< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
In Colorado, we're good at making ghost towns, and that's been the case since before there was a Colorado; the Mesa Verde structures, built so carefully with what must have been back-breaking labor, were abandoned about 700 years ago.
Scholars still dispute the cause for that, but we know what happened in more recent cases. The best known are the hard-rock mining camps -- Caribou, Turret, Ashcroft, Rosita, Gladstone, etc. -- where they ran out of ore.
Those are just a start. The first Anglo settlements, like Bent's Fort and Hardscrabble, did not endure. Coal-mining was once a big industry, and when it faded, towns like Baldwin and Cokedale were abandoned. Railroad tracks were pulled up, leaving foundations and little more at spots like Shirley and Hancock.
High wheat prices and wet years during World War I inspired a rush to the High Plains. A few years later, prices fell but the rain didn't. What remained were fading settlements like Keota and Toonerville.
The farming ghost towns may be the saddest of all, since their founders expected to build a sustainable civilization, whereas miners know that the vein is going to pinch out someday.
But coal and metals aren't all that Colorado mines. These days, a fair chunk of the state's population mines water, and that may explain the geography of Referendum A.
Referendum A, which will soon appear on a state-wide mail-in ballot, would allow the Colorado Water Conservation Board to issue up to $2 billion in bonds for major water projects approved by the governor.
Although no projects will be specified until after the
election, backers of Referendum A call their group Save
Colorado's Water,
and their propaganda talks about
developing our state's unused share of the Colorado River
on the Western Slope.
So that's the most probable source of the water for a storage and diversion project. Where would it go?
The south metro area -- Arapahoe, Douglas and Elbert counties, and environs -- has been one of the fastest growing areas in the nation. The combined population of those three counties grew from 461,548 in 1990 to 721,983 in 2001.
Where does the water for those 260,435 new residents of new developments come from? In most cases, from wells that tap aquifers in a geologic formation known as the Denver Basin, which extends from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from the Front Range east as far as Limon.
These aquifers are layers of porous rock or gravel which can hold water in their spaces. They get some natural recharge, but if water is pumped out faster than it is recharged, it's the same thing as mining the water. What you take out of a reservoir can be replaced by next year's snow melt, but what you take out of the ground is not going to be replaced.
The problem is already evident. The water table at one well in southern Arapahoe County has declined by 529 feet in the past 13 years.
Last March, there was a conference called Troubled
Waters,
where engineers and hydrologists addressed the
Denver Basin. The conference summary concluded that the
problem is fairly straightforward: Water is being pumped
out of the aquifers faster than it is being
replenished,
and new supplies will be
needed.
The experts know that the Denver Basin water will run out, but they can't say whether that will happen in 30 years or 100 years. But it will happen if the pumping continues. So Colorado has what amounts to a growing city of 250,000 people, based on mining a non-renewable resource. When the water table drops too far, that's one big ghost town.
Nobody there wants that to happen, of course. The people who matter have been making piles of money from real-estate development, and Referendum A is a way to preserve the goose which has been laying their golden eggs. Thus the list of endorsers of Referendum A is heavy with South Metro politicians and water districts -- they need the state to act to keep them in business.
Or, as Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Western Slope's
Colorado River Water Conservation District put it, Lots
of local politicians in the Southern Metro area are looking
for what we are calling a new 'well-fare' project, to bail
out their constituents.
So there's the geography of Referendum A -- tap the Western Slope to benefit South Metro developers and developments. Supporters tell us that this will benefit the entire state. What it really does is change the location of our future ghost towns.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >