2-28 House Committee amended to appropriations

• Title: 2-28 House Committee Amended to Appropriations
• IBCC - Doc Type: Legislation

2-28 House Committee amended to appropriations

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that we heard kind a divided the bill into two things; setting up a
stmcture for facilitating dialogue, and then getting involved in the
meat of the bill, actually pushing forward an agreement. And that's
where the discussion got a little rougher.

There was a lot of support for 1177 to create a fomm for having
better dialogue and that was out there. And then where the
discussion would break down is how do we not step on the toes of
people that have adjudicated water rights, how can we keep these
people at the table, and lots of the amendments that you've seen
here deal with the problems that have been raised in pali by the
water community.

We had a meeting with the Colorado Water Congress where a
number of the folks in the State Affairs Committee raised concerns
about contractual obligations and not getting involved in those
private agreements. And this bill has gone - there have been a lot
of amendments done here to address those.

Representative Penry was willing to restmcture this so that we, in
fact, set up that planning group that would come back, report to the
General Assembly, develop a charter. And what I would like to
add to the list of things that this Committee would need to work on
is to develop a mechanism for ensuring mitigation and/or
compensation for basins or areas of origin. I think that should be
on the radar screen and that that would be one way to start getting
that into the overall dialogue. It's not specific as to how they
would have that discussion but that will be an amendment that I'm
gonna hand out here once I figure out the right timing for that.

So I'd like to get the Committee's thoughts on going down this
path, 'cause this is a little bit different than the way the bill was
originally. Does anybody have any comments? Did you want to
say something?

Rep. PelllY You did a good job of describing, I mean really, one of the real
challenging legal issues we've dealt with is how do we make these
agreements binding and legal and give them force and value.
Because the last thing we want to do is create a gabfest that leads
to some ending that has no real meaning. And so what we've done
is instead of us solving that issue ourselves, we said, "Interbasin
Compact Committee, you tell us how to best make these
agreements, give these agreements force and make them binding."
Whether that's through contractual authority, the whole menu of
options they have. But instead of really trying to be specific and

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