WSP13038 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Rio Grande COJnpact The following u a continuation of the Jpeech by DavtJ U7. RohhiJU~ Attorney at Law~ Hill e3 RohhiJU~ P. C.~ at the 24th Annual Water Work.Jhop~ Gunnuon~ ColoradO. Let me talk briefly about the Rio Grande Compact. It Valley, and the amount of water obligated for delivery was signed in 1938 based upon 10 years of study on downstream. It did not provide a significant amount the Rio Grande conducted by a federal agency. It was of water for additional growth. It was designed to hold designed to allocate the waters of the Rio Grande among Colorado to a certain amount of consumption. When the States of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. You those hydrologic relationships were developed, it was will see that it is a compact, from Colorado's perspective, understood that the San Luis Valley contained a large that uses a tabular relationship between four inflow groundwater basin and its existence, and its relationship gages and a single outflow gage at the state line. The to surface streams, was impliedly accounted for in the State of Colorado is obligated to deliver a percentage Compact. From the early 1950s until the mid-1960s, of the flow of the river that changes depending on the Colorado allowed well development to occur, and at amount of inflow. If you think about it, what we are the same time allowed the ditches senior to the compact doing here is limiting consumption in Colorado. If to continue to divert. By 1966 or1967, we were almost you look at the two tables in Article 3 of the Rio Grande one million acre-feet in debt to the States of New Mexico Compact, you will see that as the inflow increases, the and Texas. We were sued by the two states in the U.S. percentage that may be consumed by Colorado goes Supreme Court. Colorado sued for peace and agreed down. That is true on both the Rio Grande and that henceforth, from 1968 onward, it would deliver at Conejos, which have separate tabulations. The purpose, least what the tables of relationship required in each obviously, is to keep Colorado from using all the water and every year. That lawsuit remained a viable legal in a wet year. On the other hand, it was intended to proceeding until 1985, when it was dismissed because protect Colorado's agricultural economy in a dry year. of the enormous water years in the '80s that filled and The same is true for New Mexico. If you ever doubt spilled Elephant Butte Reservoir, which is an event in what a good job Colorado's negotiators did, look at the the Compact that wipes out past debits. relationship between the opportunities for Colorado to consume water in Article 3 as compared to the opportunities for New Mexico to consume water in Article 4. The problem with the Rio Grande Compact, obviously, is that it requires delivery each and every year. In Colorado, there are very few reservoirs in the Rio Grande Basin. As a result, we do not have the opportunity and the flexibility that we have on the Colorado, for example, where you have a bucket like Lake Powell that allows the upper basin states to store two or three years' supply and gives us the freedom to make decisions about our water resources in this state, including the freedom to have instream flows and to allow rivers to remain undammed. If we didn't have Lake Powell, we wouldn't have that flexibility. On the Rio Grande, water users suffer because they do not have a large bucket, and each year the State of Colorado must curtail water use to make certain that the supplies required to be delivered to New Mexico are, in fact, delivered. All water supplies in the Rio Grande, as the Compact contemplated, are fully used as far as Colorado's share of the basin is concerned, except in the limited years when Elephant Butte Reservoir fills and spills. The 1 O-year study tried to draw hydrologic relationships between the amount of use in the San Luis 2 At the present time, we are in a situation, with regard to the Rio Grande Compact, where we probably are consuming more water in the basin today than Mother Nature will replace during a normal hydrologic cycle. Remember, we have been in a 20-30 year wet cycle. The time will come, with the existing level of use that occurs in that basin, when sacrifices will have to be made. The priority system will have to operate very strictly for us to continue delivering water to New Mexico and Texas. Understand that the people in the San Luis Valley are very clear about the circumstances in which they live, and thus you see the almost violent reaction when others try to convince them that there is more water available that can be taken, and try to convince them that 100,000 or 200,000 acre-feet of additional water can be taken out of the basin without creating any adverse consequences. This is fantasy; it is absolutely wrong. If you take more water out of the basin, you are only exacerbating problems to be faced under the Compact in the future. The way the State was forced to meet the compact terms from 1968 to 1985, and the way the State does it today, is to curtail senior water rights - senior surface ditches in order to get the water through to the state line so it can be gaged.