Shoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWeb
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager). here’s an excerpt:
February 9, 2024
The purchase [of the Shoshone Power Plant non-consumptive use hydropower rights] represents the culmination of a decades-long effort to keep Shoshone’s water on the west side of Colorado’s mountains, settling the region’s long-held anxieties over competition with the water needs of the Front Range, where fast-growing cities and suburbs around Denver need more water to keep pace with development. Even though the Shoshone water rights carry an eight-figure price tag, the new owners will leave the river virtually unchanged. The river district will buy access to Shoshone’s water from the plant operator, Xcel Energy, and lease it back as long as Xcel wants to keep producing hydropower. The water right is considered “non-consumptive,” meaning every drop that enters the power plant is returned to the river. The river district wants to keep it that way as long as they can and ensure the water that flows into the hydroelectric plant also flows downstream to farmers, fish and homes.
The river district is rallying the $98.5 million sum from local, state and federal agencies. The district has secured $40 million already, with deals in the works for the remainder. It’s rare for a big-money water deal to find this kind of broad approval from a diverse group of water users. But the acquisition is seen as pivotal for a wide swath of Colorado, and has been co-signed by farmers, environmental groups and local governments…Shoshone’s water right is one of the oldest and biggest in the state, giving it preemptive power over many other rights in Colorado. Even in dry times, when cities and farms in other parts of the state feel the sting of water shortages, the Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant can send water through its turbines. And when that water exits the turbines and re-enters the Colorado River, it keeps flowing for myriad users downstream…
The hydro plant itself produces relatively little energy. Its 15 megawatt capacity is only a small fraction of Xcel Energy’s total Colorado output of 13,100 megawatts. Shoshone’s capacity is enough to serve about 15,000 customers, which is less than a quarter of the population of Garfield County, where the plant is located. But the power plant has held legal access to water from the Colorado River since 1902, and can claim seniority over the vast majority of other water owners in the state. That kind of seniority means power and certainty for whoever owns it. And that has raised the hackles of Western Colorado water users, who worry that water users in other parts of Colorado might be interested in buying Shoshone’s water right…The Colorado River District’s plans to buy Shoshone’s water have rallied widespread support, largely because of the transfer’s widespread benefits. Perhaps no constituency will benefit from the move as much as the one that lives in the river itself…Standing on the banks of the Colorado River in Grand Junction, [Dale] Ryden looked out over a murky, meandering stretch of water. It’s part of the “15 mile reach,” a critical section of the river about 80 miles west of the Shoshone plant. The reach is filled partly by water exiting Shoshone’s turbines. Ryden explained that this section of river is home to a variety of species, some of which are endangered, and some which are found nowhere else on earth besides the upper portions of the Colorado River. Those species – with funky names like the flannelmouth sucker and the humpback chub – rely on this stretch of river for virtually every aspect of life.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
“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
Will seven Western states be able to rapidly craft a voluntary plan to keep the Colorado River afloat for decades to come? It’s increasingly unclear, as negotiations have foundered between two sides, according to key players. There are sharp differences between northern and southern states’ proposals, with representatives of the mountainous Upper Basin states of Colorado and New Mexico unwilling, to date, to shoulder large future cuts, both because of historic underuse of their share of the river and because of heavily populated California and Arizona’s historic overuse. The southwestern states have for years taken twice as much as their northern neighbors.
Total losses (evaporation and riparian ET) from Reach 1 through Reach 5. Credit: USBR
Upper Basin officials, including Colorado’s plainspoken river commissioner, Becky Mitchell, said they have been informed of a proposal under discussion by California, Arizona and Nevada, collectively known as the Lower Basin, where the Lower Basin and Mexico would agree to take 1.5 million acre-feet of water less from the shrinking river each year. Mitchell said far more details are needed. That amount would be enough to both to make up for evaporation and leakage from delivery canals snaking across the hot desert, and to help stabilize the nation’s largest reservoirs, based on a report released Thursday by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that showed average annual losses to evaporation and river banks of 1.3 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin.
Lower Basin officials, including California’s Colorado River commissioner JB Hamby, who is leading the state’s negotiating team, declined to confirm numbers while they hash out specifics, but pointedly said major reductions need to be contributed by every state. One California official did confirm the numbers. Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s top representative on the river talks, also wouldn’t confirm the 1.5 million acre-feet number, but emphasized the structural magnitude of what the Lower Basin is offering to do, noting his state and California, with help from Nevada and Mexico, would address evaporation and leakage for decades to come, and contribute more atop that to help stabilize the system. But, he said, more needs to be done, by everyone.
“It’s hugely important for folks to know that the Lower Basin is going to step up, and that we see a desire and a need for the rest of the problem to be solved collectively,” he said. “We can’t do it all. It is not physically possible.”
[…]
“There’s been a couple times when I’ve tried to be quieter or politer to make myself heard, and it hasn’t worked,” Mitchell said. “What we’re fighting for is too important to make myself small to make myself feel comfortable.” via @ShannonMullanehttps://t.co/tNWw8yOgsX
For now, negotiations between the two sides have ground to a halt, even as a deadline looms to produce a draft agreement by next month. The last time representatives from all seven states met face to face was in early January, when they convened at the Woolley’s Classic Suites, at Denver Airport. Since then, at the urging of U.S. Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, there have been two Zoom calls with all the states that highlighted the fundamental differences, one participant said. The northern states recently invited their southern counterparts to Salt Lake City to resume full talks, but none chose to attend.
“We’ll keep inviting them,” Mitchell said. “I do not think we are at an impasse, and I do not believe we need to be at an impasse.”
As the Stewardship Manager for Colorado Water Trust, I am lucky to have several interesting jobs outside of developing new projects. I write a monthly forecasting memo that helps our staff plan for the upcoming season’s operations. I travel around the state and visit our projects to ensure they are still operating as designed. I collect streamflow and water temperature data to inform project design. It’s all great work but there is one job that is arguably the most important; I maintain and update (read the next words in an important sounding voice) The Master Dashboard Accounting Spreadsheet.
This spreadsheet tallies the streamflow volumes and the number of river miles with improved flows. Volume and miles restored are the primary metrics that describe our impact. We must report accurate records to the Division of Water Resources, and our funders like to see our volume and mileage metrics, as well. Heck, the first thing you see on our website is a cool animation tallying up our volumes and stream miles. Just looking at the site now, I see that we have restored 73,242 acre-feet of water to 612 miles of Colorado’s rivers, which is very impressive… or is it? Honestly what do those numbers mean? Is our work important? Impactful? Let’s dig a little deeper to find a better way to highlight the benefits our work.
Let’s start with terms. Acre-feet is a weird one—it’s a very important term in the water world but doesn’t translate well to a general audience. Us water nerds often try to better explain the term. “An acre-foot of water is enough water to supply two average households for one year” we will say in a very serious tone. Great, so now we can visualize how many showers and toilet flushes the Water Trust has restored. Hmm… perhaps if we convert it to gallons it will make more sense. I see that we have restored 22.6 billion gallons—that sounds impressive! Let’s convert it to metric tablespoons to get a truly enormous number. Unfortunately, the human brain is epically bad at comprehending large numbers so perhaps we should look at this another way.
Rivers and streams are not simple units easily counted and categorized. Rivers are homes for fish, drinking water for towns, irrigation water for farmers, places of recreation, and focal points for communities in the arid west. Rivers are local and personal. Our Yampa River Project is a great example for examining the alternative metrics we can use to measure our impact on the river and the community that depends on it. Low summertime flows on the Yampa lead to high water temperatures that are unhealthy or even deadly to the trout who call the river home. To help protect the trout, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) is often forced to close the river to extremely popular recreational activities like angling and tubing. While the closures help keep fish alive, they severely impact summer tourism and the local economy. Since 2012, the Water Trust has partnered with the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, Colorado Water Conservation Board, City of Steamboat Springs, and the Yampa River Fund to release additional water from Stagecoach Reservoir 18 miles upstream of Steamboat. These releases help cool temperatures for the fish and keep the river open for recreation. Now, let’s take a closer look at some of the metrics that tell the story of our impacts to the Yampa and the Steamboat community.
Take a look at the plot below, which shows the flows in the Yampa River in Steamboat during the late summer of 2023. The blue shading shows the flows that the Water Trust released. Last summer, Water Resources Specialist, Blake Mamich, saw that dropping flows and high river temperatures were exceeding regulatory thresholds (which lead to river closures) so he acted quickly, coordinating releases to boost stream flows and keep the river cool.
Graphic credit: Colorado Water Trust
Let’s look at some of the metrics that help tell the story of this successful project. In 2023, the Yampa River Project:
Released water for 60 days, keeping the river cool to keep the city compliant with regulations.
Boosted flows for fish for nearly two months.
Averted 38 days of river closures, keeping the river open when it would have otherwise been closed for over a month during the busy tourism season.
Water Trust releases often accounted for over 30% of the entire flow in the Yampa River, and has accounted for over half of the flow in years past.
Now there are some metrics that show the impact of our work a little better than 3,288 acre-feet or one billion gallons. Let’s look beyond the flow numbers to see how the project is providing benefits to the upper Yampa community. A 2019 study by the Steamboat Chamber of Commerce found that summer tourism has a $166 million-dollar impact on the city which supports over 2,000 jobs. While I am not an economist, it’s not unrealistic to imagine that a 38-day closure of the river flowing through the heart of town would reduce those numbers. It’s also interesting to note that less than 2% of the economic benefits would easily pay for this project to run in perpetuity. Looking beyond the tourism impacts, the water continues to flow downstream of Steamboat where it is available to agricultural users along the length of the river. This project is also a long-term investment in sustainable river health as the Water Trust has operated this project in 10 of the last 12 years, providing a decade of benefits.
Digging more deeply into the impact of our projects really shows why our work is so important. They go beyond just putting flows into the river—they make tangible and long-term impacts on the habitats and communities that rely on healthy rivers across the state.
I will keep updating the Master Dashboard Accounting Spreadsheet and reporting our volume numbers since they are still very important to our work, but I promise to chime in here on occasion to highlight all of the benefits that our projects generate. So next year when you are reading the annual report and you see we have restored enough water to cover Manhattan Island to a depth of 5 feet*, know that there is a story behind the numbers.
*That is true by the way.
The Yampa River emerging from Cross Mountain Canyon in northwest Colorado had water in October 2020, but only the second “call” ever was issued on the river that year. Photo/Allen Best
+ UT nixes Bears Ears swap; Mining Law reform … NOT!
Though it sits just 10 miles from the Grand Canyon’s south rim, the controversial Pinyon Plain (née Canyon) uranium mine goes unnoticed by the millions of people who drive past it on their way to the national park. It’s tucked in among the trees about two miles off the highway, and its total above-ground footprint is a mere 17 acres — smaller than an upscale shopping center in Flagstaff.
Officials at Energy Fuels, Pinyon Plains’ operator, highlight the facility’s inconspicuousness when responding to opposition to plans to rev up the mine. Curtis Moore, Energy Fuels’ VP of marketing, told the Navajo-Hopi Observer in 2022 that the mine “is about as small and low-impact as commercial mining gets.” There’s no gaping open pit like those at the copper mines further south in Arizona nor hulking piles of waste rock and toxic tailings and, Moore insisted, the Pinyon Plain is the most heavily regulated conventional mine in the nation, which should prevent it from contaminating groundwater or the air.
Moore’s assurances don’t ease the concerns of many Havasupai people, however, who are affected by the mine in ways that transcend regulations and the scope of conventional Western science. “We have a belief system that they don’t understand,” Havasupai elder Carletta Tilousi told The Guardian in 2022. “In our stories, that area where the mine is located is Mother Earth’s lungs. So when they dug the mine shaft, they punctured her lungs.”
This is the sort of potential harm that almost never makes it into environmental impact statements or regulators’ considerations of proposed projects. That may be changing. The United States Geological Survey has published a new report on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, one that incorporates Indigenous knowledge to identify exposure pathways that standard risk analyses might miss. The report, by Carletta Tilousi (Havasupai Tribe) and Jo Ellen Hinck (USGS), is an eye-opening read.
In the Grand Canyon-area, high-grade uranium ore often occurs in geologic features known as breccia pipes, prompting prospectors to stake hundreds of claims there from the 1940s to the 1980s, when the domestic uranium mining industry collapsed. Interest was revived in 2007, when prices shot up again, and more claims were staked. The Pinyon Plain Mine — which was developed years ago but never produced ore — sits a few miles from Red Butte, a landform held sacred by several tribal nations, and in Mat Taav Juudva, or “sacred meeting corridor” for the Havasupai. It is now within the boundaries of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. New mining claims can’t be staked here, but since Pinyon Plain was an existing, valid claim when President Biden established the monument last year, it is grandfathered in.
The Havasupai Tribe has pushed back against uranium mining for decades, saying it endangers their health, land, and culture. The Pinyon Plain Mine sits above the Redwall-Muav aquifer, and mining could contaminate this precious store of groundwater. Indeed, when the mine shaft was sunk in 2016, it encountered a perched aquifer, which drained into the shaft. This not only threatens the tribe’s drinking water, but also its very existence. The report quotes Havasupai Vice-Chairman Edmond Tilousi thusly: “If the R-Aquifer becomes contaminated, and we must abandon our ancestral home of Supai Village, we will leave the blue-green waters of Havasu Creek behind and consequently will cease to be the Havasuw Baja. While we may still breathe air, we, the People of the Blue Green Water, will have become extinct.”
The aquifers are just one exposure pathway. Others will appear in standard risk assessments of mines, like this one:
Typical conceptual site framework for a mining site that highlights human health and ecological risk assessment considerations. From Park and others (2020). Source: Conceptual Risk Framework for Uranium Mining—An Update to Include Havasupai Resources at Risk. Credit: The Land Desk
And yet others are typically overlooked. This updated contaminant exposure framework shows both the pathways revealed by standard analyses, and those identified through Indigenous knowledge and the Havasupai perspective:
Contaminant exposure framework for uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region from the Havasupai perspective. Photographs by Blake McCord and Dawn Beauty. Source: Conceptual Risk Framework for Uranium Mining—An Update to Include Havasupai Resources at Risk. Credit: The Land Desk
This new report, “Expanded Conceptual Risk Framework for Uranium Mining in Grand Canyon Watershed—Inclusion of the Havasupai Tribe Perspective,” gives a far more holistic view of mining and its impacts than standard analyses. As such, it gives a much more complete vision of what is actually at stake. Hopefully other researchers and federal agencies will take note and follow the authors’ lead.
I will admit that I was pretty psyched to hear that Congress was finally taking up mining law reform. After all, the General Mining Law of 1872 hasn’t been significantly altered since then President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law. Isn’t it about time to tighten things up a bit and end the 152 years of public land giveaways? Apparently not.
Yes, Congress is considering the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act. But no, it is not reforming the law in a good way.
See, the law currently says that for a mining claim to be valid, the claimant has to prove it contains a valuable mineral deposit. And if it’s not valid, then a mining company can’t use or occupy the claim. For decades, this requirement was more or less ignored when it came to mining companies using invalid claims on public lands to store waste rock or mill tailings. But in recent years, judges have handed down some significant rulings — most notably the Rosemont decision — blocking mines from storing waste on invalid, unproven claims.
The “Clarity Act” pushed by Rep. Mark Amodei, a Nevada Republican, would essentially validate invalid claims by removing the “valuable mineral” requirement. The language from the bill reads: “A claimant shall have the right to use, occupy, and conduct operations on public land, with or without the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit,” if the claimant pays their location fee and annual maintenance fees.
In other words, it further loosens an already lax and antiquated law.
🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡
It really seems as if the Republican-led Utah legislature is looking to one up Congress in the dysfunction department. Nearly every day we hear some news of boneheadedness coming out of Capitol Hill, and nearly every time it’s follow up by something even more head-scratching out of Salt Lake City.
This week’s moronic moment comes to you courtesy of Gov. Spencer Cox and his comrades in the legislature, who put the kibosh on a land exchangethat would have swapped out state parcels in Bears Ears National Monument for federal land outside the monument. You might be thinking that Utah felt like they were getting the short end of the stick here, and merely wanted to renegotiate. But in fact, as Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration officials and Utah’s congressional delegation will tell you, the swap is a really good deal for the state and for the schools and institutions revenues from the lands support.
The exchange would allow SITLA (Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration) to dispose of discrete parcels within the monument with minimal revenue-generating potential. In return, they’d receive consolidated blocks of Bureau of Land Management land in areas targeted for lithium, potash, uranium, helium, oil and gas, and/or residential development. Meanwhile the BLM would rid itself of the headache of dealing with all of these little inholdings within the monument. SITLA officials estimated the swap would net the state hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue over the long term, which was good enough for Utah’s entire congressional delegation to sign onto federal legislation that would have ratified the deal (it stalled out, however, which opened the door to this week’s withdrawal).
So what’s changed that would spur the withdrawal? Nothing. Cox and his Republican colleagues claim they made this imbecilic move because: the BLM “has signaled that it will adopt an exceptionally restrictive and unreasonable land management plan {for Bears Ears NM} that would negatively impact the communities surrounding the Monument and the state’s public school children…”
Yes, Utah’s elected leaders are throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars for public schools because they perceived “signals” about something they didn’t like. The draft management plan for Bears Ears NM hasn’t even been released, and even if it is restrictive as all get out, canceling the exchange will do nothing to change it. Nothing! All this little political circus act will do is, yes: Take money away from public school children.
In other words, this whole thing is merely an exercise in ideology-driven stupidity. Echoing their GOP brethren in Washington, D.C., Utah’s Republicans are acting against their constituents’ best interest in order to make a political point. Only not even they know what that point might be.
In response to falling flows in the critical habitat reach, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam from 350 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 400 cfs for tomorrow, February 10th, at 4:00 AM.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.
John Echohawk and David Getches discuss strategy in NARF’s early years. Photo credit: Native American Rights Fund
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
February 7, 2024
When David Gover became an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, he inherited a water rights legal case about as old as he was.
The case revolving around water rights in Oregon held by the Klamath Tribes started in 1975 and it’s emblematic of many tribal water cases — they’re long, complex and require specific legal knowledge. There are not enough Native water attorneys to handle the difficult cases, which are critical for tribes to access the water they are entitled to. That’s one of the challenges Gover hopes the new, Colorado-based Tribal Water Institute will help solve. The institute will help train new attorneys in tribal water law and provide other resources to help tribes access and develop their water rights. Tribes hold some of the oldest and most senior water rights in the West, but many do not have the money or infrastructure to use their water or sufficient legal staff to protect it.
“There’s still so much need out there and capacity is an ongoing issue for us all,” Gover said…
The institute will train young water attorneys to advocate for tribes in state and federal policy and serve as a central resource for tribes on water issues. It will be part of the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit that has worked on myriad legal issues for tribal nations since 1970. Too often, tribes are stuck in a reactive position on water policy and litigation because they don’t have enough resources to work proactively, Gover said. The Native American Rights Fund has represented tribes in nine of the 35 tribal water rights settlements approved by Congress since 1978, but there is more work than attorneys available…
The Walton Family Foundation — which has spent millions on water issues in the West — donated $1.4 million to launch the institute. Native American Rights Fund staff continues to fundraise for the $4.2 million they estimate will be needed to fund the institute for three years. Tribal nations are under-represented in federal and state policy discussions, said Moira Mcdonald, environment program director of the Walton Family Foundation.
“That is unjust and unwise,” she said. “We need to listen to their voices. More inclusive decision-making will lead to greater benefits for the environment and society as a whole.”
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
Fair representation for tribes is especially important in the Colorado River basin. Combined, the 30 tribes in the basin hold rights to approximately 25% of the water. But many have not been able to use their full allotment and the tribes have been repeatedly left out of negotiations over how the river should be used and divided.
John Echohawk. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
The Bureau of Reclamation today published an overview of historical natural losses along the lower Colorado River. The Mainstream Evaporation and Riparian Evapotranspiration report looks at water surface evaporation, soil moisture evaporation, and plant transpiration. It will be used by Reclamation as a source of data as it manages regional water operations and to improve the agency’s modeling efforts.
“Reclamation’s approach to water management in the Colorado River Basin and across all Reclamation states is based on best available science, transparency, and inclusivity.” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “The release of the Mainstream Evaporation and Riparian Evapotranspiration study today evidences this commitment by informing our partners and the public about river and reservoir evaporation and transpiration in the Colorado River Basin.”
The report provides an overview of average mainstream losses from both river and reservoir evaporation, as well as the evaporation and transpiration associated with vegetation and habitats along the river. The report states that approximately 1.3-million-acre feet of losses occur annually along the lower Colorado River mainstream. Based on data from 2017 to 2021, approximately 860,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water is lost to evaporation occurring annually from Lake Mead to the border with Mexico. A further 445,000 acre-feet is lost to evaporation and transpiration from natural vegetation and habitats.
The Dolores River flows more than 241 miles from south to north through Colorado and then into Utah where it joins the Colorado River, carving one of the country’s most stunning canyons.
In 1765, a Spanish explorer came across what he named “El Río De Nuestra Señora de Dolores,” or “The River of Our Lady of Sorrows.” Today, the Dolores River brings pleasure rather than sorrow, as a vibrant habitat for wildlife and a popular recreation destination.
Dolores River watershed
Why is the Dolores River important?
The water in the Colorado River is used for multiple purposes across many western states; including agriculture and drinking water. The river provides water to the cities of Cortez and Dove Creek as well as the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Montezuma Valley through large, man-made canals. Importantly, the Dolores River flows into the Colorado River, which provides critical downstream benefits to some 40 million Americans.
Mcphee Reservoir
The Dolores River was dammed just southwest of the city of Dolores, Colorado, creating the McPhee Reservoir, which allocates all of its stored water for agriculture. Even though it is the second largest reservoir in Colorado, the McPhee does not have the capacity to support agriculture and to release enough water into the river to help recreation and wildlife thrive.
This watershed is an ideal habitat for large mammals, such as desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, and beavers as well as many migratory birds. The river is also home to three native fish; flannelmouth sucker, bluehead sucker, and roundtail chub.
The jaw-dropping scenic views make it a popular tourist destination year after year. Rafting, camping, hiking, fishing, hunting, bird watching and other activities are abundant. Visitors also come for the rich cultural history. The Dolores Canyon was home to ancient Ute peoples, Ancestral Puebloans, and Fremont peoples for thousands of years.
Dolores River Canyon. David Joswick | Used by permission
Because of the more intense drought conditions caused by climate change, there is often not enough water in the McPhee Dam left to release into the river after water has been allocated to agriculture. The river’s flow has decreased by 50% over the last 10 years. Not having enough water flowing can lead to dramatic increases in both water temperature and sediment and silt, leading to reduced water quality.
Nathan Fey, seen here paddling the Lower Dolores River. The lower Dolores River depends on a deep snowpack for boating releases from McPhee Reservoir. (Photo courtesy Nathan Fey)
The importance of snowpack to the river was demonstrated in 2016. Thanks to a healthy snowpack which released more water than past years, the river flowed at a “floatable” level for the first time in half a decade. The fully flowing river led to increased water recreation, such as rafting the technical rapids, exploring back hidden canyons, fly fishing for rainbow trout and spotting wildlife such as beavers. Camping even resumed, despite many campsites being overgrown and untended for years.
In addition to low water levels, the river is exposed to pollution from uranium tailings and runoff from historic mines at its headwaters. With the possibility of mining resuming, the Dolores could be exposed to even more pollution, threatening native fish species, potentially leading to population declines. Additionally, it decreases the quality and the safetyof drinking water across the country, potentially leading to public health risks.
