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During our General Assembly's special session last week, a senate committee defeated a measure to finance the construction of more dams.
The plan was to put a referred measure on the November ballot, and if that had passed, then the state could issue up to $10 billion in revenue bonds for dam construction and maintenance.
The bill didn't say where the dams should be built, or how much water would be stored, or where that water might come from, so it's just as well that the Senate Appropriation Committee killed it.
For one thing, the typical Colorado approach to water management is to capture some of the spring snowmelt -- the source of about 80 percent of our annual water supply -- and store it for use later in the year.
But we could have had dozens more dams this spring, and it wouldn't have helped, since this year, there wasn't enough spring runoff to matter. Building reservoirs to store water is one thing, but building reservoirs to store non-existent water is just a waste of money.
Even so, there may be merit in the idea of finding money for some Colorado dams and reservoirs.
Here's an example. Martha and I took a walk in the woods one afternoon last summer (it's something we try to do every week, although as with many good intentions, it doesn't always happen), and along the Middle Fork of the South Arkansas River (the pioneers of this area were not especially creative when applying nomenclature), we saw a sign for a trail to Boss Lake.
We hiked the mile or so up to the small reservoir in a
subalpine valley. The earthfill dam (actually, it was more
like a rockfill
dam) had been cut open to lower the
spillway by about 25 feet.
This made me curious, so I called my usual source on local water matters -- Terry Scanga, general manager of the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District.
The Boss Lake dam, he said, was built about 70 years ago, and it was in such bad repair that the state engineer's office said its capacity had to be reduced. Thus the lowering of the spillway, so that there would be less water behind the dam.
Now, I'm not real fond of what reservoirs can do to
valleys -- the mud flats and the bathtub rings
are
ugly, and any dedicated environmentalist can give you a
long list of other horrors.
But such damage had already been done at Boss Lake. So why not get the maximum benefit from it, by repairing the dam so its reservoir could hold more water?
Money,
Terry said. Boss Lake has some
complicated ownership issues, but we're working on squaring
that away. Even after that is cleared up, though, and
we're in a position to restore it, it will cost major
dollars to do the environmental assessments even before we
can do construction.
Boss Lake isn't a big reservoir. It once held about 500 acre-feet, Terry said, and it now holds only 250. But it seemed unlikely that Boss Lake was unique. How many other Colorado reservoirs were restricted because their dams were in bad repair?
Dam safety is the responsibility of the state engineer's office, which makes inspections and issues orders to reduce capacity, or even eliminate storage entirely, if the dam needs repairs.
After some adventures navigating the voice-mail system, I got to talk to Garrett Jackson, a state water engineer, and he had a database of Colorado dams that had been restricted because they failed an inspection.
There are 168 reservoirs which, if they were repaired to operate at their designed capacity, would provide an additional 64,391 acre-feet of storage.
Some of those reservoirs,
he cautioned, would
cost a lot more to repair than the storage is
worth.
Scanga agreed that it isn't cheap to restore a reservoir -- the UAWCD's cost estimates are about $5,000 per acre-foot of restored capacity at Boss Lake and similar installations. The costs for new storage, according to studies done by the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, run from $800 to $5,000 an acre-foot.
So reservoir restoration might not be the cheapest way to go. But on the other hand, we've already trashed those sites, and it makes sense to get the maximum use from that before we start trashing new valleys for new reservoirs.
A further benefit: these rebuilt dams should be safer than they are now, and dams do collapse with catastrophic results -- 20 years ago, the Lawn Lake Dam above Estes Park failed, causing $25 million in damage and killing three people.
Given all that, it makes sense to find a way to finance some dam repairs throughout the state, and allocate the resulting increased storage in a way that offers a public benefit. Or at least, it makes more sense than asking Colorado voters to sign a $10 billion blank check.
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