if it were to melt. In general, about 10 inches of snow melts down to around 1 inch of water here in Colorado.
Elder said what’s been interesting this year is that the majority of snow has fallen right around holidays starting after Halloween, then before Thanksgiving, between Christmas and New Years, and now between Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day.
“We can see the snowpack looks like steps on our charts around all these holidays,” Elder said. “With the recent storms, we saw basically an entire month’s worth of snow in seven days.”
Elder said that having the snowpack above 100% heading into March is a good sign for our water supply in the coming year.
The Fraser River at the bottom of Berthoud Pass is covered in snow. The river is part of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water captures snow for its water supply. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“March and April are typically our snowiest months of the year in Colorado. Those two months usually provide about one-third of our annual snowpack. That’s because the snow that falls in those months has a higher water content than snow that falls in the beginning and middle of winter,” he said.
Denver Water’s total reservoir supply stands at 82% full as of Feb. 21, which is about average for this time of year. Remember that reservoir levels fall over the winter and then go back up in the spring when the snow melts.
As for what to expect for the rest of the ski season, maybe consider heading to the hills on St. Patrick’s Day or Easter, and who knows possibly even Mother’s Day in May!
An artist’s rendering shows what Glade Reservoir, a key component of the Northern Integrated Supply Project would look like after construction. The project is going ahead after Northern Water agreed to settle a lawsuit by Save the Poudre for $100 million.
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
March 5, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
A massive new reservoir project in Northern Colorado is closer to reality after its architects settled a lawsuit with an environmental group seeking to block construction. The Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, will go ahead sooner than expected after a lawsuit settlement. Northern Water will pay $100 million into a trust after Save the Poudre, a nonprofit, agreed to drop its lawsuit. That money will fund river improvement projects.
The controversial water project, which will cost around $2 billion to build, has been tied up in planning and permitting for more than two decades. Advocates for the new reservoirs say it’s an important way to make sure fast-growing communities in Larimer and Weld counties have enough water for new homes and residents. Opponents worry it will take water out of a Cache la Poudre River that is already taxed by diversions for cities and farms.
…the settlement money will go into a new “Poudre River Improvement Fund.”
[…]
The fund can be used for “ecological, habitat, and recreational improvements,” including the potential creation of a “Poudre River Water Trail” from Gateway Park in Poudre Canyon to Eastman Park in Windsor. The fund will be managed by a six-person committee, three of whom will be appointed by Save the Poudre, and three by the NISP enterprise…
Proponents of the Northern Integrated Supply Project say it will help fast-growing communities along the northern Front Range keep pace with the volume of new residents. (From Northern Water project pages)
NISP would supply 15 different water providers along the northern Front Range through two reservoirs and a system of pipelines and pumps. Northern Water, the agency that would build and operate NISP, projects that it will provide water to nearly 500,000 people by 2050.
Water from the system would flow to a diverse group of towns and cities north of Denver. Small, fast-growing towns such as Erie and Windsor stand to receive some of the largest water allocations from NISP. The list also includes the Fort Collins Loveland Water District, the Left Hand Water District, which is just north of Boulder, and Fort Morgan on the eastern plains.
“These are communities that have identified the need for housing as something that will increase the quality of life,” said Jeff Stahla, a spokesman for Northern Water. “So this is an important time for us as residents to realize that we can help to solve some of the problems and some of the the challenges that we’re seeing out there on the horizon as more people choose to live here.”
Stahla said construction is expected to take off in 2026, with some pipes being laid in the summer and fall of this year. If Save the Poudre’s lawsuit was still in place, he said, construction would have begun in “2027 or even beyond.” Glade Reservoir, the centerpiece of NISP’s water storage system, would flood a valley northwest of Fort Collins that is currently home to a stretch of U.S. Highway 287 connecting Fort Collins and Laramie, Wyo. That section of road would be rebuilt further East.
Kids play in the Poudre River Whitewater Park near downtown Fort Collins on Oct. 20, 2023. The Cache la Poudre is often referred to as a “working river” because it carries a large volume of water from manmade reservoirs to cities and farms far from its banks. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Stahla said Northern Water’s permit includes requirements to mitigate environmental impacts caused by the new reservoirs. He alluded to the fact that the river is already connected to a number of large reservoirs and its water is piped and pumped far away from its original course.
“The Poudre River has really been a working river for 150 years now,” he said. “What NISP is planning to do certainly is not the only impacts to the river that have been occurring or will occur.”
…Stahla…suggested work on diversion structures, which redirect the river’s water towards farms and water treatment plants. Stahla suggested they could be modernized… and moved further downstream to allow more water to flow through certain sections of the river.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. Credit: Northern Water
Here’s the release from email from Jeff Stahla at Northern Water:
February 28, 2025
BERTHOUD, Colorado – Northern Water, on behalf of the Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP) Water Activity Enterprise, and the nonprofit group Save the Poudre have reached a settlement to the lawsuit challenging the federal permit issued for NISP, clearing the way for the construction of the vital water supply project in Northeastern Colorado.
The agreement, signed late on Friday, Feb. 28, by the Northern Water Board of Directors, outlines the creation of a new and long-term funding source for additional investments to benefit the reach of the Poudre River from the mouth of the Poudre Canyon to the river’s confluence with the South Platte River near Greeley. Throughout the next two decades, $100 million will be contributed by project participants to create a fund likely at the NoCo Foundation, or similar type foundation, with the intention of the money to be made available for projects and initiatives that improve the river for recreational uses, wildlife, water quality and more.
The agreement includes dismissal of the legal challenge to the federal Section 404 Clean Water Act permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in January 2023. Northern Water received the permit after two decades of work showing the need for the project. The mitigation requirements in the permit will remain, with the settlement funding adding projects beyond those outlined in the various permit documents issued for the project.
“This is a milestone day for the communities participating in the project,” said Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind. “The settlement agreement will close the permitting process for the project, open the door to constructing a project that will deliver much-needed water supplies to vibrant communities, and allow for dozens of large-scale riverine investments in and along the Poudre River.”
NISP’s Program Manager, Carl Brouwer, added, “This added investment to the river will complement the mitigation and enhancements identified by the involved permitting agencies.”
When complete, the project will include Glade Reservoir northwest of Fort Collins, a forebay and pump plant below the Glade Reservoir dam, Galeton Reservoir northeast of Greeley, 50 miles of buried pipelines to convey water to project participants, four additional pump plants, improved diversions on the Poudre River to allow fish passage and a requirement to convey 30 percent of the NISP water downstream for added benefit to the Poudre River. A section of U.S. Highway 287 will be rerouted around Glade Reservoir at the expense of project participants. Engineers estimate the project will cost $2 billion, with full buildout producing an annual yield of 40,000 acre-feet.
Construction of a fish passage at Watson Lake northwest of Fort Collins and a wetlands area at Eastman Park in Windsor has already occurred. Work on the remaining pipeline segments, the relocation of U.S. Highway 287 and the Glade Reservoir dam is projected to begin in 2026, with construction at Galeton Reservoir occurring after the completion of Glade Reservoir.
NISP includes participating communities and water providers large and small. The 15 participants include Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Erie, Fort Morgan, Left Hand Water District, Central Weld County Water District, Windsor, Frederick, Lafayette, Morgan County Quality Water District, Firestone, Dacono, Evans, Fort Lupton, Severance and Eaton.
Water storage such as NISP is identified in the Colorado Water Plan as a necessary component for Colorado’s long-term water future. It joins water conservation, land use planning and other solutions to meet future water needs in Colorado.
About Northern Water
Northern Water, a public agency created in 1937, provides water for food production and municipal, domestic and industrial uses for more than 1 million people in Northeastern Colorado via the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, Pleasant Valley Pipeline and Southern Water Supply Project. Northern Water also generates hydropower at two sites and provides water quality services throughout the region. Its Municipal Subdistrict delivers water through the Windy Gap Project.
Through the building of two new reservoirs in Northern Colorado, the Northern Integrated Supply Project will supply 15 Northern Front Range water providers with 40,000 acre-feet of new, reliable water supplies. Aside from needed water storage, the project will incorporate an array of environmental and wildlife mitigation aspects and bring additional recreation opportunities to the region. Learn more at www.NISPwater.org.
Chances are when you’ve watched your favorite weather person on the local news you may have seen them put up a map of Colorado that shows the statewide snowpack.
If you’re a curious person you may wonder: Why do they show the map? What is snowpack? And where do they get all that information?
We’re here to help answer these questions.
First off, snowpack is the amount of water stored in the snow that blankets the mountains across our state. It’s important to measure the snowpack because the snow is where Colorado gets about 80% of its water supply for household and agricultural uses.
So now to answer the final question: Where does information about the snowpack come from? The data comes from SNOTELs.
OK, so what’s a SNOTEL?
Well, SNOTEL is short for “snow telemetry.” Think of it as just a fancy way of describing an automated weather station in a remote location that beams information back to a database.
9News meteorologist Cory Reppenhagen talks about the statewide snowpack during an evening weathercast. Image credit: 9News.
“In Colorado, we have 117 SNOTEL sites, and there are over 900 sites across 13 western states,” said Brian Domonkos, a hydrologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “These sites have been around since the late 1970s and provide critical information about the amount of water in the snowpack.”
SNOTELs use “snow pillows” to measure the water content.
Snow pillows are rubber bladders on the ground that are filled with water and ethanol (to prevent the water from freezing). The pillow then weighs the snow, like when you stand on a scale to get your weight.
This SNOTEL site is located on the top of Berthoud Pass in Grand County. The snow pillow is covered in snow in front of the shed. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The pressure on the pillow pushes an equal amount of the antifreeze liquid into a measurement tube, which converts the weight of the water contained in the snow into inches of water content. This measurement is the snowpack, which is technically called the Snow Water Equivalent, and also known as SWE.
A sensor reads the SWE from the tube and sends the data to the NRCS’s central database.
The same SNOTEL site at Berthoud Pass in the summer shows the gray snow pillows located in front of the shed. Photo credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“Generally speaking, here in Colorado, 10 inches of snow melted down equals roughly about 1 inch of water,” Domonkos said. “The data is used to predict how much water will flow into rivers and streams when the snow melts in the spring.”
The information from the SNOTELs is used by farmers, ranchers, water utilities, environmental groups and recreationists. Communities also use the information to be aware of the potential for flooding during the spring runoff.
There are 16 SNOTELs in Denver Water’s collection area that are viewed daily by the utility’s water planning team.
“The SNOTEL network is the most important source of information we have to manage our water supply, and I honestly can’t image how we’d get by without them,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply.