Prickly Pear Dolores River Canyon. David Joswick | Used by permission
We must protect the Dolores River
We must ensure the water in the Dolores River is safe for drinking, wildlife, recreation, and agriculture. Designating the land surrounding the Dolores River in Mesa and Montrose counties as a national monument would help to protect endangered species, encourage sustainable and responsible recreation and protect the water that does flow in the river from future toxic pollution. A national monument will not address all of the challenges with water shortages in this area but it will give wildlife a better chance. This will allow people to continue to enjoy the unique beauty of this area without running the risk of overuse, and preserve it for future generations.
Dolores River skeleton plant (Lygodesmia doloresensis). Photo by Peggy Lyon via Colorado Natural Heritage ProgramThe Dolores River, below Slickrock, and above Bedrock. The Dolores River Canyon is included in a proposed National Conservation Area. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism.A view of the Dolores River below Slickrock.Ponderosa Gorge, Dolores River. Boating is popular on the Lower Dolores River, which is being considered as a National Conservation Area. Photo credit RiverSearch.com.Dolores River Campground September 2016.St Louis Tunnel Ponds June 29, 2010 – view south towards Rico. Photo via the EPA.The Dolores River shows us what’s at stake in the fight to protect the American West — Conservation ColoradoPhoto via the Sheep Mountain AllianceDolores River south of Lizard Head PassFriends of the Dolores River Fall Fest 2011 siteDolores River above DoloresDolores RiverDolores River Canyon near Paradox
Hundreds of growers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley could see their water costs nearly quadruple under a new plan designed to slash agricultural water use in the drought-strapped region and deflect a potential legal crisis on the Rio Grande.
A new rule approved by the area’s largest irrigation district, known as Subdistrict 1, and the Alamosa-based Rio Grande Water Conservation District, sets fees charged to pump water from a severely depleted underground aquifer at $500 an acre-foot, up from $150 an acre-foot. The new program could begin as early as 2026 if the fees survive a court challenge.
“It’s draconian and it hurts,” said Sen. Cleave Simpson, a Republican from Alamosa who is also general manager of the Rio Grande water district.
The region, home to one of the nation’s largest potato economies, has relied for more than 70 years on water from an aquifer that is intimately tied to the Rio Grande. The river begins high in the San Juan mountains above the valley floor.
Both the river and the aquifer are supplied by melting mountain snows, but a relentless multi-year drought has shrunk annual snowpacks so much that neither the river nor the aquifer have been able to recover their once bountiful supplies.
And that’s a problem. Under the Rio Grande Compact of 1938, Colorado is required to deliver enough water downstream to satisfy New Mexico and Texas. If the aquifer falls too low, it will endanger the river’s supplies and push Colorado out of compliance. Such a situation could trigger lawsuits and cost the state tens of millions of dollars in legal fees.
Subdistrict 1 has set state-approved goals to comply with the compact. Within seven years, it must find a way to restore hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water to the aquifer, a difficult task.
Rio Grande River, CO | Photo By Sinjin Eberle
An acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons of water, or enough to cover an acre of land with water a foot deep.
The specter of an interstate water fight is creating enormous pressure to reorganize the valley’s farming communities in a way that will allow them to use less water, grow fewer potatoes, and still have a healthy economy.
For more than a decade, valley water users have been working to reduce water use and stabilize the aquifer. Many have already started experimenting with ways to grow potatoes with less water by improving soil health, and to find new crops, such as quinoa, that may also prove to be profitable.
But the pumping plans, considered innovative by water experts, haven’t been enough to stop the decline in aquifer levels. The Rio Grande Basin is consistently one of the driest in the state, generating too little water to make up for drought conditions and restore the aquifer after decades of over pumping.
With the new fees, the region will likely have some of the highest agricultural water costs in the state, said Craig Cotten, who oversees the Rio Grande River Basin for Colorado’s Division of Water Resources.
Perhaps not as high as water in the Colorado-Big Thompson Project on the northern Front Range, where cities and developers and some growers pay thousands of dollars to buy an acre-foot of water.
Still it is much higher than San Luis Valley growers and others have paid historically. Fees at one time were just $75 an acre-foot, eventually reaching $150 an acre-foot. The prospect of the fee skyrocketing to $500 is shocking.
“That is high,” said Brett Bovee, president of WestWater Research, a consulting firm specializing in water economics and valuations. Typically such fees across the state have been in the $50 to $100 range, he said.
But Bovee said the water district is taking constructive action while giving growers opportunities to find their own solutions to the water shortage. “It’s putting the decision-making power into the hands of growers and landowners, rather than saying ‘everybody take one-third of your land out of production.’”
Third hay cutting 2021 in Subdistrict 1 area of San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Chris Lopez
Subdistrict 1 is the oldest and largest of a group of irrigation districts in the valley, according to Cotten. Its $500 fee has triggered a lawsuit by some growers, who believe the district is applying the new fees unfairly.
“The responsibility for achieving a sustainable water supply is to be borne proportionately based on (growers’) past, present and future usage,” Brad Grasmick, a water attorney representing San Luis Valley growers in the Sustainable Water Augmentation Group and the Northeast Water Users Association, said, referring to state water laws. “But we believe the responsibility is being disproportionately applied to our wells.”
Those growers are now trying to create their own irrigation district and they are suing to stop the new fee.
“I think that more land retirement and more reduction in well pumping is needed and that is what my group is trying to do,” Grasmick said. “No one wants to see the aquifer diminish and continue to shrink. If everybody can do their part to cut back and make that happen, that is the way forward. My guys just want to see the proportionality adhered to.”
To date, tens of millions of dollars have been raised and spent to retire wells in the San Luis Valley, with Subdistrict 1 raising $70 million in the last decade, according to Simpson. And in 2022 state lawmakers approved another $30 million to retire more wells.
Lawmakers are closely monitoring these efforts to reduce water use while protecting growers.
Sen. Byron Pelton, a Republican from Sterling, said the combined money that is going to the Rio Grande and Republican basins is critical. But the potential for legal battles, he said, is concerning.
“Agriculture is key in our communities,” Pelton said. “But the biggest thing is that we have to stay within our compacts. Sometimes you’re backed into a corner and that is just the way it has to be. I hate it, but we have to stay in compliance.”
How much irrigated land will be lost as wells are retired isn’t clear yet. Simpson said growers who have access to surface supplies in the Rio Grande will still be able to irrigate even without as many wells or as much water, but the land will likely produce less and farms may become less profitable.
And it will take more than sky-high pumping fees to solve the problem, officials said. The Division of Water Resources has also created another water-saving rule in Subdistrict 1 that will force growers to replace one-for-one the water they take out of the aquifer, instead of allowing them to simply pay more to pump more.
Cotten said the hope is that the higher fees combined with the new one-for-one rule will reduce pumping enough to save the aquifer and the ag economy.
Valley growers are already shifting production and changing crops, said James Ehrlich, executive director of the Colorado Potato Administrative Committee in Monte Vista, an agency involved in overseeing and marketing the region’s potato crops.
“There are a lot of creative things going on down here,” Ehrlich said. “But we have to farm less and learn to survive as a community together. And Mother Nature has not helped us out. We’ve stabilized but we can’t gain back what (state and local water officials) want us to gain back. It is just not going to happen.”
More by Jerd SmithJerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Montgomery Reservoir, a source of water for Colorado Springs Utilities, can hold about 5,700 acre-feet of water. As the result of an agreement with West Slope opposers, Colorado Springs will be allowed to enlarge the reservoir to hold an additional 8,100 acre-feet without West Slope opposition. CREDIT: COLORADO SPRINGS UTILITIES
Colorado Springs has agreed to give up water rights tied to reservoirs in the Blue River basin in exchange for the ability to expand Montgomery Reservoir on the east side of the Continental Divide without opposition from Western Slope entities.
Colorado Springs Utilities had been fighting in water court since 2015 to hang on to conditional water rights originally decreed in 1952 and tied to three proposed reservoirs: Lower Blue Reservoir, on Monte Cristo Creek; Spruce Lake Reservoir, on Spruce Creek; and Mayflower Reservoir, which would also have been built on Spruce Creek. Lower Blue Reservoir was decreed for a 50-foot-tall dam and 1,006 acre-feet of water; Spruce Lake Reservoir was decreed for an 80- to 90-foot-tall dam and 1,542 acre-feet; and Mayflower Reservoir, was decreed for a 75- to 85-foot-tall dam and 618 acre-feet.
After negotiations with eight opposers, including the Colorado River Water Conservation District, Summit County and the town of Breckenridge, the parties are set to approve an agreement that would cancel the conditional water rights for Spruce Lake and Mayflower reservoirs. A third potential reservoir, Lower Blue, would keep its 70-year-old rights, but Colorado Springs would transfer the majority of the water stored to Breckenridge and Summit County, and would share the costs of building that reservoir, which would be owned and operated by Breckenridge and Summit County.
In exchange, the Western Slope parties will not oppose Colorado Springs’ plan to enlarge Montgomery Reservoir to hold an additional 8,100 acre-feet of water for a total capacity of about 13,800 acre-feet. That project is expected to enter the permitting phase in 2025. After the permitting and construction of the Montgomery Reservoir expansion, the conditional water rights for Spruce Lake and Mayflower reservoirs would be officially abandoned and the water rights for Lower Blue Reservoir transferred to Summit County and Breckenridge.
“These conditional rights we’re relinquishing in the agreement are for future reservoirs that would be difficult to permit and build for us,” Jennifer Jordan, senior public affairs specialist at Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU), said in an interview with Aspen Journalism. “And we can gain in average years that same yield and perhaps a little bit more by getting the Montgomery Dam enlargement completed.”
A 2015 evaluation of the conditional water rights and proposed reservoirs by Wilson Water Group found several potential environmental and permitting stumbling blocks, including the presence of endangered species and challenging high-Alpine road construction.
CSU also agreed to a volumetric limit of the amount it will be allowed to take through the Hoosier Tunnel after the Montgomery Reservoir expansion: 13,000 acre-feet per year over a 15-year rolling average. CSU currently takes about 8,500 acre-feet per year through the tunnel.
Montgomery Reservoir is part of CSU’s Continental Hoosier System, which takes water from the headwaters of the Blue River between Breckenridge and Alma to Colorado Springs via the Hoosier Tunnel, Montgomery Reservoir and Blue River Pipeline. It is the city’s oldest transmountain diversion project.
Each year, transmountain diversions take about 500,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River basin to the Front Range. Colorado Springs is a large water user that draws from this vast network of tunnels and conveyance systems that move water from the mountainous headwaters on the west side of the Continental Divide to the east side, where the state’s biggest cities are located. Colorado Springs’ largest source of Western Slope water is its Twin Lakes system, which draws from the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River above Aspen.
Proposed reservoirs on the Blue River
Map: Laurine Lassalle – Aspen Journalism Source: Colorado Springs Utilities Created with Datawrapper
CSU to support Shoshone
The Glenwood Springs-based River District was created in 1937 to combat these types of diversions and keep water on the Western Slope. It was one of the entities that opposed CSU’s conditional water rights in its nearly nine-year water court battle, which kicked off when the water provider filed a diligence application. That is the process in which a conditional water-right holder must demonstrate to the water court that it can and will eventually develop the water right, and that in the previous six years, it has done its diligence in seeing a project through.
On Jan. 16, the River District board approved the settlement agreement, which includes a commitment from Colorado Springs that the utility will support the River District’s efforts at securing the Shoshone water right.
The River District is working to purchase water rights from Xcel Energy associated with the Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon. The water rights date to 1902 and are nonconsumptive, meaning the water would stay in the river and flow downstream to the benefit of the environment, endangered fish and other water users on the Western Slope. The Colorado Water Conservation Board approved $20 million toward the $98.5 million purchase last week.
“The settlement provides additional local water supplies to the Blue River Valley and a commitment of support from Colorado Springs Utilities for the Shoshone Water Right Preservation effort, which provides substantial benefits to the health of the entire Colorado River, including important water security, economic and environmental benefits to the West Slope,” River District General Manager Andy Mueller said in a prepared statement. “In addition, the West Slope will benefit from clearly specified limits on the total amount of water Colorado Springs can divert through its Continental-Hoosier transmountain diversion tunnel.”
The agreement was also good news for Breckenridge, which will split the 600 acre-feet of water from Colorado Springs in a future Lower Blue Reservoir equally with Summit County. The reservoir was originally decreed for 1,006 acre-feet, but the agreement now limits the reservoir capacity to 600 acre-feet. Colorado Springs will retain the remaining amount, about 400 acre-feet, which can be stored in Montgomery Reservoir.
Breckenridge Mayor Pro Tem Kelly Owens said Breckenridge will be able to use the stored water in late summer, when flows in the Blue River are at their lowest.
“The way we see it is that we’ve now protected those waters, the snowmelt, and keeping it in the Blue River basin,” Owens said.
According to the agreement, Colorado Springs would pay 50% of the construction costs of a future Lower Blue Reservoir, and Breckenridge and Summit County would each pay 25%.
Colorado Springs City Council is expected to approve the agreement at its Feb. 13 meeting.
This story ran in the Feb. 5 edition of the Summit Daily.
Changing Rio Grande flow at Otowi over time. Credit: John Fleck/InkStain
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
February 2, 2024
I’ve been updating the crufty old code I use to generate graphs to help me (and colleagues) think about river flows.
This one’s a little busy, so maybe for specific nerd colleagues’ use, and not general consumption?
It’s based on a request from a friend who uses these, and asked for a visualization of the wet 1981-2000 period compared to the drier 21st century. This is an important comparison given that a whole bunch of New Mexicans (including me!) moved here in the wet 1980s and ’90s, which created a sense of what’s “normal.”
It’s important to note that this is not a measure of climate, at least not directly. This is a measure of how much actual water flows past the Otowi gage, which is a product of:
climate-driven hydrology adding water
trans-basin diversions adding water (“trans basin diversion” singular, I guess, the San-Juan Chama Project)
upstream water use subtracting water
reservoir management decisions moving water around in time (sometimes reducing the flow by storing, sometimes increasing it by releasing)
I get so much out of staring at these graphs. A few bits from this one, which I did a few evenings ago curled up with my laptop in my comfy chair:
Look at the curves around Nov. 1 – a drop as irrigation season ends, following by a rise as managers move compact compliance water down the river to Elephant Butte. Makes me curious about what they were doing back in the ’80s and ’90s in November.
This year’s winter base flow is low.
At some point soon I’ll get the updated code onto Github, but it’s not quite ready for sharing. (I’m rewriting it in Python, because learning is fun!)
If approved by all seven subject parties, the agreement will settle about nine years of debate and allow Colorado Springs Utilities to expand its Montgomery Reservoir in Park County, between Alma and Hoosier Pass, to increase Colorado Springs’ water supply, officials with the city-owned utility told its board of directors in mid-January.
“The agreement gives more certainty in our Blue River water supply. For the general customer, it brings more reliability for how we go forward and what our future looks like” as Colorado Springs continues to grow, said Abby Ortega, Colorado Springs Utilities’ general manager of infrastructure resources and planning…
The deal too will advance plans to build a new water reservoir at the southern base of Quandary Peak for use by Summit County and the town of Breckenridge. All six Western Slope entities have approved the agreement — Breckenridge, Summit County, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Ute Water Conservancy District, the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District and the Grand Valley Water Users Association. The Colorado Springs City Council, which acts as the Utilities Board of Directors, will vote on the proposal Feb. 13.
Colorado Springs Collection System via Colorado College.
A bill moving through the Colorado General Assembly would require local jurisdictions to amend their landscaping codes to eliminate use of thirsty species of grasses from alongside roads such as this streetscape in Arvada. CREDIT: ALLEN BEST/BIG PIVOTS
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 30, 2024
Minor pushback to proposed limits on new water-thirsty grasses in areas that get little or no foot traffic
This story was produced as a collaboration between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism — two nonprofit news organizations covering Colorado’s water. It follows a five-part series that examined the intersection of water and urban landscapes in Colorado.
Colorado legislators in 2022 passed a bill that delivered $2 million to programs across the state for removal of turf in urban areas classified as nonfunctional. By that, legislators mean Kentucky bluegrass and other thirsty-grass species that were meant to be seen but rarely, if ever, otherwise used.
Now, they are taking the next step. The Colorado Senate on Tuesday voted in favor of a bill, Senate Bill 24-005, that would prevent thirsty turf species from being planted in certain places that rarely, if ever, get foot traffic, except perhaps to be mowed.
Those places include alongside roads and streets or in medians, as well as in the expansive areas surrounding offices or other commercial buildings, in front of government buildings, and in entryways and common areas managed by homeowners associations.
The bill also bars use of plastic turf in lieu of organic vegetation for landscaping.
“If we don’t have to start watering that turf in the first place, we never have to replace it in the future,” state Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, a co-sponsor, said in making the case for the proposed new state standard.
Roberts stressed that the prohibition would not apply to individual homes or retroactively to established turf. “It applies to new development or redevelopment. It does not apply to residential homes,” he said. “This is about industrial, commercial and government property across the state.”
Kentucky bluegrass and other grass species imported from wetter climatic zones typically use far more water than buffalo grass and other species indigenous to Colorado’s more arid climate. The bill, however, does allow hybrids that use less water as well as the indigenous grass species.
Originally reviewed by an interim legislative committee in October, the bill was subsequently modified to provide greater clarity about what constitutes functional versus nonfunctional turf, while giving towns, cities and counties greater flexibility in deciding which is which within their jurisdictions. If the bill becomes law, local jurisdictions will have until Jan. 1, 2026, to incorporate the new statewide standard into their landscaping code and development review processes.
After being approved on a third reading by the Senate by a 28-5 vote on Wednesday morning, the measure now moves to the House.
Advocates do not argue that limits on expansion of what the bill calls nonfunctional turf will solve Colorado’s water problems. Municipalities use only 7% of the state’s water, and outdoor use constitutes roughly half of municipal use.
“One more tool in the toolbox,” Roberts said.
State Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, said if the standard had been adopted 20 to 30 years ago, perhaps 10,000 acre-feet of water could have been saved annually.
“As a percentage, it is minimal,” he conceded. “It’s closing the gaps in small increments as best you can as opposed to large sweeping change.”
The backdrop for this is more frequent drought and rising temperatures since 2002, what Simpson called the aridification of the West. The climatic shift is forcing harder choices.
“We are all trying to figure out how to live and work in this space,” Simpson said.
In a Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee meeting Jan. 25, Simpson also said he was motivated to help prevent water grabs by Front Range cities from the San Luis Valley, what locals sometimes call Colorado’s south slope. Three separate attempts have been made in the past 35 years to divert water from the San Luis Valley, a place already being forced to trim irrigated agriculture to meet requirements of the Rio Grande Compact.
“That’s largely my motivation to be part of this conversation and do everything I can to reduce that pressure on my rural constituents and our way of life,” Simpson said in the committee hearing. The bill passed the committee on a 4-1 vote.
Developing water for growing cities — particularly along the Front Range but even in headwaters communities — has become problematic as the climate has veered hotter and, in most years of the 21st century, drier.
The result, as was detailed in a five-part collaboration in 2023 between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, has been a growing consensus about the need to be more strategic and sparing about use of water in urban landscapes.
Agriculture uses nearly 90% of the state’s water, as was noted by state Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver. At Tuesday’s Senate hearing, he chided Roberts, Simpson and other legislative sponsors for not addressing efficiency in agriculture.
Hansen, who grew up in a farm town in Kansas near the Colorado border, applauded the bill but questioned why the interim committee hadn’t come up with legislation to improve efficiency of agricultural water use. He cited the use-it-or-lose-it provision of Colorado water law that he suggested discouraged farmers and ranchers from innovating to conserve water.
“I feel the interim water committee let us down by not bringing forth anything that advances conservation on what is by far the largest category of use, almost 90%,” he said. “I want to know what is next on that front.”
The San Luis Valley is one of several areas of Colorado where irrigated agriculture must be curbed in order to meet interstate river compacts. Top: Grassy areas along a street in Arvada. Photos/Allen Best
Hansen got strong pushback. Simpson responded that agriculture in the San Luis Valley has already been forced to change. To comply with the Rio Grande Compact, his district is trying to figure out how to take 10,000 to 20,000 acres out of agricultural production. On his own farm, he said, water deliveries that traditionally lasted until mid-July have ended as early as May 20. “I have to figure out a way to grow crops that are less water-consumptive, more efficient and ultimately take irrigated acreage out of production,” Simpson said.
State Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling, also took the occasion to cite incremental gains in irrigation efficiency and the loss of production in the Republican River basin. There, roughly 25,000 acres need to be taken out of production for Colorado to meet interstate compact requirements.
As had been the case several days before at the bill’s legislative committee hearing, most of the limited opposition in the Senate was against the notion that cutting water used for landscaping is a statewide concern. It’s a familiar argument — a preference for local control — used in many contexts.
A representative of the Colorado Municipal League (CML), a consortium of 270 towns and cities, told the Senate committee that the proposal constituted state overreach in a one-size-fits-all approach.
Heather Stauffer, CML’s legislative advocacy manager, cited the regulations of Aurora, Greeley and Aspen as examples of approaches created to meet specific and local needs. “We would advocate that the state put more money into funds that address turf removal programs that have been very successful among municipalities across the state,” Stauffer said.
In 2023, Boulder-based Resource Central completed 604 lawn-replacement projects along the Front Range. With aid of state funding, it plans to expand its turf-removal and popular Garden In A Box programs to the Western Slope this year.
No representatives from any towns or cities showed up to oppose the bill. But representatives of three local jurisdictions, including Vail-based Eagle River Water and Sanitation District and the water provider for unincorporated Pueblo West, testified that the bill filled a need.
Denver is behind the bill. Denver Water, which provides water to 1.6 million people, including the city’s 720,000 residents as well as many suburban jurisdictions, has committed to reducing the water devoted to urban turf in coming years by 30%, or roughly the turf covering 6,000 acres. Utility representatives have said they don’t want to become frugal with water devoted to existing landscapes only to see water used lavishly in new development.
Andrew Hill, government affairs manager for Denver Water, called the bill a “moderate approach” in creating a new waterwise landscaping standard, one in which imported grasses are not the default.
“It makes real changes statewide, but it’s narrow enough to only apply to areas [where] I think a consensus exists,” Hill said at the committee hearing.
Sod last autumn was removed from this library in Lafayette. Many local jurisdictions in Colorado have participated in sod-removal programs. Photo/Allen Best
Local governments can go further, and many have already. Thirty-eight local governments and water providers in Colorado offer turf-replacement programs. Western Resource Advocates found last fall that 17 of the jurisdictions already limit new turf while another nine plan to do so.
Aurora and Castle Rock, late-blooming municipalities in the metropolitan area, have adopted among the most muscular regulations in Colorado, taking aim at water devoted to new homes’ front yards. Both expect to continue growing in population, and together they plan to pursue importations of water currently used for farming along the South Platte River in northeastern Colorado. Aurora also still owns water rights in the Eagle River basin that it has been trying to develop for the past 40 years.
In the full Senate debate, Republican leaders argued for incentives, such as the expanded buy-back program for turf removal, instead of a statewide thou-shalt-not approach.
The Colorado River Drought Task Force recommended legislators allocate $5 million annually for turf-removal programs. Key legislators have already indicated they plan to introduce legislation to do just that.
But is this the answer? Such programs are “inefficient and not cost-effective” if water-thirsty grass species continue to be planted in questionable places, the policy manager for municipal conservation at Western Resource Advocates said in the committee hearing last week.
