Brief by Central Staff
Water Politics – September 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District cannot expand to cover all of Frémont County because the petitions did not have an adequate number of proper signatures.
District Judge David Thorson made that ruling on July after several days of hearings in Cañon City. The District had accepted the petitions (technically, it was called “verified consent”) and presented them to the court.
State law requires signatures from 5% of the property owners within municipal limits, and 25% of the owners of irrigated land outside municipal boundaries. The signatures were challenged by several Frémont County property owners, assisted by Mark Emmer of Salida and represented by attorney Bill Alderton, who has a private practice in addition to serving as judge of the Chaffee County Court.
Emmer worked with several volunteers, who typed in the names and addresses of petition signers. He downloaded the Frémont County assessor’s database, and found duplicate signatures, property trustees signing as property owners, and similar problems.
As submitted, the petitions from municipalities contained 589 names; 540 were required. The judge found only 523 valid signatures, so the hearing stopped then as he ruled that the petition was inadequate, and so the court did not consider the validity of the petitions signed by owners of irrigated land outside city limits.
There were other UAWCD issues before the court. Chaffee County had filed to oppose the expansion, on the grounds that a larger district would give Frémont County control of assets (several reservoirs) that were supposed to be managed for the benefit of Chaffee County residents.
The judge tossed that, on the ground that it was outside the scope of the hearing, which he confined to the adequacy of the expansion petitions.
So the UAWCD remains at its current size — Chaffee, Custer, and western Frémont counties. It does have a new director; the court appointed Patricia Alderton to the at-large seat. She is the Poncha Springs town administrator, thereby putting someone with a municipal water interest on the board, and she replaces Tom Young of Cotopaxi, who had been on the board since the District started in 1979.
Two incumbents — Tom French of Howard and Jeff Ollinger of Buena Vista — were appointed to new four-year terms. Ollinger was the UAWCD’s first, and only, elected board member when he took office in 2001.
Still at issue, when Colorado Central went to press, was who’s going to pay the bill for the hearings. State law requires the petitioners to post a bond to cover court and attorney costs (including the costs incurred by the challengers) if the petitions are challenged.
The judge waived the bond, and now the court has to determine how to recover the money — which could be in the neighborhood of $50,000 for the combined costs of the District and the challengers.