This chart uses SNOTEL data to determine the Snow Water Equivalent in the area of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water collects its water. Note the left side that shows the inches of water content in the basin. Image credit: Denver Water.
This map shows the 16 SNOTEL sites located in areas where Denver Water collects water for 1.5 million people in the metro area. Image credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Elder’s team uses the data to make informed decisions about reservoir management and whether any water restrictions for Denver Water customers may be needed in addition to the regular summer watering rules.
Denver Water also monitors 115 SNOTEL sites upstream of Lake Powell to keep an eye on conditions in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Denver Water collects half of its water supply from rivers and streams that feed into the Colorado River.
“We use the SNOTEL data to provide insight into potential water rights calls that may impact our operations,” Elder said. “The earlier we have information, the better decisions we can make with our water supply.”
Denver Water also relies on manual snowpack readings collected on snow courses and from data collected in the spring from an Airborne Snow Observatory. Learn about these methods in this TAP story.
This map shows snowpack information collected from SNOTEL sites in river basins across the western U.S. Image credit: National Resources Conservation Service.
Domonkos said the SNOTELs are also critical in monitoring long-term weather trends across the western U.S.
“When you’re watching the news, you’ll see the various river basins showing a certain percent of the normal amount of snowpack for that date,” Domonkos said. “We always like to see the snowpack in the 100% to 120% range so it’s not too high that could lead to flooding and not too low that could lead to water shortages.”
Along with measuring the snowpack, the SNOTEL sites also measure all other forms of precipitation like rain, hail and ice. They also measure air temperature, soil moisture and soil temperature.
Brian Domonkos checks out weather data at the Berthoud Pass SNOTEL site in Grand County. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“These sites are very important for not only day-to-day weather information, but also for comparing snowpack year to year so we can keep track of any emerging trends,” Domonkos said.
All of the information is available for free on the NRCS website, which has a variety of data from each SNOTEL site. The information can be found on the NRCS website.
Here’s the release from the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water District (Jenny McCarty):
February 21, 2025
LONGMONT – Funding approved by Longmont’s voters in 2024 is enabling the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District to leverage grants and other sources to provide $1.7 million this year to community partners working to address the most imminent water and watershed issues today. The funds will help mitigate wildfire risks, improve farm irrigation, save water by reducing non-functional turf grass, and enhance stream flows to benefit the environment.
In 2025, the District is partnering with and funding the Boulder Valley and Longmont Conservation Districts, Crocker Ditch, HFR Enterprises, Holland Ditch Company, Hover Park Home Owners Association (“HOA”), Town of Lyons, and The Watershed Center. 2025 marks the fourth year the District offered funding through their Partner Funding Program. Including $352,000 earmarked for 2025, the District has awarded 25 partners a total of $1.2 million, leveraging those dollars for more than $6.1 million since January 2022 (369%) toward improvements in water management within the St. Vrain watershed.
The St. Vrain Forest Health Partnership (“SVFHP”) includes 100+ partners including fire districts, agencies, towns and community members working to increase fire resilience to benefit communities, the forests and water quality. A portion of the District’s $352,000 will go to support the SVFHP’s outreach and education efforts. “We couldn’t accomplish this work without the District’s support and funding and are grateful to our community who voted for the ballot initiative,” said Yana Sorokin, Executive Director of The Watershed Center.
The Boulder Valley and Longmont Conservation Districts (“BVLCD”) are working alongside the SVFHP to develop forest management plans on private properties and conduct forest treatments to reduce risk of catastrophic wildfires. “These funds will help to reduce wildfire risk to life, property, and important surface waters within District boundaries,” explained Rob Walker, Director of BVLCD.
Boulder County Ditch and Reservoir map. Credit: The St. Vrain and Lefthand Water Conservancy District
The District is also partnering with Crocker Ditch, HFR Enterprises, and Holland Ditch Company to help improve local aging agriculture infrastructure and vegetation encroachment to support its future function.
Andy Pelster, Agriculture and Water Stewardship Sr. Manager for City of Boulder, which has ownership in Crocker Ditch, stated, “District funds will help improve water delivery efficiency and tracking.” Danna Ortiz, a representative of HFR Enterprises added, “This project gives us hope that the Knoth Reservoir may once again function, providing water for our ag neighbors and wildlife.” Larry Scripter, Vice President of the Holland Ditch Company said, “We wouldn’t be able to keep going with this work without the District’s financial support.”
Hover Park HOA is leading one of the first District-supported turf replacement projects in Longmont this year. In addition to funding support from other local agencies, Hover Park HOA is working to “replace over 8,200 square feet of thirsty turf grass with water-wise plants that support pollinators, look beautiful, and will create a more usable space for our community,” says Barbara Hau, resident representative for the HOA.
The Town of Lyons is using District funding to complete a preliminary analysis for managing stream flows on the St. Vrain Creek through Lyons for environmental benefit. Tracy Sanders, Lyons Flood Recovery Lead, said the District’s funds might “help determine whether environmental flows can improve creek conditions for temperature, and ultimately fish health.”
“These partnerships continue the District’s strong history of collaboration,” said Sean Cronin, Executive Director of the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District. “Each project advances our goals the voters approved: to protect water quality, maintain healthy rivers and creeks, support local food production, and protect forests that are critical to our water supply,” he added.
About the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District
The St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District (“District” and “SVLHWCD”), created in 1971, is your trusted local government working to safeguard water resources for all. The District’s work is founded in the Water Plan five pillars: protect water quality and drinking water sources, safeguard and conserve water supplies, grow local food, store water for dry years, and maintain healthy rivers and creeks. Aligned with the Water Plan, the District is pleased to promote local partner water protection and management strategies through the Partner Funding Program.
As a local government, non-profit agency formed at the request of our community under state laws, the District serves Longmont and the surrounding land area and basin that drains into both the St. Vrain and Left Hand Creeks. Learn more at http://www.svlh.gov.
If you have any questions about the District’s Partner Funding Program, please contact Watershed Program Manager at: jenny.mccarty@svlh.gov or 303.772.4060.
More than a year after an environmental group sued to stop a $2 billion northern Colorado water project, whispers of a settlement are being heard as the case winds its way through U.S. District Court in Denver.
Last January, Save The Poudre sued to block the Northern Integrated Supply Project, a two-reservoir development designed to serve tens of thousands of people in northern Colorado. The suit alleged that the Army Corps of Engineers had not adequately weighed the environmental impacts and less harmful ecological alternatives to the project…
Colorado-Big Thompson Project map. Courtesy of Northern Water.
Northern Water, which operates the federally owned Colorado-Big Thompson Project for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, is overseeing the permitting and construction of NISP. The agency also declined to comment on any potential settlement. Northern Water serves more than 1 million Front Range residents and hundreds of growers in the South Platte River Basin.
“We’re still moving forward with what we need to do on the litigation,” Northern spokesman Jeff Stahla said.
Northern Water’s board discussed the litigation in a confidential executive session last week at a study retreat and it is scheduled to discuss it in another private executive session Feb. 13 at its formal board meeting, according to the agenda.
Sources told Fresh Water News and The Colorado Sun that those discussions are related to the potential multimillion-dollar settlement.
Key developments this past year
In October, a federal judge delivered a favorable ruling to Wockner’s Save the Colorado on a case involving Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir expansion project. Now [envisonmental groups] are seeking an injunction to force Denver Water to stop construction of the dam, which began in 2022.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Raising the Boulder County dam by 131 feet will allow Denver Water to capture more water from the headwaters of the Upper Colorado River on the Western Slope. In its ruling, the federal court said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had failed to consider the impact of climate change on the flows in the Colorado River.
What impact that ruling may have on the NISP case isn’t clear, but [the environmental group that sued Denver Water] said they believe it will give his organization more leverage to push for changes in NISP.
In addition, the City of Fort Collins has dropped its formal opposition to NISP. And Stahla said Northern has continued to push forward with key parts of the development, including the design work needed to relocate a 7-mile stretch of U.S. 287 northwest of Fort Collins.
Fort Collins Mayor Jeni Arndt said the city changed its stance because most of its environmental concerns had been met through the 21-year federal permitting process.
“The EPA had signed off, and the Corps of Engineers had signed off,” she said. “It was obvious that this was not going to be another Two Forks,” referring to a massive dam proposed in the 1970s by Denver Water on the South Platte River near Deckers. It was rejected by the EPA due to environmental concerns.
Arndt said the city also planned to use a later review process, known as a 1041 review, to address other environmental concerns that might arise.
If NISP is ultimately built, and most believe it will be, it will provide water for 15 fast-growing communities and water districts along the Interstate 25 corridor, including the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Fort Morgan, Lafayette and Windsor.
The largest participant in the giant project is the Fort Collins-Loveland District. Board member Stephen Smith said he believes NISP will move forward one way or another and that it is critical to serving the water-short region.
“NISP is going to get built and it will provide water to Fort Collins by 2033,” he said.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. An environmental group is now suing the Army Corps of Engineers over a key permit for Northern Water’s proposal. (Save the Poudre lawsuit, from Northern Water project pages)
Three of Colorado’s top water experts hammered home the idea that Colorado’s water situation id precarious, at best, and almost always on the brink of crisis. The day-long Voices of Rural Colorado symposium in Denver was the setting for an hour-long discussion of Colorado water. Attendees heard from, and interacted with, Rebecca Mitchell, former executive director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and now Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission; Zane Kessler, director of government relations for the Colorado River District; and Jim Yahn, Logan County Commissioner and manager of the North Sterling Irrigation District. One of the points that was repeatedly made during the discussion was that the Colorado River is Colorado’s River. Besides watering most of the Western Slope of Colorado, the river is tapped for more than a half-million acre feet of water to the Front Range and eastern plains. Nearly half of that, about 200,000 acre feet per year, is fed directly into the Big Thompson River at Estes Park, primarily for irrigation in the South Platte River Basin. The remaining 330,000 acre feet is diverted to cities on the Front Range like Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo. That water ends up in the South Platte and Arkansas River basins…
Yahn told the attendees that continued drought in the Colorado River Basin will have an impact on the South Platte Valley, which is why projects like the Chimney Hollow Reservoir, nearing completion next to Carter Lake west of Berthoud, are important…Mitchell said that the crisis on the Colorado is easily seen in the water levels of the two largest reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead on the Nevada-Arizona state line near Las Vegas, and Lake Powell, halfway between Salt Lake City and Phoenix on the Utah-Arizona state line.
In 2024, the City of Fort Collins applied for a 1041 permit from Larimer County. As a part of the permit process, two public hearings will take place with the county’s Planning Commission and the Board of County Commissioners.