The policy manager, Lindsay Rogers, said passing the bill would build the momentum to “help ensure that Coloradans live within our water means and particularly in the context of a growing state and worsening drought conditions.”
The Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado, which represents 400 Colorado landscape and supplier companies, testified in support of the bill but hinted at future discussions as the bill goes through legislative sausage-making. Along with sod growers, they quibble over the dichotomous phrasing of nonfunctional versus functional turf. They prefer the words recreational and utility.
On the flip side of these changes, some home gardeners might find buffalo grass and other indigenous grasses more conserving of water but less appealing. Buffalo grass, for example, greens up a month or so later in spring and browns up a month earlier in fall.
Water in urban landscapes is also on the agenda for three programs this week at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Congress, the state’s preeminent organization for water providers. Included may be a report from a task force appointed by Gov. Jared Polis last February that met repeatedly through 2023 to talk about ways to reduce expansion of water to urban landscapes.
Click the link to read the interview on the USDA website (Elizabeth Creech):
Dr. Joseph (Joe) Prenger is the Wetlands Lead for the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), an effort led by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to quantify the effects of voluntary conservation across the nation’s working lands. In this Ask the Expert, Dr. Prenger answers questions about new CEAP findings on the capacity of wetlands to capture and store nutrients from cropland fields, associated water quality benefits, and NRCS resources to support wetlands on private and Tribal lands.
Dr. Joseph (Joe) Prenger is the Wetlands Lead for USDA’s Conservation Effects Assessment Project, CEAP. Photo Credit: Dr. Prenger
Let’s start with the basics: What are wetlands, and how do they improve local water quality?
Wetlands occur where water covers or is present near the soil’s surface, either seasonally or year-round. Wetlands in agricultural settings may capture and store sediment and nutrients from the surrounding environment, reduce flooding, contribute to climate change mitigation by serving as a carbon sink, increase biodiversity, and provide wildlife habitat.
This nutrient capture and storage component is key for local water quality. We know nutrients, namely nitrogen and phosphorus, support healthy, productive crops. When nutrients are lost from cropland fields and enter local waterbodies, however, they may contribute to harmful algal blooms and hypoxic or low oxygen zones, and compromise water quality.
Supporting farmers in making targeted, site-specific decisions to effectively manage nutrients is critical. It’s very difficult to achieve 100% crop uptake and 0% nutrient loss, though, even with strong planning. We need SMART Nutrient Management to reduce the amount of nutrients lost from cropland fields, plus a way to capture and store those nutrients that are lost before they reach local waterbodies. Wetlands in agricultural landscapes have the potential to serve this second function, particularly when restored or constructed with this goal in mind.
You recently published findings on increasing the water quality benefits of agricultural wetlands. What are the key takeaways for farmers?
We published a new Conservation Insight on this topic in January 2023. Findings pull from a literature review of studies reporting field measurements for prairie-pothole wetlands found throughout parts of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. In short:
Nitrogen retention by these wetlands ranged from 15% to 100%, and phosphorus retention ranged from 0% to 100%.
These are large ranges. An individual wetland’s effectiveness in capturing and storing nutrients depended largely on upland management practices.
Accumulation of sediment from agricultural fields, for instance, may eventually lead to infilling of wetlands and associated reductions in water storage capacity. A buffer between cultivated cropland and the adjacent wetland – such as a grass filter strip – may reduce this sedimentation and deliver significant improvements to water storage and nutrient capture.
Here is the bottom line for farmers: When strategically integrated in operation-wide conservation planning, wetlands can offer a suite of benefits. The key is to plan them as part of an overall strategy that carefully manages the contributing areas to reduce contaminant loading and preserve wetland functions. Wetlands can significantly reduce nutrient loss to waterways, supporting water quality goals both locally and in terminal waterbodies like the Great Lakes or Gulf of Mexico. In addition, wetlands can help reduce flooding and recharge groundwater supplies, serve as a carbon sink, increase biodiversity, and provide wildlife habitat.
Wetlands, like these in the Prairie-Pothole Region of North Dakota, may capture and store nutrient runoff from cropland fields. Photo Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Does USDA support farmers and other land managers in wetlands conservation efforts?
Absolutely, yes. Through NRCS, USDA offers financial assistance and one-on-one technical support for farmers and other land managers interested in wetlands conservation. Specifically:
NRCS supports land managers in implementing voluntary practices to conserve natural resources and strengthen working lands. This includes practices – such as filter strips – that capture nutrients and sediments prior to entering streams and wetlands, thus improving the potential for wetlands to store water and recycle nutrients over the long term. Filter strips are also a climate-smart mitigation activity, with the potential to increase soil carbon and sequester carbon in perennial biomass while improving water quality.
I encourage anyone interested in wetlands conservation across their working lands to contact the NRCS office at their local USDA Service Center.
Where can I learn more about CEAP assessments?
Through CEAP, USDA quantifies and reports on trends in conservation practices, and associated outcomes, over time. You may learn more about CEAP assessments by visiting our new webpage – nrcs.usda.gov/ceap. Our Wetlands Assessments webpage provides information on the effects of conservation efforts related to agricultural wetlands, including additional publications.
Dr. Joseph (Joe) Prenger is the CEAP Wetlands Lead for the NRCS Resource Inventory and Assessment Division. He can be reached at joseph.prenger@usda.gov.
A partial dam break on Connecticut’s Yantic River is threatening a downstream community with potentially life-threatening flooding January 2024. Photo credit: American Rivers
Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Amy Souers Kober and Andrew Fisk):
January 10, 2024
Unsafe dams are “ticking time bombs” putting communities at risk
A partial dam break on Connecticut’s Yantic River is threatening a downstream community with potentially life-threatening flooding. Authorities have issued a flash flood warning and are evacuating the area. The dam is rated as a high hazard potential by the state’s dam safety office.
The incident is an example of the growing threat of dam failures to communities nationwide, as infrastructure is aging and climate change is fueling more severe flooding.
Andrew Fisk, Northeast Regional Director for American Rivers, made the following statement:
“Dam failures can be disastrous and put lives at risk. This is a wake-up call. Increasingly frequent and severe flooding is straining infrastructure in the Northeast and nationwide. In order to protect communities, we must improve the safety and performance of dams.”
“Tens of thousands of dams across our country are old and obsolete. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s dams a D grade in its report card on the nation’s infrastructure. One of the most cost-effective ways to deal with outdated, unsafe dams is to remove them.”
“We support the efforts of the community and the Connecticut Dam Safety Program to manage this emergency. American Rivers has advocated in past years to strengthen the dam safety program and get them the resources they need to keep Connecticut’s dams safe.”
“Congress must act to reauthorize the National Dam Safety Program which supports state dam safety agencies. The program’s authorization expired on September 30, leaving thousands of high-risk dams across the country vulnerable to failure. Aging dams are ticking time bombs. We must help communities invest in necessary repairs and, where appropriate, dam removal and river restoration.”
Connecticut Rivers Shown on the Map: Connecticut River, Farmington River, Housatonic River, Naugatuck River, Quinebaug River, Quinnipiac River, Scantic River, Shepaug River, Shetucket River, Thames River and Willimantic River. Connecticut Lakes Shown on the Map: Bantam Lake, Barkhamsted Reservoir, Boldon Lake, Colebrook River Lake, Easton Reservoir, Gardner Lake, Lake Candlewood, Lake Gaillard, Lake Waramaug, Mansfield Hollow Lake, Moodus Reservoir, Napaug Reservoir, Pachaug Pond, Quaddick Reservoir and Saugatuk Reservoir. Credit: Geology.com
Becky Mitchell. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
February 2, 2024
Becky Mitchell speaks crisply and with a bass-drum firmness. Her speeches are like freight trains, orderly processions full of weight, one thought pounding after another.
Her full-time job since July 2023, as Colorado’s lead negotiator in Colorado River matters, gives her weighty material that matches her rhetorical style. Before that, she informally held the same role as the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
The Colorado River has been riven with rising drama in the last 20 years. The seven basin states – but particularly Arizona and California – have reluctantly, slowly conceded reforms necessary to the occasion. The federal government, the referee for the river and operator of the two giant dams, Hoover and Glen Canyon, was slow to force the hard decisions.
“It is time for a fundamental change in how we manage the Colorado River,” she told members of the Colorado Water Congress at the group’s annual conference on Jan. 30. “It’s time to adapt to the river that we have, not the river we dream of.”
“We have some difficult roads ahead of us as we work to find a sustainable solution for the basin,” she said in wrapping up her 15-minute speech. “What we must do would’ve been easier 10 years ago. It would’ve been easier 5 years ago. Tomorrow will be difficult, but we must have the courage to try.”
Following is a lightly abridged version of the speech:
Change is coming. I can’t emphasize enough how much the post-2026 negotiations matter whether you are in the upper basin, lower basin, Mexico, or a member of one of the 30 tribal nations. We all deserve a future with certainty and security in our water supply without that being jeopardized by constant crisis management. We also all deserve a future where we can live within the means of the river and without the risk of overuse or misuse driving us into crisis.
The Yampa River carried a robust runoff flow from winter snows through Steamboat Springs in May 2023, helping pull back the two giant reservoirs of the Colorado River from the brink of disaster. Top, Becky Mitchell addresses the Colorado River Water Users Association in December 2021. Photos/Allen Best
For the past two decades, the upper basin has been caught between the impacts of climate change and lower-basin overuse. I acknowledge that the lower basin does not like the term overuse. My intent is not to offend, but rather to be clear and honest about uses that exceed what the compact and hydrology can allow whatever it is called. We cannot and will not agree to guidelines that perpetuate management of our water resources that do not acknowledge what Mother Nature is providing. The basin cannot continue to use water at a rate that is unsustainable. Those who are fearful of change or who benefit from status quo will find fault in the plain facts that I share with you here today. You will find fault in the tone with which I share them.
The good news is that change is coming. The upper division states have said for years, decades now, the lower basin needs to take responsibility for the role in emptying the reservoirs. But let me be clear why this change is needed. Dry hydrology and overuse have drained the reservoirs. Future guidelines must recognize the reality of the Colorado River Basin hydrology.
Our lower basin neighbors have recently recognized that they must address the overuse. The next step for them is to explain how will they make this commitment a reality. We look forward to seeing those details.
We will continue to do everything we can to get to a seven state solution that protects Colorado and the upper basin, but we also need to be prepared for other scenarios. The upper division states have presented a concept to the lower basin states that outlines mechanisms for living within the means of the river while rebuilding and maintaining Powell and Mead and operating within the law of the river.
(Our concept) is essentially a water budget that honors the law and Mother Nature. The Colorado River Compact is our foundation. Solutions need to respect the law of the river and recognize the reality of hydrology across the entire basin. Those solutions must also be real and verifiable. Aspirational goals do not provide the clarity that is required to provide predictability across the basin.
We cannot and will not agree to balancing like the ’07 guidelines, a concept that was used to justify sending water downstream. The water should be used to rebuild storage. We’re focused on fair, legal and sustainable outcomes for the entire basin. Out of respect for the sovereignty of those lower basin states and the role of the Secretary of the Interior as the water master in the lower basin states, we have not weighed in on how they should apportion the reductions amongst themselves. That is for the lower basin (states) to work out.
We have heard our downstream neighbors say, if we figure out the structural deficit, will you meet us in the middle on climate change? That’s one heck of a hypothetical. If the lower basin overuse is addressed, we’d be looking at a very different situation than what we see today. In fact, if the lower basin had accounted for evaporation and transit losses through the ’07 guidelines, the reservoirs would likely be healthy now.
We are the ones who’ve been doing the work on climate change. We absolutely have been doing our part. What I’ve heard from across Colorado is we are willing to help. We are willing to be a part of the solution, but we cannot solve a problem alone.
We (already) take involuntary and uncompensated reductions when Mother Nature doesn’t provide water. Users in the upper basin have taken an average of 1.3 million acre-feet in shortages annually over the last several years. We make do with less in our communities, our workforce, our economies, and our food production. The lower basin must recognize and acknowledge the annual shortages that occur in the upper division states and then acknowledge — thank you — that the operation of the reservoirs must absolutely respond to hydrology. In addition, we must also acknowledge that the upper basin has not developed into our 7.5 million acre-foot apportionment and that undeveloped tribal water rights are flowing downstream.
In May 2022, this boat ramp at Lake Powell was useful as a place to sit but had no value for launching boats. Photo/Allen Best
Overuse must end, and the compact must remain our foundation. It will not be easy. As we move into a future that is more responsive to hydrology, I acknowledge that we all must acknowledge there will be hardship and pain, while also acknowledging that this hardship and pain has existed in the upper basin for decades. Because we haven’t been shielded from climate change impacts, the upper basin states are uniquely positioned to assist our downstream neighbors in learning how to live with less.
We are collaborating in unprecedented ways in the upper basin, and this time we’re doing it at a bigger table. I’m very proud that we are working with the upper basin tribal nations in recognition of their historical ownership and their undeveloped federally reserved water rights. This collaboration has made very clear to me that is unacceptable for the upper division states to accept any limitations on future uses when upper basin tribes have limited access to clean water, agricultural production, and economic vitality.
I remember the speech I gave in the summer of 2022. The reservoirs were crashing. The federal government had laid out an ultimatum: Figure out how to conserve 2 to 4 million acre feet or we’ll figure it out for you. The lower basin was unwilling and unable to reach an agreement about cuts to their uses. I remember many long meetings and long hours that my team and I put into discussions with our fellow upper division states. We worked out the five-point plan. This was a turning point for Colorado. The decision was a difficult one for me. It was not fun.
By implementing this plan, we have positioned ourselves as leaders in the basin, the ones willing to come to the table to do our part. Colorado cannot and will not accept status quo. We cannot or will not be bullied into a future that drains the reservoirs for continued unsustainable use.
For example, we pushed the Bureau of Reclamation to modify how the upper basin is represented in Colorado River Basin modeling. Our advocacy means that today the updated models better reflect the reality in the upper basin, a reality that will be represented in the post 2026 tools. Reclamation models now show what shortages look like here.
This team has also worked to make Colorado more resilient. Over the past year, the CWCB has spearheaded a turf removal program to make our municipalities more resilient for future water shortages.
Division of water resources has continued to strictly administer water rights, including painful cuts to water use to respond to Mother Nature.
My fellow commissioners and the upper Colorado River Commissioners revamped the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program, or SCPP, to allow water users to voluntarily forego their water uses in exchange for compensation, thereby helping to put water in the river to mitigate drought in the upper division states.
California’s Imperial Valley has a year-round growing season and uses Colorado River water for palm trees and almost every crop imaginable . February 2017 photo/Allen Best
The drought task force critically examined the Colorado River issues and not only applauded the good work of the state, but recommended additional resources to augment our existing work.
The river team is also working to transition our guiding principles from paper to practice. You are all familiar with the irrefutable truths. It’s one thing to say these are our principles. It’s another thing to then apply them to the basin-states negotiations. That is a difficult task. I’ve seen some of these principles gain traction throughout the entire Colorado River basin. Federal government has acknowledged the need for managing the reservoirs sustainably. The lower basin has acknowledged the need to address their overuse. The environmental community recognizes that healthy storage at our nation’s two largest reservoirs must be the first step in protecting Colorado’s rive and the, Colorado River’s ecosystems. Gradually, I’m hearing interest from DC to the Imperial Valley, recognizing that the status quo does not work anymore.
It is time for a fundamental change in how we manage the Colorado River. We must all live within the means of the river if we hope to sustain it. I want Lake Powell and Lake Mead to serve the purposes they were designed to serve. To provide for sustainable development of our compact apportionments in the Colorado River Basin and to provide water security in dry years. A sustainable system means we have to rebuild storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead and protect upstream storage for releases only in the most dire circumstances. This means that the worldview around water must change, particularly in the lower basin. We must manage demand to rebuild the storage that provides certainty of supply. In all years, we all must adapt to the available water supply.
We have an opportunity now to collaboratively determine how to adapt to the river that we have, not the river we dream of. The lower basin states have said many good things that signal that they are open to collaboration.
We believe them when they say they will own the structural deficit, when they say they will live within the means of the river, when they say they will support the tribes and that they support the environment. I take them at their word. We assume that they are serious about these commitments, and we expect open and transparent accounting of all lower basin uses of main stem tributaries so that we can trust but verify their actions. We hope that the lower basin will come around to support the framework for management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead that is sustainable for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River.
What we must do would’ve been easier 10 years ago. It would’ve been easier five years ago. Tomorrow will be difficult, but we must have the courage to try.
Colorado River Basin Plumbing. Credit: Lester Doré/Mary Moran via Dustin Mulvaney and Twitter
The Rio Grande flows near Albuquerque as the sun rises over the Sandia Mountains. (Photo by Diana Cervantes for Source NM)
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
The nation’s highest court will hear federal objections to a deal between Texas and New Mexico in their dispute over Rio Grande water in oral arguments scheduled for a midweek date on March 20.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up the case last week, as the lawsuit crawls into a decade since its filing.
Justices will evaluate arguments from the federal government taking exception to a compromise planagreed to by Texas, New Mexico and Colorado to settle the case. The three states are parties in the lawsuit and agreed to the compromise in January 2023. [ed. emphasis mine]
The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer said there would be no need to adjust its budget request before the New Mexico State Legislature because of the oral arguments in D.C. State Engineer Mike Hamman said in a written statement that the office is looking forward to the oral argument in March.
“We are confident that the Supreme Court will accept the states’ proposed settlement, which will allow us to move forward towards securing a stable water future for all users in the lower Rio Grande,” said Hamman.
Budget asks
Also on Monday morning, the New Mexico House of Representatives released its state budget proposal for the next fiscal year. In the proposed budget, the House Appropriations and Finance committee extended $2 million given last year to the New Mexico Department of Justice for Rio Grande litigation and notes another $6.4 million on interstate water litigation will carry forward from last year.
In the Office of the State Engineer, $8.9 million is set aside for litigation and adjudication of water rights within streams around the state and underground basins.
Separately, the agency will transfer $2.5 million to the litigation and adjudication programs of the state engineer. While not all adjudication and litigation is specific to the supreme court’s Rio Grande case, that in all, totals to nearly $20 million between both agencies.
How we got here
Formally called Original No. 141 Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, the case has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
The 2014 filing by the state of Texas centers on allegations that New Mexico groundwater pumping downstream of Elephant Butte Reservoir took Rio Grande water allocated to Texas.
Texas said New Mexico’s pumping violated the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, a legal agreement between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas to split the river’s water.
While 80% of the river’s water is used for agriculture, it’s a major source of drinking water for cities such as El Paso and Albuquerque, and for wildlife. Las Cruces sits below Elephant Butte Reservoir and receives all its drinking water from groundwater.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to intervene in the case. Attorneys for federal agencies said New Mexico groundwater pumping threatened federal abilities to deliver water to tribes, regional irrigation districts and Mexico under a federal treaty.
The case pressed on to trial in 2021 and was split into two parts. A six-week virtual portion of the trialwas held in the fall, and a second in-person technical portion was pushed back after months of negotiations by parties took up much of 2022.
Just before the trial was set to resume, the three states announced an agreement which would resolve issues between Texas and New Mexico. It includes measuring water deliveries at the state line, new conditions for over- and under-deliveries of Rio Grande water and incorporating drought baselines and groundwater pumping into the formulas for how much water is available.
Attorneys for the federal government objected, arguing that the agreement was made without their consent.
U.S. 8th Circuit Judge Michael Melloy recommended last year that the Supreme Court accept the deal over objections from the federal government, calling it “fair and reasonable” in his 123-page report. He said disputes over federal operations in Southern New Mexico could be resolved in other courts.
In December, the federal government submitted a filing objecting to Melloy’s recommendation. In the filing, attorneys said the settlement “imposes obligations on the United States without its consent.” Attorneys further argued that the deal should be thrown out because it is “contrary to the Compact”.
It’s expected that only attorneys for the states and the federal government will have time to speak during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in March. If that happens, groups unable to present arguments would include farming associations, irrigation districts, the city of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University, which appear as amici curae or “friends of the court.”
Opinions from the Supreme Court are typically issued by late June, occasionally early July, during their session.
Map of the Rio Grande watershed. Graphic credit: WikiMedia
“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
From email from the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (Michael Elizabeth Sakas):
February 1, 2024
Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner, spoke to a sold-out crowd at the Colorado Water Congress’s Annual Convention in Aurora, CO this week. She shared an update on the state’s negotiation positioning, and the reality of difficult roads ahead, as the states and Tribal Nations work to find sustainable solutions for 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River in the arid southwest.
“Change is coming to the Colorado River and because it is, I can’t emphasize enough how much the Post-2026 negotiations matter,” Commissioner Mitchell said in her speech. “Whether you are in the Upper Basin, Lower Basin, Mexico, or a member of one of the 30 Tribal Nations, we all deserve a future with certainty and security in our water supply, without that being jeopardized by constant crisis management.”
The current guidelines, called the ‘07 Guidelines, manage Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These expire in 2026, and the states that share the river are in the process of negotiating new guidelines for how Lake Powell and Lake Mead will operate post-2026. Powell and Mead hit their lowest levels on record in recent years, partly because states in the Lower Basin continue to use more water than what flows into these reservoirs. Commissioner Mitchell said that the ‘07 Guidelines cannot simply be extended.
“I want to recognize that the Lower Basin does not like the term overuse. My intent is not to offend, but rather to be clear and honest about uses that exceed what the Compact and hydrology can allow,” Commissioner Mitchell said. “Whatever you call it, we cannot– and will not– agree to guidelines that perpetuate management of our water resources that do not acknowledge what Mother Nature is providing. The Basin cannot continue to use water at a rate that is unsustainable.”
“History shows that collaborative efforts by the Basin States can provide superior solutions. We will continue to do everything we can to get to a seven-state solution that protects Colorado and the Upper Basin. But we also need to be prepared for other scenarios,” Commissioner Mitchell said.
“Our Colorado River team is a force. I cannot thank the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Division of Water Resources, and the Attorney General’s teams enough. Also, I greatly appreciate the support of Governor Polis, who has been engaged and helpful as we enter these critical negotiations,” Commissioner Mitchell said. “Together, we have shown the federal government and the Lower Basin that Colorado cannot and will not accept the status quo or be bullied into a future that drains the reservoirs for continued, unsustainable use in the Lower Basin.”
Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention Speech Jan. 31, 2024
Change is coming – and because it is, I can’t emphasize enough how much the Post-2026 negotiations matter.
Whether you are in the Upper Basin, Lower Basin, Mexico, or a member of one of the 30 Tribal Nations, we all deserve a future with certainty and security in our water supply without that being jeopardized by constant crisis management. We all deserve a future where we can live within the means of the river, without the risk of overuse or misuse driving us into crisis.
For the past two decades, the Upper Basin has been caught between the impacts of climate change and Lower Basin overuse, along with the increasing risk that our thirsty neighbors will look upstream for more water.
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
I want to recognize that the Lower Basin does not like the term overuse. My intent is not to offend, but rather to be clear and honest about uses that exceed what the Compact and hydrology can allow. Whatever you call it, we cannot – and will not – agree to guidelines that perpetuate management of our water resources that do not acknowledge what Mother Nature can provide.
The Basin cannot continue to use water at a rate that is unsustainable.
Those who are fearful of change, or who benefit from the status quo, will find fault with the plain facts I share here with you and will find fault with the tone in which I share them, as an excuse for their inaction. We must move forward together to face the future with honesty and courage. You, Colorado, and all people in the Basin deserve nothing less than honesty and courage.
The good news? Change is coming. The Upper Division States have said for decades that the Lower Basin needs to take responsibility for its role in emptying the reservoirs.
