SouthPlattePublicCommentDaveMiller

• File Number: 8420.500
• Description: South Platte River Basin Task Force
• State: CO
• Basin: South Platte
• Date: 7/26/2007
• Author: Dave Miller
• Title: Memo Submitted to SPTF
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Correspondence

Jul 2~ 07 02:24p

p.2

Natural Energy Resources Company
P. O. Box 567, Palmer Lake, Colorado 80133
[phone] Fax [phone]

July 25,2007

Memo For: John Stulp and Harris Sherman, Co-Chairmen
Governor's South Platte River Task Force

From: Dave Miller, strategic eaergy and water planner ~

Subject: Emergency Development to Save Colorado's Water and Agriculture

Statement of Problems Colorado's interstate water and east slope farms are in jeopardy,
because of our state's thirty-year failure to develop and beneficially use its substantial Colorado
River Compact entitlements. Colorado needs assured new water supplies for its droughts,
growth, farms, and interstate obligations in Nebraska and Kansas. Colorado's current water
shortages and farm dry-ups are escalating, because Front Range cities are being forced to
prematurely use and reuse their existing trans-mountain rights to extinction. Colorado's South
Platte and Arkansas River Valleys are green and highly productive, because of irrigation wells
approved by several State Engineers, who assumed Colorado would have the foresight and
political will to develop its Colorado River entitlements.

B;u::kground Colorado is blessed with high monntalns that provide most of the renewable water
used by cities, farms, and environments throughout do'Ml river states on both sides of the Divide,
Colorado's legislature wisely established the Colorado Water Conservation Board in 1937, and
the Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority in 1982, to expedite planning,
protection, and development of Colorado's interstate compact entitlements for current and future
generations. Historically, Colorado leaders and water agencies have had a strong sense of
urgency for interstate water development, because of the ultimate "use it or lose it" water law of
the West.

Since the early 1980's, Colorado has leaned heavily toward the national green notion that
'.storage projects are politically incolTect". In fact, Colorado is now the only western prior
appropriation state that does not maintain a strong professional public planning process to
provide integrated water development recommendations for statewide needs. Colorado is also
the only state that relies heavily on territorial water courts and excessive conditional water rights
to guide its strategic interstate and inter-basin water development decisions,

Colorado's legislature has appropriated many millions of dollars over the last thirty years for
munerous basin water studies and interstate compact assessments, Unfortunately, none of these
basin studies has led to integrated, statewide solutions, as intended by the legislature. The recent
1000 page Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI) was a good step in the right direction,
because it provided compatible data that could be integrated and used to formulate statewide
solutions, as directed by the legislature. Unfortunately, SWSI's .'solution objectives" were