The meetings are scheduled at the Larimer County offices at 200 W. Oak St. in Fort Collins at the following times:
Planning Commission: February 19, 2025 at 6 p.m.
Board of County Commissioners: March 24, 2025 at 6:30 p.m.
The Planning Commission holds its hearing to provide a permit recommendation to the County Commissioners. The County Commissioners hold a hearing to make a final decision on the permit application.
The Halligan Project requires a 1041 permit from Larimer County because it includes the enlargement of a reservoir resulting in a surface area at high water line in excess of 50 acres. The permit process looks at all aspects of the project. To view the application, visit the county’s portal by clicking the button below.
Information Session on Larimer County Permit Application
As someone who is interested in the Halligan Water Supply Project, we are reaching out to inform you about recent developments. In 2024, the City of Fort Collins submitted an application for a 1041 permit from Larimer County. The City, acting through Fort Collins Utilities, is proceeding with this permitting process now as the project is moving through phases of design and closer to construction. The permit process looks at all aspects of the project. To view the application, visit the county’s website by clicking this link.
To increase awareness, the City is hosting an Information Sessionon Feb. 12, 2025 from 6-7:30 p.m. at the Livermore Community Hall. City staff will be on hand to highlight elements of the application and answer questions. While this won’t be part of the official public comment process with Larimer County, we encourage you to engage directly with us. To RSVP, click the button below. Light refreshments will be provided.
DENVER, CO – January 23, 2025 – The High Line Canal Conservancy announced today that Harriet Crittenden LaMair, the organization’s founding CEO, will step down after 11 years of visionary leadership. Harriet will remain in her role until mid-2025 to ensure a seamless transition as the Conservancy begins its next chapter.
“The preservation and protection of the High Line Canal have been my passion for the past 11 years,” said LaMair. “It has been an honor and joy to work with so many friends and partners to secure a vital future for the old Canal. Given the Canal safeguards that we have put in place, I am confident this is the right time to step away from leading the Conservancy. Together with Denver Water, local governments and private support, we have permanently protected the Canal under a conservation easement, improved community access and safety and established a strong stewardship endowment, forever ensuring improved care along all 71 miles,” said LaMair.
LaMair’s impact is significant, having spearheaded the creation of the High Line Canal Conservancy in 2014, transforming it from a startup nonprofit into a trusted regional leader. Under LaMair’s leadership, the Conservancy has achieved historic milestones: securing over $33 million in private investment matched by public funds for more than $100 million in Canal improvements, establishing a Canal Collaborative that unites 14 jurisdictions, launching impactful community programs and protecting the Canal with a conservation easement.
High Line hero in action! Harriet Crittenden LaMair rallies the team and community to protect and celebrate the 71-mile treasure during an event along the trail in Aurora. Photo by Evan Semón Photography
“Harriet has been a trusted leader and champion for the Canal over the years and has set us up for success,” said Arapahoe County Commissioner Carrie Warren-Gully. “We would not be where we are today without her tenacity, vision and commitment to the long-term protection and stewardship of the Canal. She is leaving a lasting legacy and big shoes to fill — and a collective awareness that we all have a responsibility to care for this regional treasure now and forever.”
LaMair’s contributions have garnered regional and national acclaim, including the 2017 Jane Silverman Ries Award and the 2022 Denver Regional Council of Governments Metro Vision Award.
“Harriet’s leadership has been nothing short of transformative, shaping the High Line Canal Conservancy into a trusted and respected regional leader,” said Alan Salazar, CEO of Denver Water. “Her unwavering passion for the natural world and her exceptional ability to bring people together have united communities and organizations around a shared vision for the Canal’s future. Denver Water is proud to have partnered with Harriet and the Conservancy in this remarkable journey, and her legacy will undoubtedly inspire continued stewardship and collaboration for generations to come.”
Paula Herzmark, Chair of the High Line Canal Conservancy Board, credited LaMair with being the driving force behind the Conservancy’s success: “Through her vision and determination, she not only built an organization but also inspired a regional movement that will benefit communities for generations. We owe her an incredible debt of gratitude for her leadership and passion for this remarkable resource.”
As the Conservancy moves forward, it remains steadfast in its mission to preserve and enhance the 71-mile High Line Canal. Over the next three years, the organization will implement more than 30 improvement projects, expand community programs and advance natural resource management initiatives. Herzmark reiterated the Board’s commitment to building on LaMair’s legacy, stating, “As Harriet transitions from her role, we remain committed to carrying forward the legacy she created.”
The Conservancy’s Board is actively preparing for this leadership transition and is committed to identifying a new CEO who will continue advancing the Conservancy’s mission and vision. More information about the job posting will be shared in the coming weeks. In the meantime, interested parties can contact employment@highlinecanal.org for inquiries.
About the High Line Canal Conservancy The High Line Canal Conservancy is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving, protecting and enhancing the 71-mile High Line Canal. Since its founding in 2014, the Conservancy has led a regional effort to ensure the Canal remains a vibrant and enduring resource. Learn more at HighLineCanal.org.
The High Line Canal Collaborative celebrates a historic moment, marking the land transfer of a portion of the Canal from Denver Water to Arapahoe County. Left to Right: Harriet Crittenden LaMair (High Line Canal Conservancy), Paula Herzmark (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Dessa Bokides (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Amy Heidema (Denver Water), Mark Bernstein (Denver Parks and Recreation), Diana Romero Campbell (Denver City Council), Tom Roode (Denver Water), Alan Salazar (Denver Water), Jim Lochhead (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Steve Coffin (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Laura Kroeger (Mile High Flood District), Lora Thomas (Douglas County Commission), Evan Ela (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Melissa Reese-Thacker (South Suburban Parks and Recreation), Dan Olsen (Southeast Metro Stormwater Authority), Pam Eller (South Suburban Parks and Recreation Board of Directors), Earl Hoellen (Cherry Hills Village City Council), Jeff Baker (Arapahoe County Commission), Leslie Summey (Arapahoe County Commission), Shannon Carter (Retired – Arapahoe County Open Spaces), Bill Holen (Arapahoe County Commission), Carrie Warren-Gully (Arapahoe County Commission), Gretchen Rydin (Littleton City Council), Gini Pingenot (Arapahoe County Open Spaces), Amy Wiedeman (City of Centennial), Suzanne Moore (City of Greenwood Village), Brian Green (Aurora Parks, Recreation and Open Space), Nicole Ankeney (Aurora Parks, Recreation and Open Space). Photo by Evan Semón Photography
Lafayette, CO — Today, House Assistant Minority Leader Joe Neguse, Co-Chair of the Colorado River Caucus, announced $2.4 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for two projects in Colorado’s 2nd District aimed at restoring and improving the ecological conditions of local waterways and aquatic habitat near the communities of Granby and Boulder. These investments were allocated by the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART Environmental Water Resources Projects program.
“Local communities are instrumental in protecting and restoring Colorado’s rivers and streams. This important funding will support locally driven projects that enhance watershed health and resiliency, restore ecological conditions, and embody the spirit of ecological stewardship,” said Assistant Leader Neguse.
“Colorado is focused on protecting our vital water sources so that there is plenty of clean water for our communities and environment. I applaud Rep. Neguse’s leadership in Congress to pass federal legislation that is delivering for Colorado, and thank our State agencies and Coloradans carrying out these important projects,” said Governor Jared Polis.
Projects in Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District include the Upper Colorado River Ecosystem Enhancement Project, managed by the Grand County Learning By Doing Cooperative Effort (LBD), and the Boulder Creek Headwaters Resiliency Project, led by the Boulder Watershed Collective. Additional information on both can be found HERE and below:
$1,425,859 for the Upper Colorado River Ecosystem Enhancement Project, to restore two stream reaches on the Fraser River and Willow Creek near the community of Granby.
$954,204 for the Boulder Creek Headwaters Resiliency Project, to restore and improve the ecological condition of 181 acres of degraded aquatic and riparian habitat, and 2.8 miles of wet meadow streams throughout the Boulder Creek Watershed near Boulder.
“This is just another great example of the successful collaboration taking place in Grand County across a wide range of stakeholders that is resulting in very tangible improvements in the ecological health of the Colorado River headwaters,” according to a statement from the Grand County Learning By Doing Management Committee.
“The projects selected are working through a collaborative process to achieve nature-based solutions for the health of our watersheds and river ecosystems to increase drought resiliency,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “This historic investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law gives Reclamation the opportunity to continue to collaborate with our stakeholders to leverage funds for these multi-benefit projects.”
“Denver Water is proud to support ongoing stream improvement projects like those to be funded in this latest round of federal funding. Congratulations to Grand County Learning by Doing on this award. We look forward to working with our partners on the upcoming restoration work to Willow Creek and the Fraser River to benefit the Colorado River Basin,” said Rick Marsicek, Chief of Water Resource Strategy at Denver Water.
As co-founder and Co-Chair of the Congressional Colorado River Caucus, Neguse has brought together a bipartisan mix of lawmakers each representing a state along the Colorado River Basin. The group is working to build consensus on critical issues plaguing the river and support the work of the Colorado River Basin states on how best to address the worsening levels of drought in the Colorado River Basin.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Patricia J. Rettig):
December 2, 2024
Imagine a best-selling, 900-page novel using “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river” as its centerpiece, connecting the earth’s geologic origin and dinosaur age to 1970s rural Colorado.
Now imagine that novel becoming a touchstone for its times, yet still relevant today, as our nation approaches its 250th anniversary. The book is James A. Michener’s Centennial, an unlikely novel published a half-century ago. By creating a microcosm of the country, he explained America to itself in anticipation of the 1976 bicentennial.
That the Pulitzer-prize winning Michener chose as his landscape the West—and the little-known South Platte River on Colorado’s northeastern plains—is surprising only in that this was his first epic novel related to the U.S. mainland.
But ever since he briefly lived in Greeley, Colorado, in the late 1930s before his writing career began, the winding South Platte River stuck with him. As a young college professor, Michener recognized the wealth of stories resulting from the hardships of people surviving in an arid area.
After Michener’s service on a national bicentennial committee left him frustrated, he decided to return to the Centennial State, Colorado, which gained statehood in 1876. He hoped to tell a tale of the American experience, and in the opening chapter a character states, “If we can make the Platte comprehensible to Americans, we can inspire them with the meaning of this continent.”
Forgoing stereotypical Western stories of railroad builders and farmers’ daughters, Michener fictionalized selected histories of settlement and created relatable characters.
South Platte at 52 bridge image by Laura Perry, courtesy USGS.
Native Americans, French trappers, Mennonite settlers, farmers of German-Russian descent, English ranchers, Mexican and Japanese laborers—all depended on the South Platte River and its tributaries in the dry, inhospitable land. They also had to depend on each other.