Let’s be clear about why this change is needed. The ‘07 Guidelines cannot be extended. Under the ‘07 Guidelines, dry hydrology and overuse by the Lower Basin have drained the reservoirs. Future guidelines must recognize the reality of Colorado River Basin hydrology.
Our Lower Basin neighbors recognize that they must address their overuse, what they call the “structural deficit.” I applaud that first step of acknowledging their responsibility. The next step is for them to explain how they will make this commitment a reality that we can rely on. We look forward to seeing those details.
The history of the Basin shows that collaborative efforts by the Basin States can provide superior solutions. We will continue to do everything we can to get to a seven-state solution that protects Colorado and the Upper Basin.
But we also need to be prepared for other scenarios.
The Upper Division States have presented a concept to the Lower Basin States that outlines mechanisms for living within the means of the river while rebuilding and maintaining Powell and Mead, and operating within the Law of the River – essentially a water budget that honors the law and Mother Nature.
The Colorado River Compact is our foundation. Solutions need to respect the Law of the River and recognize the reality of the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin. Solutions must also be real and verifiable. Aspirational goals do not provide the clarity that is required to provide predictability to the Basin.
We cannot and will not agree to continue “balancing” under the ‘07 Guidelines, a concept used to justify sending water downstream to fuel Lower Basin overuse. That water should be used to rebuild storage.
We’re focused on fair, legal, and sustainable outcomes for the entire Basin.
Out of respect for the sovereignty of the Lower Basin States, and the role of the Secretary of the Interior as Water Master of the Lower Basin, we have not weighed in on how they should apportion reductions among themselves. That is for the Lower Basin to work out. We’ve rolled up our sleeves in a good-faith effort to balance the demands with supplies, and the need to have water available in dry years to keep the system from crashing.
We have heard our downstream neighbors say, “If we figure out the structural deficit, will you meet us in the middle on climate change?”
First off – that’s one heck of a hypothetical. If Lower Basin overuse is addressed, we would be looking at a very different situation than what we see today. In fact, if the Lower Basin had accounted for evaporation and transit losses throughout the ‘07 Guidelines, the reservoirs would likely be healthy.
But at this time, we’re the only ones who’ve been doing anything about climate change. We’ve shown that we are willing to do our part, that we have been doing our part. I have heard across Colorado that we’re willing to help – but we cannot solve the problem alone.
We take involuntary and uncompensated reductions when Mother Nature does not provide. Water users in the Upper Basin have taken an average of 1.3 million acre-feet in shortages annually over the last several years. In other words, we have used 1.3 million acre-feet less than what we may have used if our water users’ demands were fulfilled.
When we make do with less water, we also make do with less in our communities, our workforce, our economies, and our food production. The Lower Basin must recognize and acknowledge the annual shortages that occur in the Upper Division States, and then acknowledge that the operation of reservoirs must respond to hydrology.
In addition, we must acknowledge that the Upper Basin has not developed into our 7.5 million acre-foot apportionment and that undeveloped Tribal water rights are flowing downstream.
Regardless of what the future agreement looks like, the sideboards are set: we can no longer operate without regard for Mother Nature, overuse must end, and the Compact must remain our foundation.
It won’t be easy. As we move to a future that is more responsive to hydrology, I acknowledge that there will be hardship and pain in the Lower Basin – while also acknowledging that this hardship and pain has existed in the Upper Basin for decades, because we haven’t been shielded from climate change impacts.
The Upper Basin is uniquely positioned to assist our downstream neighbors in learning to live with less.
Seventy-five years ago, my predecessor agreed to the 1948 Upper Colorado River Compact, which established the Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC) as a forum for “interstate comity.” That sentiment has never been truer in the Upper Basin than today. The Upper Division States are strongly united, and we’re stronger because of the common interests shared across Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
We are collaborating in unprecedented ways in the Upper Basin, and this time we’re doing it at a bigger table. I’m very proud that we are working with the Upper Basin Tribal Nations in recognition of their historical ownership and their undeveloped federally reserved water rights. This collaboration has made it very clear to me that it is unacceptable for the Upper Division States to accept any limitations on future uses when the Upper Basin Tribes have limited access to clean water, agricultural production, and economic vitality.
What we can do and what we will do is operate responsibly, and initiate programs and policies that promote sustainable uses across the Upper Basin.
I would like to take a moment to reflect on how far we have come as a state, and as the Upper Basin, over the last couple of years. I remember the speech I gave to you all in the summer of 2022. The reservoirs were crashing. The federal government had laid out an ultimatum: “Figure out how to conserve 2 to 4 million acre-feet, or we’ll figure it out for you.” The Lower Basin was unwilling and unable to reach an agreement about cuts to their uses.
When it became clear that a Basin agreement was impossible, I remember the many long meetings and long hours that my team and I put into discussions with our fellow Upper Division States. And we worked our way to the Five Point Plan.
That Five Point Plan was a turning point for Colorado. You all know that decision was a difficult one for me. But by implementing this plan, we positioned ourselves as leaders in the Basin as the ones willing to come to the table to do our part.
A few short months later, the General Assembly passed a bill that funded the creation of several new full-time employees. If you’ve ever worked in state government, you’ll know that getting one new employee is a massive success – imagine then how significant it is to secure nearly 20 positions dedicated to Colorado River issues.
Our Colorado River team is a force. I cannot thank the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Division of Water Resources, and the Attorney General’s teams enough. Together, we have shown the federal government and the Lower Basin that Colorado cannot and will not accept the status quo or be bullied into a future that drains the reservoirs for continued, unsustainable use in the Lower Basin.
For example, we pushed the Bureau of Reclamation to modify how the Upper Basin is represented in Colorado River Basin modeling. Our advocacy means that today, the updated models better reflect the reality in the Upper Basin — a reality that will be represented in post-2026 tools. Reclamation models now show what shortages look like here. The models also show how shortage cuts into our water needs.
This team has also worked to make Colorado more resilient. Over the past year, the CWCB has spearheaded a turf removal program to make our municipalities more resilient to future water shortages; DWR strictly administered water rights – including painful cuts to water use – to respond to Mother Nature; Me and my fellow Upper Colorado River Commissioners revamped the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program – or SCPP – to allow water users to voluntarily forgo their water uses in exchange for compensation, thereby helping to put water in the river to mitigate drought in the Upper Division States; and the Drought Task Force critically examined Colorado River issues, and not only applauded the good work of the state, but recommended additional resources to augment our existing work.
The Colorado River team is also working to transition our guiding principles from paper to practice. You are all familiar with the irrefutable truths. It’s one thing to say, “These are our principles.” It’s another thing to then apply them in Basin State negotiations.
I’ve seen some of the principles gain traction throughout the entire Colorado River Basin. The federal government has acknowledged the need for managing the reservoirs sustainably. The Lower Basin has acknowledged the need to address their overuse. The environmental community recognizes that healthy storage at our nation’s two largest reservoirs must be the first step in protecting the Colorado River’s ecosystems.
Gradually, I’m hearing diverse interests, from D.C. to the Imperial Valley, recognize that the status quo doesn’t work anymore, that it is time for a fundamental change in how we manage the Colorado River, and that we must all live within the means of the River if we hope to sustain it.
I want Lake Powell and Lake Mead to serve the purposes they were designed to serve: to provide for sustainable development of our compact apportionments in the Colorado River Basin, and to provide water security in dry years.
A sustainable system means we have to rebuild storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and protect upstream storage for releases only in the most dire circumstances. This means that the worldview around water must change – particularly in the Lower Basin. We must manage demand to rebuild the storage that provides certainty of supply in all years. We all must adapt to the available water supply.
We hope our Lower Basin partners will meet us in this moment. We have an opportunity to collaboratively determine how to adapt to the river that we have, not the river that we dream of.
The Lower Basin states have said some good things that signal they are open to collaboration. We believe them when they say that they will “own the structural deficit,” when they say they will “live within the means of the River,” that they “support the Tribes,” and that they “support the environment.”
I take them at their word. We assume they are serious about these commitments, and we expect open and transparent accounting of all Lower Basin uses– mainstem and tributaries– so that we can trust but verify their actions.
We hope that the Lower Basin will come around to support a sustainable framework for the management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River. We are bound together by this River, by the Compact we signed 100 years ago, and by our shared interest in a vibrant American southwest.
Utilizing unprecedented federal funds, I believe that we can reach an agreement that protects all who rely on this critical resource – and we should do this post haste: 40 million people are counting on us.
I want to acknowledge my counterparts in both the Upper and Lower Basins, along with the leadership of the Bureau of Reclamation, and the fact that we have some difficult roads ahead of us as we work to find a sustainable solution for the Basin. What we must do would have been easier ten years or even five years ago. Tomorrow will be difficult, but we must have the courage to try.
The history of the Basin shows that collaborative efforts by the Basin States can provide superior solutions. We all know we must prepare for other scenarios. But for now, I promise you that we are focused on finding that collaborative solution.
My request is that Colorado stay unified at this critical time in the negotiations. I commit to making space and time to have the difficult discussions we need to have within Colorado about these important issues. But the most important task – right now – is to find success in the negotiations with the other Basin States.
Success depends on all of us staying together with a common goal of protecting the resources of Colorado for all who depend upon them – including the Tribal Nations, agricultural users, cities, and the environment.
Thank you.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo
January 29, 2024—The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) has voted to recommend $20 million in funding to the Colorado River District as part of the annual Water Projects Bill contributing to a larger funding effort to secure Shoshone permanence and foster water security on the Colorado River.
“The CWCB Board considered this funding application very carefully. This is a significant step towards maintaining historic flows on the Colorado River,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “As an agency, we will continue to do our due diligence in this process, with the hope that these efforts can benefit the environment and give West Slope water users more certainty.”
The decision follows a special workshop held on January 25, and a final vote during CWCB’s January Board Meeting. On December 19, 2023, the Colorado River Water Conservation District and Public Service Company signed an agreement that would allow the River District to purchase the water rights associated with the Shoshone power plant. The River District is also planning to seek funds from the Bureau of Reclamation and others.
In the coming months to years, CWCB will work with the River District to negotiate an instream flow agreement. If approved, the two entities would then seek a change in water right decree through Colorado Water Court. The CWCB’s Instream Flow Program secures instream flow water rights to protect streamflow to preserve the natural environment of streams and lakes where fish and other species live. The integrity of this long-standing program depends on a thorough review, so it’s critical CWCB staff follow public processes.
“We also greatly appreciate the hard work and dedication of CWCB staff in this effort and their positive recommendation of funding to the Board,” said Andy Mueller, Colorado River District General Manager. “We consider the state an integral partner in protecting Shoshone’s flows in perpetuity, and the $20 million funding milestone brings this generational investment in Colorado water security one step closer to the finish line.”
“If completed, Shoshone water right preservation would help maintain flows on the Colorado River, and support the system as a whole,” said Dan Gibbs, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “Securing this water right and negotiating an instream flow use agreement could mean supporting healthy agriculture, providing clean drinking water, fostering healthy environments, and more. We look forward to working with the Colorado River District and Xcel Energy as this process enters the next phases of evaluation and approval.”
New Mexico Lakes, Rivers and Water Resources via Geology.com.
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
January 31, 2024
Even as New Mexico water supplies are predicted to decline by more than 25% over the next five decades, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said she always views the glass as half-full, in the Tuesday presentation of a long-awaited report addressing the state’s water needs for the next 50 years.
Or really: “45 years, since it took us five years to write it,” the governor quipped.
Without action, New Mexico will have a shortage of 750,000 acre feet of water in that time period, according to the document.
The 23-page document proposes using water conservation, new water supplies and protections for watersheds to address the shortfall. It breaks down further into 11 subsections with points to develop public education campaigns, improve infrastructure, modernize wastewater treatment plants and protect and restore watersheds.
“It conserves water and it reduces waste,” Lujan Grisham said. “If it’s leaking, and it’s evaporating, we don’t know where it is, and if we’re not protecting it and if it gets polluted.”
Lujan Grisham described the quantities of brackish water (salty water) in deep underground aquifers to be as vast as an “ocean.”
“We should not be using our fresh drinking water in a number of industries,” she said. “Because we don’t need to make that choice between your safe drinking water and your business. We have the chance here to do both. And that’s exactly the path we’re on.”
Lujan Grisham said that treated produced and brackish water would not be used for drinking water or agricultural sources, but only in manufacturing and industrial uses, at this time.
It’s unclear how much brackish water would be available to support the governor’s goals, said State Geologist J. Michael Timmons, because the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources has not received full funding for an aquifer mapping project. An executive budget request asked for $9 million dollars for aquifer mapping.
“There are probably vast amounts of water, we need to better understand the quantity and quality of that water,” Timmons said. “It leads to the details of how accessible it is, to draw it through the rock formations. There’s a lot of work to be done on our part as a state agency, and others, to better understand those resources.”
At the press conference, Lujan Grisham was joined by the governors from Sandia and Santa Clara Pueblos, the New Mexico Environment Department secretary, the Clovis mayor and several lawmakers.
Some water advocates celebrated the priorities in the plan upon first review. Allyson Siwik, the executive director of Gila Resources Information Project, said she was pleased to see watershed pollution protections, restoration projects, stormwater management and drinking water infrastructure included.
Others said the plan did not address the issues facing New Mexico’s water crisis, including Melissa Troutman, a climate and energy advocate for WildEarth Guardians.
“The governor’s water plan ignores critical water threats in New Mexico, such as daily oil and gas spills that go unpenalized,” Troutman said in a written statement. “And her Strategic Water Supply incentivizes water-intensive industrial development like hydrogen, manufacturing, and fossil fuels that are inappropriate for any arid bioregion.”
How did we get here?
Lujan Grisham has been calling for a 50-year water plan since 2019. While lawmakers declined to fund the plan in prior years, New Mexico In Depth reported lawmakers provided $250,000 annually for the 50-year water plan and granted $500,000 in a one-time appropriation to the Office of the State Engineer in 2023.
A draft of the 50-year water plan circulated in 2022. What was presented today, “evolved” from that draft, said the governor’s spokesperson Maddy Hayden.
“The Action Plan released today evolved from the draft 50-Year Water Plan shared with the public and Water Task Force members in 2022 and reflects the Governor’s priority actions to provide water security for future New Mexicans,” Hayden wrote.
Hayden continued to say that the plan “complements many ongoing state agency programs” and that the implementation will have community involvement.
It bears little resemblance to those other reports.
The New Mexico Water Policy and Infrastructure Taskforce led by state environmental agencies, but also with lawmakers, conservation nonprofits, local water districts, tribal governments and more, issued a 90-page report that included detailed recommendations for funding more data collection. The group outlined dollar amounts for future legislation and staffing levels to sustain these water plans.
The 50-year action plan asks for recurring funding of $1.25 million per year for aquifer mapping and any additional funds would provide more than 100 monitoring wells in the next 12 years.
The other funding request in the plan asks for $500 million in 2024 and 2025 for the Strategic Water Supply Project. The “Return on Investment” for that project, according to the document, would be 100,000 acre feet of new water by 2028. By 2035, the report says, 50,000 feet to treat brackish water would be available for “recharging freshwater aquifers,” or used for “communities, farms, aquatic ecosystems and interstate compact compliance.”
The report assigns deadlines for actions in the next few years, but does not indicate how much the goals cost to accomplish.
In one section, the report says in order to address contaminated groundwater across hundreds of sites – including legacy uranium sites, petroleum releases and other polluted spots, New Mexico will “develop a dashboard of all known contaminated groundwater sites, including the status and estimated cost of cleanup for each site.”
It would then, “launch a state program to pay for the remediation of 100 neglected sites with no responsible party,” by 2025.
Sitting around a fire at a campsite along the Colorado River in Utah, boater Mike DeHoff flips through old photos of the area. Scientists from the United States Geological Survey circle around him and peer interestedly over his shoulder. He points to an old picture of the North Wash boat ramp, where the group is camped. The ramp was built about 20 years ago as a temporary take out for boaters running Cataract Canyon, a popular section for whitewater rafting, flowing through Canyonlands National Park upstream of Lake Powell. But in the past few decades, the ramp has deteriorated rapidly as water levels receded in the lake and the river here cut away at the land.
DeHoff, a welder based in Moab, Utah, runs the Returning Rapids Project, which documents annual changes in a section of the Colorado river called Cataract Canyon. The project brings external scientists out to survey species, measure sediment changes in the riverbed and examine the geology of newly exposed rock formations. The team presents this information, along with their own observations, to various organizations across the region and to the public. DeHoff and his team do this work, in part, to help provide important information before officials make crucial water management decisions regarding the river.
DeHoff is helping coordinate this March sediment survey with the USGS’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, in a portion of the river that was once part of Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. In the past few decades, drought, climate change and the overuse of water have caused the lake level to drop, spurring a crisis for the millions of people who rely on it for water and hydropower. But as the lake receded, DeHoff began noticing something unexpected: The river upstream flourished.
DeHoff helps USGS researchers take out their boat at the eroded North Wash ramp—a task that requires rollers, winches and a team of several people. Margaret Osborne
DeHoff started seeing changes in Cataract Canyon in 2002—about when the region’s drought started. Lower water levels led rapids to form. Cottonwoods and seep willows sprouted in areas that were once underwater. As Lake Powell shrunk, the river cut through the layers of sediment left behind—dams halt the flow of rivers and stop sediment from moving freely. Yet, despite these rapid changes, DeHoff saw little scientific research or public attention focused on this section of the river. Instead, he says, efforts went downstream to the Grand Canyon, on the other side of the lake.
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area map from the official brochure National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
A brief history
Before engineers dammed the river, Cataract Canyon was notorious for its massive, churning rapids—earning it the nickname “The Graveyard of the Colorado.” In 1964, Glen Canyon Dam was built near what’s now Page, Arizona, to supply power to areas of the West and to form the Lake Powell reservoir. In the United States, the Lake Powell reservoir is second in size only to Lake Mead, which is located 360 river miles downstream.
Seventeen years after the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was built, the reservoir hit full capacity—or “full pool”—and stretched 186 miles long. It inundated a stretch of river called Glen Canyon, which is sometimes referred to as “America’s lost national park.” The canyon was once home to a variety of plant and animal species as well as unique rock spires, arches, slot canyons and more than 3,000 ancient ruins. Just upstream of Glen Canyon, 65 percent of Cataract Canyon was also flooded, and many of its fearsome rapids disappeared.
The dam has also trapped millions of tons of sediment behind it in Lake Powell, which deprives the Grand Canyon downstream of sand and silt. The sediment holds critical nutrients for life and can form and replenish beach habitats that are important for plants and animals—and campsites for the 27,000 yearly Grand Canyon boaters.
“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
States, tribes, legislators, the public and other stakeholders are all competing for the dwindling water in the Colorado River, which was originally divided up in the 1923 Colorado River Compact. This agreement among the federal government and Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming was based on science that overestimated the amount of water that would be available in the years to come. And it left Native American tribes and Mexico out of the deal altogether. Over the years, subsequent agreements, court decisions and decrees have been added to the 100-year-old document to determine how water is split up. But at the end of 2026, some of these guidelines governing the system will expire and need to be renegotiated. Experts say deep cuts will need to be made to water usage. It may even mean drilling bypass tubes around the dam, which would essentially drain Lake Powell—one of the solutions the Bureau of Reclamation proposed lastyear.
The research facilitated by the Returning Rapids Project could help give officials a more holistic view of how their decisions will affect the entire river system. “Everybody knows that there’s going to have to be big decisions made about how we manage the Colorado River,” DeHoff says. “The way we’re using the river, and how we’re storing its water, is outdated.”
Environmentalists have proposed decommissioning Glen Canyon dam for decades to restore the health of the river and help conserve water. Some proponents, including the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, advocate to “Fill Lake Mead First,” a proposal that would combine the water from both reservoirs into Lake Mead. The proposal includes the construction of diversion tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam, allowing the river to flow freely through it and restoring Glen Canyon to its picturesque glory. According to a study commissioned by the institute, filling Lake Mead first would save about 300,000 acre-feet of water per year that would have otherwise been lost to ground seepage or evaporation in Lake Powell—about the amount allocated yearly to the state of Nevada. But a 2016 study from Utah State University has put this number closer to 50,000 acre-feet.
Record-breaking snowfall last winter in Utah has caused water levels to rise again. Lake Powell is now around 35 percent full. But scientists caution the drought is not over, and the precipitation is just a temporary fix to the region’s longstanding water shortage.
DeHoff chats with researchers about the river. Margaret Osborne
How the project formed
The shop DeHoff founded, Eddyline Welding in Moab, welds boats, frames and equipment for river runners. Private, commercial, USGS and National Park Service boaters gather there to swap stories and information.
Around 2017 or 2018, Peter Lefebvre, a longtime raft guide, began chatting with DeHoff about his observations in Cataract Canyon. “It was like, ‘Oh, so have you seen this rock sticking out of the river over here?’” Lefebvre says. The two formed the Returning Rapids Project with another local, Bego Gerhart. They wanted to investigate when the rapids would return to Cataract Canyon as Lake Powell receded. So far, they’ve documented the return of 11 rapids.
DeHoff and his partner, Meg Flynn, who’s the assistant director of the local library, have spent hours finding archival photos of the river upstream from Lake Powell. Project members pinpoint where the photos were taken and return to the same spots via raft, by motorboat or on foot to snap images, often at the same time of day and year, to compare the river and the landscape.
“It’s a treasure hunt,” Flynn says. “It’s super fun to figure out.”
Peter Lefebvre takes a photo to match an image taken previously. Margaret Osborne
The project soon grew, and in 2019, the Glen Canyon Institute, which advocates for a free-flowing river through the dam, took the Returning Rapids Project under its wing, allowing it to receive donations. The project now has four core part-time investigators: DeHoff, Flynn, Lefebvre and Chris Benson, a geologist, pilot and former raft guide. They’ve also recently involved some younger members in research and boat operations.
“All these government offices and agencies were kind of all doing their own thing and not really paying attention to this,” Benson says. “With all this change, all this worry about levels and drought, people weren’t really studying this.”
But scientists have now published multiple papers based on data collected with the help of the Returning Rapids Project.
Returning Rapids has also given presentations to various groups, including the Utah Geological Association, the Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies, the Colorado Plateau River Guides and classes of university students. They’ve shared their findings with National Park superintendents, decision makers at the Bureau of Reclamation and Utah raft guides. In Moab, they’ve spoken at local events and even given a talk for visiting high school students from California.
The team’s observations, historical research and photo matching are published in yearly field binders for the public to read. Commercial river guides sometimes share the binders with passengers on their trips.
“It’s gone from having a conversation in the welding shop to being a part of meetings of every superintendent who has anything to do with the Colorado River with the National Park Service,” DeHoff says. “And trying to help them think about it, which is nuts.”
In the field
Back at the campsite, the USGS researchers listen as DeHoff chats more about the history of the area. In the morning, the scientists set up equipment and board research vessels, which will collect data on sediment in the riverbank that they can compare to previous surveys.
One boat carries a sonar device with 512 beams to map the floor of the river and a lidar instrument, which uses lasers to scan the riverbank. The team spends the day motoring up and down a section of the river—“mowing the lawn” they call it—near the Dirty Devil confluence. On two computer screens, raw data appears as textured images of the riverbed. “This mossy-colored, brown-looking texture is indicative of sand,” researcher Katie Chapman says, pointing to the screen.
