2-07 House Committee Lay Over Unamended

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2-07 House Committee Lay Over Unamended Page 8 of 49 responsibility and stewardship to see if! could help move us to the next level in this very impOliant debate. The circumstance we see today, of course, has been more the hallmark than not and water issues in Colorado has been one of conflict, controversy, quarrel and the formality of that of course is called litigation. About the same time as I was starting to sort through whether we could find a better definition of the state's role in moving the water debate forward, I attended a water conference here in the city. As I listened to a number of people talk about various potential solutions, one of the speakers mentioned that maybe it was time, that time was right in Colorado for us to think in terms of inter- basin negotiations, inter-basin compacts. I followed up that conversation with this gentleman and a convergence in time occurred then. That was about the time this book was becoming generally available. This is Silver Fox of the Rockies, written by professor emeritus of history at Colorado State University, Daniel Tyler. It's the first exhaustive biography of Delph Carpenter. In his biography of Delph Carpenter he took great pain to go into the detail through Carpenter's documents cataloging the Colorado River compact. It's a wonderful book. If you haven't had an oppOliunity and you're interested in that part of Colorado's water history, I highly recommend it. So I started studying the compact. I'd had an interest in the compact having been raised in the Colorado River basin, grew up as an irrigator out of the river and practiced law there for all these years. I had more than a working knowledge of the law of the river and particular of the impact of the Colorado River compact. Had for a number of years understood a lot about the value and the impact of the compact, but only after I studied in some depth Del Carpenter's role, how he came about it and how the compact eventually came together, did I understand the brilliance and the wisdom that had got us there. Think about that. You'd have to know that would be so. This was signed in 1922 among the seven basin states. The political conflict between those seven states would have to be as difficult as we could imagine under any circumstances. The more I thought this, studied it and talked to other people, the more I realized there were a lot of similarities between the political context in the 1920s among the seven basin states and what we see here in Colorado up and down the front range in particular, across www.escriptionist.com Page 8 of 49