NISP participants asked to contribute $33M for 2025 project design, activities

BERTHOUD — The 15 members of the Northern Integrated Supply Project will have to collectively come up with more than $33 million this year to fund continued planning and design and legal work for the ongoing water project that is designed to secure their future water needs.

NISP has been in the works for more than 20 years and is part of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s plan to secure 40,000 acre feet of water per year to 15 cities and water districts throughout the Front Range and Northern Colorado.

“This is going to be the largest share they’ve had (to pay) so far,” Northern Water spokesman Jeff Stahla said of the 2025 participant agreements. The 2025 agreement is their 21st in which participants pay their share of the project costs.

NISP will include two reservoirs, Glade and Galeton, to store water from the Cache la Poudre and South Platte rivers, collecting 40,000 acre-feet of water annually to be delivered via pipelines to water utilities throughout the Front Range. Comprising 15 municipalities and water districts, NISP is expected to deliver enough water for nearly half a million residents by 2050. Part of the project is building pipelines to reach the end users and the reservoirs.

Participants in the project include the cities of Fort Morgan, Evans, Fort Lupton, Lafayette and Dacono, as well as the towns of Erie, Windsor, Frederick, Eaton, Firestone and Severance. Also included are the Fort Collins-Loveland, Left Hand, Central Weld County and Morgan County Quality water districts.

The project’s impact on the flow of the Cache la Poudre River through Fort Collins has been one of the primary points of contention as Northern Water officials have worked their way through the study and permitting process, which has prompted a series of lawsuits by environmental groups. In October, a state appellate court judge, however, affirmed the Board of Larimer County Commissioners’ 2019 approval of the project — a decision that was not appealed to a higher court. Northern Water continues to fight against a challenge to the U.S Army Corps’ approval of the project in U.S. District Court, however.

Legal defense fees from both lawsuits and federal permitting are included in the participants’ costs for 2025. The lawsuit doesn’t prevent Northern Water from performing the back-end work on the project, but it does prevent it from floating bonds on the project, or at least bonds with decent interest rates.

“The litigation has forestalled us going out to the bond market for financing,” Stahla said. “Because the project is under litigation, we wouldn’t get as advantageous of an interest rate.”

What’s different this year is that Northern Water will actually be able to do some actual work to forward the project, such as securing easement agreements with landowners, and putting some pipeline in the ground.

“We need to build a mile and a half of pipeline this year,” Stahla said, explaining that the pipeline will be placed in Johnstown where a lot of development is ongoing. “We want to get the pipeline built in the area, so that development doesn’t occur where we’d have to rip something out to lay our lines.

“This will be the first time pipeline is put into the ground for this project,” Stahla said.

This year also will likely see more condemnation proceedings in court, Stahla said. The water district has been working with landowners for access to the land to build water pipelines, but there are often disagreements on fair market value of the land.

The Northern Water board in late 2024 sued Martin Lind’s Vima Partners to condemn some land after the two could not agree on a price. That lawsuit is ongoing.

Stahla said the board will put other condemnation proceedings in front of a judge this year.

“It’s not that we’re looking to condemn a whole bunch of properties,” Stahla said. “But it starts the process to ensure that landowners are getting fair value and taxpayers are paying fair value.”

Stahla said Northern Water officials expect that land that was a part of the 1041 permit process through Larimer County could end up in such condemnation proceedings.

Meanwhile, Northern Water continues to work on several phases of the project.

This year’s intended projects include further consultation, permitting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies, compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act and other requirements for federal permitting, field work, and analysis for permitting, modeling, and other activities related to designing and permitting the project; as well as the final design for Glade Reservoir, U.S. Highway 287 relocation, construction manager/general contractor design involvement, and completion of the Galeton Dam preliminary design.

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