Researchers Katie Chapman and Paul Grams collect data on the USGS boat. Margaret Osborne
Between 2020 and May 2022, USGS geomorphologist Paul Grams saw the river scour the riverbed 36 feet deeper, and the water is now encountering resistant bedrock. In this section, the river is flowing along a different path than its historical channel. Grams says a waterfall or rapid could form here if the water level continued to drop, which would change how sediment moves in the river and shift the river dynamics and ecosystems upstream. A waterfall could also act as a barrier for migrating fish and affect infrastructure decisions, such as where to build a boat ramp.
As the USGS group mows the lawn, Returning Rapids motors around the river to match photos and measure river depth using a fish-finder device.
In a follow-up survey in the early summer, Grams documented an even more dramatic scouring—about 33 feet in just six months—thanks to the season’s high water flows.
DeHoff uses a fish finder to figure out the depth of the river. Margaret Osborne
Making a big scientific impact
A few months before this trip, back in the library in Moab, DeHoff pulled out an 11-foot-long map of the Colorado River and laid it flat on the table in front of him. He pointed out areas that have changed over the years. “We’ve seen all kinds of like native flora and fauna come in and repopulate the areas where the river has restored itself,” he said.
Ecologist Seth Arens of the University of Colorado’s Western Water Assessment, who organized the first Returning Rapids science trip in 2019, says the region is a fascinating natural laboratory. Arens was inspired to research the Lake Powell area because of conversations with DeHoff on a private trip. He’s been conducting plant surveys in side canyons and says he’s the first to research the terrestrial landscape that was once underwater, an area that’s about 100,000 acres.
So far, Arens has documented shrubs, cottonwood trees, native grasses, wildflowers, early signs of cryptobiotic soil crusts and unique vertical ecosystems called hanging gardens—all of which have appeared in the last few years. He says this knowledge could be useful for understanding how landscapes change in arid regions as reservoirs dry and dams are removed.
A USGS boat “mows the lawn.” Margaret Osborne
Arens makes it clear he is not advocating for the removal of Glen Canyon Dam, but he says his research should be taken into account when officials make their decisions around future water management. Though he hasn’t published his data yet, he says he’s submitted comments to the Bureau of Reclamation. If Lake Powell refills, it will come at a cost, he adds.
“There will be ecological resources that are again submerged and lost,” he says. “I think it’s fair for that information to be part of that decision-making process.”
Cari Johnson, a geologist and geophysicist at the University of Utah, has also been on several Returning Rapids science trips. She says the Returning Rapids Project has made her research on sediments safer and more efficient. The group has helped her get permits, work with management agencies and provided practical knowledge about boating.
“I wouldn’t be able to do any of the science that I have done so far without [DeHoff],” she says. “He has been incredibly effective at getting smart people all together.”
Wide green median in Erie. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 30, 2024
Relatively minor pushback in Colorado Senate to proposed limits to new water-thirsty grasses in urban areas that get little or no foot traffic
Colorado legislators in 2022 passed a bill that delivered $2 million for programs across the state for removal of thirsty turf classified as non-functional, meaning that the grass is mainly ornamental, to be seen but not otherwise used.
This morning [January 30, 2024] the Colorado Senate will review a bill that, if approved, will extend the concept.
“This bill is about not putting (in) that non-functional turf in the first place,” explained Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, in introducing SB24-005 to the Senate Agriculture and Water Committee last Thursday. “If you don’t put it in the first place, you don’t have to replace it.”
The committee approved the bill, titled “Prohibit Landscaping Practices for Water Conservation,” in a 4-1 vote.
The Colorado Municipal League registered opposition, but tellingly, no representatives of towns or cities showed up to argue against the bill. Instead, support was expressed by representatives of several local jurisdictions, including the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, the second largest water provider on the Western Slope, as well as the special district that provides water for Pueblo West.
The bill takes aim at Kentucky bluegrass and other species imported from wetter climatic zones that are planted along streets and in medians, amid parking lots, in front of government buildings as well as the expanses you often see around office parks and many business and industrial areas. The imported species can use far more water than buffalo grass and other species indigenous to Colorado’s more arid climate.
Residential property is unaffected. Worried about a public backlash, legislators amended the bill to make that exemption doubly clear.
The bill also bars use of plastic turf in lieu of organic vegetation for landscaping.
Originally reviewed by an interim legislative committee in October, the bill was subsequently modified based on input of stakeholders. Functional and non-functional turf were clarified. The bill was also modified to give cities and counties flexibility to determine areas of “community, civic and recreational” turf grasses, in effect letting them decide what is functional in some instances. The revised bill language also made it clear that installing native species of grass or those hybridized species that use less water would be OK. The revised bill also give municipalities and counties until Jan. 1, 2026, to review and revise their landscaping code and development review processes.
Part of the impetus to reduce water devoted to urban landscapes is a desire to protect water for agriculture in the San Luis Valley and other farm areas of Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, a co-sponsor, called the bill a “natural extension” of the turf-buy-back bill from 2022. He said he was surprised at the reaction in Alamosa to that funding. The water district he manages began getting inquiries about how to participate. “It kind of inspired me that there’s more room for improvement here in this space,” he told committee members.
Simpson also said he was motivated to help prevent water grabs by Front Range cities from the San Luis Valley, what locals sometimes call Colorado’s South Slope. Three separate attempts have been made in the last 35 years to divert water from the San Luis Valley, a place already being forced to trim irrigated agriculture as necessary to meet requirements of the Rio Grande Compact.
“That’s largely my motivation to be part of this conversation and doing everything we can to reduce that pressure on my rural constituents and our way of life,” said Simpson.
Nobody argues that the limits on expansion of what the bill calls non-functional turf will solve Colorado’s water problems. Municipalities use only 7% of the state’s water, and outdoor use constitutes roughly half of municipal use. Agriculture uses nearly 90% of the state’s water.
But developing water for growing cities, particularly along the Front Range but even in the headwaters’ communities, has become problematic as the climate has veered hotter and, in most years of the 21stcentury, drier.
The result, as was detailed in a five-part collaboration during 2023 between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, has been a growing consensus about the need to be more strategic and sparing about use of water in urban landscapes.
Disagreements remain about whether the state should create a state-wide standard, as is proposed in this legislation, or whether local governments should figure out their own solutions.
It’s a familiar arguing point in Colorado, but rarely are the divisions neat and simple. That’s also true in this case. Colorado Springs, the state’s second largest city, has a robust program for urban landscape transformation but was hesitant about the bill’s approach, wanting to ensure local flexibility.
Denver is fully behind the bill. Denver Water, which provides water to 1.6 million people, including the city’s 720,000 residents as well as many suburban jurisdictions, has committed to reducing the water devoted to urban turf in coming years by 30%, or roughly 6,000 acres. It says it doesn’t want to become parsimonious with its water only to see water used lavishly in new settlements.
Andrew Hill, the government affairs manager for Denver Water, called the bill a “moderate approach” in creating a new waterwise landscaping standard, one in which imported grasses are not the default.
“It makes real changes statewide, but it’s narrow enough to only apply to areas (where) I think a consensus exists,” said Hill at the committee hearing.
Local governments can go further, and many have already. Colorado has 38 turf replacement programs, and Western Resource Advocates found last fall that 17 of the jurisdictions already limit new turf and another 9 plan to do so.
Aurora and Castle Rock, late-blooming municipalities in the metropolitan areas, have adopted among the most muscular regulations in Colorado, even taking aim at water devoted to front yards. Both expect to continue growing in population, and together they plan to pursue importations of water currently used for farming along the South Platte River in northeastern Colorado. Aurora also still owns water rights in the Eagle River that it has been trying to develop for the last 40 years.
The Colorado Municipal League, a consortium of 270 towns and cities, insists that the proposal represents state overreach of one-size-fits-all policies for local landscapes. Heather Stauffer, CML’s legislative advocacy manager, cited the regulations of Aurora, Greeley, and Aspen as examples of approaches created to meet specific and local needs.
“We would advocate that the state put more money into funds that address turf removal programs that have been very successful among municipalities across the state,” Stauffer said. In 2023, Boulder-based Resource Central completed 604 lawn-replacement projects along the Front Range. With aid of state funding, it plans to expand its turf-removal and popular Garden In A Box programs to the Western Slope this year.
The Colorado River Drought Task Force recommended legislators allocate $5 million annually for turf removal programs. Some legislators have indicated they plan to introduce legislation to do just that.
Removal of turf, such as at this library in Lafayette, has become more common in Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
Witnesses at the committee hearing repeatedly echoed what Roberts said in introducing the bill. Paying for turf removal is “inefficient and not cost-effective” if water-thirsty grass species continue to be planted in questionable places said Lindsay Rogers, policy manager for municipal conservation at Western Resource Advocates, which helped shape the bill.
Rogers said passing the bill would build the momentum to “help ensure that Coloradans live within our water means and particularly in the context of a growing state and worsening drought conditions.”
The Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado, which represents 400 Colorado landscape and supplier companies, testified in support of the bill but hinted at future discussions as the bill goes through legislative sausage-making. Along with sod growers, they quibble over the dichotomous phrasing of “non-functional vs functional turf. They prefer the words recreational and utility.
On the flip side of these changes, some home gardeners might well find buffalo and other indigenous grasses, if more conserving of water, less appealing. Buffalo grass, for example, greens up a month or so later in spring and browns up a month earlier in autumn.
Water in urban landscapes is also on the agenda for three programs this week at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Congress, the state’s preeminent organization for water providers. Included may be a report from a task force appointed by Gov. Jared Polis last February that met repeatedly through 2023 to talk about ways to reduce expansion of water to urban landscapes.
This photo shows the Thompson Creek drainage on the right as it flows into the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. A company with oil shale interests has voluntarily abandoned its conditional water rights for a reservoir on Thompson Creek. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT
A company with ties to oil shale development in western Colorado has dropped its attempt to maintain water rights for a proposed reservoir on Thompson Creek.
Puckett Land Co. on Jan. 26 filed a motion to dismiss its diligence application for conditional water rights that date to 1966 and are associated with the construction of a 23,983-acre-foot reservoir on Thompson Creek, a tributary of the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. Later that day, a water court judge signed off on the motion, meaning the water rights have now been abandoned.
The Greenwood Village-based company holds interests in 17,500 acres of land in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, according to its water court filing. Attorney for Puckett Megan Christensen said the decision to voluntarily cancel these water rights was for business purposes. In its November filing, known as a diligence application, Puckett had said that current economic conditions are adverse to oil shale production.
“Puckett has a portfolio of water rights and in looking at them, they made the decision that this one wasn’t worth maintaining anymore, so they decided to just go ahead and dismiss it,” Christensen said in an interview with Aspen Journalism.
The proposed reservoir site had been on BLM land in Pitkin County within the boundaries of an area that the U.S. Forest Service and BLM are proposing to withdraw from eligibility for new oil and gas leases. The proposed Thompson Divide withdrawal area is comprised of 224,713-acres in Garfield, Gunnison and Pitkin counties that generally straddles the ridge of mountains running from south of Glenwood Springs to the northern edge of the West Elk Wilderness, south of McClure Pass.
Carbondale conservation group Wilderness Workshop supports the withdrawal area and celebrated Puckett dropping the water rights as a win for the Crystal River.
“This is great news for the Thompson Divide, the Crystal River, and our local ecosystem and communities,” Will Roush, executive director of Wilderness Workshop, said in a prepared statement. “Puckett’s intention to cancel their conditional water rights demonstrates just how speculative conditional water rights associated with oil shale development are. Other holders of similar rights ought to follow Puckett’s lead.”
Proposed Thompson Creek reservoir
Map: Laurine Lassalle – Aspen JournalismSource: BLM, Pitkin CountyCreated with Datawrapper
Conditional water rights
Puckett is among the companies with an interest in western Colorado oil shale development, who have water rights dating to the 1950s and ‘60s, which were amassed in anticipation of a boom. A report produced by conservation group Western Resource Advocates in 2009 found that there were conditional water rights associated with oil shale development for 27 reservoirs with 736,770 acre-feet of water in the mainstem of the Colorado River basin.
Companies have been able to hang onto these conditional water rights in some cases for over 50 years without using them because Colorado water law allows a would-be water user to reserve their place in the priority system based on when they applied for the right — not when they put water to use — while they work toward developing the water. Under the cornerstone of water law known as prior appropriation, older waters rights get first use of the river.
To maintain a conditional right, an applicant must every six years file what’s known as a diligence application with the water court, proving that they still have a need for the water, that they have taken substantial steps toward putting the water to use and that they “can and will” eventually use the water. They must essentially prove they are not speculating and hoarding water rights they won’t soon use.
But the bar for proving diligence is low. Judges are hesitant to abandon these conditional water rights, even if they have been languishing without being used for decades.
Before Puckett dropped its diligence application, John Cyran, senior staff attorney for Western Resource Advocates’ Healthy Rivers Program, said holding onto conditional rights like these raised speculation concerns.
“The water is being held without a plan to use it, which violates a central tenet in western water law,” Cyran said in an email. “Water shortages are affecting Colorado’s communities, fish and wildlife. We cannot afford to let companies profit off these shortages by holding onto unused conditional water rights.”
Crystal River Ranch was the only entity to file a statement of opposition to Puckett’s application. The deadline to file a statement of opposition is Jan. 31.
Crystal River Ranch also expressed concern that the over-50-year-old water rights had never been used and said that over the five decades Puckett had not shown it would develop them.
“During that period, the applicant has failed to obtain the necessary federal, state and local permits required to develop this reservoir,” the statement of opposition reads. “Therefore, this subject conditional water right must be canceled and abandoned.”
The Thompson Creek water rights had been part of a proposed “integrated system” that includes conditional water rights for two proposed small reservoirs, and a pump and pipeline on Starkey Gulch, a tributary of Parachute Creek. The application did not specifically mention work regarding the Thompson Creek reservoir site in its list of diligence activities and Puckett had said that diligence on any part of the system constitutes diligence with respect to the entire system. It is unclear how the Thompson Creek reservoir would have operated with these other parts of the system, but Christensen alluded to the reservoir being conceived of as additional back-up supply.
Christensen said the water rights applications for the Starkey Gulch components are still going forward because those water rights are closer to Puckett’s landholdings. These diligence applications were filed on Nov. 30 and so far no entities have filed statements of opposition.
Map of oil shale and tar sands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — via the BLM
About: This highly interactive event convenes water management leaders and others from across the Ogallala region to learn about and from each other’s work to slow aquifer decline and support ecosystem and community resilience.
When? Please plan to attend both days :
Monday, March 18 1 pm-5 pm CDT & evening social 6:30-8:30 pm
Wyoming’s plan to construct the West Fork Dam in the Medicine Bow National Forest “does not align well” with federal policy and management plans, a forest official wrote in a 2022 brief intended for U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.
The Medicine Bow environmental policy analyst who evaluated the state’s plan for the 264-foot high dam also said the proposal might not meet a U.S. Forest Service public-interest standard necessary for a land swap that would enable dam construction.
The critical assessment was penned as Medicine Bow staff prepared a briefing paper on Wyoming’s plan to construct the dam and its 130-acre reservoir in Carbon County to serve fewer than 100 irrigators who want more late-season water. Forest officials sought staffers’ input on the proposed development above the Little Snake River.
Medicine Bow officials were preparing the late-2022 briefing for regional and Washington D.C. officials, unnamed VIPs and Secretary Vilsack, according to documents obtained by WyoFile through a records request.
In an internal Medicine Bow email, forest environmental policy analyst Matt Schweich asked that the briefing paper state that “[t]he Forest is concerned that the State’s current preferred concept does not align well with Forest Service policy and the Forest plan, that it may not be in the public interest, and is likely to be highly controversial with the public.”
Ninety-six percent of comments on the plan opposed the project, a WyoFile tally of submissions showed. Criticism ranged from the project’s environmental impacts to Wyoming’s rosy analysis of public benefits and the state’s willingness to fund the bulk of the project for the benefit of private irrigators.
An ongoing environmental review necessary to advance the Wyoming project will determine whether the dam plan meets federal policies and the Medicine Bow management plan. A federal-state land exchange necessary for construction must be found to be in the public interest. An environmental impact statement and associated reviews of the proposal have been delayed once, and their completion date remains uncertain.
A Medicine Bow spokesman said Schweich’s opinion does not reflect the official position of the agency, which will only be revealed through the environmental impact statement.
Last puzzle piece
The Forest Service, U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are working to complete the EIS in a process largely obscured from public view. The emails, however, provide another peek into the thinking of Forest Service specialists regarding the merits of the controversial project.
In another internal discussion previously reported by WyoFile, a Medicine Bow hydrologist expressed worry that the dam proposal wasn’t being thoroughly vetted. Medicine Bow spokesman Aaron Voos dismissed that worry last year, characterizing the criticism as healthy agency discussion.
Schweich added his newly revealed assessment of the dam plan in a Sept. 26, 2022 email exchange as Medicine Bow staffers were preparing a “Hot topic” report for leadership, including Vilsack. Fully four years before that, Wyoming water developers had settled on the size of the dam, the capacity and size of the reservoir and the site of the complex. Wyoming has not deviated significantly from those plans.
Little Snake River watershed S. of Rawlins. Water developers want to construct an $80 million, 264-foot-high dam on the West Fork of Battle Creek south of Rawlins. This artist’s conception shows what the reservoir would look like in a Google Earth rendition. Credit: Wyoming Water Development Office.
A month before Schweich wrote his 2022 assessment, Wyoming had provided the last piece of the puzzle, telling Medicine Bow officials the state would seek 1,762 acres of forest land in an exchange that would enable construction of the dam and reservoir. Jenifer Scoggin, director of the Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments, provided that land-swap information to Medicine Bow officials in August 2022,according to a letter she wrote later that year.
Medicine Bow officials appeared to have known the size of the dam and reservoir, their location and the federal acreage Wyoming sought when the officials asked Schweich for his assessment.
A month after Schweich responded, Wyoming submitted its formal proposal to the Medicine Bow for a land exchange and dam construction.
Regardless how well-informed Schweich was when he made his 2022 assessment, spokesman Voos said it was unclear at that time exactly what the state intended.
“[T]he internal, draft email of Hot Topics updates [to which Schweich contributed] is prior to receipt of any formal land exchange proposal from the State,” Voos wrote WyoFile. “At the time, multiple informal discussions were taking place surrounding conceptual ideas.
“Since it was unclear what the State’s future use of any current National Forest System land might have been at that time,” Voos wrote, “then yes, there was the possibility for misalignment with our policy and Plan.”
WyoFile obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. Although the environmental impact statement is being written largely out of public view, the public had an opportunity to weigh in on the issue before the analysis began. People will be able to comment on the review when it is completed.
The vegetation in this beaver wetland rebounded vigorously after the Cameron Peak Fire. Photo: Evan Barrientos/Audubon Rockies
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
When the Cameron Peak wildfire ripped across northern Colorado in 2020, it left hundreds of thousands of acres charred and dusty — except for a series of beaver ponds tucked inside Poudre Canyon. The wetlands survived the state’s largest recorded wildfire and acted as a buffer as the flames raged through the canyon. And after the flames were extinguished, they served as a sponge to absorb floodwaters sped by the lack of vegetation, minimizing flood damage downstream. But a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year left wetlands like the ones in Poudre Canyon — as well as thousands of miles of seasonal streams critical to the state’s water system — without protection under federal law. The court’s majority limited the coverage of the Clean Water Act, leaving protection gaps for more than half of Colorado’s waters that lawmakers, conservationists, developers and state water quality officials are rushing to fill…Colorado, like many states, relied on the federal government’s permitting process to regulate when people could dig up waterways or wetlands and fill them in — activities known as dredging and filling. Although Colorado has its own Water Quality Control Act that makes it illegal to pollute waters, there is now no process to vet proposed dredge and fill projects, or to issue permits allowing those projects to legally proceed…
Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie is crafting a bill this legislative session to give the CDPHE the authority to fill that gap. But key questions remain about how far lawmakers and state officials are willing to go in replacing federal protections…
In May, the high court’s justices ruled 5-4 that wetlands not connected on the surface to another body of federally protected water do not qualify for protection themselves under the Clean Water Act. The law also doesn’t protect wetlands connected to rivers or lakes via groundwater below the surface, the court found, and it doesn’t protect streams that flow seasonally or only after precipitation falls. The ruling left the protection of the newly exempt waters to the states, many of which do not have robust water protection laws…
Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org
The Department of Public Health and Environment in July enacted an emergency rule to provide some oversight over dredge and fill activities in waters that lost federal protection…The state policy states that the department will not punish people who dredge or fill in waters if the person notifies the CDPHE, the impacted area is small and the activities comply broadly with the federal law that existed before the Supreme Court decision. The goal, said Nicole Rowan, director of CDPHE’s Water Quality Control Division, is to give developers and others a way to proceed with projects without fearing legal trouble because of ambiguity in the law.
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
Environmental group Save The Poudre has filed a lawsuit to try and stop the Northern Integrated Supply Project from going forward to construct two reservoirs and supply water to 15 communities…In the lawsuit, filed Thursday, Save The Poudre says the diversion of water from the Poudre River would cause severe damage to the river, including its aquatic life, the Poudre River Whitewater Park in Fort Collins and the riparian corridor…The lawsuit also alleges that in approving the permit, the Army Corps violated both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act because it didn’t adequately consider alternatives and didn’t choose the least environmentally damaging alternative, respectively…
NISP would divert water from the Poudre and South Platte rivers to store in two new reservoirs: Glade Reservoir north of Fort Collins and the smaller Galeton Reservoir east of Ault. Communities that would be served by the project include the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District and others in Weld and Boulder counties.
Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP) map July 27, 2016 via Northern Water.
Critical minerals for the clean energy transition are abundant in the Southwest, but the dozens of mines proposed to access them will require vast sums of water, something in short supply in the desert.
One by one, leaders from across Arizona gave speeches touting the importance of water conservation at Phoenix City Hall as they celebrated the announcement of voluntary agreements to preserve the declining Colorado River in November.
“The two largest foreign-based multinational mining companies in the world intend to construct the massive Resolution Copper Mine near Superior,” said Etpison, the vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “This mine will use, at a minimum, 775,000 acre feet of groundwater, and once the groundwater is gone, it’s gone. How can this be in the best interests of Arizona?”
The question is one the state and the Southwest must answer. Mine claims for the elements critical to the clean energy transition are piling up from Arizona to Nevada to Utah. Lithium is needed for the batteries to store wind and solar energy and power electric vehicles. Copper provides the wiring to send electricity where it will be needed to satisfy exploding demand. But water stands in the way of the transition, with drought playing into nearly every proposed renewable energy development, from solar to hydropower, as the Southwest debates what to do with every drop it has left as the region undergoes aridification due to climate change and decades of overconsumption.
Mining opponents argue the proposals could impact endangered species, tribal rights, air quality and, of course, water—both its quantity and its quality. Across the Southwest, the story of 2023 was how water users, from farmers in the Colorado River Basin to fast-growing cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, needed to use less water, forcing changes to residential development and agricultural practices. But left out of that conversation, natural resource experts and environmentalists say, is the water used by mining operations and the amount that would be consumed by new mines.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe has fought for years to stop Resolution’s proposed mine. It would be built on top of Oak Flat, a sacred site to the Apache and other Indigenous communities, and a habitat of rare species like the endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus, which lives only in the Tonto National Forest near the town of Superior. The fate of the mine now rests with the U.S. District Court in Arizona after the grassroots group Apache Stronghold filed a lawsuit to stop it, arguing its development would violate Native people’s religious rights.
But for communities located near the mine and across the Phoenix metropolitan area, the water it would consume is just as big of an issue.
Throughout the mine’s lifespan, Resolution estimates it would use 775,000 acre feet of water—enough for at least 1.5 million Arizona households over roughly 40 years. And experts say the mine would likely need far more.
“By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project would make Arizona’s goal for stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unreachable,” one report commissioned by the San Carlos Apache Tribe reads. In one hydrologist’s testimony to Congress, water consumption was estimated to be 50,000 acre feet a year—about 35,000 more than the company has proposed drawing from the aquifer.
The Resolution copper mine isn’t the only water-intensive mining operation being proposed. Many of what the industry describes as “critical minerals,” like lithium and copper, are found throughout the Southwest, leading to a flurry of mining claims on the region’s federally managed public lands.
“Water is going to be scarcer in the Southwest but the mining industry is basically immune from all these issues,” said Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney at the Western Mining Action Project, which has represented tribes and environmental groups in mining-related lawsuits, including the case over Oak Flat.
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law as a way to continue the country’s development westward, allowing anyone to mine on federal lands for free. To do this, all one needs to do is plant four stakes into the ground where they think there are minerals and file a claim. Unlike other industries that make use of public lands—such as the oil and gas industry—no royalties are paid for the minerals extracted from the lands owned by American taxpayers.
Flynn referred to mining as the last of the “Lords of Yesterday”—a term coined by Charles Wilkinson, a long-time environmental law professor at the University of Colorado who died earlier this year—referring to the industries like oil and gas drilling, ranching and logging that were given carte blanche by the federal government to develop the West after the Civil War and push Indigenous populations off the land. All of those industry regulations have changed, Flynn said, except mining.
That’s led mining to be viewed as the top use of public lands by regulators who give it more weight than conservation or recreational activities, he said.
“You don’t have to actually demonstrate that there are any minerals in a mining claim, you don’t have to provide any evidence that there is a mineral there at all,” said John Hadder, the executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, an environmental group based in Nevada that monitors mining claims. “You can just be suspicious—and there’s a lot of suspicion going around.”
Most of Nevada is completely reliant on groundwater, an increasingly scarce resource. Without water, companies hunting critical minerals can’t mine, Hadder said, so they look to acquire water rights from other users, typically by buying up farms and ranches, changing the economics and demographics of a community. When the mines are developed, they can impact local streams, groundwater levels and the quality of the water as toxins seep into aquifers and surface supplies over the years. Now, with the clean energy transition gaining traction, there’s a new mining boom, prompting increasing concerns over how local ecosystems will be impacted. In Nevada alone, there are more than 20,000 mining claims related to lithium, the biggest of which are, of course, drawing controversy.
A large-scale evaporation pond at the Silver Peak lithium mine on Oct. 6, 2022. The evaporation process can take a year and a half to complete. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent)
Now, Canada-based Rover Metals is looking to drill a lithium exploration project near the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a wetland habitat in Nevada near the California border that supports a dozen endangered and threatened species and is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, which environmentalists call “the Galapagos of the desert.”
“Nevadans almost more than any other state have had to wrestle with the availability or lack thereof of water for development for its entire history,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped lead the push to protect the refuge. “This is sort of compounding that already really complex challenge.”
The presented concept project would be a partnership between Pueblo Water and [Colorado Springs Utilities] to enlarge the reservoir. Colorado Springs Utilities would use the enlarged space for the first 30 years, at which point Pueblo Water would get half of it. The reservoir’s dam was built in 1902 and was used by the Otero Irrigation Co. until 1955 when the reservoir was sold to Pueblo Water. Since then, [Alan] Ward said, Pueblo Water has “spent a lot of money doing various projects to upgrade the dam for improved safety.”
The purpose of the project “is to bring it up to modern dam safety standards,” Ward said. “The challenge with the dam as it is today … the dam is built on a foundation of rock and gravel, which allows a lot of water to seep through. We’ve constantly battled seepage issues over the years.”
The other reason for the enlargement is to increase water storage to “increase resiliency, reliability, and flexibility” in meeting future water needs for Pueblo Water and Colorado Springs Utilities. The current dam is 70 feet high with a capacity of 11,140 acre-feet (currently restricted at 9,100 af). The enlargement proposal would bring the dam to a height of 106 feet and 30,000 af capacity. The reservoir’s surface area would increase from 414 acres to 631 acres. The dam would be built on the downstream side of the current dam, closer to the highway. Another impact of the project…They also may be adding an upstream buttress to hold things in place in case of an earthquake…Around 30-40 acres of wetlands around the reservoir would be impacted as the reservoir backs further up the valley, as well as a few small areas at the base of the existing dam. Ward also noted the large boreal toad population in nearby ponds.
Arkansas River Basin — Graphic via the Colorado Geological Survey
Scott Hummer, former water commissioner for District 58 in the Yampa River basin, checks out a Parshall flume installed on an irrigation ditch in this August 2020 photo. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
From email from the Colorado Division of Water Resources (Michael Elizabeth Sakas):
January 26, 2024
The Colorado Division of Water Resources announced that as of January 16, 2024, new rules governing the measurement of surface and groundwater diversions and storage are now in effect for Division 6. The division includes the Yampa, White, Green and North Platte River basins.
“The Division 6 Measurement Rules are the first set of rules covering surface water measurement in the State of Colorado and are a significant milestone for the Division of Water Resources,” said Erin Light, Division 6 Engineer. “The adoption of the rules will provide the Division of Water Resources greater leverage in assuring that the diversion and use of water is administerable and properly measured and recorded.”
For background, Colorado statutes include a requirement that owners of ditches and reservoirs install headgates where water is taken from the natural stream. These statutes also give the state and division engineer the authority to require owners and users of water rights to install measuring devices.
“Accurate measurement of diversions is critical to protect Colorado’s entitlement to water, including under the Colorado River Compact, and to ensure we are maximizing the beneficial use of the public’s water resource for consumptive and environmental purposes,” said Jason Ullmann, Deputy State Engineer.
The statutes, however, do not include any specifics regarding what is considered an acceptable headgate or measuring device. Historically, it has been administered by the Division of Water Resources (DWR) through issuing orders to owners for the installation of headgates or measuring devices.
“Over several years, Division 6 has issued hundreds of orders for the installation of operable headgates and measuring devices with varying degrees of success,” said Division Engineer Light. “I believe that these rules will help water users in Division 6 by providing clarity regarding what structures require measurement and what is considered an acceptable level of accuracy for the required measurement methods.”
The rules describe two types of measurement methods: measuring devices, which are physical devices (flumes, weirs, etc) that are placed in a diversion for measurement. Then there are alternative measurement methods, which are typically indirect methods of measuring flow rates without a physical device.
Water users are provided the following time periods to comply with the rules:
Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 5.0 cfs – 12 months (January 16, 2025);
Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 2.0 cfs and less than 5.0 cfs – 18 months (July 16, 2025);
Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights less than 2.0 cfs – 24 months (January 16, 2026);
Reservoirs with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 5.0 AF – 12 months (January 16, 2025);
Reservoirs with a capacity or water rights less than 5.0 AF – 24 months (January 16 2026).
Water users unsure of their decreed water right or permitted well permit flow rates and volumes can use DWR’s online tools available through CDSS (https://dwr.state.co.us/Tools/) to find this information. Anyone who has questions regarding how these Rules apply to their diversion or how to install a measuring device on their system can contact the DWR’s Division 6 Lead Hydrographer at (970) 291-6551. The Rules are available on the DWR website as a Laserfiche imaged document.
Yampa River Basin via Wikimedia.
Map of the North Platte River drainage basin, a tributary of the Platte River, in the central US. Made using USGS National Map and NASA SRTM data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79266632
A new year brings a new opportunity for Colorado decision-makers to shore up water resource vulnerabilities and accelerate resilience and stewardship practices. Policy is born by addressing a solution to a problem. Impacts of climate change and unsustainable water demand bring uncertainty to Colorado’s birds, communities, watersheds, and waterways. Resilience and stewardship are top themes for 2024 legislation on water, our most valuable natural resource. Audubon Rockies is busy working with lawmakers, agencies, and partners to prioritize healthy, functioning, and resilient watersheds and river systems for people and birds—the natural systems that we all depend upon.
Below are the two top water priorities for Audubon in the 2024 Colorado legislative session. Please make sure you’re signed up to hear about opportunities to engage with them.
Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on. The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
1. Clean Water Stewardship for Colorado
Speaker of the House McCluskie mentioned the need to restore protections removed from the Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency decision in her opening 2024 legislative session remarks:
“Water is intrinsic to the Colorado Spirit, and the lifeblood of our agriculture industry and tourism economies. The recent United States Supreme Court decision about the definition of Waters of the United States leaves many of our waterways in Colorado unprotected. In the wake of this difficult decision, we have an opportunity to take action to reestablish these critical protections.”
It is imperative to protect our waterways for all of Colorado to thrive. The United States passed the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1972 for water quality and related public health protections, realizing the outsized importance of our rivers, streams, and wetlands to communities and wildlife. At the time when waterways were literally burning with industrial waste, Congress recognized the threat to public health and addressed the widespread problem with bipartisan support and passage of the CWA. The CWA aimed to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters and took a watershed approach due to the connectivity of waters from headwaters to lowlands. The CWA protects waterways and their many benefits by requiring certain activities such as the construction of highways to minimize or mitigate their impact.
Despite the CWA’s successes over the last 50 years, there has been a lot of litigation and legal interpretations over the years. Most recently, the United States Supreme Court, through the Sackett case decision, effectively rewrote the CWA by severely narrowing the scope of its protections. Before Sackett, the CWA provided for the protection of the majority of Colorado’s wetlands and streams at the federal level.
So what is the void created by the Sackett decision for Coloradospecifically? In Colorado, we no longer have a federal partner to help protect our waterways. The decision upended a regulatory system that protected water quality for public health. Wetlands and streams are crucial ecosystems, particularly in Colorado, where we are semi-arid to arid. Before Sackett, the CWA would have protected all Colorado waters with a significant affect on downstream water quality and availability. After the Supreme Court decision, protections were sharply reduced.
Here are some examples of waterways that now have reduced or no federal protections in Colorado:
These wetlands, located on a 150-acre parcel in the Homestake Creek valley that Homestake Partners bought in 2018, would be inundated if Whitney Reservoir is constructed. The Forest Service received more than 500 comments, the majority in opposition to, test drilling associated with the project and the reservoir project itself. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Wetlands that are not adjacent to a flowing river
Playa lakes, which are groundwater-dependent,
Iron Fen. Photo credit from report “A Preliminary Evaluation of Seasonal Water Levels Necessary to Sustain Mount Emmons Fen: Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests,” David J. Cooper, Ph.D, December 2003.
Fens, (a type of peat-accumulating wetland fed by mineral-rich ground or surface water)
Colorado River headwaters tributary in Rocky Mountain National Park photo via Greg Hobbs.
Headwater streams that flow only after precipitation events
In Colorado, 26 percent of streams only flow in response to rainfall, and 59 percent flow seasonally. By some estimates, as much as two thirds of Colorado’s waterways have lost protections.* Nationwide, approximately 63 percent of all wetlands are now unprotected.
With the loss of 3 billion birds in the past 50 years—in part due to dwindling wetlands and significant development of natural spaces—and Audubon science showing that two-thirds of North American bird species are at risk of extinction from climate change, action is needed at the state and federal levels to protect the water bodies and habitat that birds need to survive. Protecting water quality is a bipartisan stewardship issue and brings broad public support. We look forward to working with the state as it creates a wetlands and streams protection program for water quality protection that works for Colorado’s unique waterways. If Colorado does this right, it could be a model for other semi-arid Western states to follow suit.
Colorado snowpack basin-filled map April 16, 2023 via the NRCS.
2. Resilient tools to deal with long-term uncertainty in the Colorado River
Despite near-term optimism (and a momentary sigh of relief) from a heavy 2023 snowpack and recent January storms, climate change and unprecedented drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin for the last 24 years are threatening Colorado’s ability to satisfy water users, ecosystem needs, water-related recreation, and, potentially, interstate obligations. There are real consequences for people, birds, and every other living thing that depends on rivers in this region.
In 2023, the Colorado General Assembly determined that it is in the best interest of Colorado to form a task force to provide recommendations for programs to assist Colorado in addressing drought in the Colorado River Basin and the state’s interstate commitments related to the Colorado River and its tributaries (SB-295, Section 1). From August through December 2023, the Colorado River Drought Task Force and a sub-task force on Tribal matters, met to draft a report on recommendations for further actions. You can learn more about the recommendations here.
As Colorado contends with near-certainty of continued warming, severe drought, and declining river flows over the next several years, we need more flexible ways to manage and deliver water to support the Colorado River we love. Colorado needs tools and resources to proactively respond to drought conditions and maximize the benefits to the state, its water users, and river ecosystems from once-in-a-generation competitive federal funds available to address the Colorado River Basin drought. Audubon will be engaging this session for solutions that will provide new and innovative solutions to the water threats we face.
*The State is waiting for additional guidance from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to determine exactly how many of Colorado waters may lose protection.
State Engineer’s Office Division boundaries. Division 1 in Greeley: South Platte, Laramie & Republican River Basins. Division 2 in Pueblo: Arkansas River Basin. Division 3 in Alamosa: Rio Grande River Basin. Division 4 in Montrose: Gunnison & San Miguel River Basins, & portions of the Dolores River. Division 5 in Glenwood Springs: Colorado River Basin (excluding the Gunnison River Basin). Division 6 in Steamboat Springs: Yampa, White and North Platte River Basins. Division 7 in Durango: San Juan River Basin and portions of the Dolores River. Credit: Colorado State University
OPEN ONLY TO CURRENT RESIDENTS OF COLORADO. This posting may be used to fill more than one vacancy.
Hydrographer duties include measuring and evaluating data to determine the stream flow quantity at assigned stream gaging stations, and maintaining such gages; measuring water flow in canals and ditches in support of state Water Commissioners; servicing, calibrating, monitoring, and repairing all equipment associated with stream gaging stations, including telemetry equipment; inspecting water measurement structures, reporting on their accuracy and recommending solutions to any problems observed; and, evaluating and compiling official flow records for state and federal publication. These duties will be primarily performed within the Colorado River Basin.
State Engineer’s Office Division boundaries. Division 1 in Greeley: South Platte, Laramie & Republican River Basins. Division 2 in Pueblo: Arkansas River Basin. Division 3 in Alamosa: Rio Grande River Basin. Division 4 in Montrose: Gunnison & San Miguel River Basins, & portions of the Dolores River. Division 5 in Glenwood Springs: Colorado River Basin (excluding the Gunnison River Basin). Division 6 in Steamboat Springs: Yampa, White and North Platte River Basins. Division 7 in Durango: San Juan River Basin and portions of the Dolores River. Credit: Colorado State University
This posting is open to current and non-current residents of the State of Colorado at the time of submitting your application.However, if you are selected and accept the position, you will be required to establish residence in the State of Colorado.
The purpose of this position is to provide leadership, guidance and oversight to the Division 5 operations group responsible for Augmentation Plan coordination and administration. This group supports water rights administration by developing methodologies to collect and analyze water diversion and delivery data to verify augmentation plan operators are operating in compliance with all applicable court decrees, statutes, rules and regulations and to analyze Water Court applications, including reports of engineering experts, consult with the Water Court Referee regarding all applications, write reports summarizing the agency’s position and negotiate or provide expert engineering support / testimony to litigate any conditions necessary to protect existing water rights; to supervise professional and technical staff; and provide assistance to the public in understanding Colorado water law.
Embark on an exhilarating visual journey as we unveil the awe-inspiring transformation of the Klamath River over 5 months of meticulous deconstruction of Copco 2 dam. Immerse yourself in the grandeur of over 15,000 captivating images capturing the first and smallest of the four dams destined for removal by October 2024. Witness history in the making with the unveiling of the largest river restoration project ever undertaken! This mesmerizing time-lapse is just a glimpse into our ambitious 6-year independent feature film, “Undamming Klamath.” Join us as we bring this monumental river restoration story to life! This is an independent film and time-lapse project that needs your support. Tax-deductible donations through The Redford Center below:
Tubing the Yampa River in Steamboat Springs. Tubing season typically begins in June and lasts through August. Conditions are reliant on the amount of snow-melt and rainfall Steamboat receives. If the water levels are too high or too low tubing will be halted. Photo credit: City of Steamboat Springs
A new forecasting tool to determine closing and opening procedures for the Yampa River is among a set of proposed regulations being discussed by city officials. The proposed policies are aimed at protecting “the biological integrity of the Yampa River while sustainably managing recreation,” according to a report provided to council members last week. Late last year, Parks and Recreation commission members approved the use of the new tool, provided by the Carbondale-based firm Lotic Hydrological, which will set closure and reopening decisions for the Yampa River based on a framework of scientific criteria. Craig Robinson, Parks and Recreation Open Space and Trails Manager, said the current regulations for the criteria to determine river openings and closures “are a little bit vague,” in that they are based on a number of factors and involve consultation with Colorado Parks and Wildlife…
Outfitters and anglers licensed by the city to use the Yampa River agree the health of the river’s ecosystem is most important, but depending on their interests, they don’t necessarily agree over the proposed policies. Backdoor Sports owner Pete Van De Carr noted the proposed system to close and reopen the river will likely result in less frequent but longer-term closures…
Brett Lee, the owner of Straightline Sports, provides angling tours for his customers on the Yampa River. Unlike Van De Carr, he said he welcomes the new opening and closing procedures being pitched by city staff because they will, hopefully, help mitigate the impact of tubing on the river…Adding to system for determining the opening and closing of the Yampa River, the city is also proposing new policies for licensed commercial outfitters that supply tubes and other guided services on the Yampa River. The proposed rules will require any tubes rented by outfitters or sold in the city must have a minimum 30-guage PVC thickness. If approved, they would also implement a three-year permit renewal process for outfitters and will specify that tube allocations for the outfitters are not considered as “real or personal property.” Additionally, if any business owner with tube allocations sells their business — and its tubing allocations — the city must be notified, and the new entity must reapply to assume their allocation.
Fund will retire approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water
When Colorado Senate Bill 28 was adopted during the 2022 legislative session, it created the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund with $30 million earmarked for irrigators in the Upper Rio Grande Basin.
The state money derived from Colorado’s share of federal COVID dollars that came through the American Rescue Plan Act would serve to incentivize local farmers to permanently retire more groundwater wells. Doing so would further reduce groundwater pumping and translate to fewer irrigated acres in the Valley as a whole.
Seven months after opening applications to the fund, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has enough contracts to spend nearly the entirety of the $30 million. The contracts represent the full retirement of approximately 34 crop circles and partial restrictions on 28 circles, according to an accounting from the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
When it’s all said and done, the $30 million will have paid for the retirement of approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water. An acre-foot represents around 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre of land.
Each application submitted to the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund was reviewed by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and Colorado Division of Water Resources. So far six applications representing $4,772,204 have been closed and the RGWCD now owns those water rights, according to deputy general manager Amber Pacheco.
The remaining applications have to be approved or rejected by March 31.
The senate bill also directed $30 million to sustainability efforts on the Republican River Basin in the eastern plains. Like the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, the Republican River Water Conservation District has been successful in administering the program, Pacheco said.
“We’ve been pretty successful,” she said at the Jan. 16 board meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. “It’s pretty shocking that in six months that amount of money was obligated.”
A small amount of funding will likely remain after current applications are all reviewed, Pacheco said.
The RGWCD received a total of 27 applications. Here’s a breakdown of applications by subdistrict. The applications represent 11,296 acre-feet of past annual withdrawals that would be retired.
Applications total approximately $29,000,000
14 applications in Subdistrict 1* – $11,700,000 2 applications in Subdistrict 3* – $1,200,000 1 application in Subdistrict 4 – $500,000 4 applications in Subdistrict 5 – $5,100,000 2 applications in Subdistrict 6 – $1,300,000 4 applications in Subdistrict 7 (Trinchera Subdistrict) – $9,300,000
*SD1 and SD3 both offered some type of incentive on top of the SB28 program.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the Inkstain website (John Fleck):
The Bureau of Reclamation’s January 2024 “Most Probable” 24-month study forecasts that annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam for both Water Years 2025 and 2026 will be 7.48 million acre-feet per year (maf). If this happens, the ten-year total flow at Lee Ferry for the 2017-2026 period will drop to about 83.0 maf, only about 500,000 acre-feet above 82.5 million acre-feet, the first 1922 Compact hydrology “tripwire.”
That line – 82.5 maf feet of Lee Ferry deliveries over a ten year period – has become a dividing line between two contending interpretations of the most important unresolved question in the century-old Colorado River Compact: How much water must the Upper Basin deliver to the Lower Basin? What happens if it doesn’t?
September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS.
Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.
The consequences of triggering the tripwire, which might happen in 2027, are significant. In the worst case scenario, it could plunge the basin into Supreme Court litigation over the interpretation of the 1922 Compact, which could result in a forced curtailment of post-compact water uses in the Upper Basin. Or, alternately, if the Basin States are willing to settle their long-term disputed issues or implement basic changes to the Law of the River via the renegotiations of the post-2026 operating rules, it could be a “non-event.” This is one of the fundamental issues facing the states as they meet to develop their basin-state alternative.
The 82.5 maf tripwire is based on the 1922 Compact’s two flow-related requirements at Lee Ferry; Article III(d) requires the four Upper Division States to not cause the progressive ten-year flow at Lee Ferry to be depleted be depleted below 75 maf. Additionally, Article III(c) provides that if there is not sufficient surplus water to meet the annual water delivery requirements of the 1944 Mexican Treaty, normally 1.5 maf, then each basin must provide half of the deficiency (the required annual delivery minus the available surplus). The Upper Division States must deliver their share of the deficiency at Lee Ferry in addition to their obligations under Article III(d).
The Upper Division and Lower Division States have never agreed on the meaning and interpretation of Article III(c). There have been numerous papers on the disputed issues by both compact scholars and practitioners and Article III(c) has never been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Suffice it to say that the Lower Division States believe that the Upper Division States must deliver at Lee Ferry a total of 82.5 maf every ten years (75 maf + 10 x 750,000), but the Upper Division States believe that they currently have no obligation to Mexico, so the number is at most 75 million. There are of course, nuances. The Lower Division States have suggested that the Upper Division States might also need to cover transit losses between Lee Ferry and Mexico and the Upper Division States have most recently suggested that if climate change, not Upper Basin depletions, is causing the ten-year flow to fall below 75 million, then their article III(d) non-depletion obligation must be appropriately adjusted. Further, if pursuant to either the extraordinary drought provision or a treaty minute, the required annual delivery to Mexico is less than 1.5 maf, then, even with no surplus, the Upper Division’s 50% share would be less than 750,000 acre-feet.
One should recognize that the annual releases from the Glen Canyon Dam and the annual flow at Lee Ferry (the compact point) are not the same. Between the dam and Lee Ferry, the river gains flow from groundwater accretions (in part due to leakage around the dam) and from the Paria River. These gains can vary from about 30,000 acre-feet to over 300,000 acre-feet annually. The ten-year Lee Ferry flow for 2014-2023 was approximately 86.1 maf.
That amount – 86.1 maf – might seem like a safe cushion. But because it is a ten-year moving total, we are about to drop out years with big releases (9 million acre feet) and replace them with years with just 7.48 maf. At the end of 2024, because both 2014 (the year that drops out) and 2024 (the year that is added in) are 7.48 maf years, the ten-year flow will stay about the same. The way the ten-year flow calculation works is next year, 2015 will drop out and 2025 will be added in, and so on, but here is the problem; From 2015 through 2019, the 2007 Interim Guidelines dictated an annual release of 9 maf per year. With accretions, flows at Lee Ferry averaged about 9.18 maf per year (source: UCRC 74th Annual Report). Thus, if 2025 and 2026 are 7.48 maf years, the ten-year flow will lose about 1.5 maf/year making the total about 83 maf for the 2017-2026 period. Because the 2007 Interim Guidelines expire, we don’t know what the annual release will be in 2027, but if it’s less than about 8.5 maf, because 2017 was a 9 maf year, the ten-year Lee Ferry flow could drop below the tripwire – 82.5 maf (with two more 9 maf years, 2018 and 2019, in the pipeline).
We recognize that the 24-month studies don’t predict the future. They are a planning and management tool. It’s plausible that by 2027, a series of wet years could result in a ten-year flow that is much higher than 82.5 maf, something that is, in our view, unlikely. But as we sit here in January 2024, the 24-month study is the only planning tool we’ve got. It would behoove us to pay attention to what it is telling us.
If a future 24-month study projects that ten-year flows will fall below 82.5 maf, it will be a big deal for the basin. What provision of the Law of the River will control annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam – the post-2026 Operating Guidelines, the Lower Division’s interpretation of the 1922 Compact (82.5 maf), or the Upper Division’s interpretation of the 1922 Compact (75 maf or less)? If the Lower Division States agree to a ten-year flow target of less than 82.5 maf, are they effectively surrendering to the Upper Division States? If the Upper Division States agree to a flow target of 82.5 maf, are they effectively surrendering to the Lower Division States? If the Upper Basin states agree to either 82.5 maf or some smaller compromise delivery target and the hydrology remains bad, how will Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah – our states – approach the required water use reductions? What if there is not enough water in storage in Lake Powell (and the other CRSP reservoirs) to release sufficient water to bring the ten-year flows to 82.5 maf? Will the Lower Division insist that that the UCRC implement a curtailment of post-compact uses in the Upper Basin. If the UCRC refuses to do so, will that plunge the Basin into litigation?
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
At the recent 2023 CRWUA meeting, representatives of the Lower Division States stepped up and made it clear they own the “structural deficit,” and the conference was buzzing with talk of the innovative system approach the Lower Division has put on the table. This is great news, but as Colorado’s Royce Tipton concluded sixty years ago, the “structural deficit” is not a single number. It’s a range that depends on the interpretation of the Lee Ferry obligations of the Upper Division States under the 1922 Compact. If the average annual flow requirement is 8.25 maf/year, (which Tipton referred to as “fictional”) he calculated the deficit to be about 1.2 maf/year. Today we believe it’s about 1.4 -1.5 maf/year (Tipton’s assumptions about system losses were probably too low and perhaps his Lee Ferry to Lake Mead inflow assumptions too high). If, however, the average annual flow requirement is 7.5 maf/year, he calculated the deficit to be about 2 maf/year, today maybe 2.2 maf/year. This difference is huge, especially for the Central Arizona Project, the junior user on the Lower basin mainstem.
In the past decades, water managers in the Colorado River Basin have made accomplishments that even two decades ago were considered out of reach: The 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, the shortage sharing agreements with Mexico, the increased recognition of the rights of the Basin’s Native American communities are just a few. The Lower Division’s recent pronouncement that they own the structural deficit is another major step forward, but it has a fundamental flaw. Representatives of all seven Basin states continue to stubbornly insist that the Law of the River, and specifically, the 1922 Colorado River Compact, will serve as the “foundation” of the post-2026 operating guidelines. The flaw is that is that we don’t know if this foundation is based on a ten-year Lee Ferry flow of 82.5 maf, or 75 maf, or something different.
Put simply, the states agree that the Law of the River has to be the basis of what we do, but don’t agree on what the Law of the River actually says. [ed. emphasis mine] Without an agreement on this fundamental issue, calling the 1922 Compact a foundation is nothing more than self-delusional wishful thinking. Now that the Lower Division States have agreed to own the structural deficit, is the next step for all seven states and the federal government to openly acknowledge that given the impacts of climate change on the river, the 1922 Compact’s overallocation of water and its disputed Lee Ferry flow provisions are core problems for the basin, not the foundation? Finding a sustainable future, without litigation, will require accepting and acknowledging the basic problems we face, not avoiding them.
It is a bitterly cold December morning and I am tooling up Boulder Canyon to do some backcountry skiing above Nederland. As I slow down for a hairpin turn, the sun makes its way over the edge of the canyon and I notice some movement in the creek. It’s a little bird known as a Dipper, bobbing up and down on a rock in the creek—and now diving into a pool below a fallen tree. These incredible birds live year-round near flowing streams in the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere in the west. They dive underwater for their food—aquatic insects—and actually have an extra eyelid so they can see while they’re underwater! Dipper populations on a stream mean it has excellent water quality and low silt load—both characteristics of Boulder Creek in Boulder Canyon above the City of Boulder.
Excellent water quality for Dippers and other species that live in or around aquatic ecosystem starts—of course—with water in the stream. In Colorado, water use is controlled under the state’s “prior appropriation system”, which forms the legal framework for water distribution in the state. You may have heard the phrase “first in time is first in right” which simply means the more “senior” rights to use a quantity of water are associated with the earliest uses. In many parts of the state (for example the Cache La Poudre River near Fort Collins or the Rio Grande and its tributaries near Alamosa), many irrigation water rights pre-date statehood. And, while the act of putting water to use forms the basis of a water right, that right is only enforceable if confirmed by a district court or, since 1969, Colorado’s water courts.
The habitat of the American Dipper (Cinclus americana) is usually clear, rushing, boulder-strewn, mountain streams, within tall conifer forests. Photo via http://birdingisfun.com
In many, if not most streams in the state, the amount of water decreed far exceeds available water supplies. Such streams are “over-appropriated”, meaning that only in a very wet year will many of the more recent (“junior”) water rights get to divert water. In fact, Boulder Creek is over-appropriated at locations downstream of the City of Boulder. The Dippers are still safe in the canyon, where there are few actual diversions of water for consumptive use.
“Over-appropriated” as a concept gets a bad rap. At the time of European settlement, those turning the prairie and mountain valleys into farms and cities were focused on building new homes in an unfamiliar place. Whether we agree with these decisions today, at the time, claiming every drop of available water was an obvious start to settling in a place as arid as Colorado. But Colorado’s prior appropriation system also has flexibility that allows volumes of water to be assigned to “instream flow” uses—providing a means to leave water in the stream to benefit aquatic ecosystems, including our friend the Dipper.
The Colorado Water Trust is on the forefront of creative and thoughtful efforts to use flexibility in state water law to put water back into streams. The Trust works to identify both streams in need of additional flows and water rights owners who want to re-imagine the use of their consumptive water rights to improve stream health in their own neighborhood. Broadly, these tools fall into two categories: leases or loans, which are used by the Trust and water right owners who want to maintain ownership of their water rights; and purchase of water rights from owners who are interested in selling to the Colorado Water Trust.
An image of the Crystal River Valley from an EcoFlight mission in August 2022. The view is downvalley, toward Mount Sopris. A group is exploring a federal designation of wild and scenic for the Crystal River in Gunnison and Pitkin counties. Courtesy of Ecoflight
On the Crystal River, a tributary of the Colorado River, the Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch, a water user diverting from a critical reach of the Crystal River, entered into an agreement that compensates the Ranch for coordinating diversions in a manner that enhances stream flows. The result is two-fold: the Ranch coordinates its diversions during certain types of water years to benefit the stream flow, but maintains ownership of its valuable, senior irrigation rights for use when water is more plentiful; and the stream benefits in years in which the river reach would otherwise be dry.
The Trust has also, from time to time, purchased portions of water rights, including an interest in the McKinley Ditch which diverts from the Little Cimarron River near Gunnison. Historically, three miles of the Little Cimarron River near Gunnison ran dry during late summer, due to upstream water diversions. Working with the Trust’s frequent partner, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Trust obtained a change decree from the Division 4 Water Court. The change decree authorizes the Trust’s water, which would otherwise be limited to irrigation uses, to be left in the stream for the benefit of the aquatic ecosystem.
Sarah Klahn, Board Member, Colorado Water Trust, Shareholder, Somach Simmons & Dunn. Credit: Colorado Water Trust
The Dippers in Boulder Canyon are in good shape, given the water quality and flow regime in Boulder Creek below Barker Dam; any resident Dippers in the Cimarron or Crystal watersheds in the vicinity of the Water Trust’s projects are in better shape than they were before the Trust’s projects were initiated. And for other streams in Colorado that may experience extreme low flows (or dry up completely) during certain types of water years, the Water Trust is actively looking for opportunities to partner with senior water right owners and use available tools provided by the prior appropriation system to enhance stream flows and enhance and protect aquatic ecosystems.
Sarah Klahn is a member of the Water Trust Board of Directors and a shareholder in Somach Simmons & Dunn. Sarah represents farmers and ranchers, as well as institutional clients, on water rights matters in four western states.
Stateline run of Dolores River around the turn of the last century. Photo credit: Pete Kolbenschlag
From email from Pete Kolbenschlag (Colorado Farm & Food Alliance):
The North Rim of the Black Canyon, in the National Park, which is accessed from Fruitland Mesa near Crawford – a remote region of ranches at the base of the West Elk Mountains – showcases an especially dramatic feature. Even among many spectacular places in western Colorado it impresses, marking where the Southern Rockies transition into the mesas, deserts and canyons of the Colorado Plateau. This cherished national treasure is also a local North Fork favorite, found on the way to Blue Mesa and the city of Gunnison.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance is supportive of public lands conservation, for protecting the stunning landscapes near our home-base. Set into this amazing landscape are small towns like Crawford, Paonia and Hotchkiss, and scattered between and on the mesas all around are the farms, ranches, wineries and businesses that work hard to make it here.
As we consider how we can adapt rural communities to be resilient and prosperous in a changing climate and dynamic future, we think that land conservation and watershed health are two of the most important, and effective, strategies we can pursue. That is one reason, as we look even further west, across the Uncompahgre Plateau, into the heart of Colorado’s red rock canyon country along the Dolores River, we see opportunity.
Far less visited than Moab and Monticello, Utah which lie just on the other side of the La Sal Mountains and Paradox Basin, the looming Wingate cliffs along this tributary to the Colorado River, which it joins at Dewey Bridge just over the stateline, contain an unique, fascinating, often hardscrabble history.
Back in the North Fork Valley, the Black Canyon National Park is not the only nearby designated national park service or conservation area. Just downstream is the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area. And above it is the Curecanti National Recreation Area which includes not only Blue Mesa reservoir, Colorado’s largest water body, but seldom visited upper reaches of the Black Canyon itself, with sweeping vistas of the San Juan Mountains and the Uncompahgre Plateau. Protected public lands are critical components of the economy in this region.
So lately as talk has percolated up from people who love the red rock Dolores River country, about securing protections to conserve what is unique and important about it, we pay attention. Sen. Bennet has long championed a bill to establish a national conservation area for part of the Dolores Canyon region. And more recently, a growing coalition of businesses, conservation groups and local elected officials are calling on President Biden to designate a national monument for a part of the region as well.
We think this could be a great opportunity to ensure what is unique there remains intact and that local businesses benefit from growing visitation to the region. Given the rich history in the West End of Montrose County, like the Hanging Flume and the town of Uravan – a critical player in the Atomic Age – it’s no wonder community leaders are wanting to protect the area.
Towns like Naturita and Nucla, with their markets and cafes, can serve as hubs that support local farms and residents, as they always have, and play host to visitors and activities, provide guides and services, and be the jumping off and provisioning point for the more adventuresome.
For places as rooted in tradition as are the rural communities of western Colorado, public land conservation and protecting the health of our lands and watersheds is a solid strategy to preserve what we care about most. And to welcome new opportunities. This is the strongest connection we see with our friends on the West End: protected public lands protect a rural way of life – and can help us better prepare for and better prosper in the future.
As 2024 opens to new possibilities, we cannot think of a better conversation than how to secure a locally-rooted, sustainable, and prosperous future for the Dolores Canyon Country and the rural, western communities of our local and nearby watersheds. As President Biden looks for legacy projects to leave with future generations, now is the time for Colorado’s leaders like Senators Hickenlooper and Bennet, and Governor Polis to speak up and urge the president to act.
A frozen Thompson Creek near its confluence with the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. A company with an interest in oil shale development in western Colorado is seeking to maintain conditional water rights for a proposed reservoir on Thompson Creek. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Puckett Land Co.’s 23,893 acre-foot proposal dates to 1966, part of “integrated system” involving lands in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties
A company with an interest in oil shale development in western Colorado is seeking to maintain its water rights associated with a proposed reservoir on Thompson Creek that would be located within an area proposed for oil and gas lease withdrawal.
Puckett Land Co. is seeking to hold on to conditional water rights that date to 1966 for a 23,893-acre foot reservoir on Thompson Creek, a tributary of the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. It would be nearly one-fourth the size of Ruedi Reservoir, which, when full, holds just over 100,000 acre-feet. The reservoir site is located on Bureau of Land Management land in Pitkin County.
According to water court documents filed in November, Puckett says the water is needed for the “commercial development of Puckett’s oil, gas, coalbed methane and/or oil shale minerals.” The water is decreed for industrial, domestic, recreational, irrigation, power, mining and all other purposes related to shale oil production, including the maintenance of a camp and community.
Puckett Land Co., based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, holds interests in 17,500 acres of land in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, according to the application. The Thompson Creek water rights are described as being part of an integrated system that includes conditional rights for two small reservoirs, and a pump and pipeline on Starkey Gulch, a tributary of Parachute Creek. Those Parachute Creek basin reservoirs have not been constructed.
Attorney for Puckett Land Co. Peter D. Nichols said that it would be inappropriate to respond to questions from Aspen Journalism while the application is pending in water court.
The proposed reservoir site is within the boundaries of an area that the U.S. Forest Service and BLM are proposing to withdraw from eligibility for new oil and gas leases. The proposed Thompson Divide withdrawal area is comprised of 224,713-acres in Garfield, Gunnison and Pitkin counties that generally straddles the ridge of mountains running from south of Glenwood Springs to the northern edge of the West Elk Wilderness, south of McClure Pass.
Carbondale-based conservation group Wilderness Workshop supports the withdrawal, and executive director Will Roush said a reservoir on Thompson Creek is highly problematic for many reasons, including its many harmful effects on the ecosystem.
“The local community has been working for over a decade to protect Thompson Creek and the surrounding lands; damming the creek runs counter to these efforts and deeply held community values,” Roush said in a statement. “Furthermore, the intended use of this water would be to enable oil shale and other fossil fuel production. Given our water and climate crises, utilizing precious West Slope water to increase climate pollution is simply unacceptable.”
The proposed reservoir site is just upstream from Sunfire Ranch, which is near the confluence of Thompson Creek and the Crystal River. In 2020, Pitkin County spent $10 million to put a conservation easement on the property, meaning that most of the 1,240-acre property is protected from development. Pitkin County also has its own taxpayer-funded board, Healthy Rivers, that funds programs and grant requests that focus on improving water quality and quantity.
Pitkin County Attorney John Ely said he is evaluating Puckett’s application and deciding whether the county wants to weigh in. Interested parties have until Jan. 31 to file statements of opposition in water court. As of Friday, no such statements had been filed.
Proposed Thompson Creek reservoir
Conditional water rights
The reason Puckett has been able to hold on to water rights that are nearly 60 years old without putting them to beneficial use lies in a quirk of Colorado water law that at least one scholar says needs to be reformed. Conditional water rights allow a would-be water user to reserve their place in the priority system based on when they applied for the right — not when they put water to use — while they work toward developing the water. Under the cornerstone of water law known as prior appropriation, older waters rights get first use of the river.
To maintain a conditional right, an applicant must every six years file what’s known as a diligence application with the water court, proving that they still have a need for the water, that they have taken substantial steps toward putting the water to use and that they “can and will” eventually use the water. They must essentially prove they are not speculating and hoarding water rights they won’t soon use.
But the bar for proving diligence is low. Judges are hesitant to abandon these conditional water rights, even if they have been languishing without being used for decades. Andrew Teegarden, a water fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado School of Law, argues this is partly because in Colorado water is treated as a property right.
“Some of the standards I think are a little lackadaisical merely because they don’t require the holders to spell out and specify all of the diligence activities that an individual took,” Teegarden said. “Most of the diligence applications that you’ll see are not filled with tons and tons of information; it’s more general statements about things like maintenance and building infrastructure. … It seems like we could require a little bit more specificity out of some of these holders.”
In Puckett’s diligence filing, the company says that in the past six years, it has spent nearly $100,000 on maintaining, repairing and upgrading its infrastructure and overall water system on its properties in the Colorado River basin; spent more than $80,000 on operational activities such as road maintenance and erosion control; spent more than $16,000 on professional services, including survey and title work; and has spent more than $80,000 on legal services to protect and develop its water rights.
The application does not specifically mention work regarding the Thompson Creek reservoir site in its list of diligence activities and says that diligence on any part of the system constitutes diligence with respect to the entire system. It is not clear how the Thompson Creek reservoir would operate with other parts of the system.
Puckett also said in its application that current economic conditions are adverse to oil shale production, but that that should not be sufficient on its own to deny its diligence claim.
Diligence filings are common and often fly under the radar. In 2017, the last time Puckett filed a diligence application for the Thompson Creek reservoir, no parties filed statements of opposition in the case. In the diligence filing prior to that, in 2010, only one party — the owners of the Crystal River Ranch — came forward as opposers. In that case, Puckett agreed to abandon conditional rights for a pipeline that would have diverted water from a point below the proposed dam.
An aerial view of the Thompson Divide area, looking south along West Divide Creek, with the Bull Mountain pipeline running roughly parallel, to the left, of the creek bottom. Mount Sopris, at upper left, and Chair Mountain, upper right, frame the background. CREDIT: DAN BAYER / ECOFLIGHT
Oil shale and water use
In 2009, conservation group Western Resource Advocates produced a report called “Water on the Rocks” about oil shale water rights in western Colorado. According to the report, in anticipation of a boom, in the 1950s and ‘60s, companies with an interest in western Colorado oil shale amassed an enormous portfolio of water rights because extracting the oil from shale, a type of sedimentary rock, requires huge amounts of water. The report found that there were conditional water rights associated with oil shale development for 27 reservoirs with 736,770 acre-feet of water in the mainstem of the Colorado River basin.
If these conditional water rights were to be developed, the impacts could be felt by other water users throughout the basin. When the holders of conditional rights with older priority dates finally begin diverting water they have not used in decades, they may force junior rights holders to stop using water, something Teegarden calls “line-jumping.” The sheer volume of water tied to oil shale development, if ever used, could upend the whole system.
“As soon as some of these conditional rights begin coming online, they’re going to curtail these users that have been receiving that water in some cases for decades,” Teegarden said. “We have these users who have been making productive use of the state’s water for all this time and have been following all of the requirements of the law, but now they are the ones that might be punished for their use of the water.”
In a draft paper on the unintended consequences of conditional water rights in Colorado, Teegarden advocates for reforms to the anti-speculation and due-diligence standards. He says if users fail to put water to beneficial use within the typical 10-year abandonment period, the conditional water rights should be abandoned. With the help of the legislature, water courts could also implement a strict time limit for putting conditional rights to beneficial use and stop allowing them to exist indefinitely. For example, extensions through diligence filings could stop being granted after 50 years.
“I think that we really need to be serious about looking into and reforming these conditional rights before the time comes where we see some of these impacts to other water users across the state,” Teegarden said. “Because if we wait until that point, we won’t be able to guarantee a water-secure future, especially with the volumes of water that are associated with these conditional rights.”
Map of oil shale and tar sands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — via the BLM
Elephant Butte Reservoir back in the day nearly full. Photo credit: USBR
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
January 12, 2024
New Mexico once again fell short in 2023 of the requirement set out in the Rio Grande Compact to deliver water to Elephant Butte Reservoir for use in Southern New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, delivering ~25,000 acre feet less than the Compact requires, according to preliminary estimates presented at Monday’s meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
These numbers are preliminary. The final, official numbers will be sorted out at this spring’s meeting of the Rio Grande Compact Commission. But if they hold, that would put New Mexico’s cumulative Compact debt at ~125,000 acre feet.
Really bad things don’t start happening until New Mexico’s cumulative Compact debt rises above 200,00 acre feet, but lessbad things are already happening now as a result of the debt. Under Article VI of the Compact:
Translated, that means any runoff we could actually store in upstream reservoirs in 2024 we can’t use, but rather have to hang onto to run down to Elephant Butte after the end of the irrigation season.
RUN-OF-THE RIVER AGAIN FOR MIDDLE VALLEY IRRIGATORS, AND FOR THE FISH
There’s a complex interaction here between physical storage* and rules. But the bottom line is that once again this summer, water users in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, the stretch of the river between Cochiti Pueblo and Elephant Butte Dam, will be entirely dependent on natural runoff available after the farmers in the San Luis Valley of Colorado take their share of the river.
I would predict, as a result, that:
People who irrigate in the Middle Valley should expect a high risk of significant stretches with no ditch water in the summer,
Water available for instream flows for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow will once again be extremely tight, with a high likelihood of drying in the Isleta and San Acacia reaches this summer, and
The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority is likely to shut down river diversions for its drinking water plant at some point in the summer and switch over to groundwater pumping so I can keep taking showers.
* PHYSICAL STORAGE
El Vado Dam, built by the federal government and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District in the 1930s to store water during the spring runoff peak for irrigators to use in the late summer is under repair, a project taking way longer than expected. It’s likely that the necessary paperwork to store some water in Abiquiu Reservoir will be in place by runoff season, but the Compact Article VI debt means that water cannot be used for irrigation in 2024.
A controversial Utah oil-train proposal opposed by Colorado communities and environmentalists was dealt another blow this week when the U.S. Forest Service withdrew a key permit for the project.
In an announcement published Wednesday, Ashley National Forest Supervisor Susan Eickhoff blocked the issuance of a permit to the Uinta Basin Railway to construct 12 miles of railroad track through a protected area of the national forest in northeast Utah. The stretch of track in question is part of the proposed railway’s 88-mile connection between the oil fields of eastern Utah’s Uinta Basin and the existing national rail network.
The project has drawn fierce opposition from Coloradans. A federal “downline analysis” estimated that 90% of the resulting oil-train traffic — as many as five fully loaded, two-mile-long trains of crude oil tankers per day — would be routed through environmentally sensitive and densely populated areas in Colorado, en route to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. The oil trains would more than quadruple the amount of hazardous materials being shipped by rail through many Colorado counties.
Colorado’s Eagle County and five environmental groups sued to overturn the Uinta Basin Railway’s approval, and in August 2023 a panel of federal judges ruled that the approval process contained “numerous” and “significant” violations of the National Environmental Policy Act. The ruling vacated portions of the project’s environmental impact statement and ordered the federal Surface Transportation Board to redo its analysis of key environmental risks.
Because the Forest Service’s decision in August 2022 to grant a right-of-way permit to the project was based on that flawed analysis, the agency has withdrawn its decision pending further proceedings at the STB.
This map, included in U.S. Forest Service documents evaluating the Uinta Basin Railway proposal, shows the 88-mile length of the route. Tunnels are shown in yellow. CREDIT: COURTESY IMAGE
“If the deficiencies are addressed and resubmitted for consideration, the Forest Service may issue a new decision,” Eickhoff wrote in a Jan. 17 letter.
