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<br />April 28, 2004 <br /> <br />To: SWSI Team; Rick Brown <br />Re: South Platte Roundtable Topics <br /> <br />(1) Performance measures. Crafting and applying performance measures is a <br />challenging task, and your most recent draft includes some reasonable measures but also <br />some which are troubling.. My greatest concern is with the use of perfonnance measures <br />that give positive (albeit lower) scores to negative outcomes.. For example, a project that <br />reduces in-stream flows will be scored as a "1" -less than the "5~' for a project that <br />improves instream flows, but a positive environmental score nonetheless.. The same is <br />true for the other recreational and environmental measures, for the rural area quality of <br />life measure, and for the evaporation loss measure.. This problem could be addressed in <br />two ways.. <br /> <br />One option would be to create negative scores, so that projects that adversely affect an <br />objective would appear not just as low scores but as negative scores.. That would allow <br />harmful projects to be docked, projects that are beneficial to be scored more highly, and <br />projects that are neither to be kept neutral. This is not trivial. Projects that are neutral or <br />beneficial in tenns of the objectives may be more viable than other projects that have <br />greater positives under some objectives but carry the baggage of significant negatives for <br />other objectives.. <br /> <br />Another option would be to re-craft these performance measures entirely by making them <br />more like the measures used for other classes of demand.. For example, since a measure <br />of performance for M&I and Agriculture is the amount of shortage during a 19508 <br />drought, the same perfonnance measure could be used for environmental and recreational <br />demands.. SWSI could identify the percent of stream reaches that experience shortages <br />during a 1950s drought. A similar but perhaps more revealing measure would be to <br />indicate the percent of years under which a stream experiences shortages.. You may be <br />able to develop other similar measures that would show how often environmental <br />demands are met under different scenarios. This approach would maintain consistency in <br />how SWSI examines and compares alternatives in terms of recreational, environmental, <br />M&I; and agricultural demand. <br /> <br />(2) Demand projections" Given historic trends in conservation (a 10%+ decline in per <br />capita M&I use over the past seven years), your estimate of 6% reduction in per capita <br />usage over a 30 year period seems far too conservative.. Formal conservation programs <br />and informal shifts in water use patterns by customers have combined to reduce demands <br />per capita and will continue to do so into the future. While it is reasonable to offer high <br />and low estimates for these changes, using 6% as the "middle ground'" characterization <br />seriously underestimates the savings that will be achieved. <br /> <br />(3) Gap analysis. Your description still leaves unclear whether your final gap will <br />reflect current demand YS.. future demand, or current supply vs. future demand. As I <br />noted previously, many water utilities have water rights and infrastructure in place to <br />