By George Sibley
Thirty-five water-user groups from both sides of the Continental Divide recently concluded a “Colorado River Cooperative Agreement” concerning the waters of the Upper Colorado River – both the water still in that river’s tributaries in Grand, Summit and Eagle Counties, and the water diverted out of those rivers into the South Platte basin.
This situation lies a little to the north of Central Colorado, but it is nonetheless worth watching down here in Central Colorado as this agreement unfolds. “Central Colorado” is, after all, a region of the state fiendishly created by this magazine’s founders Ed and Martha Quillen to include headwaters on both the East and West Slopes. (Not to mention on Colorado’s “South Slope,” the Upper Rio Grande – technically East Slope but recently treated like the West Slope by the rest of the East Slope: a place to go for more water.)
So the dynamics of the “Colorado River Cooperative Agreement” among our northern neighbors on both sides of the Divide should be of more than just passing interest in our part of the state. Just the list of negotiating parties is interesting in the context of Colorado water history. Thirty-four of the 35 parties are from the West Slope, including practically every municipal government, irrigation district, water and sanitation district, water conservancy district, and other water-related organization from the Continental Divide all the way down to Grand Junction in the Upper Colorado watersheds funneling into the Colorado main stem. These are 34 very diverse organizations, from irrigation ditch companies going back more than a century to water districts for half-built resort developments, and everything in between; each with its own unique challenges, and all with some history of economic competition with some of the other parties for either business, or water, or both. These organizations together represent a total of about 300,000 people on the West Slope (2010 figures), ranging from ranchers to rafters to retirees.
The East Slope, on the other hand, had only one negotiating party: Denver Water, representing 1.3 million comparatively homogeneous urban and suburban municipal and industrial users. A friend on the Front Range sees Denver Water as a big ocean liner, plowing ahead on its set course of “supplying the City and County of Denver and its inhabitants with water for all uses and purposes.” I would extend the metaphor: a big ocean liner plowing ahead on course in a harbor crowded with a lot of much smaller craft – sailboats, fishing boats, yachts, rowboats, et cetera. The ocean liner is not deliberately trying to run over any of the small craft, but – historically at least, until the present – it has not always made an effort to not run over them, and many of the 34 other parties to the agreement have felt pretty overrun in the past.
This is the first time that “the ocean liner” has engaged all of the West Slope small craft at the same time – with the potential for chaos there mostly avoided by having the Colorado River District staff take the lead on most of the negotiating for the West Slope. It is not to my purpose here to even summarize all of the complex provisions of the Cooperative Agreement. It basically amounts to exchanges of relatively modest amounts of water to “firm” Denver Water’s deliveries to the Front Range, for relatively modest amounts of money to improve water quality and stream ecosystems in the Colorado’s headwaters tributaries. That may not sound like a negotiation that should have taken five years, but the time expenditure becomes obvious with just a scan of the details (available in summary form on the River District website – www.crwcd.org).
What’s as important as the specific outcomes is the place of this negotiation in the history of water development across the Great Divide – which, legally, can happen with no permission at all from the basin of origin. Several transmountain diversions, in fact, happened in the first third of the 20th Century without a by-your-leave. But the first really big transmountain diversion, the 1930s Colorado-Big Thompson Project from the Grand Lake area into the South Platte basin, was a textbook case of East and West Slope entities working things out, in a cooperative agreement titled “Senate Document 80” that gave the West Slope “compensatory storage” for future as well as present needs. A similar agreement compensated the West Slope for its present and future losses to the Arkansas basin with the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. Both of those projects were orchestrated by the Bureau of Reclamation.
But the metro-area utilities, led by Denver Water, had no patience with such altruistic stuff. Denver Water went beyond just ignoring the basin-of-origin impacts of transmountain diversions; it spent decades, and probably millions, trying to unravel the Green Mountain Reservoir compensatory storage agreement. It wasn’t until events circa 1990 – the Eagle County commissioners denying critical permits to metro-area entities for enlargements of an existing transmountain diversion, and the Environmental Protection Agency veto of a major Front Range reservoir – that the handwriting went on the wall for the big metro-area utilities. Any future transmountain diversions would only happen through mutual agreements with the basins of origin.
Even as the negotiations leading to the Cooperative Agreement were beginning to commence, in 2005 the legislature was creating a formalized process for such interbasin negotiation, through the “Colorado Water for the 21st Century” Act. This act created “Roundtables” in each of the state’s eight major river basins (plus one for the metro-area “sink”), and an “Interbasin Compact Committee” made up of representatives from each of the Roundtables plus some gubernatorial appointees. The whole process was intended to be “grassroots” and “bottom up:” first, enabling the basins to identify their own needs and challenges at the Roundtable level, then developing “portfolios” of potential resolutions for those needs and challenges.
A problem with that, however – and the rationale for the Interbasin Compact Committee – is the perception that the metropolitan area is unable to solve its future water supply problems without the help of non-metro areas, either in their own basins or in other basins. Since the metro area is projected to get most of the growth over the next several decades, the non-metro basins all have to take into account, in planning solutions for their own problems and shortfalls, the extent to which they are also likely to become part of the solution to the metropolitan problem.
A question arises for me (not necessarily for the Gunnison Basin Roundtable of which I’m a member). What should a basin of origin for a transmountain diversion be able to ask, even require, from a proposed basin of destination? The new Cooperative Agreement broadens and deepens the 1930s idea of “compensatory storage” to include requiring quite a bit of expensive mitigation work in the basin of origin to take care of the ecological and economic changes imposed by the removal of high-quality headwaters water.
But a question being raised with increasing frequency from the West Slope today is: when will this ever stop? Will the East Slope ever be able to say, okay, that’s all we will ever need from the West Slope (“in perpetuity,” as we used to say to the Indians)? Denver Water takes a step – sort of – in that direction in the Cooperative Agreement, pledging that, following execution of the Agreement, they (and all those to whom they supply water) will not undertake any future West Slope water development activities without prior approval of the Colorado River District and the county(ies) immediately impacted.
That, of course, is not to say they won’t be back for more. But toward an answer to that question of “how much is finally enough” – non-metro Roundtables should maybe push the envelope a little farther with requests, or demands, to metro utilities that come after more water. For example, do you have in your home basin a rate structure permanently encouraging serious conservation? Do you have in place a plan for the total “reuse to extinction” of water you take from our basin? Are you working actively with your local officials and planners to create and adopt land use regulations that “fit” a high desert climate?
Positive answers to those questions – in addition to mitigations in the basin of origin – would probably do as much as a basin of origin could expect in terms of good faith on the part of those taking water out of one “future” to put it in another.
Meanwhile, I just have to note an editorial from the Pueblo Chieftain a few months ago (3/22/11). Historically, the Chieftain has waxed enthusiastic about bringing water through the Divide from the Gunnison Basin to the Arkansas Basin. But today, Puebloans are looking at a big pipe that will be pumping water from Pueblo Reservoir (built for West Slope water from the Fryingpan River) uphill to Colorado Springs to meet growth anticipated there by 2040. This provides the Chieftain with a different perspective on the process of moving water around the state.
“Rather than move water to people who aren’t even here yet,” the Chieftain suggests, a little plaintively, “we ought to move the people to the water.”
Umm – yes. Perspective is everything. Maybe that’s a point from which to start negotiating. But, do we really want all those people where the water is now?
George Sibley writes from the Upper Gunnison valley where he is currently working on a history of the Colorado River District. As a member of the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy board and the Gunnison Basin Roundtable, he is up to his neck in water issues.