By starting with the land’s formation, Michener depicts every character as an immigrant. He estimates human arrival in the region at about 12,000 years ago, and those Indigenous peoples and their descendants remain present throughout the story. As more people arrived and society evolved, everyone built lives in relationship with the river.
For many, the river provided a pathway to the West. For a few, it revealed golden nuggets, though the real wealth was the water itself.
Yet what Michener presents as progress gradually becomes recognized as unsustainable. The memorable Potato Brumbaugh has not only the innovative idea of irrigating crops but also the radical concept of digging a tunnel under the Rocky Mountains to import water from west of the Continental Divide. When this source is not enough, groundwater pumping increases, with dire consequences.
Such innovation—water-related and otherwise—is important to understand today, but also significant is knowing the history of how communities got built. Michener also shows the conflicts that arose with each wave of newcomers bringing their own ideas about how to live.
He also demonstrates changing attitudes, including acceptance of racial differences and increasing dismay over environmental destruction. His story concludes in the early 1970s, referencing Watergate, international conflict and immigration. Characters face inflationary times and polluted air and water. They know they need to solve the coming water shortages.
Not much is different today.
The key difference is that as Michener’s characters decry the environmental damage caused by their ancestors and neighbors, they also recognize they need to know their history and honor their longstanding connections to the land and water.
This is what modern humanity has forgotten. Through the innovations of pipes, plumbing and chemical treatments, we have relegated our rivers to the background, as if they were merely an unending supply of water at our command. We have lost our connections to natural resources, to history, to each other.
Patricia Rettig, Associate Professor, Libraries, Colorado State University, March 29, 2022
As we now prepare for our 250th anniversary, Centennial, both the novel and the groundbreaking 26-hour television miniseries airing from 1978 to 1980, reminds us of the country’s strengths.
Nearly 900 pages in, a character skips a Colorado-Nebraska college football game to survey the South Platte by plane. As he nears the Nebraska state line, he says, “No one in Colorado will believe it, but this river is more exciting than football.”
Imagine if more people, in all states, felt the same way. Patricia J. Rettig is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is the archivist for the Water Resources Archive at the Colorado State University Libraries
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Douglas County is adding new homes like crazy. Some of its towns plan to double in size in the next 30 years, but these new homes use shockingly little water, blowing up traditional water planning rules and raising questions about how much water Colorado communities need to grow.
Sterling Ranch, for instance, has more than 10 years of data showing that the master-planned community of 3,400 residences just off Interstate 25 near Littleton uses just 0.18 acre-foot of water for each single family home, about 30% less than most urban homes, where 0.25 to 0.50 acre-foot per home is the norm. An acre-foot equals 326,000 gallons.
The community conserves by requiring water-wise lawns, using super-efficient showers and toilets, and installing separate meters for indoor and outdoor use. It also uses recycled water for its parks.
In response, Douglas County has allowed Sterling Ranch to adopt much lower water standards for the thousands more new homes it plans to build. The community will hold 12,500 homes when it is fully built.
Since 2013, Douglas County commissioners have twice allowed the community to dedicate less water to new homes, agreeing to a reduced standard of 0.40 acre-feet, from 0.75 in 2013 and to 0.24 in 2021. Next month, Sterling Ranch and its water district, Dominion Water and Sanitation, will ask the county for the authority to set the standards in the future as it sees fit, without county review, something that incorporated cities, such as Parker and Castle Rock do now.
Lindsay Rogers, a municipal water conservation analyst with Western Resource Advocates, said the lowering of water demand standards is welcome news.
“The new standard is a good approach,” she said, and very different from traditional planning efforts in Colorado, where cities routinely ask for much more water than is actually needed, placing higher demands on rivers and underground supplies and raising the cost of water service, a major contributor to higher home prices.
“We want to see counties, cities, and water providers setting a water dedication that is as closely aligned as possible with the water use on site,” she said.
“Sterling Ranch is a great example who has done this well, and has proven savings, and should be rewarded for its efforts,” she said.
More and more homes
Like other arid Western states being blistered by drought, warming temperatures, and lower stream flows, Colorado’s water future is not assured. The Colorado Water Plan predicts that the state could need up to 740,000 acre-feet of new water supplies by 2050 under the most dire planning scenarios, where the climate warms intensely and growth surges.
But if new homes can operate with 30% less water than they once did, would that lessen future shortages and provide the state some breathing room? Possibly.
But it’s not likely to do much, according to Kat Weismiller, acting head of the water supply planning section at the Colorado Water Conservation Board, because the scale of development is small.
“We look at a range of drivers, including social values, around water conservation and development to understand future water demands. While the new development at Sterling Ranch is innovative and sets an important example for how we can develop new communities in a water-efficient way, at this time, the scale of this type of development is fairly limited and it would be unlikely to meaningfully shift the way we forecast water needs at the state level or entirely close the gap,” she said.
Ultra-water-efficient homes
The trend toward ultra-water-efficient homes appears to be on an upward trajectory.
Another large Douglas County development under consideration, the Pine Canyon Ranch on Castle Rock’s border, asked for and has been given preliminary approval by the Douglas County Planning Commission to build 800 new homes and 1,000 townhomes and apartments with just 0.27 acre-feet of water per home.
Kurt Walker owns Pine Canyon Ranch. His family has been trying to annex into Castle Rock for 20 years. Tired of waiting for the city to act, the Walker family went to the county. Its plan calls for a sophisticated recycled water system and water-efficient homes.
The plan has drawn opposition from Castle Rock and others worried about the potential use of nonrenewable groundwater, and added traffic and congestion. If the land is annexed into Castle Rock — talks are underway again — the city would likely supply the water, bringing the ranch’s groundwater into its own water system, which uses a combination of surface water, recycled water and groundwater. Castle Rock requires new homes to come with 1.1 acre-feet of water.
Walker said he believes a deal will eventually be reached with Castle Rock. But he defends his family’s use of the nonrenewable groundwater it owns. In Colorado, landowners typically own rights to the water contained in the aquifers beneath their land.
“If I really wanted to maximize the amount of houses on my property, I would not have reduced the water standard to 0.27. … Our plan would leave about 50% of our groundwater rights in the ground, untouched,” Walker said. “If I was in this just to put as many houses on this property as I could, I would have taken everything out of the aquifer that I could. That could have added 600 or 700 houses onto what we proposed. But we didn’t do that.”
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.
A look into the past
There was plenty of that type of development in the 1970s as Douglas County began to boom. Developers tapped its groundwater repeatedly. The water was so pure, it needed little treatment. Other cities, such as Denver, brought water over mountains from miles away. But here, it could just be pulled up through a water well. This helped keep the cost of building homes low and lured developers who built Highlands Ranch, Parker and Castle Rock.
But those underground water supplies proved to be fragile. Some aquifers can be recharged from snowmelt and rain, but these, in the Denver Basin, are sealed in rock formations which recharge slowly. As pumping increased, the aquifers declined. Soon, wells began to fail and alarms began ringing.
The water picture today is much different. In 1985, state lawmakers forced well owners to limit their pumping by extracting just 1% of available water supplies each year, in the hope of extending the aquifers’ life for 100 years.
Now, though the Denver Basin aquifers continue to supply millions of gallons of water to Douglas County communities, the declines have slowed, and water districts and cities have moved to develop and use renewable surface supplies from rivers, and from recycled water plants.
And the county itself is much more concerned about future water supplies today. Though it does not own reservoirs and pipelines, it guides water use, as other counties do, by regulating how much water developers must bring to the table before they are approved to begin building.
This year it created its own Water Resources Commission and is creating a 25-year water plan. The county has been criticized for not creating a longer-term plan, say 100 or 300 years, as nearby counties have done. But County Commissioner George Teal said the 25-year plan is only a first-step.
“We plan on a 20-year horizon right now,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we won’t do a 100-year plan at some point.”
Some say it’s time to stop groundwater use entirely
Steve Boand, a former county commissioner and water consultant, has been monitoring the health of the county’s groundwater supplies for decades.
He supports lower water requirements for new homes, but he wants the county to go further and outlaw building solely with nonrenewable groundwater, something he acknowledges isn’t on the county’s political radar right now.
“It’s up to community planners to figure out what the right balance is — 0.5 is OK, if a house only needs 0.3, and 0.2 can be allocated to other uses, like park land,” Boand said. “We have to try these things to see if they will work.”
Western Resource Advocates’ Rogers says she’s encouraged by the data, at Sterling Ranch and elsewhere, that shows new homes can be built with much lower water profiles. That they are also likely to encourage more growth is real but less concerning, she said.
“It’s possible that these new standards will mean more homes,” she said. “But growth is happening, and it is going to continue whether it is in Douglas County or other places in Colorado. The fact that the growth is happening in places like Sterling Ranch, where they have all of these efficiencies in place, is a good thing.”
Fort Collins, Loveland, Timnath and Windsor residents who get their water from the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District will see a 30% increase or more in rates for 2025…Residents who reach higher tiers of water use and homeowners association accounts that go over allotments will be hit even harder if they don’t find ways to reduce. But after hearing from representatives of HOAs, the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District board backed off charging “irrigation customers” five times as much when they go over their allotments, which were assigned at the time their accounts were created but haven’t been enforced. Instead, this segment of ratepayers, which includes commercial customers and parks, will pay twice as much as the normal rate for overages…The board approved the rate increases for 2025 on Nov. 19…
Base fees for residential, commercial and irrigation customers are increasing 30%. On top of that, rates per 1,000 gallons of water are increasing 30% across all tiers for residential customers. The 30% rate increases also apply to the three or four developments in what is known as “The City of Fort Collins service area as defined by IGA.”
[…]
The water district is also introducing a new fourth tier for residential customers. The cost of water will be five times higher than the next closest tier — for extremely high water use that exceeds 50,000 gallons per month…
Fees for single-family development taps will increase anywhere from 19% to 31%.
Fees for multifamily development taps will increase 15%.
Fees for commercial development taps will increase 33%.
Arapahoe County has enough water to meet its needs through 2050, according to a new study, but major steps will need to be taken to reduce future demand and protect the county’s groundwater supplies.
Arapahoe County Commissioner Jeff Baker, in a statement, said the study is a cautionary tale, showing that while existing supplies generate 141,000 acre-feet of water each year, future growth could strain those supplies.
“If they want to build, they need to make sure there is enough water to provide adequate water resources to people. This is not a green light to develop,” Baker said.
Arapahoe County is home to 656,000 people, who use 83,400 acre-feet of water a year. By 2050, those numbers are expected to soar, with population topping 900,000 and water demand increasing to as much as 116,000 acre-feet a year, according to the new report.
