Lawsuit threatened as Thornton pipeline gets final Larimer OK

FORT COLLINS — In the final step in the Board of Larimer County Commissioners’ approval of the city of Thornton’s application to run a water-transmission line through the county, the panel endorsed a “findings and resolution” item as part of its consent agenda to greenlight the project.

However, the leader of a nonprofit group that has fought the pipeline for years says he’ll sue to try to stop it. Gary Wockner, who heads Save the Poudre, said he will take legal action in Larimer County District Court next month.

“We will file it before the deadline, which is 28 days after the (county commission) chair signs the Findings and Resolution, likely July 10 or so,” wrote Wockner in an email to BizWest on Wednesday.

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The commissioners in early May voted unanimously to grant Thornton’s application to send water it owns on 10.4 miles of the county through a 42-inch steel water-transmission line. The Larimer County segment is the final piece in a 70-mile pipeline from Water Supply and Storage Reservoir #3 to the city of Thornton’s Wes Brown Water Treatment Plant. Five segments of the pipeline in Weld and Adams counties have been completed or will be soon.

The water is coming from water rights held by six Larimer County farms that Thornton purchased in the 1980s. Its representatives say developers in the thirsty north Denver suburb need the water to provide more affordable or attainable housing.

The commissioners’ May approval came more than three hours into the third night of hearings on the Denver suburb’s “1041” application, and followed its lengthy presentation on why letting Thornton’s water flow through the Cache la Poudre River instead, an option preferred by the majority of residents who testified during previous sessions, could not be accomplished.

“It’s insane to divert the water out of the Poudre and put that water in a pipeline that crosses the river 12 miles downstream,” Wockner wrote in a news release. “Using the river as the conveyance would increase the health of the river in Fort Collins, the riparian corridor along the river and the recreational opportunity at the new Whitewater Park in downtown.”

Wockner contended that the Northern Integrated Supply Project, a proposal being advanced by the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, “actually changed state law to specifically allow using the Fort Collins Poudre River corridor as the conveyance for about 13,500 acre feet of its water, while the Larimer County Commissioners failed to require Thornton to do the exact same thing for almost the exact same amount of Thornton’s water (14,000 acre feet).

“If NISP can do it voluntarily, Thornton must do it too.,” Wockner wrote. “The legal and policy precedent set by NISP must be applied to Thornton, and we will seek court intervention to enforce it.”

The “1041 approval” from the county is named for House Bill 1041, passed by the Colorado Legislature in 1974. It’s a set of regulations that give local governments authority to regulate issues of “statewide concern,” including those involving transportation and the protection of specific geographic, historic, cultural and natural resources. Larimer County first adopted 1041-based regulations in 2008 and added water and sewer transmission lines in 2009.

The county denied Thornton’s earlier attempt in 2019, and a district judge upheld the county’s decision.

This time, Larimer County’s commissioners did win 83 conditions for approval, including some that involved topsoil salvaging, dam safety, tree protection and mitigation, refined air-pollution mitigation, lighting operations during pipeline construction, a lighting plan for a pumphouse, and minimized space between Thornton’s pipeline and one operated by Northern Water as part of NISP in stretches where the two are co-located.