NorthPlatteRoundtable09 25 07 - Laserfiche WebLink

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North Platte Basin Roundtable Meeting Minutes 09-25-07 Jim Baller brought up the question of gas drilling: Will that be non-consumptive if they pump water out of the ground? Carl: it's called "produced water". Don't lalow if the state has quantified that. Kent: We still don't l~1ow if that's non-consumptive or consumptive. We haven't seen the potential in this basin yet for that bind of drilling, so far it hasn't paroled out. Paula: we don't lalow how much other basins have looked at produced water. San Juan maybe has looked at it the most. Tom Hackleman: What about wetlands? Waterfowl habitat? Maybe we ought to quantify the important waterfowl habitat, could tall{ about state wildlife lease areas. North Park is second in the state for important waterfowl habitat. Jolu7 Rich: What about wildlife habitat? Deer, antelope, ells, moose, bear, coyote, sage- grouse? Kent: that's hard to quantify. Wildlife habitat is a priority for us, but is it something that we can tie to water and non-consumptive use needs? Water developments that are important to sage-grouse are a priority, yes, but how do you tie non-consumptive use to sage-grouse habitat? *Identify water developments considered important to sage-grouse. Still don't lalow how to tie that to non-consumptive, but it is an important attribute to this basin. There was discussion about consumptive vs. nonconsumptive and balance between the two. There was also discussion about instream flow filings. Kent brought up the Natural Heritage program and their inventories of important wetland riparian plants communities. Would the roundtable like to see those plants better quantified so we lalow what they are? Do we have to list it as a priority to get the information? We might not want to list that as an attribute, but we want to know what Natural Heritage has identified. * ~ Carl suggested-why don't we schedule a meeting w/them (Natural Heritage) and have them give a presentation to the roundtable? Dave Meyring: the most important non-consumptive use it seems is recreation. Can we have upstream storage to augment low flows as anon-consumptive use? Is that another we can quantify? High elevation storage? Potential storage augmentation for low-flow periods. Storage for augmentation. Carl I don't foresee a project being built just for consumptive or non-consumptive uses alone; they will have multi-use/multi-purpose. It's too expensive to build projects just for irrigation storage. Paula: water supply study (surface water modeling) will identify possible sites for those types of projects.