Fort Collins staff urges city council to oppose NISP

FORT COLLINS — The Fort Collins City Council should pass a resolution conditionally opposing construction of the Northern Integrated Supply Project water-storage reservoirs, according to a sharply worded report issued Thursday by a broad range of city departments.

“We felt that there are a handful of key issues that need additional work,” said John Stokes, director of the city’s Department of Natural Resources. “Probably the key thing is a lack of a quantitative water-temperature model for the Poudre River. Without that information, a lot of our comments are based on the fact that we don’t have that information.”

If approved, NISP would include construction of Glade and Galeton reservoirs, which combined could store more than 215,000 acre-feet of water, 40,000 of which would be allocated to municipal water supplies annually. Glade Reservoir, which would be larger than Horsetooth Reservoir west of Fort Collins, would be built north of the intersection of U.S. Highway 287 and Colorado Highway 14 northwest of Fort Collins and would hold up to 170,000 acre-feet of water diverted from the Cache la Poudre River. Galeton Reservoir would be built east of Ault and Eaton in Weld County and hold up to 45,000 acre-feet of South Platte River water.

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About a dozen cities and towns and four water districts have signed up to buy water from the NISP project if it wins final approval from the Corps. Supporters, including the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry, the Northern Colorado Legislative Alliance and many other business- and agriculture-backed groups, see the project as crucial to keeping up with the growing demands of development, industry and agriculture along the Front Range.

Opponents have said the project would drain water from the Poudre as it flows through Fort Collins, limiting opportunities for recreation that include tubing, whitewater kayaking and fishing.

If the City Council accepts the staff recommendation at its Tuesday, Sept. 1, meeting, it would pass a resolution directed at the Corps of Engineers, which has proposed building the project.

“All the city can do – we’re like any other member of the public,” Stokes said. “We’re allowed to comment, and the Corps is free to consider our comments or not. We’ve written comments for the Corps to consider. Council will consider a resolution endorsing those comments and passing them on to the Corps.”

The staff report acknowledges that some areas of the Corps’ Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement, released earlier this summer, “represent a significant improvement over the 2008 Draft Environmental Impact Statement.” However, it continued, “Staff continues to have numerous significant and fundamental concerns with respect to NISP’s impacts to the city and the failure of the SDEIS to adequately or accurately describe all of the impacts.”

The staff criticized the Corps’ inclusion of a no-action alternative as “not bona fide” because it “improperly skews the entire analysis in favor of the preferred alternative” – building Glade and Galeton reservoirs.

Other city concerns included “the potential for water-quality degradation that could affect source water and wastewater treatment facilities; flawed analyses and conclusions related to the project’s reduction of peak flows which are likely to harm the environment and potentially increase flood risk; in general, flawed analyses and conclusions regarding long-term degradation of habitat; a failure to analyze an alternative that would avoid most negative impacts to Fort Collins; a conceptual mitigation plan that is premature and inadequate because the impacts of the project have not yet been correctly described; a conceptual mitigation plan that includes an augmentation flow that, as currently described, is not likely to be allowed under Colorado water law and administration; and significant negative impacts to the recreation values of the river.”

The staff report concluded that “The city’s interests were best served by adopting a position of conditional opposition due to the shortcomings of the impacts analysis, the anticipated harms to Fort Collins, and the inadequacies of the conceptual mitigation plan. The draft resolution thus states: ‘That the City Council cannot support NISP as it is currently described and proposed in the DEIS and SDEIS, with the understanding that the City Council may reach a different conclusion with respect to a future variant of NISP that addresses the City’s fundamental concerns expressed in the city’s comments to the DEIS and comments to the SDEIS.”

Gary Wockner, executive director of Save the Poudre, the primary NISP opposition group, praised the staff report.

“We support the city staff’s general conclusion that the SDEIS has extreme flaws,” he said in a media release. “NISP would drain and destroy the Cache la Poudre River and degrade the enormous financial, cultural, and environmental investment the Fort Collins community has made to protect and restore this amazing river. We will fight to stop NISP and protect the Poudre River for as long as it takes.”

The city staff’s full report is online here.