Day 1: Water Sustainability Turns to Talks of Day of Reckoning

By Daniel Berger
assistant editor
Headwaters News
April 11,2007

The 2007 State of the Rockies Conference commenced yesterday in the atrium of Armstrong Hall, on the campus of Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and from the opening remarks onward, the speakers all seemed to want to make a few things clear: this report was primarily written by a talented group of undergraduates and a team of professors; climate change is affecting almost every issue covered in the report; and the future of the Rocky Mountain region is mired in uncertainties surrounding growth.

Colorado College president Richard Celeste opened the conference with a brief history of the college, connecting the school’s founding in 1874 to the mission of this fourth annual Report Card, which is to conduct state-of-the-art research to help Rockies residents clearly see their communities, their environment and their economy so they can better shape their future.

Following the president, several of the student writers and researchers previewed their chapters, including ones on forestry issues, county and state demographics, political changes and changes to the urban landscapes.

But Day 1 really began to cook at the first panel on water sustainability. Attendees packed the room and, following panelists’ presentations, the audience threw tough questions at the speakers.

The first speaker from the panel was Tyler McMahon, a senior at Colorado College . Dressed in a gray suit with a red-striped tie not quite pulled snug, McMahon launched into an overview of his chapter, which focused on water transfers from agriculture users to urban water entities.

McMahon used a series of graphs and charts to show that water withdraws are increasing across the country and region, with Idaho and Colorado leading the western states. The driest states, Nevada , New Mexico and Utah had the least. He then went on to illustrate how farm economics and urban growth markets are together fueling the transfers.

There are several methods of water transfer, he said, and he outlined a handful that are either being employed, or that he said should be employed, including making the transfer process more flexible between farmers and cities, so water can flow back and forth from year to year, depending on where needs lie most. You can read much of what he said in his chapter in the report (pdf).

Melinda Kassen, Trout Unlimited’s Western Water Project Managing Director, followed McMahon by reporting on a recent study by her group, entitled “Gone to the Well Once Too Often,” (pdf) which looks at groundwater sustainability.

“To be good river stewards, we also have to be groundwater stewards,” she said, but added later that Colorado water law doesn’t always allow for that.

“To be good river stewards, we also have to be groundwater stewards,”

Kassen, like many of the other speakers, included historical context in her discussion of current conditions, noting that groundwater pumping had mostly been done by hand until the 1950s, when industrial wells began being used. At that time, she noted, state officials didn’t realize that groundwater and surface water were the same resource; conventional wisdom was that they were separate. (I also spoke about this idea in a talk I gave last week in Duango.)

Because this realization came so late in the game, there are now few groundwater rules. “Weak groundwater rules,” she said, “make water use conflicts worse,” noting what happened in eastern Colorado last summer, when farmers lost their crops because they had no water. A system that looks good on paper, but that doesn’t work in practice, she said, failed those farmers.

But the situation, she added, “is not all gloom and doom. There are ways we can deal with this.” They include:

• Electing leaders with the courage to acknowledge the issue, and then take action.
• Enforcing existing laws.
• Managing with strategies that stress conservation and efficiencies.
• Developing other ways to transfer and share water.
• And conducting all of the above in a way that is sustainable, so water can be put back in the rivers and in the groundwater systems.

The third speaker on the panel was Gary Bostrom, general manager of the Water Services Division of Colorado Springs Utilities. Bostrom outlined a proposed pipeline plan to bring the growing city more water from the Arkansas River Basin west of the city.

The Southern Delivery System, he said, is a 43-mile pipeline that will increase water supply and also provide system redundancy (back-up for an aging system) for city water users. Bostrom laid out an elegant-sounding plan that also includes public education, a 50-year growth plan, and added efficiencies in the system.

Kay Brothers, deputy general manager for the South Nevada Water Authority, also joined the panel, but gave no formal presentation, as she was the keynote later that night. See that story.

The speakers presented for about an hour, before the floor was opened to audience questions, and that’s when the tone shifted a bit. One after another, audience members grilled the panelists about growth issues. If you take water out of the system at this spot, what’s left to replace it? Won’t more water development further promote more growth? If there are so many rules second-guessing the development process, why are there still so many conflicts?

And through the answers came some of the complicated nuances of water law, and some of the unresolved issues.

Yes, there is a section of the Arkansas River , the Legacy Reach as it’s called, that will have less water through this current plan, said Bostrom, but it won’t be completely dewatered, and the utility is investigating what that dewatering will mean. But he added that a developer has to show he or she has water before they can build. And that led to the question, does that have to be real, or “wet” water, or just paper water?

In answering questions, panelists also explained the difference between diverted uses and consumptive uses, which together make up a water right. Diverted use is how much water a right-holder can take out of the system, while consumptive use is how much of that diverted water her or she can use. The difference, set in law, comes from agriculture, where some water is lost along its path from source to field and some water is naturally returned to the system through infiltration.

Today, though, when water is transferred from one basin to another, that transfer agreement still includes diverted and consumptive uses, and they are not always equal.

Bostrom also explained the two kinds of water he deals with, native water and transmountain water, and the uses associated with them.

Native water, Bostrom explained, is the water that flows off of nearby Pikes Peak , and can only be used once. Transmountain water is water brought in from another basin or drainage, and can be used more than once, depending on the agreement.

The hour-long question session ended with a discussion of the energy required to move all of this water. “How much coal,” one audience member asked, “does it take to run your faucet for five minutes?”

Brothers chimed in on this one, speaking about the water system in southern Nevada , acknowledging the issue and adding that her organization is addressing this issue, asking water users to voluntarily pay a “green” fee to better reflect the energy costs associated with the water transport. And from here, the conversation veered right toward the inevitable, head-on train: what is the limit of growth, how far are we from it, and what can we do about it.

Brothers touched briefly on that, adding she’d address it more in her keynote. And then the session broke for dinner.

Read about Brothers' keynote.

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