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Two Forks Reservoir is dead. I'll risk going out on a limb to predict that it will not be built.
Two Forks once looked inevitable; almost all the major movers and shakers in Colorado favored it.
But note how they have begun to hedge. Denver Mayor Federico Peña says the city should look at alternatives. Gov. Roy Romer says he, too, is considering alternatives, and adds that there should be a statewide water plan.
Two Forks still has a few supporters, though. Larry
Simpson, head of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy
District (NCWCD), remains squarely in favor. If it isn't
built, he fears that Denver and its suburbs will look
north, into his turf, and make a helter-skelter dash
for water.
When he worries about water raids, he knows what he's talking about. A dozen years ago, when I lived in Grand County on the Western Slope, Simpson and his cohorts showed up with the Windy Gap Project.
Front Range cities were growing rapidly then; they were purchasing agricultural water from the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which the NCWCD administers. If cities kept buying up this water, farms would dry up.
Nobody wanted that, of course. So the NCWCD said it would protect farmers by building a new reservoir at Windy Gap near Granby. New suburbs would have lawns and trees, and no farms would go dry.
However, NCWCD totally misrepresented what it would do with that water. Instead of going to families or factories, much of the water went to the cooling towers of the Rawhide Power Plant near Fort Collins.
Rawhide was built by the Platte River Power Authority, which in turn supplies electricity to several municipal utilities along the Front Range. You can argue that electricity is as vital as water, and that if the cities needed kilowatts more than they needed acre-feet, this was still an acceptable way to use the water.
But Rawhide has been on line for several years, and not one kilowatt of its output has ever gone to those cities. The plant's entire output is sold to Public Service Co. The cities that built Windy Gap didn't need the water or the electricity -- but they grabbed the water anyway.
There might have been occasions when NCWCD told the truth during its visits to Grand County, but if there were, I don't remember them.
So I can't feel real sorry for Larry Simpson when he says he's worried about water raids if Two Forks isn't built. He's a master at offensive strategy in our water wars, and now we'll get to see how good he is at defensive strategy.
As for the statewide water plan that Gov. Romer says we
should have -- it reminds me of that popular political
slogan in the 70s, controlled growth.
It sounded so
reasonable that nobody bothered to ask who was going to be
in control.
What body would administer a statewide water plan? If this Supreme Water Board was representative of our population, then it, like our legislature, would be dominated by suburban interests allied with Colorado Springs.
Those are the same interests that were pushing for the uneconomical and unnecessary Two Forks, who plan to put a 200-foot-high dam in the Arkansas River, who have grandiose schemes for moving water out of the Gunnison Country and across two mountain ranges. And if they ran the statewide water plan, they'd find a way to make every Colorado citizen, instead of just their water customers, pay for these follies.
We don't need a statewide water plan, because it
wouldn't improve anything. We do need our governor to
just say no
to Two Forks.
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