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Various of our elected leaders, including a potential governor or two, have threatened to increase the state sales tax by 0.3 or 0.4 percent, in order to pay for more water projects.
With a sales tax, everybody gets to pay for water projects, and supposedly everyone will benefit from them. That may be true, but it sure took me a long time to figure out how to benefit from a recent water project in northern Colorado.
I first encountered this project a decade ago, when I ran a weekly newspaper up in Grand County. Grand County's major export is water -- primarily to Denver through the pioneer bore of the Moffat Tunnel, and to the northern Front the Adams Tunnel, part of the Colorado-Big Thompson (CBT) project.
The CBT project was completed thirty years ago to provide water for farmers. However, the cities of the plain -- Loveland, Longmont, Fort Collins, etc. -- were growing rapidly in 1976. To accomodate their new residents, the cities were buying up CBT water meant for agriculture. If this trend continued, there would be little agricultural water, and thus few working farms with their open space, left along the Front Range.
So it was announced that a consortium of Front Range cities would augment their water supplies by building a reservoir at Windy Gap on the Colorado River, just west of Granby. By diverting more from the Western Slope, the cities wouldn't have to buy up the farmers' CBT water.
Did all this new water go for lawns and factories, as advertised? No, not quite. Four of those cities -- Loveland, Longmont, Fort Collins and Estes Park -- have municipal electric utilities. As soon as they had been granted the right to take Windy Gap water for domestic use, they forgot all about the protection of agriculture.
The cities assigned most of their Windy Gap water to the Platte River Power Authority, which built a huge coal-fired electric plant that required cooling water. The Rawhide Plant had been proposed for Weld County. However, the Weld County Commissioners didn't want it. Weld County is primarily agricultural, and they feared that the plant's fumes would damage crops and livestock.
Neighboring Larimer County agreed to take the power plant. This boon to agriculture sits just across the county line, where the prevailing winds come from the west. So Weld County's farmers still receive whatever comes out of the smokestack.
Growing cities need electricity just as much as they need water. Even if nobody ever drinks the diverted water, using the water to cool a power plant might still serve a legitimate municipal need, if the electricity is for municipal customers.
But do the people in Loveland, Longmont, Fort Collins and Estes Park get any power from their Rawhide Plant? No. To use the most charitable interpretation, it appears that the wizards at the Platte River Power Authority had vastly overestimated electric demand.
The cities that claimed they needed more water, but really did not, are the same cities that claimed they needed more electricity, but in fact did not. Not so much as a kilowatt of Rawhide's output goes to those city-owned utilities.
Instead, every watt that Rawhide generates is sold to Public Service Company, a private company, and the contract runs for 10 years. Public Service gets a pretty good deal on the power, since the plant was financed with municipal bonds.
The Windy Gap Water Project supposedly began as an effort to protect agriculture. It has resulted in a smokestack that produces absolutely nothing of benefit to its owners -- the residents of Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins and Estes Park.
If Windy Gap is any example of modern Colorado water projects, then I finally found a way to benefit. Move upwind and buy stock in Public Service Company.
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