Article by Ellen Miller
Water – February 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
THAT GIANT SLURPING SOUND you’ll be hearing in the next few years will be coming from all of the bootlicking, lobbying, groveling and lawyering going on in order to influence a decision on the Big Straw, a proposed project that would redesign Colorado’s plumbing.
Supporters of the Big Straw, who spoke at an informational meeting on Dec. 10 in Grand Junction, promise that it will do something for everyone.
They envision recycling Colorado River water by pumping it back from the Utah line west of Grand Junction up to a point near Tennessee Pass, there to be diverted to the South Platte and/or the Arkansas for use in the central mountains and on the Eastern Slope — or the water could be sent back down the Colorado for Western Slope use. That concept has acquired several names; the most printable is “Big Straw.”
On the Western Slope, where the longtime and now late editor Dick Day of the Montrose Daily Press often pointed out that paranoid people have enemies, too, the Big Straw is being looked at cautiously and skeptically.
But that’s putting it nicely. In some quarters, the response is, “over my dead body.”
Rep. Matt Smith, R-Grand Junction, is an environmental attorney. His political pedigree includes his brother-in-law, U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis and his father, David, a longtime water and agriculture activist from Meeker.
Smith has been the “lucky” Western Slope rep whose duty it has been for years to carry the “basin of origin” bill, which would require bona fide compensation, in real water and money, to basins who lose water to other basins. The legislation is routinely killed, yet the Western Slope keeps on trying.
Still, Smith appreciates the Big Straw concept. He says the good reservoir sites in Colorado’s high country already have dams in them, and, like it or not, new people will continue to come. But he isn’t endorsing the project fully. Instead he likes the idea of a soon-to-be-launched study of the Big Straw.
If anything, Smith said, discussion of the Big Straw has educated citizens all over the state “that the water available in western Colorado is over two mountain ranges and all the way to the state line. We’ve been trying to explain that for years.”
But the Eastern Slope needs to start using its own water before it comes after the water of others, whether it’s the Western Slope, the Gunnison basin or the San Luis Valley, Smith says.
“There’s an estimated 300 million, that’s right, million acre feet in the Denver aquifer, but they’re willing to go after every drop on the Western Slope before they’ll touch their own,” Smith said.
Not so fast, says Chips Berry of the Denver Water Board.
“It’s not a lake. There’s a lot of water in it, but we don’t know how much is recoverable. Secondly, can you and should you develop a non-renewable resource? If it’s done at all, we may at some point put in some wells for drought protection, not for yearly supply.”
Still, Berry, like Smith, favors the current Big Straw study, if for no other reason than to determine the cost of construction and operation.
THE BIG STRAW idea isn’t a new one. This correspondent first heard about it during a Western State College Water Workshop sometime in the early 1980s. The late Eastern Slope water buffalo in chief was Glenn Saunders, the attorney who advised the Denver Water Board in its successful drives to divert water from the Colorado’s headwaters. He was holding court at the Cattlemen Inn.
(Note: at this writing, it’s sad to report, the Cattlemen is a black ice palace, its sturdy brick walls still standing but its interior and roof destroyed by a fire Jan. 6.)
Saunders, in a joking tone, allowed that the Western Slope wouldn’t mind diversions a bit as long as Denver stuck a hose in at the Utah line and pumped it back over the hill.
That’s essentially the Big Straw.
So in 1988, Ralph “Butch” Clark III of Gunnison, an environmental planner and landowner, wrote a proposal for what he calls CARP, the Colorado Aquaduct Return Project.
Then last year, Greg Hoskin of Grand Junction, a water lawyer who serves on the Colorado Water Conservation Board, proposed a “fatal flaw” study of the Big Straw. Thus the CWCB found $500,000 in its own funds and is seeking proposals from consulting groups. It can’t hire anyone, however, until the Legislature approves.
Hoskin expects the “fatal flaw” study to be finished by November. Then the real fur can start flying.
SO WHERE are the water buffaloes? one might ask. In Smith’s view, the Eastern Slope herd “has said for years and they’re still saying it: ‘We won’t go into the aquifer until we’ve sucked every drop from western Colorado.’ So we on the Western Slope say, ‘Be prepared to build a very long straw and a very large water treatment plant.'”
It takes a while to work around to a real sticking point in the Big Straw: water quality.
Back in the early 1970s, Carbondale rancher Mike Strang was a Republican in the Colorado House, a lonely voice pleading for water diversion quantity to take a back seat to water quality.
Today, that same concern is now echoed by Western Slope water defenders like Smith and Hoskin, Berry of the Denver Water Board, and environmentalists like the Western Colorado Congress.
Truth be told, the water flowing toward the Utah line is pretty yucky. It carries dissolved solids, salt in large qualtities and pesticides from agriculture’s return flows. Maybe that’s the reason so many bizarre ideas come out of California.
Water users in the upper Colorado, including the Front Range diverters, have no interest in dirty water. After all, for all these years they’ve been getting the cleanest stuff that melts off the snowpack high up in the Rockies.
Skip Edwards, a WCC activist who retired from the BLM and moved to Crawford, fears that the Big Straw “looks like a perpetural motion machine filled with ever-dirtier water.”
The likely answer, according to Smith and Hoskin, is the addition of water treatment plants. They could be placed at the Utah line to wash the water before it goes back uphill, or at the top before it is distributed to other basins or run back down the Colorado. Either solution, of course, would add significantly to the cost of both construction and operation of the Big Straw.
THERE WAS A “coming out” party for the Big Straw Dec. 10 in the Grand Junction City Council Chamber. There were the requisite panelists, including Clark, Club 20, federal land, water and water quality types, environmentalists and a peach farmer. The audience was peopled by true believers, a couple of water buffaloes and more than a few cynics.
Ed Carpenter, the crusty former state rep from Grand Junction, brought up his die-hard support for the Dominguez Project, a reservoir south of Grand Junction along the Gunnison River given up as impractical years ago.
Questons about salt, costs and water rights were fielded in large part by referring to the coming study.
But the prevailing Western Slope view was summed up by Glen Miller, a 70-something hydrologist who lives in Grand Junction.
“I’m a cynic,” he said. “The Eastern Slope may continue to divert high mountain waters. If the Big Straw is not built and Denver continues to take good mountain water they should also take their share of the salt.”
Ellen Miller is a freelance writer based in Grand Junction, where she on occasion joins Ed Quillen in enjoying recycled Eastern Slope water as packaged by a certain brewer in Golden.
