2-07 House Committee Lay Over Unamended

• Title: 2-07 House Committee Lay Over Unamended
• IBCC - Doc Type: Legislation

2-07 House Committee Lay Over Unamended

Page 28 of 49

The principle concern we have was articulated by Chips Barry and
goodness, we agree. How can this bill produce the objective it
states, which is a contract between basins when there is no
assurance that the people who have control over the resource will
participate in the process. There is no unappropriated water in the
upper Gunnison basin; therefore, unless the holders of those
decreed water rights and decreed conditional rights come to the
table, no compact can be negotiated because no negotiator has the
authority to bind those people.

Here's another problem that we have in the upper Gunnison basin.
The biggest water rights in our basin are held by the United States
of America. How does this bill provide a process that induces the
United States to participate or binds the United States to the result
of this contract?

Secondly, we are concerned with the fact that the foundation of the
process is the SWSI roundtable. The SWSI roundtable was not
selected for this purpose. Its members are not qualified for this
purpose and the bill allows that group itself to determine its mles
of membership.

The stakeholders are poorly represented on those roundtables.
Director George said, Representative Penry said we don't want to
give a top down mle on how these roundtables should be created
because we want the local folks to make that decision. The
problem is if you're from a roundtable in the Gunnison basin and
we make wonderful mles for our group, how do we know that the
roundtable we're dealing with without some stmcture has
authority, has qualification, has expertise to make these discussions
meaningful?

The second great concern that our district has is how does this
process feed into what exists now? How does it affect a county's
ability to review projects under the 1041 process? How does it
affect the work that the conservation districts and conservancy
districts are already doing? There's no integration provided in this
bill for those processes.

Finally, the concern that we have with the stmcture of the
commission as it's set up now is that there's no guarantee even that
the upper Gunnison basin would have any representation on the
commission at all. The Gunnison basin is entitled to select two
representatives to the state commission. It's a very large basin, as
most of you know. It mns from the Continental Divide to the state
line. Ifwe in the upper basin were somehow outnumbered on the

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Page 28 of 49