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.
As with other counties, Arapahoe County does not deliver water, relying instead on 12 separate water districts and agencies to supply its communities, according to Anders Nelson, a spokesman for the county. Some of its supplies come from renewable surface water — primarily runoff from mountain snowpack — while the more rural parts of the county rely on groundwater.
The study outlines several steps that should be taken to protect the fast-growing community southeast of Denver from future water shortages. The county will require developers to document adequate water for new construction projects; implement county-wide water-efficient landscaping rules, and encourage regional partnerships and water sharing agreements.
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.
The twin turbines of Xcel Energy’s Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon can generate 15 megawatts. The plant was down for about a year and a half, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
The Shoshone Hydropower Plant in Glenwood Canyon was not operating for nearly all of 2023 and more than half of 2024, adding urgency to a campaign seeking to secure the plant’s water rights for the Western Slope.
According to records from the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the Shoshone Hydropower Plant was not operating from Feb. 28, 2023 until Aug. 8, 2024. According to Michelle Aguayo, a spokesperson from Xcel Energy, the company that owns the plant, there was a rockfall which forced an outage as well as maintenance which impacted operations during that time period.
The Grizzly Creek Fire burning along the Colorado River on August 14, 2020. By White River National ForestU.S. Forest Service – Public Domain
In 2024 the plant has been down for 221 days; in 2023 for 307 days; in 2022 for 91 days and in 2021 for 143 days. Water Resources Division 5 Engineer James Heath said he began tracking Shoshone outages in 2021 when they began to happen more frequently, starting with the post-Grizzly Creek fire mudslides in Glenwood Canyon.
“It was all these extended outages and just being able to have some sort of record of what was going on,” Heath said. “I kept getting questions from the parties on how many days we were operating ShOP and what the priorities were on those different days.”
The recent extended outages of the plant increase the urgency of the effort by the Colorado River Water Conservation District to acquire Shoshone’s water rights, which are some of the oldest and most powerful non-consumptive rights on the main stem of the Colorado River. If the plant were to shut down permanently, it would threaten the Western Slope’s water supply. The water rights could be at risk of being abandoned or acquired by a Front Range entity.
At a tour of the Shoshone plant in October, hosted by the Water for Colorado Coalition, River District Director of Strategic Partnerships Amy Moyer explained why the Shoshone water rights are important for improving water security and climate resilience on the Western Slope.
“As we’re sitting here in the iconic Glenwood Canyon. … It is a beautiful place, but we have an active highway, a railroad, a hydro power plant, all nestled in this tiny canyon that has experienced its fair share of natural hazards and risks over the years,” Moyer said. “When we’re looking at the level of risk, that is why we are looking for permanent protections for these water rights, and why we have a willing partner in Xcel Energy realizing that they had an incredible asset that was meaningful to Colorado’s Western Slope and the Colorado River itself.”
Water runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
According to the terms of ShOP, when it is on during the summer, the plant can call 1,250 cfs. In the wintertime, that number falls to 900 cfs. The agreement is in place for 40 years (with 32 remaining), a relatively short period in water planning, after which it could be renegotiated. And ShOP doesn’t have the stronger, more permanent backing of a water court decree.
“ShOP came about as a band aid to kind of maintain the river flow and the river regime when the plant was out,” said Brendon Langenhuizen, River District director of technical advocacy. “ShOP wasn’t meant to be for year after year after year of the plant being down.”
The Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. The River District has made a deal with Xcel Energy to buy the water rights associated with the plant to keep water flowing on the Western Slope. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
The River District’s campaign to acquire the Shoshone water rights has been gaining momentum over the last year, with about $55 million in committed funding so far from entities across the Western Slope, the River District and the state of Colorado. The River District plans to apply for $40 million in funding from the U.S. Bureau Reclamation’s B2E funding. This money from the Inflation Reduction Act is earmarked for environmental drought mitigation.
The River District’s plan is to add an instream flow use to the water rights in addition to their current use for hydropower. That requires working with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which is the only entity in the state allowed to hold instream flow rights which preserve the environment, as well as getting a new water court decree to allow the change in use.
That way, when the Shoshone plant is offline, the instream flow right would be activated to continue pulling water downstream, making ShOP obsolete and solidifying a critical water right for the Western Slope.
Xcel would lease the water right for hydropower from the River District for as long as the plant is in operation.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
“Colorado’s Western Slope is truly at an epicenter of increased temperatures and decreased streamflows that are exacerbating temperature issues, creating water quality issues,” Moyer said. “So it’s imperative that we look for these legacy level, permanent solutions to build resiliency in our basin.”
On October 14th, the Poudre Flows Project, a collaboration of Colorado Water Trust, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Cache la Poudre Water Users Association, the cities of Fort Collins, Greeley, and Thornton, Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, began increasing flows in the Cache la Poudre River. During the week of October 14, Thornton added flows between the mouth of the Poudre River and the confluence with the South Platte.
The Poudre Flows Project aims to reconnect the Cache la Poudre River past numerous frequent dry-up locations between the mouth of the Poudre Canyon and the confluence with the South Platte River while still allowing water rights owners to use their water. Under a temporary plan approved by the State, water provided by the cities of Thornton and/or Greeley can be used in a trial run of the innovative Poudre Flows Project. As conditions allow, the temporary plan allows water provided by Thornton to be used to increase flows by up to 20 cubic feet per second (“cfs”) for up to two weeks this fall and again in the spring. As conditions allow, the plan will also allow water provided by Greeley to be used to increase flows between 3-5 cfs between the months of April to October.
“The Poudre Flows project has brought a cross section of water users and river advocates together to add and protect flows on the Poudre River,” said Emily Hunt, Deputy Utilities Director for the City of Thornton. “Thornton is proud to contribute the first deliveries of water in a trial run of this project and is excited to continue its work with the Colorado Water Trust and the Poudre Flows partners to achieve significant environmental benefits for the Poudre River.”
Fly fishing on the Poudre River west of Fort Collins. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
The Poudre Flows Project implements a new mechanism known as a Streamflow Augmentation Plan that was approved by the Colorado legislature to help restore depleted river flows. Generally, an augmentation plan is a tool used by water users to increase flexibility and maximize utilization of water supplies on a stream while still protecting other water users. While augmentation plans are typically used to replace water diverted from the river to meet water use needs, the Poudre Flows Project uses this same tool to meet environmental needs by releasing water to the river and protecting it from diversion by others as it flows downstream.
“The Colorado Water Conservation Board is proud to be a part of this critical effort to protect flows on the Cache La Poudre River,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “Through our agency’s Instream Flow Program, we are able to ensure that the river maintains its vital flows, supporting both the environment and the communities that depend on it. This collaboration highlights the importance of innovative solutions to protect Colorado’s water for generations to come.”
Historically, environmentalists and recreationalists have been at odds with water users who take water out of the river. The Poudre Flows Project is bringing together those who have previously been in conflict, including municipalities, water conservancy districts, state agencies and agricultural producers. This group will strategically leverage water rights to preserve and improve river flows in times of low flow. The Poudre Flows Project has a pending water court case; but in the meantime, Greeley and Thornton have obtained temporary approvals in October from the Colorado Division of Water Resources, via substitute water supply plans, to use their water rights in the Streamflow Augmentation Plan for one year. This is the first Streamflow Augmentation Plan in the state and could be a model for streamflow improvement in other river basins.
Playing in the Poudre River at the Fort Collins whitewater park. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
“Greeley is excited to see the Poudre Flows project going live after many years of regional collaboration, enabling legislation, and investment in this innovative water administration strategy,” said Sean Chambers, Director of Water Utilities for the City of Greeley. “The project will physically enhance the Cache la Poudre river, its aquatic habitat, and the administration of water rights, and Greeley appreciates the Colorado Water Trust’s leadership and project management.”
THE POUDRE FLOWS STORY: For more than a decade, the water community of the Poudre River Basin has been working on an innovative plan to reconnect one of the hardest working rivers in Colorado, the Cache la Poudre River. Since the Colorado gold rush in the mid-1800s, people have diverted water from the Cache la Poudre River for beneficial uses that have helped northeastern Colorado grow into the agricultural and industrial powerhouse it is today.
While the Poudre River flows are high during the spring runoff, there are times throughout the year when the river dries out entirely in places below some water-diversion structures. To combat dry conditions and improve river health, local communities have worked hard over the past decade with the goal of improving and bringing vitality to the Cache la Poudre River. The Poudre Flows Project is a perfect example of those efforts.
The Poudre River during a dry-up period. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
Colorado Water Trust, a statewide nonprofit organization with a mission to restore water to Colorado’s rivers, has been one small part of this process. Over a decade ago, Colorado Water Trust had an unorthodox, pioneering idea to reconnect the Poudre River, and the water community of the Poudre River Basin said, “Let’s get it done.” A broad collaboration of water providers, cities, state government, nonprofits, and a collective of farmers have worked tirelessly to make this novel idea a reality and rewater the Poudre River. Finally, this year, the Poudre Flows Project will be put into action through the generous contributions of water by the cities of Greeley and Thornton. This is the first step toward reconnecting the Poudre River both now and for future generations.
”The Poudre Flows Project is such a great example of collaboration and innovative thinking when it comes to water, and it shows a recognition of how important our streams are to us as Coloradans,” said Kate Ryan, Executive Director of Colorado Water Trust. “You have all different types of water users on the Poudre River coming together to take responsibility for the health and vitality of this river and to find ways to protect it for future generations. The success of this project could serve as a blueprint across the state for communities of water users to protect their own rivers and streams in the face of a changing climate.”
Colorado’s water landscape is very complex and the legal structure for this project is innovative. The Poudre Flows Project will provide water right owners a flexible opportunity to add their water to the plan on a temporary or permanent basis. This groundbreaking project has the potential to be replicated in other basins throughout Colorado. Lastly, one of the unique aspects of this project is that it doesn’t change the Poudre River from being the hardest-working river in Colorado. Instead, the Poudre Flows Project provides an avenue for optimal management of river water, to protect people’s livelihoods AND the river itself. The Poudre Flows Project proves that if we work together, we can maintain all that we love about Colorado, from the beauty and thrills of a flowing river to the local food and beer that river water helps provide, and the flourishing neighborhoods that depend on the river’s water in their homes.
“Partnerships are the key ingredient to the success of the Poudre Flows Project,” said Katie Donahue, Director of the City of Fort Collins Natural Areas Department. “Together we are launching a new chapter of river resiliency for our community.”
