C150069 Benefits & Potential Roles Report

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . t . . . . t . It It . CHAPTER 2 CURRENT ISSUES AND TRENDS Issues surrounding pressurized secondary water supply development in Colorado appear to involve seven principal interest groups. These include: I) the state and the Colorado Water Conservation Board, 2) municipalities, 3) rural domestic water suppliers, 4) water users (consumers), 5) residential housing and subdivision developers, 6) landscape irrigation engineering firms, and, 7) most important to this study, agricultural water suppliers. These agricultural water suppliers include mutual ditch and irrigation companies and irrigation districts. There are obviously other interest groups important to water development and use, such as recreational, environmental and commercial-industrial groups. However, for the purposes ofthis study and report, these groups are somewhat peripheral to the issues being raised here. What we would like to accomplish in this chapter is to identifY and link the needs of these various involved interest groups to each other in such a way as to suggest points of consensus and conflict over the future of pressurized secondary supply. To begin, we will briefly outline the general trend in this type of water service for the Rocky Mountain region, and then relate these trends to what we are observing in various areas of Colorado. The next chapter covers more directly the relationship between secondary supply, the programs of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and the future of agricultural water suppliers in the state. The discussion begins with the issues and trends in secondary water supply by looking at the development of this type of water service in Utah and Idaho. These two states have been involved in the development of secondary water systems on a large scale for more than fifteen years. The Davis and Weber Case Study Two agricultural entities with very well developed pressurized secondary systems serving residential areas are the Davis and Weber Counties Canal Company in Sunset, Utah, and the Nampa- Meridian Irrigation District in Nampa, Idaho. These two irrigation systems were originally totally agricultural in nature. They gradually entering into secondary water service as urbanization occurred around them. The full story of the Davis and Weber Counties Canal Company's (D&W) entry into secondary service is presented in Chapter 6. Briefly, in order to ensure that their traditional irrigation facilities were not unduly disrupted by residential subdivision development, the stockholders in this mutual ditch and irrigation company had the foresight to recognize that providing secondary water supply to homes in newly developed subdivisions was, oddly enough, a way to protect their irrigation system assets. This was accomplished by ensuring that the D& W water decree could be protected through continued beneficial use of its decree, utilizing a portion of the revenues from its secondary supply system for canal improvements, while obtaining improved cooperation from local municipalities to protect the agricultural irrigation system serving the remaining farms (Figures 9-16). Today, the D&W irrigation system is comprised of two operations that are carefully integrated with each other. One is the traditional system of open ditches serving agricultural area production, while the second system is pressurized to serve upwards of 8,000 residential houses in the area. Local 11