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Colorado's modern water wars are usually fought in a courtroom. But this year, we all get to participate, thanks to two ballot initiatives, Amendments 15 and 16.
Amendment 15 requires meters on wells pumping from one aquifer in the San Luis Valley. Amendment 16 requires the Alamosa-based Rio Grande Water Conservation District to pay, retroactively and with interest, for water pumped from beneath state-owned land; the money would go to schools.
These initiatives did not appear on the ballot because energetic citizens volunteered to circulate petitions last summer. The circulators were paid, and they were working in the interests of Gary Boyce and his Stockman's Water Co., which plans to drill deep wells in the Confined Aquifer of the San Luis Valley and export the water to the Front Range.
Because the circulators were paid, I plan to vote against these amendments. I do not like it that, if you have enough money, you can write a law, hire people to circulate petitions, then buy propaganda and perhaps get the public to approve. If every initiative with paid circulators gets defeated, this odious process might stop.
The initiative process was developed about a century ago, so that mere citizens could get around corrupt state legislatures that were owned by railroads and the like.
Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that equates money with speech, though, the initiative process has become just another method for the wealthy to get their way.
But Amendments 15 and 16 are just part of a conflict in the San Luis Valley, and even if they're defeated, the real issues will remain.
The northern San Luis Valley is a closed basin which
could hold 2 billion acre feet of water between its
surface, 8,000 feet above sea level, and its bedrock floor,
10,000 to 30,000 feet below. This Confined Aquifer
may also get up to 1 million acre feet a year of recharge
water.
Gary Boyce, who controls more than 100,000 acres above the Confined Aquifer, has formed Stockman's Water Co., and proposes to drill wells and export up to 150,000 acre-feet a year to the growing and thirsty Front Range.
There are competent people who say it can be done without harming other water users.
He is opposed by just about everybody in the San Luis Valley. Much of that opposition is led by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and its main constituency, irrigated farmers along the Rio Grande in the south part of the San Luis Valley. Thus the Boyce initiatives.
Assume they're defeated, as they should be. Suppose Boyce just goes away then. Would that end this struggle?
No, because the new owner of Boyce's land -- more than 100,000 acres of old Mexican land grant north of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument -- might come up with a similar proposal. Or some Front Range city water department, armed with the right of eminent domain, could appear on the scene.
Pass an amendment to our state constitution to stop further trans-basin water diversions?
The money and the voters in Colorado are along the Front Range, where there isn't enough water to accomodate ever more real-estate development. The majority rules, and that Front Range majority, no matter how the state constitution might be amended now, can rewrite the rules when the time comes.
Further, the feds could step in. A New Mexico environmental group has filed a notice of intent to sue over the administration of the Rio Grande Compact, under which Colorado is supposed to deliver water to New Mexico.
The compact was written in 1934, long before there were water-quality and endangered-species laws.
Federally mandated changes in water administration are a distinct possibility, no matter what Colorado does. The feds could require more water in the Rio Grande, which would mean less irrigation in the San Luis Valley, and in the long run, a project like Boyce's to pump water from the Closed Basin into the Rio Grande in order to save agriculture in the San Luis Valley and deliver water to New Mexico.
That is already happening with the federal Closed Basin Project, which last year exported 40,000 acre feet from the northern San Luis Valley to the Rio Grande.
In brief, the whole thing is hideously complex. Amendments 15 and 16 should be defeated, but their defeat won't change the underlying issues.
As long as Colorado's Front Range population continues to grow, and as long as anybody thinks there's water in the Closed Basin, then this struggle will continue.
Boyce isn't the bad guy here. He's an entrepreneur trying to serve a market. That market exists because of land developers along the Front Range from Denver to Colorado Springs. As long as they're in business, rural Colorado water will be threatened, no matter what happens to these amendments or to Gary Boyce.
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