FUNDERS FOR THIS PROJECT INCLUDE: • Xcel Energy Foundation • City of Fort Collins • City of Greeley • City of Thornton • Northern Water • Gates Family Foundation • Eggleston Family Fund of the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado • New Belgium Brewing Company • Odell Brewing Company • Alan Panebaker Memorial Endowment of the Yampa Valley Community Foundation • Telluray Foundation • Colorado Water Conservation Board
Cache la Poudre River drop structure. Photo credit: Northern Water
Cache la Poudre River. Photo credit: Allen BestFort Collins community members kayak and sit on the shore of the Poudre River during the grand opening of the Poudre River Whitewater Park off of North College and Vine Drive Oct. 12. (Alyssa Uhl | The Collegian)Poudre River whitewater park. Photo credit: Rocky Mountain CollegianFort Collins community members kayak and sit on the shore of the Poudre River during the grand opening of the Poudre River Whitewater Park off of North College and Vine Drive Oct. 12. (Alyssa Uhl | The Collegian)Construction begins on Cache la Poudre River for fish ladder near Watson Lake. Photo credit: Jason Clay/Colorado Parks and WildlifeCache la Poudre tributaries cutthroat stocking event August 2020. Photo credit: Jason Clay via Colorado Parks and WildlifeCache la Poudre River May 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs Ralph Parshall squats next to the flume he designed at the Bellevue Hydrology Lab using water from the Cache la Poudre River. 1946. Photo Credit: Water Resource Archive, Colorado State University, via Legacy Water News.Cache la Poudre River from South Trail via Wikimedia Foundation.Grand River Ditch gaging station. Photo credit Greg Hobbs.Cache la Poudre River
Lake Powell has been about a quarter-full. The snowpack looks strong now, but it’s anybody’s guess whether there will be enough runoff come April and May to substantially augment the reservoir. May 2022 photo/Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
October 24, 2024
Colorado River Basin states have scaled back their demands on the river. But agreement about solutions proportionate to the challenge remains distant as the 2025 deadline nears.
The story so far: Andy Mueller, the manager of the Colorado River District, the lead water policy body for 15 counties on the Western Slope of Colorado, used his organization’s annual seminar this year to call for the state to begin planning for potential curtailments of diversions. The river has delivered far less water in the 21st century than was assumed by delegates of the seven basin states when they drew up the Colorado River Compact in 1922. Might higher flows resume? Very unlikely, given what we know about climate change. See Part Iof the series and Part II.
“Having a state plan for compact curtailment has been on the table for what seems like forever, likely 2005 to 2007,” said Ken Neubecker. Now semi-retired, he has been carefully watching Colorado River affairs for several decades and has represented several organizations at different times.
Why hasn’t Colorado moved forward with this planning? When I called him to glean his insights, Neubecker shared that he believes it’s because such planning encounters a legal and political minefield.
“It’s not as simple as pre-1922 rights are protected and post-1922 rights are going to be subject to curtailment based on the existing prior appropriation system.”
Denver Water’s Moffat Tunnel diversion from the Fraser River to Boulder Creek. Most of water diverted to Colorado’s Front Range cities from Western Slope rivers and creeks have legal rights junior to the Colorado River compact. Photo/Allen Best
Front Range municipal water providers and many of Colorado’s agriculture diversions are post-1922 compact. And so are some agricultural rights on the Western Slope.
“I think everybody thinks that well, we’re on the slow-moving train and the cliff is getting closer but it’s not close enough – and there are other things that we can do to slow the train down.”
Taylor Hawes, Colorado River Program director for the Nature Conservancy via Water Education Colorado.
Taylor Hawes, who has been monitoring Colorado River affairs for 27 years, now on behalf of The Nature Conservancy, suspects that Colorado doesn’t want to show its legal hand or even admit the potential need to curtail water use in Colorado. She contends that planning will ultimately provide far more value.
“The first rule you learn in working with water is that users want certainty. Planning is something we do in every aspect of our lives, and planning is typically considered smart. It need not be scary,” she told Big Pivots. “We have all learned to plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
Colorado can start by creating a task force or some other extension of the state engineer’s office to begin exploring the mechanisms and pathways that will deliver the certainty.
“We don’t have to have all the answers now,” Hawes said. “And just because you start the process for exploring the mechanism to administer compact compliance rules doesn’t mean you implement them. It will give people an understanding of what to expect, how the state is thinking about it.”
Rio Grande near Monte Vista. Meeting Colorado’s commitments that are specified in the compact governing the Rio Grande requires constant juggling of diversions. Photo/Allen Best
Compacts have forced Colorado to curtail diversions in three other river basins: the Arkansas, Republican and Rio Grande. The Rio Grande offers a graphic example of curtailment of water use as necessary to meet compact obligations on a week-by-week basis.
The Republican River case is a more drawn-out process with a longer timeline and a 2030 deadline. In both places, farmers are being paid to remove their land from irrigation. The Colorado General Assembly this year awarded $30 million each to the two basins to bolster funding for compensation.
A study commissioned by the Nature Conservancy that involved interviews with water managers and others in those river basins had this takeaway message: “the longer (that) actions are delayed to address compact compliance, the less ability local water users have to tailor compliance-related measures to local conditions and needs and reduce their adverse impacts.”
In the Arkansas Basin, Colorado had to pay $30 million and water available to irrigators was reduced by one third.
“That’s the first lesson in how not to do compact compliance: do not wait to be sued because (then you lose) the flexibility to do stuff the right way,” said one unidentified water manager along the Arkansas River.
Neubecker points to another basin, the South Platte. Even in 1967, Colorado legislation recognized a connection between water drawn from wells along the river and flows within the river. The 2002 drought forced the issue, causing Hal Simpson, then the state engineer, to curtail well pumping, creating much anguish.
Ken Neubecker via LinkedIn
Creating a curtailment plan won’t be easy, Neubecker warns. “It could easily take 10 years. ’Look how long it took to create the Colorado Water Plan. It took a couple years and then we had an update five years later. And that was easy compared to this.”
All available evidence suggests the Colorado River Basin states are nowhere near agreement.
In August, Tom Wilmoth provided a perspective from Arizona in a guest opinion published by The Hill under the title of “Time is running out to solve the Colorado River crisis.” As an attorney he has worked for both the Arizona water agency and the Bureau of Reclamation before helping form a law firm in 2008.
“It has taken 24 years for the problem to crystalize, but less than 24 months remain to develop a solution,” he wrote. “Yet there appears to be little urgency in today’s discussion among the Colorado River Basin’s key players.”
Wilmoth said ”Deferring hard conversations today increases the risk of litigation later.” He, like all others, sees a reasonable chance it would end up before the Supreme Court – with the risk of the justices appointing a special master to adjudicate the conflict. “Its recent tendency has been to appoint individuals lacking in subject matter expertise, a troubling prospect given the complex issues at play.”
The area around Yuma, Ariz., and California’s Imperial Valley provide roughly 95% of the vegetables available at grocery stores in the United States during winter months. February 2017 photo/Allen Best
Monitoring the conversations from Southwest Colorado, Rod Proffitt sees Mueller trying to prepare people in the River District for the challenges ahead.
“I think he has tried to scare people. He is trying to get them prepared to make some sacrifices, and limiting growth is a sacrifice.”
A semi-retired water attorney, Proffitt is also a director of Big Pivots, a 501-c-3 non-profit.
Make no mistake, says Proffitt, more cuts in use must be made – and they need to be shared, both in the lower basin and in the upper basin. What those cuts need to be, he isn’t sure. Nor do they necessarily need to be the same.
For example, he can imagine cuts that are triggered by lowering reservoir levels. At a certain point, lower basins must reduce their use by X amount and upper basin states by Y amount.
The federal government has mostly offered carrots to the states to reduce consumption, a recognition of the river’s average 12.4 million acre-feet flows, far short of the flows assumed by the compact. It also has sticks, particularly regarding lower-basin use, but has mostly avoided using its authority. Instead, the lower-basin has reduced use voluntarily, if aided by the federal subsidies.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, have yielded a river of money for projects in the West that broadly seek to improve resiliency in the face of drought and climate change. The seeds have been planted in many places. For example, a recent round of funding produced up to $233 million for the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona for water conservation efforts.
The federal government has also offered incentives to reduce consumption in the upper basin. The System Conservation Pilot Program ran from 2015 to 2018. The 2024 program was funded with $30 million through the Inflation Reduction Act and had hopes for conserving about 66,400 acre-feet.
The federal government, through the Bureau of Reclamation, has clear authority to declared water shortages in the lower basin. It has warned that three million acre-feet less water must be used. The lower-basin argues that the upper basin should share in some of this burden.
Grand Junction has a maze of irrigation canals but the municipal water utility gets water from a creek that flows from the Grand Mesa. Some diversions in Colordo are pre-compact, but many others occurred after 1922. This is a scene from Grand Junction. Photo/Allen Best
Should the federal government get out the stick?
“Nobody wants to apply vinegar this close to the November election,” said James Eklund when we talked in late September about the stalemate on the river.
Eklund has had a long association with the Colorado River. His own family homesteaded on the Western Slope near Colbran in the 1880s and the ranch is still in the family. He lives in Denver, though, and was an assistant attorney in the state attorney general’s office in 2009, when I wrote my first story. He later directed the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the lead agency for state policy.
For the last few years Eklund has been on his own, more or less, a water attorney now working for Sherman and Howard, a leading Denver firm, while trying to represent clients with diverse agriculture water rights.
“Litigation is a failure,” he said when I asked him about Mueller’s remarks in Grand Junction. He contends the upper basin must come to the table with more ideas about how to solve the structural imbalance between supplies and demands than it has so far. And this, he said, will involves some pain.
Creating compact curtailment will involve rule-making, though, and that will take time and effort. Echoing Denver Water’s position, he says it will divert Colorado from the more important and immediate work of helping negotiate solutions.
Eklund suspects an ulterior motive of the River District: to get the state to play its cards on what curtailment could look like so that it can begin jockeying for position.
On the other hand, he believes cutbacks should be premised on two bedrock principles: voluntary and compensated. But Eklund also says that if the situation becomes desperate enough, water will continue to find its way to cities. “The Front Range is not going to bend its knee to alfalfa plants. It’s not going to do it.”
And then, Colorado’s Constitution allows municipalities to take water. It requires compensation.
The Bureau of Reclamation has said the same thing in the lower basin. Las Vegas and other cities will not be allowed to dry up.
The Bureau of Reclamation has said that Las Vegas and other cities will not be cut off from water in the Colordo River. . Photo/Allen Best
But what if compact curtailment means making the hard decision about who doesn’t get water and does not get compensated – people like the farmers near Fort Morgan who, in 2002, had to cease pumping water?
