NEWS

Final draft of Colorado Water Plan will push action

Jacy Marmaduke
jmarmaduke@coloradoan.com

Colorado is a few months away from finishing its first-ever statewide attempt at tackling an age-old problem: Too many people, too little water.

The state faces a projected shortfall of 500,000 acre-feet of water — enough to fill Horsetooth Reservoir three times and then some — by 2050. By then, the state’s population will have nearly doubled to 10 million people.

The Colorado Water Plan, more than two years in the making, reached the end of its final public comment period last week. Now, the Colorado Water Conservation Board is combing through an estimated 26,000 comments with the intent to respond to them and prepare a final draft for the Dec. 10 due date.

The hardest part, board members and water wonks say, will be whittling down the second draft’s 16-page list of goals into a shortlist of action items. The goals were derived from eight regional “basin implementation plans.”

“Right now the plan is like this giant, glittery Christmas tree of unicorns and rainbows, and everyone’s happy,” said Drew Beckwith, Western Resource Advocates' water policy manager. “But now (they) need to devise a way to prioritize the pieces of the plan.”

And that’s what they’ll do, Water Conservation Board Director James Eklund said.

“We don’t want this to be some pie-in-the-sky idea that can’t be implemented,” he said.

It’s too early to tell exactly which action items will make the cut for the final draft, but Eklund said it will prioritize conservation – the point at which every water conversation must start, as Gov. John Hickenlooper likes to say — and storage.

The plan will be action-oriented, Eklund said, although the document can’t directly instigate action. That power lies in the hands of Hickenlooper, government agencies and the Colorado Legislature. New water projects will need regional coordination and funding.

Fort Collins is part of the South Platte River Basin, which also includes Boulder, Windsor and Greeley. The South Platte Basin worked with the Metro Basin – Denver – to come up with a basin implementation plan.

The basin goals include:

  • Initiating new water storage projects, especially ones that integrate the South Platte River
  • Finding alternatives to buy-and-dry, or the municipal purchase of farm land for water use
  • Instilling stricter requirements for efficiency in plumbing fixtures, appliances and landscaping to conserve water

There’s one thing the final plan likely won’t prioritize: a transmountain diversion project. The second draft included seven tough criteria for evaluating proposals for those kinds of projects, and none of the basin plans advocated for a specific one.

That makes Eklund, a native of the tiny West Slope town of Collbran, pretty happy.

What makes Beckwith happy is the plan’s sense of inclusion. He gets that sense from the collaborative nature of the plan and the board’s efforts to engage the public through comment periods and roundtables.

This is the first time the “water buffaloes” — a colloquial moniker for the mostly older, mostly white, mostly men who’ve historically dominated Colorado’s water rights dialogue – aren’t the only ones at the table, he said.

Eklund said that’s the point. The board wanted the plan to present a wide range of viewpoints in language that “you don’t need to be a Ph.D. water scientist to understand.”

Board staff did that by bringing pieces of the plan home to their family — Eklund wanted edits from people who don’t know water jargon.

That part isn’t over yet, Eklund noted with a laugh.

“I know my wife’s pretty tired of reading chapters in draft form,” he said.

Reporter Jacy Marmaduke covers environment and breaking news for the Coloradoan. Follow her on Twitter at @jacymarmaduke.

Clarification: The Colorado Water Plan's final draft won't exclude transmountain diversion projects from the water conservation discussion. Rather, it will likely not list a specific transmountain diversion project as a top priority.