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Our legislature was busy last week; among other business, the state senate was debating a bill from Sen. Jim Dyer of Littleton which would allow the issuing of up to $10 billion in bonds to finance water projects.
As of my deadline, the bill's fate was uncertain, but Dyer was certain that the state needs to act. Otherwise, Front Range cities will continue to buy farmers' water rights, eventually acquiring all agricultural water in Colorado and turning the state into a maze of cities and strip malls.
If current economic conditions persist, they
ultimately will destroy agriculture in Colorado,
he
argued.
But is Colorado agriculture really that fragile? Does Colorado really need more water storage, and if so, how much and where? And where will the water come from?
The other night, Aurora Mayor Paul Tauer was on the TV news, repeating the mantra that Colorado has the legal right to about a million acre-feet a year, mostly on the Western Slope, which just flows to other states, because Colorado lacks the facilities to capture, store and transport this water to where it is needed.
A million acre-feet is a lot of water; it's about the same as the annual domestic consumption of Colorado's current population.
But where is this water? It wasn't around last year as the drought continued -- if there had been some surplus water on the Western Slope, then why were Dillon Reservoir, and Green Mountain Reservoir, and Blue Mesa Reservoir all so low?
The simple answer is that during a sequence of dry years, which is when we need the water, there wasn't any to spare. There's also plenty of storage capacity now, since the reservoirs are so low. It may take years of above-average precipitation to get full use from the storage capacity already in place.
So building more storage capacity won't help to recover from this drought. The theory must be that Colorado should start construction now in anticipation of having more dams, canals, conduits, tunnels and the like in a decade or so. For those projects to be of any use, though, we need a series of wet years in the interim, so that the existing facilities are running at capacity, and there remains enough surplus water to justify this $10 billion investment.
Do you want to go to the bank and borrow money on those assumptions? That's essentially what we're talking about with $10 billion in water-development bonds -- borrowing a lot of money, based on some assumptions about climate and water demand ten years down the road.
And again, the question arises: Where will that water come from? The current buzz concerns the Upper Gunnison River. The state government negotiated a deal with the federal government concerning reserved flow rights through Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.
In some eyes, this means that up to 240,000 acre-feet of water that now flows west might be diverted east. No court has ever determined that this water is available for diversion, and last week I asked Greg Walcher about it.
He's the director of the Colorado Department of Natural
Resources, and one of main negotiators of the Black Canyon
agreement. You know and I know that the 240,000 acre
feet isn't available,
he said. There have been
proposals, like the Union Park project, to collect and
divert some of this imaginary water, but I can assure
you that as long as Bill Owens is governor and I'm in this
job, Union Park or one of its clones is not going to be
built.
So the governor's office, as well as the Western Slope, will fight diverting Gunnison water, if there is any, to Paul Tauer's Aurora or anywhere else on the Front Range. Gunnison River development is politically impossible.
Where else? Gary Boyce had a plan to sell water from the Closed Basin of the northern San Luis Valley -- but now that the 100,000-acre Baca Ranch is being sold to the federal government as part of the expansion of Great Sand Dunes National Park, that water can't be developed.
What's left? Agriculture uses about 85 percent of all the developed in Colorado. Towns and cities use from 6 to 8 percent. If you doubled the urban share to 15 percent, agriculture would still have at least 75 percent of Colorado's water supply.
There would still be farms and ranches and productive open space. If we got more sensible about how we developed, Colorado wouldn't have to become the generic suburban sprawl that Dyer seems to fear. But that would require the state government to take a serious look at land use and transportation -- and hey, it's simpler just to talk about borrowing money.
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