Neubecker characterizes the position of Colorado as one of conflict avoidance. Look at where it got Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minster, in his negotiations with Hitler.
What Colorado must do is prepare for the worst-case scenario. “It’s a doomsday plan,” Neubecker says of compact curtailment. “Make the plan, involve all the people who are going to be effected by the plan, and put it on the shelf – but not too far back on the shelf, just in case you need it”
For now, water levels in the two big reservoirs are holding more or less steady.
Another winter like 2002 could trigger renewed clanging of alarm bells.
John Fleck at Morelos Dam, at start of pulse flow, used 4/4/14 as my new twitter avatar
In New Mexico, Fleck, the author, who also monitors Colorado River matters at his Inkstain blog, rejects the metaphor of the Titanic or the idea that conflict is inevitable. In 2002, California was still using 5.1 million acre-feet from the Colorado River, both for agriculture and to supply the metropolitan areas of Southern California. This was well above the state’s apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet. “The rhetoric was that it will be a disaster to California’s economy” to return to the allocated flows.
California eventually did cut back and it has done just fine. “Everybody would prefer not to do the adaptation, but they have done it just fine. We see that over and over again in community responses to drought in the Western United States,” he said.
Lake Powell currently has filled to 40% of capacity, a marked improvement from February 2023, when the reservoir had fallen to 22% of capacity. Mead is at 36% of capacity. The situation is not as tense as it was two years ago. That could change in the blink of another hot, dry runoff like that in 2002.
Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage between 1 January 2023 and 15 October 2024, highlighting the amount of reservoir recovery during each snowmelt season and the amount of reservoir drawdown during intervening periods. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Click the link to read the article on the Denver Water website (Cathy Proctor and Jay Adams):
October 23, 2024
Preparing a water system to meet future challenges means investing in a flexible, resilient operation that’s ready for just about anything — such as a warming climate, pandemics, population growth, periodic droughts, competition for water resources, security threats and changing regulatory environments.
From meeting day-to-day challenges to addressing long-range issues, Denver Water is building and maintaining just such a system, one that stretches from the mountains to homes and businesses across the Denver metro area.
The goal: Ensuring a clean, safe, reliable water supply for 1.5 million people, about 25% of Colorado’s population, now and in the future.
To continue meeting that goal, Denver Water expects to invest about $1.8 billion into its water system during the next 10 years, from large projects to regular inspection and maintenance programs designed to ensure the system is flexible, resilient and efficient.
In addition to rates paid by customers, funding for Denver Water’s infrastructure projects, day-to-day operations and emergency expenses, like water main breaks, comes from bond sales, cash reserves, hydropower sales, grants, federal funding and fees paid when new homes and buildings are connected to the system. The utility does not make a profit or receive tax dollars.
Here’s an overview of some of Denver Water’s recently completed and ongoing work:
Northwater Treatment Plant
Denver Water in 2024 celebrated the completion of the new, state-of-the-art Northwater Treatment Plant next to Ralston Reservoir north of Golden. The new treatment plant was completed on schedule and under budget.
The treatment plant can clean up to 75 million gallons of water per day and the plant’s design left room for the plant to be expanded to clean up to 150 million gallons of water per day in the future as needed.
A major feature of the site visible from Highway 93 is the round, concrete tops of two giant water storage tanks. Most of the two tanks are buried underground; each tank is capable of holding 10 million gallons of clean, safe drinking water.
The plant is a major part of Denver Water’s North System Renewal Project, a multi-year initiative that included building a new, 8.5-mile pipeline between the Northwater Treatment Plant and the Moffat Treatment Plant. The new pipe, completed in 2022, replaced one that dated from the 1930s.
The Moffat Treatment Plant, which also started operations in the 1930s, is still used a few months during the year and will eventually transition to a water storage facility.
Lead Reduction Program
The water Denver Water delivers to customers is lead-free, but lead can get into drinking water as the water passes through old lead service lines that carry water from the water main in the street into the home.
The Lead Reduction Program, which launched in January 2020, is the biggest public health campaign in the utility’s history and considered a leader in the effort to remove lead pipes from the nation’s drinking water infrastructure.
Denver Water crews dug up old lead service lines from customers’ homes for years of study that led to the utility’s Lead Reduction Program. Denver Water has replaced more than 28,000 old, customer-owned lead service lines at no direct cost to the customer. Photo credit: Denver Water. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The program reduces the risk of lead getting into drinking water by raising the pH of the water delivered and replacing the estimated 60,000 to 64,000 old, customer-owned lead service lines at no direct cost to the customer. Households enrolled in the program are communicated with regularly and provided with water pitchers and filters certified to remove lead to use for cooking, drinking and preparing infant formula until six months after their lead service line is replaced.
To date, Denver Water has replaced more than 28,000 customer-owned lead service lines at no direct cost to the customers. The program received $76 million in federal funding in 2022 to help accelerate the pace of replacement work in underserved communities, resulting in thousands of additional lines being replaced during 2023 and 2024.
Water storage
Work on the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project, the subject of more than 20 years of planning, got underway in April 2022. Expected to be complete in 2027, the project will raise the height of the existing dam by 131 feet.
The higher dam will nearly triple the amount of water that can be stored in Gross Reservoir, providing Denver Water with more flexibility to manage its water supply in the face of increasingly variable weather and snowpack patterns.
Check out the work done on Gross Dam during summer 2024:
After two years of preparation and foundation work, Gross Dam’s new look began to take shape in 2024 when workers began placing new, roller-compacted concrete at the base of the Boulder County dam in early May.
Raising the dam involves building 118 steps on the downstream side of the dam. Each step is 4 feet tall with a 2-foot setback.
At the height of construction, there will be as many as 400 workers on-site, and when complete the dam will be the tallest in Colorado.
Ongoing investments for the future
As the metro area grows and changes, it’s often an opportunity for Denver Water to upgrade older elements of its system.
Denver Water is continuing its investment in replacing about 80,000 feet of water mains under streets every year while also installing new water delivery pipe where needed. The utility has more than 3,000 miles of pipe in its system, enough to stretch from Seattle to Orlando.
In early 2025, Denver Water will wrap up a major project: replacing 5 miles of 130-year-old water pipe under East Colfax Avenue, from Broadway to Yosemite Street. The pipe replacement work was done in advance of the East Colfax Bus Rapid Transit project. That effort, led by the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, broke ground in early October.
In addition to replacing the water mains under Colfax, Denver Water crews are replacing any lead service lines they encounter during the project.
Changing our landscapes
In recognition of the drought in the Colorado River Basin, Denver Water and several large water providers across the basin in 2022 committed to substantially expanding existing efforts to conserve water.
Among the goals outlined in the agreement is the replacement of 30% of the nonfunctional, water-intensive Kentucky bluegrass in our communities — like the decorative expanses of turf grass in traffic medians — with more natural ColoradoScapes that include water-wise plants and cooling shade trees that offer more benefits for our climate, wildlife and the environment.
Denver Water supported a new state law passed in 2024 designed to halt the expansion of nonfunctional, water-thirsty grass by prohibiting the planting or installation of high-water-using turf in commercial, institutional, or industrial property or a transportation corridor. The bill takes effect Jan. 1, 2026. The new law doesn’t affect residential properties.
To help customers remodel their landscapes to create diverse, climate-resilient ColoradoScapes, Denver Water offered two workshops this year and is planning additional workshops in 2025. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water also is working with partners — including local governments, fellow water providers and experts in water use and landscapes — to develop programs that will help transform our landscapes and expand our indoor and outdoor conservation efforts.
The utility in 2024 held water-wise gardening workshops and offered a limited number of customer discounts on Resource Central’s popular Garden In A Box water-wise garden kits and turf removal services.
Get tips and information about rebates available for conserving water indoors and out at denverwater.org/Conserve.
The utility also has started work transforming its own landscapes, including about 12,000 square feet around its Einfeldt pump station near the University of Denver. It’s Youth Education program has helped Denver-area students remodel landscapes at their schools.
And it’s supporting partners, such as Denver’s Parks and Recreation Department, which is replacing 10 acres of water-intensive Kentucky bluegrass covering the traffic medians on Quebec Street south of Interstate 70. The project is replacing the homogenous expanse of turf with a closely managed, water-wise Colorado prairie meadow filled with grasses and wildflowers that provide habitat to pollinators.
These projects are examples of how Denver Water is planning for a warmer, drier future by partnering with our community. Together, we can build a system and a landscape that supports our customers and creates a thriving, vibrant community now and in the future.
Denver Water’s collection system via the USACE EIS
A “water year” with two troubling features — a slow start to winter’s mountain snowpack and a very hot, very dry summer — wound up in surprising ways.
In short, despite those two big factors, supplies for Denver Water remained strong and the 2023-24 water year, having opened with drama, closed as a quiet success.
Strontia Springs Dam, seen here about 6 miles up Waterton Canyon, received enough water to fill in 2024, with extra spilled into the South Platte River. Photo credit: Denver Water.
What’s a water year? It’s that span from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30 that water utilities, hydrologists and other experts use to track the flow of annual precipitation, from early snowfall through runoff and the months of water use on farm fields and in cities.
And the water year ending last month, on Sept. 30, 2024, clocked in as a good one for Denver Water.
After the slow start, snowpack improved over late winter and spring, reservoirs filled and spilled and customers mostly stuck to watering rules, even amid a scorching, low-rain summer in Denver Water’s service area.
Some high notes from the past 12 months:
It marked the first year since 2019 that peak snowpack in both of Denver Water’s key river basins was above normal: 101% in the South Platte River basin and 124% in the Colorado River basin.
Denver Water’s reservoirs hit capacity, always an important outcome. And a two of those — Cheesman and Strontia Springs — spilled with excess water for the first time since 2019. Two others, Dillon and Williams Fork, spilled for the second straight year.
Supplies were so strong on the Front Range that Denver Water kept Roberts Tunnel — the conveyance that brings water from Dillon Reservoir on the West Slope — turned off for six months, from January to mid-July. The Moffat Tunnel that brings water from the Fraser River to Gross Reservoir was offline for three weeks in June.
It marked a remarkable turnaround from some big obstacles earlier in the year.
By mid-January 2024, anemic snowpack was ranked among the five worst totals for that time of year on record.
After a slow start to the year, a series of snowstorms boosted the snowpack, supporting recreation on Denver Water’s reservoirs, including paddleboarding on Dillon Reservoir, throughout the summer. Photo credit: Denver Water.
And a tough summer awaited. Denver Water’s records put the summer of 2024 as the fifth-hottest in the region. And precipitation was weak, ranking fourth worst in the utility’s service area.
