IBCC Meeting Notes March 7 2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

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P. Binn~ey: Efficiency of water systems. Lots of interest in conservation and the like. Watershed management instead of individual approaches, sharing of what has been done. Respect for environment and recreation values and how to work them in so they are not cross-purpose from M&I. Didn't see anything about the economics of water development -funding at local level not federal. Debate the issue of whether the state is not just regulatory but also fiinding. M. Catlin: Thought this was a great opportuiuty to tall{ about the Colorado we want to end up with. Thai~lcs for having the IBCC do this exercise. It was interesting to see how many different people recognize the same problems. From a community point of view - we have always been a state that we have what we needed and if we had the desire we do what we need to. We may be the last generation to have that and we have to realize that moving forward we may not have all that we need. We need to decide what we want to go on and what we want to keep. If we say we are going to trade this acre of irrigated land for a development or the environment. There is a give and a take. That is a foreign concept for Colorado. And without an orgaiuzed path we may have people get hurt instead of having the state be leader in making Colorado a good place to live. On the western slop we have water but it is harder to make a living over there for a number of reasons. Uncompahgre system is a very efficient system (use water 5-6 times). The success that we have had in the past -those people are still in this state but they may have different names. Mr. Farr and others got us to this place. It is now our turn to envision where we are going and how we are going to get there. I don't lc~7ow how we are going to sustain agriculture of any sort. The American people have decided that they will pay anything for recreation and not much for food. Folks are selling their water and these people's children do not want to take over family farms. Colorado is a special place to live and water makes it so. The tuiu7el helped during the 2002 drought and they had a green spot during the drought and people wanted to live there. I don't particularly care for growth but you can't progress unless you grow. We have three types of folks in our basin -those that hate growth, those cashing in on growth, and those wishing we had the money to get in on it. It is to the point if we want to be the state we have been we need to look at how can we sustain agriculture and how can we manage the growth. Not sure that the growth numbers will be as high as today. We can't afford to not have growth because of the number of jobs that it creates (from the timber salesman to mortgage broker). We may have to demand as a state that you can oiily have a percentage of your lot landscaped. We are going to have to start at home in our yard, community's yards, my region, and my state. We need to thii~lc about it in this way. M. Kasen: I want to pickup on a couple of things that Marc said. Colorado is not a state that has promoted or valued planning historically. Saw a lot of commonalities in the IBCC members' status quo prediction and many of same hopes for a vision. It seems to me that the issue is implementing a vision when the state is not a planning state. A challenge in changing the water future is that the prior appropriation system allows for individuals to develop water. One of the reasons the IBCC was created was to talk about a different more collaborative way of doing that development. The harder conversation is not what the vision is but that existing institutions may not allow the vision to occur. My organization tries to stay within the existing system. Energy production may also be a lynchpin for our fixture as well as water. The balance is not to take more away from fish. We should be able to use our compact deliveries to meet nonconsumptive needs; the hard part will be timing and the spatial issues 4