State’s water supply report has dire warning

Eric Hecox has seen the projections and he wants Coloradans to understand there’s a dark cloud hanging over their state’s water future.

It’s all there in the 2010 Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI) report issued in late January by the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

And it’s not pretty.

The SWSI report notes that, if water use in Colorado follows current trends, large supplies will inevitably be shifted away from agricultural uses, especially along the Front Range, resulting in significant loss of farmlands, economic damage to the state’s agricultural regions and potential environmental harm.

The report concludes that between 500,000 and 700,000 irrigated acres in Colorado could be dried up by 2050.

But that’s not all. The report also says that even if the long-delayed Glade Reservoir northwest of Fort Collins is built and planned expansions of Halligan and Seaman Reservoirs in Poudre Canyon are completed, Northern Colorado will still be short more than 100,000 acre-feet of water to meet the expected demand in 2050.

Hecox, acting deputy director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and water supply planning chief, said the SWSI report should be an eye-opener for state residents, farmers, ranchers, governments and water planners.

“It points to the importance of these projects moving forward, to the extent that if they’re successful we’re moving that gap forward into time and if they’re not successful, then the gap will be larger and we’ll encounter it sooner,” he said.

The SWSI report contains 16 recommendations focused on “an implementation phase to determine and pursue projects and methods to help meet the state’s consumptive and nonconsumptive water supply needs.”

Many of the recommendations specifically call for actively encouraging and implementing water storage projects that would help hold onto more of the estimated 16 million acre-feet generated by Colorado’s rivers each year.

But Colorado can only hold onto a portion of that water because the state is obligated, under various legal compacts and decrees, to let about two-thirds of that flow out of the state to Colorado’s water-hungry neighbors.

Northern Colorado – defined as Larimer and Weld counties – falls into the state’s South Platte Basin for water planning purposes. Hecox said South Platte Basin river supplies are always unpredictable.

“The South Platte can be very dry in some years and very high in other years,” he said. “There’s water there to be developed, but you have to have storage.”

Still, Hecox said the CWCB isn’t completely fixed on just being an advocate for new storage projects.

“I think our board has recognized that there’s no one silver bullet – that the answer lies with a mix of strategies, including conservation, ag and urban water transfers, and new storage and infrastructure projects,” he said. “One thing that the water community has talked about is we’re ending an era of developing a resource and entering an era of managing a resource better.”

A summit convened by Gov. John Hickenlooper on March 3 charged water experts from all the major river basins to develop a statewide water strategy to balance the needs of urban and agricultural users within the next five years.

Hecox said groups that work to derail water storage projects for environmental protection or other reasons are only part of the story as to why it takes so long to move a project toward completion.

“Where a lot of the problems come is in the permitting phase,” he said. “They’re having a hard time getting their way through the system. Because of the complexity of the process, it gives lots of opportunities to jump in and slow it down.”

Hecox said not pursuing storage as part of the water supply solution for the state’s inevitable population growth simply means a continuing and speeded-up loss of once-productive ag lands along the Front Range.

“We often get wrapped up in discussions of highly controversial projects, but we have a status-quo solution to meet our needs,” he said. “The default solution is the transfer of ag to urban use. The South Platte Basin could lose up to 35 percent of its irrigated lands, and a lot of that would be in the Larimer-Weld county area.

Steve Porter covers agribusiness and natural resources for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-232-3147 or at sporter@ncbr.com.

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