But after that slow start, the snowpack rallied. Big snows occurred in late January, followed by normal snows in February and a big March storm that pushed snowpack numbers up, especially in the North Fork of the South Platte River.
Then, in a big surprise, the storms kept coming. Not only in April but in May, also, weeks beyond the point snowpack typically stops building.
More good news followed. Spring soil moisture was in good shape, so water stayed in streams and filled reservoirs instead of soaking into bone-dry ground, a frequent problem in recent years.
Then, customers did their part, largely adhering to watering rules that kept water use stable even amid such a hot and dry summer.
Daily use in Denver Water’s service area never soared above average and total summer demand from customers hewed close to normal.
“Customers continue to understand the basics: Don’t water in the heat of the day, turn off your irrigation after rainstorms. Keep your watering to two or, at most, three days a week,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supplies.
More customers are remodeling their yards and replacing water-needy Kentucky bluegrass with water-wise ColoradoScapes like this one that thrives in our semi-arid climate. Photo credit: Denver Water.
For Elder, the success story of the 2024 water year was how well Denver Water was able to manage its system to maximize flows for recreation and the environment.
Healthy supplies meant more water releases from Dillon that bolstered rafting in the Blue River. Good supplies also helped support rafting on the North Fork for the annual BaileyFest event. It also kept reservoir elevations high for flatwater recreation, such as boating and paddleboarding.
It also allowed releases to help aquatic environments, such as keeping stream temperatures in a safe range for fish in the Fraser River and providing flushing flows to improve fish habitat on the South Platte.
Supplies also helped ensure Denver Water could provide water downstream on the Colorado River to support endangered fish above Grand Junction.
“After a nerve-wracking start, the water year improved in a hurry,” Elder said. “Full reservoirs and good runoff give us the flexibility to move water around in a way that helps a lot of interests while serving our customers.”
Now, as the new water year kicks off, the watch for precipitation begins.
And we enter the new water year with good news: Denver Water reservoirs begin the 2024-25 water year with good supplies. But a dry summer in the region has left dry, thirstier soils that could drink up melting snow next spring. That could make 2025 trickier.
The wait, and watch, is on.
With the 2023-24 water year now in the books, Denver Water’s planners are eyeing the weather patterns to see what the winter storms will bring. Mountain snowpack, captured and stored in mountain reservoirs such as Strontia Springs (pictured) supplies most of Denver’s water. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Roaring Fork River September 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
October 22, 2024
Our story so far: Andy Mueller used the Colroado River District seminar this year to call for Colorado to begin planning for potential curtailment of the Colorado River. The state engineer, who is legally responsible for such planning, it it occurs, pushed back, saying first things first. For Part I, go here.
Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, has used the district’s annual seminar in Grand Junction in years past to warn of a worsening situation in the Colorado River Basin. Two years ago, for example, he warned that flows were already well below the 20th century averages. Might those flows of 13.5 to 14 million acre feet further decline to 9.5 million acre-feet in decades ahead?
Even relatively healthy snowfalls don’t necessarily produce robust volumes of runoff. For example, snow during the winter of 2023-24 was good but runoff just 84% of average.
“A new different” is how Dave Kanzer, the River District’s director for science and interstate matters, described the runoff numbers. [ed. emphasis mine]
“We are just kind of treading water, and where we are next year could be similar to where we are this year — unless something changes,” he added during the district’s seminar in Grand Junction. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.”
Warming temperatures most likely will produce continued declines in river flows. That was a key takeaway of the presentation by Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist. He’s a careful scientist, clear to differentiate what is known from that which is not. Much of what he said was not particularly new. Some of the conclusions he offered were little changed from those of a decade ago – but with one key difference. Another decade of data has been compiled to support those conclusions.
Seven of Colorado’s nine warmest years have occurred since 2012. The rise can be seen most clearly in summer and fall records. This past summer was part of that trend. It was the sixth hottest summer in Colorado’s recorded history going back to the late 1800s.
Some places were hotter than others, though. In Grand Junction, gages at Walker Airfield recorded the hottest June-August period ever, an average of more than 80 degrees. That’s the average temperature 24/7, day and night.
Precipitation? No clear trend has emerged. Levels vary greatly from year to year.
Graphic credit: Russ Schumacher/Colorado Climate Center
Integration of temperature and precipitation records tell a more complex and concerning story. Rising temperatures have produced earlier runoff. The warmth also exacerbates evapotranspiration, which is also called evaporative demand. The warmer it is, the more surface air draws water from the plants and dries out the soils.
The most powerful way of explaining all this was in two sequences of slides, one of which is reproduced here.
“The timing shift, even if the peak doesn’t change all that much – the timing is quite important,” said Schumacher. Colorado River flows at Dotsero, near Glenwood Canyon, have already declined 25% during late summer.
Schumacher and other scientists describe predictions with various degrees of confidence. There is, he said, high confidence of a future warming atmosphere that to an even greater degree reduces runoff no matter how much snow falls in winter. We can be sure of temperatures rising between one and four degrees F by mid-century, he said.
Unless Colorado gets far more snow and rain, the ColoradoRiver will decline further. [ed. emphasis mine]
Future warming depends upon how rapidly greenhouse gas emissions rise globally. In mid-October, they were at 418 parts per million high on the slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. They were 315 when the first measurements were taken there in 1958 and roughly 280 at the start of the industrial era.
Graphic credit: Russ Schumacher/Colorado Climate Center
And that returns us to the Colorado River Compact, the foundation for deciding who gets what and where in the basin — and who doesn’t.
In 1922, when the Colorado River Compact was drawn up at a lodge near Santa Fe, the Colorado River had been producing uncommonly robust flows. In their 2019 book, “Science Be Dammed,” Fleck and Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the River District, explained that ample evidence even in 1922 existed of drier times just decades before. Later evidence documented lesser flows in the centuries and millennia before.
Not only were flows in the Colorado River during the 20th century much less than was assumed by the compact, the document failed altogether to acknowledge water rights for Ute, Navajo and 28 other Native America tribes in the basin who were to get water as would be necessary to sustain agricultural ways of life. Just how much had not been determined, although it’s now estimated at 20% of the river’s total flow. Some claims still have not been adjudicated.
Mueller called it a “flawed document” produced by a “flawed process” that had “faulty hydrological assumptions” and did not include “major groups of people who reside in and own water rights in this basin.”
A March 31, 1922 photo of the Colorado River Commission. Standing left to right: Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), James G. Scrugham (Nevada), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), W. F. McClure (California) and W. S. Norviel (Arizona). Seated: Gov. Emmet D. Boyle (Nevada), Gov. Oliver H. Shoup (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (federal representative and chair) and Gov. Merritt C. Mecham (New Mexico). The governors were not members of the Commission. Photo: Colorado State University Library
For its time, though, the compact was a grand bargain. Colorado’s Delph Carpenter was a key negotiator. He had realized that if diversions from the Colorado River were determined by the doctrine of prior appropriation, the bedrock for water law in Colorado and most other states, the upper-basin states would lose out because they would develop the Colorado River more slowly. Instead, the compact created an equitable apportionment, essentially a 50-50 split of the water between upper and lower-basin states.
It was the foundation for what is now called the Law of the River, by which is meant the many laws, court decrees and agreements concerning both surpluses and droughts.
Dams were built, diversion structures constructed – including, because of a law of Congress in 1968, the Central Arizona Project (which also resulted in dams on the Animas and Dolores rivers in Western Colorado). That 1968 legislation, the Colorado River Basin Project Act, recognized that the river would be short by as much as two million acre-feet, said Mueller.
And then the agreements of the 21st century have tried to acknowledge lesser flows. But they have also deferred the really hard questions. The harder questions, as Mueller suggested, may yet provoke the states to get out their legal swords.
Central to the dispute is how much water should the upper basin states be releasing from Lake Powell? This is the key clause in the compact: “The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years …”
Lee Ferry, located in Arizona but a few miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, is the formal dividing point between the upper-basin states and lower-basin states in the Colorado River. It is also the put-in location for boaters rafting or kayaking the Grand Canyon. Photo/Allen Best
Flows from Colorado and other upper-division states have been about 86 million acre-feet over the last 10 years.
Lower-basin states say no, that’s not enough. They argue that the upper basin states need to accept cuts, too.
For now, there is no dispute that the upper basin states are meeting that obligation. But what if a string of years like those of 2002-2004 return? And what if the case ends up before the Supreme Court and that court ultimately rules against the upper basin?
This sets up the potential – Mueller characterized it as a certainty – for conflict, a court case that will have to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I don’t believe we’re violating the compact today, and I don’t think we’re going to be violating the compact necessarily if the river drops, if our delivery below Glen Canyon drops,” he said. “What I can tell you is we’re going to have litigation.”
In May 2022, a couple paused at once had been the bottom of the boat put-in ramp in Antelope Canyon to lok down on the receding waters of Lake Powell. The reservoir at that point was 22% full. Photo/Allen Best
Colorado, Mueller asserted, must put together rules for how it will handle shortages if the state must curtail it diversions in order to allow water to flow downstream. He called it a painful process but warned that the “future is not far away.”
The River District position is that the burden within Colorado cannot fall entirely on the Western Slope and its ag users. Programs designed to reduce compensation have been focused solely on the Western Slope and agriculture, says Lindsay DeFrates, deputy director of public relations.
“If we are looking to reduce water long term, we can’t put it on the backs of West Slope users,” she says. “It has to be a shared burden.”
Journalists insist that it’s Western Slope. People in the water community invariably say “West Slope.”
Next: Colorado River Basin states have scaled back their demands on the river. But But agreement about solutions proportionate to the challenge remain distant as deadline near.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
October 18, 2024
A federal judge this week criticized the federal government for failing to consider the risk of a Colorado River Compact call in its environmental review of the planning for Denver Water’s expansion of Gross Reservoir in Boulder County.
Wrangling over the risk of a compact call – which the judge said could force water use reductions in the Upper Basin if the Upper Basin states fail to deliver enough water past Lee Ferry to the Lower Basin – has been a key point in current negotiations between the two basins over future Colorado River operations.
The ruling, in a lawsuit against Gross Reservoir expansion by Save the Colorado River and others, allows construction to proceed, but criticizes the project’s planners for not considering the fact that the risk of a compact call means there might not be enough water to fill it. (Here’s Elise Schmelzer’s article about the decision.)
In the decision, federal judge Christine Arguello noted that the Army Corps of Engineers environmental review of the project “rests on the assumption that there will be no compact call…. However, considering the American West’s last few decades of severe aridity, such an assumption warrants considerable scrutiny.”
Here’s the full language from Arguello’s ruling. I’ve bolded the key bits:
