Brief by Central Staff
Colorado Central – August 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
A couple of errors crept into our July edition. One was the name of the Democratic candidate (and incumbent since he was appointed to replace Carl Miller after he was appointed to the state Public Utilities Commission) in House District 61. The candidate is Gary M. Lindstrom, which we mangled to Lundquist. The district essentially comprises Lake, Summit and Eagle counties.
The other error was in a statement that “Gary Boyce, manager of a huge parcel of [San Luis] Valley property, proposed a plan to supply the city of Aurora with non-tributary groundwater.”
It’s a matter of argument as to whether the deep confined aquifer in the San Luis Valley is tributary or non-tributary – you can find engineers and lawyers willing to argue either way.
But as Boyce pointed out in a phone call, the last ruling from the water court in Alamosa held that it was tributary. That’s because no one could prove that pumping 100,000 acre-feet a year out of that aquifer would not diminish the flow of the Rio Grande by less than 1% over 100 years.