“This is wonderful news for the roadless forest in Utah’s Indian Canyon and the wildlife who call it home,” said Ted Zukoski, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued to block the project. “It’s a victory for the Colorado River and nearby communities that would be threatened by oil train accidents and spills, and for residents of the Gulf Coast, where billions of gallons of oil would be refined. If the oil train’s backers attempt to revive this dangerous scheme, we’ll be there to fight it again.”
In a press release, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who had urged multiple federal agencies to put a stop to the project, applauded the Forest Service’s move.
“A derailment along the headwaters of the Colorado River could have catastrophic effects for Colorado’s communities, water, and environment,” Bennet said. “I’m glad the Forest Service has taken this important step to protect the Colorado River and the tens of millions of people who depend on it.”
Backers of the railway project include the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a group of Utah county governments in the oil-rich Uinta Basin. The coalition’s petition for a rehearing of the case by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was denied in December, though the ruling could still be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We’re still looking at options,” Greg Miles, a Duchesne County commissioner and co-chair of the coalition, said during a Jan. 11 public meeting. “We may be making a decision here within the next month.”
Dirt track to the right leads to a borehole site for a tunnel under the Ashley National Forest roadless area, part of the Uinta Basin Railway proposal which U.S. Forest Service officials approved in July 2022. CREDIT: AMY HADDEN MARSH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Click the link to read the memo on the Reclamation Website (Noe Santos and Alex Pivarnik):
The operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead in the January 2024 24-Month Study is pursuant to the December 2007 Record of Decision on Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead (Interim Guidelines) and reflects the draft 2024 Annual Operating Plan (AOP). Pursuant to the Interim Guidelines, the August 2023 24-Month Study projections of the January 1, 2024, system storage and reservoir water surface elevations set the operational tier for the coordinated operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead during 2024.
The August 2023 24-Month study projected the January 1, 2024, Lake Powell elevation to be less than 3,575 feet and at or above 3,525 feet and the Lake Mead elevation to be at or above 1,025 feet. Consistent with Section 6.C.1 of the Interim Guidelines the operational tier for Lake Powell in water year (WY) 2024 will be the Mid-Elevation Release Tier and the water year release volume from Lake Powell will be 7.48 million acre-feet (maf).
The 2022 Drought Response Operations Agreement (DROA) Plan1 for May 2022 through April 2023 was amended to suspend 2022 DROA Plan releases as of March 7, 2023. A total DROA release of approximately 463 thousand acre-feet (kaf) occurred under the 2022 DROA Plan. Reclamation will attempt to maximize DROA recovery in the Upper Initial Units in WY 2023 and through April 2024. Reclamation will provide monthly DROA accounting, including DROA releases and recovery, which can be found online at: https://www.usbr.gov/ColoradoRiverBasin/documents/dcp/DROA/DROSummarySheet.pdf.
In May of 2023, the DROA Parties agreed to the 2023 DROA Plan. The 2023 DROA Plan does not include any DROA releases, but rather provides for recovery of prior DROA releases from the units upstream of Powell.
Reclamation will continue to carefully monitor hydrologic and operational conditions and assess the need for additional responsive actions and/or changes to operations. Reclamation will continue to consult with the Basin States, Basin Tribes, Mexico, and other partners on Colorado River operations to consider and determine whether additional measures should be taken to further enhance the preservation of these benefits, as well as recovery protocols, including those of future protective measures for both Lakes Powell and Mead.
The August 2023 24-Month Study projected the January 1, 2024 Lake Mead elevation to be below 1,075 feet and above 1,050 feet. Consistent with Section 2.D.1 of the Interim Guidelines, a Shortage Condition consistent with Section 2.D.1.a will govern the operation of Lake Mead for calendar year (CY) 2024. In addition, Section III.B of Exhibit 1 to the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) Agreement will also govern the operation of Lake Mead for CY 2024. Lower Basin projections for Lake Mead take into consideration updated water orders to reflect additional conservation efforts under the LC Conservation Program.
The Great Salt Lake Commissioner’s Office has released the state of Utah’s first strategic plan to get the Great Salt Lake to a healthy range and sustain it. In November 2022, the lake fell to a new record low level. During the 2023 Legislative General Session, HB491 was passed, creating the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner and required the preparation of a strategic plan applying “a holistic approach that balances the diverse interests related to the health of the Great Salt Lake….”
“The plan represents an initial strategy to more effectively protect the lake while balancing the other ecological, economic and societal interests surrounding the lake,” Commissioner Brian Steed said. “Restoring the lake to a healthy range is not a one-year, one-policy, one-constituency solution. It will take a coordinated, data-driven approach so decision-makers can evaluate tradeoffs and balance competing interests.”
The lake is a dynamic system, and its management must also be dynamic. The plan will be revisited regularly and adjusted to reflect the latest data and meet new challenges and opportunities. The strategy includes short-, medium- and long-term actions.
As outlined in HB491, the Great Salt Lake Strategic Plan helps ensure coordination of the work taking place among the many stakeholders who work on lake issues and calls for:
Coordinating the efforts of a wide variety of agencies and stakeholders and ensuring robust public engagement on issues related to the lake
Utilizing the best available science and data when making decisions that impact the lake
Getting more water to the lake and ensuring a sustainable water supply while balancing competing needs, including human health and quality of life, a healthy ecosystem and economic development
Conserving water across different sectors (M&I, industrial and agricultural), including quantification of water savings and shepherding saved water to the lake
Protecting air and water quality
The release of the Great Salt Lake Strategic Plan is just the beginning. The hard work of implementing the plan builds off the work the state and others have already begun. As the plan states on page 15, “the actions identified in the plan’s first year largely build upon initiatives, partnerships, and programs that have already begun to help the Great Salt Lake. The short-term actions are designed to provide a foundation and guidance for longer term strategies and actions.” The plan also calls for additional detailed planning efforts to ensure enough water gets to the lake over the next 30 years and to maximize the investments that the Legislature has made for the benefit of the lake and everyone who relies upon it.
“Striking the right balance for the Great Salt Lake is no small task, especially among the pressures of continued growth, sustained drought and higher temperatures that threaten to increase demand and shrink available water supplies even further,” Steed said. “It will take all of us working together to protect and sustain the lake.”
Nebraska is moving quickly to build a major canal that will take water from the drought-strapped South Platte River on Colorado’s northeastern plains, and deliver it to new storage reservoirs in western Nebraska.
But after a tumultuous project announcement last year, with both states angrily declaring their thirst and concerns, the conflict has quieted, and talk of lawsuits, at least for now, has stopped. Water watchers liken this apparently calm work period with a similar period 100 years ago when early threats of legal battles gave way to an era of study and negotiation that preceded the signing by both states of the South Platte River Compact.
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
“In my mind, it’s ‘what is there to fight over,’” said Jim Yahn, a fourth-generation rancher, and former member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board who runs the North Sterling Irrigation Company. “Under the 1923 South Platte River Compact, it is Colorado’s obligation to deliver. So now we’re going to start suing and fighting over it? We agreed to do this. I don’t think it’s worth losing sleep over.”
With $628 million in cash from its state legislature, Nebraska has begun early design work and is holding public meetings outlining potential routes for the canal and reservoirs, according to Jesse Bradley, assistant director of the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources. At least one Colorado land purchase has been made.
Nebraska intends to complete design and start construction bidding in three years, and finish the project seven to nine years later, Bradley said.
“We’re just trying to make sure we can protect the water we have under the compact,” Bradley said. “We don’t want to be any more intrusive than we need to be … and we believe there are opportunities for some win-wins,” he said, including stabilizing levels in the popular Lake McConaughy and ensuring there will always be enough water in the river to protect one of the nation’s most successful endangered species programs, the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program.
Engineering studies indicate the project could deliver 78,000 to 115,000 acre-feet of water annually, and perhaps just 30% of that in drought years, Bradley said. But that is still big water. If the top estimates hold, that’s enough water to irrigate more than 115,000 acres of corn, or supply water to more than 230,000 urban homes for one year.
At the state line, a difficult river
On the high prairie around Sterling and Julesberg, the solitude and silence mask a complicated water arena, with cities such as Parker and Castle Rock planning major projects themselves, and large- and small-scale cattle and corn producers watching every drop that flows.
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
“There is a lot going on up there,” said Ron Redd, Parker Water and Sanitation District’s general manager. “I think that there is a fear that the way [Nebraska] has it laid out is going to be difficult. But the tone has changed because people understand it better. When we look at the numbers, we think it’s not the end of the world.”
Colorado has a history of working with Nebraska on other water issues, including the successful negotiation of the South Platte River Compact and the settlement of a lawsuit involving the Republican River and Kansas.
Still, Colorado water regulators say they will carefully monitor the project and plan to meet regularly with Nebraska’s team.
“There are issues,” said Kevin Rein, the former director of Colorado’s Division of Water Resources who retired in December. “The canal’s location and the route it would follow is important. But more substantively, we want to ensure that the placement of the headgate [diversion structure] and the canal don’t create a burden on Colorado and its water users.”
Water projects inside Colorado are subject to in-depth reviews in special water courts, but the Perkins Canal Project, as it is known, is governed by the federal compact, and won’t necessarily be subject to that process, officials said.
Colorado growers with junior water rights on the Lower South Platte, who are only allowed to divert during the winter, will likely be the most affected, according to Mike Brownell, a Logan County commissioner and dryland farmer. Under the compact, Nebraska too has a winter diversion right. The success of the deal will likely come down to how well both states and their diverters manage the water that is flowing, often in difficult icy conditions, officials said.
Local meetings in Sedgwick and Logan counties have been ongoing. Brownell said some people in those meetings estimate that vulnerable growers could lose half the water they are typically able to divert.
“If that would come to pass, it would be pretty catastrophic,” Brownell said. “We’re really not certain yet, but if we go from having thousands of irrigated acres, to having thousands of dryland acres, it’s going to severely impact the property tax base in Logan and Sedgwick counties.”
Platte River Recovery Implementation Program target species (L to R), Piping plover, Least tern, Whooping crane, Pallid sturgeon
Also of concern is the health of the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program. Funded and overseen by Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and the federal government, the nearly 17-year-old program helps keep more water in the central Platte River and has dramatically boosted at-risk bird populations, including piping plovers and whooping cranes, and expanded their habitat. It has also allowed dozens of water projects in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska to comply with the federal Endangered Species Act and continue operating.
But that hard-won agreement took 10 years to negotiate. Don Ament, a Sterling-area rancher and former Colorado Commissioner of Agriculture who helped negotiate the deal, said he’s worried that political strife over the canal and any additional strain on the river’s supplies, could endanger the recovery program.
Still, with few details on canal location and actual water diversions available yet, it’s difficult to say what impact the Perkins Canal will have, according to Jason Farnsworth, executive director of the recovery program.
“We could see more water in the river, we could see less. We just don’t know yet,” he said.
Nebraska’s Bradley said he believes the recovery initiative will actually benefit from the canal, as his state seeks to gain control over its new winter water supply and deliver it to the main stem of the river, where it will benefit birds and fish.
“Though the recovery program is not the primary objective of the canal, we think we are aligned with its goals because we are trying to maintain the flows we have today without seeing them erode,” Bradley said.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The South Platte, like other Western rivers, is seeing flows shrink, thanks to climate change and growth farther west along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor.
Good water years, such as 2023 and 2013, still can dramatically boost flows on the Colorado/Nebraska state line. Water managers in Colorado believe careful management of the lower river and perhaps increased storage, could allow all the water users to coexist.
“There is a potential impact to (water) rights in the river, whether it’s for storage or for the recovery program. So what do we do about that? We administer according to the compact,” Rein said. “It sounds a little like we’re giving up, but the water users are pretty smart. They know how to legally, and in good form, develop strategies to mitigate the impacts.
“The current perspective of Colorado,” he added, “is that we need to recognize that there is an interstate compact that has been approved by the United States and we place a high regard on the need to comply with that compact.”
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.
Systemic roadblocks in the U.S. legal system have thwarted efforts to advance the rights of nature movement. The Colorado advocates are testing a new approach.
A town in Colorado has appointed two legal guardians to act on behalf of nature—in this case, a section of Boulder Creek and its watershed situated within the town of Nederland.
Activists are hailing the move as the first time humans have been appointed to act as legal guardians for nature within the United States, where the so-called rights of nature movement has had a hard time advancing laws that recognized the rights of rivers, forests, animals and ecosystems.
Earlier this month, the Board of Trustees in Nederland, 45 miles northwest of Denver, authorized the appointment of two guardians to represent Boulder Creek and the watershed for purposes of preparing annual reports about the ecosystems’ health and to make recommendations on improving water quality, wildlife habitats and wetlands protection.
The board, the town’s legislative body, approved Nederland residents Alan Apt, an author and former board member, and Rich Orman, a retired lawyer, as the ecosystem’s first guardians.
Legal guardians are regularly appointed by courts to make decisions for, and represent the interests of, children, incapacitated adults and bankrupt organizations.
Importantly, the Nederland board did not give Apt and Orman authority to sue on behalf of the watersheds or to be sued. That exception was aimed at averting pushback from opponents, according to Gary Wockner, the Colorado-based executive director and founder of Save the World’s Rivers and a rights of nature advocate.
In Florida and Ohio, where communities have passed rights of nature laws, the agriculture industry has successfully pushed for the enactment of state-level legislation preempting the local ordinances, rendering them void.
Rights of nature laws generally provide higher levels of protection to ecosystems and species than conventional laws, worrying some industry groups who say the laws could be used to block development.
Overcoming such preemption legislation requires a state level law or constitutional change. Even before voters in Orange County, Florida, overwhelmingly approved a ballot referendum in 2020 recognizing the legal rights of five waterways to exist, the conservative Florida legislature passed a law prohibiting localities from enacting such measures.
With those lessons in mind, advocates, including Wockner, are using a different tactic in Colorado, where there currently is no rights of nature preemption law on the books.
“We chose to take a soft approach aimed at winning peoples’ hearts and minds,” Wockner said, adding that Nederland’s resolution is aimed in part at educating people about the shortcomings of existing environmental laws.
Those shortcomings, according to Wockner, include who has legal standing to go to court and enforce environmental protection laws. Typically, to meet standing requirements, plaintiffs must, among other things, show that they have been injured and that the court has the capacity to grant some sort of relief that would benefit them, which has generally required that they be human.
Rights of nature advocates say that the system is based on the flawed premise that nature—from individual species to whole ecosystems—is merely property that humans generally have the right to destroy. Typically, mainstream legal systems only consider the wellbeing of nature indirectly. For example, if land is illegally polluted, the owner of that land could ask a court to order a remedy for his economic, health or other damages. Generally, there is no way for the court to account for harm to the land in its own right.
That human-centered approach is criticized by advocates who argue that legal systems should be based on the reality that humans are part of nature and that, similar to humans, the natural world inherently possesses certain rights. They also point out that mainstream legal systems have long recognized that corporations, nation states and other non-human entities have legal rights and the ability, through guardians or other designated representatives, to go to court and enforce those rights.
Nature, too, advocates say, should have legal standing to assert its rights and request relief, such as for ecosystem restoration, even when there is no immediate human interest at stake.
In 2021, Nederland town took a step in that direction when it issued a nonbinding declaration recognizing that, within town limits, Boulder Creek and its watershed were “living” entities possessing “fundamental and inalienable rights,” such as to exist, to be restored and to provide an adequate habitat to native wildlife such as black bears, bobcats, brown trout and giant pine trees.
A previous attempt to advance the so-called rights of nature movement in Colorado was shut down in 2017. Attorney Jason Flores-Williams filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Colorado River Ecosystem and others, and against the state of Colorado, seeking judicial recognition of the ecosystems’ rights to exist, flourish, regenerate and naturally evolve.
Colorado’s then attorney general moved to dismiss the complaint, asserting that the suit contained various procedural deficiencies and threatened to sanction Flores-Williams, who, in response, withdrew the lawsuit.
Colorado Rivers. Credit: Geology.com
Since then, the town of Nederland and three other Colorado municipalities have enacted nonbinding resolutions recognizing the rights of the Uncompahgre River, Grand Lake and St. Vrain Creeks.
“We’re working within the confines of the Colorado and U.S. legal systems, and nibbling away at them,” said Wockner, the Fort Collins-based advocate. “It’s absolutely a long game, but there are a lot of people who think this way.”
The Whanganui is a major river on the North Island of New Zealand. The Whanganui River is a major river in the North Island of New Zealand. It is the country’s third-longest river, and has special status owing to its importance to the region’s Māori people. In March 2017 it became the world’s second natural resource (after Te Urewera) to be given its own legal identity, with the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. The Whanganui Treaty settlement brought the longest-running litigation in New Zealand history to an end. Dana Zartner, CC BY-ND via The Conversation
At least six countries—Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Uganda, New Zealand and Spain—as well as some Native American tribes, have some form of national law recognizing the rights of nature or legal personhood for ecosystems. Many more nations have some form of court recognition or local laws recognizing the rights of ecosystems or individual species.
Some of those laws strictly recognize that nature possesses particular rights, like the rights to exist and regenerate, while other laws recognize the legal personhood of an ecosystem, which generally implies that the ecosystem also bears duties.
The U.S. Supreme Court has in multiple cases recognized legal personhood for non-humans, most prominently in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, where it recognized the legal personhood of corporations.
Rights of nature laws also vary in who can go to court on nature’s behalf. Some provide legal standing to any person, while others, like Nederland’s resolution, appoint specific guardians. In Colombia, where there is judicial recognition of the rights of the Atrato River, a court created a guardianship body, including members of riverine communities, to enforce the Atrato river’s rights.
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
January 11, 2024
Nebraska is moving forward with plans to build a canal that would redirect some South Platte River water out of Colorado. The state bought about 90 acres of land in Colorado as part of construction plans. The purchase marks an important step for the Perkins County canal project, since critics have questioned its feasibility from the start. The canal was first pitched in January 2022 by then-Governor Pete Ricketts as a way for Nebraska to protect its water supply against rapid development on Colorado’s Front Range. The plan would take advantage of a 1923 legal agreement about sharing the South Platte. The late-December land purchase is so far the only one Nebraska has made in conjunction with the canal project. The state spent about $90,000 on the parcel southeast of Julesburg. Jesse Bradley, the state’s deputy director of Natural Resources, said it could be used “in conjunction with construction activities” and may not contain the canal itself…
[Jim] Yahn detailed a few hurdles that could get in the way of the project’s completion. First, they might have trouble filling the canal with water in the first place. Some nearby Colorado reservoirs have legal priority over Nebraska water users, and because the bulk of the water would be moved during non-irrigation season, it could literally get frozen by wintertime temperatures on its way to Nebraska. Yahn, who formerly served as the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s director for the South Platte basin, also said Nebraska should be prepared to spend a lot of money in order to acquire land along the canal’s path.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“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
What do you call a situation that remains a crisis, but has ever so slightly improved?
I’m asking myself this as I look at the latest water level data for Lake Powell, the reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds the Glen Canyon hydropower plant and is a conduit for drinking water for parts of several states.
The level on Monday was 3,568 feet above sea level, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the reservoir and the power plant.
On the same day last year, the water was at 3,525 feet—a difference of 43 feet. That was close to the reservoir’s lowest level since it was initially being filled in the 1960s.
Both the current level and last year’s are much lower than is optimal, following years of drought and overallocation of the reservoir’s water. But officials have some breathing room thanks to last year’s wet winter, which led to an above average, and in some areas, record snowpack that helped replenish some of what had been lost.
“We’ve kind of been digging ourselves out of a hole,” said Bart Miller, the healthy rivers director at Western Resource Advocates, a conservation nonprofit based in Boulder, Colorado. “The one wet year that we had is only getting a part of the way there … We still have a lot of work to do to put our demands for water back into balance with what the river provides.”
He’s talking about the Colorado River, which passes through Lake Powell. The Colorado River Basin is a source of water and hydropower for about 40 million Americans.
The lake and its 1,320-megawatt power plant get a lot of attention because of their importance to millions of water and electricity consumers, and because the water level has gotten perilously close to shutting off the flow to the power plant.
Lake Powell key elevations. Credit: Reclamation
If the level falls to 3,490 feet—78 feet below this week’s reading—water will be too low to spin the turbines that generate electricity.
If the level falls to 3,370 feet—198 feet below this week’s reading—it would reach “dead pool” status, when the water is too low to flow downstream from the dam. The results would be catastrophic for communities south of the dam, as David Dudley explained last year in Sierra magazine.
The Bureau of Reclamation does regular forecasts to have an idea of these risks. A report issued in August projects that there is essentially a zero percent chance that the power plant will be forced offline this year, but a 3 percent chance the water level will drop enough to force a shutoff in 2028.
Lake Powell is one several prominent examples of water resources that are at risk because of drought that climate change has exacerbated and the overallocation of the Colorado River. Downriver is another example, Lake Mead, whose low water levels have led to heightened concerns about the Hoover Dam power plant, as Rhiannon Saegert wrote for the Las Vegas Sun in August.
The Biden administration is working with states that rely on the Colorado River to find ways to conserve water and maintain adequate flow through Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The administration revised the operating guidelines for the lakes in April, including measures to better give notice to operators of irrigation systems and water utilities about water delivery reductions, and giving the Bureau of Reclamation more flexibility to conserve and store water.
“Failure is not an option,” said Tommy Beaudreau, who was then deputy secretary of the Interior, in an April statement.
Hydroelectric Dam
Let’s take a few steps back. Hydropower plants have long been some of the most reliable sources of carbon-free electricity. The country gets 6 percent of its electricity from hydropower, which is more than any other utility-scale renewable source except for wind.
But drought and other extreme weather events are making hydropower increasingly volatile. The ups and downs show up in national figures; 2021 and 2022 were two of the three lowest years for hydropower generation since 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration. (This doesn’t include 2023, for which full-year records are not yet available.)
The shifts look ever more drastic at the state level.
From October 2022 to September 2023, hydropower generation in Washington State—the national leader in hydropower—was down 23 percent compared to the previous 12-month period.
In that same timeframe, California increased its hydropower generation by 72 percent.
Credit: Inside Climate News
The “why” comes down to local factors such as drought or recovery from drought. For grid operators, the takeaway is that hydropower isn’t as steady as it used to be.
There also is a growing view among environmental and justice advocates that hydropower has harmful effects on plants and animals, and can lead to an increase in methane emissions. And, construction of reservoirs has often displaced Indigenous communities.
Some of those advocates, with support from farmers, are saying the Colorado River should be allowed to flow freely through the area where the Glen Canyon Dam now stands in order to improve the availability of water south of the dam, among other benefits. Ian James of the Los Angeles Times wrote about this in September.
While the idea doesn’t have widespread support, it’s not being dismissed in the way it might have been a decade ago, when the problems with the dam were less apparent.
Federal officials have resources to prepare for declining water levels on Lake Powell, but they are dealing with symptoms of larger problems: climate change and a demand for water that exceeds a shrinking supply.
For now, the news is better than it was last year at this time, but Miller isn’t treating this like a victory.
“We haven’t solved the problem,” he said. “We’re still in this place where we need to do a lot of work.”
Black Canyon July 2020. Photo credit: Cari Bischoff
From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):
The next coordination meeting for the operation of the Aspinall Unit is scheduled for Thursday, January 18th2024, at 1:00 pm.
This meeting will be held at the Holiday Inn Express in Montrose, CO. There will also be an option for virtual attendance via Microsoft Teams. A link to the Teams meeting will be emailed next week along with the meeting handouts.
The meeting agenda will include a review of operations and hydrology since August, current soil and snowpack conditions, a discussion of hydrologic forecasts, the weather outlook, and planned operations for this water year. There will also be a presentation by American Whitewater on the development of the Environmental & Recreational Flow Tool.
