Editorial: Water plan strikes right balance

Sometimes, it takes time to get something right. In the case of Colorado’s Water Plan, unveiled Nov. 19 by the Colorado Water Conservation Board after a decade of negotiations, the results were worth the wait.

The 480-page document was prepared after hundreds of meetings, more than 30,000 comments, thousands of participants and input from more than 150 entities. It provides a road map to guide the state through the coming decades, with population projected to almost double from the current 5 million by 2050. With that increased population will come increasing demand for water to serve people and industry.

The plan lays out the dilemma facing our state: “Since projections suggest wide variability in future precipitation, Colorado faces the possibility of a significant water supply shortfall within the next few decades, even with aggressive conservation and new water projects,” the plan states, adding, “Colorado’s Water Plan sets an objective to close this gap by 2030, while also addressing the effects of a changing climate on our water resources.”

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The plan’s “all of the above” approach envisions additional reservoir and aquifer storage of 130 billion gallons. But the plan also strikes a balance, requiring that same amount of additional conservation by cities and industry.

We respect the opinions of environmentalists such as officials at Fort Collins-based Save the Poudre, who are concerned that additional storage will degrade the health of rivers and streams. But new storage can occur only after extensive environmental analysis at the state and federal levels.

And we’re pleased to see the equal emphasis on conservation, which can make a huge difference as the state seeks to serve a wide range of constituencies, including an increasing population.

Indeed, the Boulder-based associate director of the Environmental Defense Fund, Brian Jackson, applauded the plan’s “spirit of collaboration, flexibility and innovation.”

Just as difficult as a decade of negotiations was in developing Colorado’s Water Plan, equally difficult will be implementing its precepts, a task left largely to state and local governments, water utilities, irrigation districts and others, as BizWest’s Dallas Heltzell noted in his article on the plan. All told, the plan is expected to cost up to $20 billion over 30 years.

The Colorado Water Plan is just that — a plan. But we look forward to the same spirit of cooperation and compromise as it is implemented in the decades to come.