C150069 Benefits & Potential Roles Report

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . are focused on the immediate, and mostly agricultural demands, of water delivery. It does take a paradigm shift and a "discovery process" to identifY the opportunity and then to react to it. Colorado is clearly taking leadership in dual water systems today. However, many of the innovations being tried in the state appear to have questionable futures. In order to understand this fact, we must briefly describe what the trends have been in Colorado. Although pressurized secondary water supply has many origins in the state, some contribution can be traced to the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Program. Beginning with salinity control program activities under USDA's Agricultural Conservation Program funds in the early I 980s, efforts commenced to improve agricultural water deliveries in western Colorado, primarily in Mesa, Delta and Montrose counties, as well as elsewhere on the Western Slope. This was a period when municipalities throughout the state were only beginning to experiment with secondary supply, and generally on a very limited basis. In the late 1970s, the Grand Valley in Mesa County began experiencing renewed growth from oil shale exploration, a temporary boom that would send housing costs upward, only to reverse precipitously in the 1980s. Nevertheless, planning agencies in the Grand Valley, primarily the City of Grand Junction and Mesa County government, were alerted to the need to secure adequate potable water supplies for the future. The acquisition of mountain storage facilities by the Ute Water Conservancy District, the principal potable water supplier for the Grand Valley, was predicated on the idea that residential outdoor water use in the Grand Valley would have to be served by the traditional ditch systems, many of which were in great need of repair. Enter the salinity control program with funds to address the problem of leaky laterals throughout the valley. Under the salinity program, many attempts were made to organize lateral groups to improve water deliveries to farms and larger residential acreages. The Grand Valley Irrigation Company (GVIC), a principal agricultural irrigation water supplier in the Grand Valley, was also positioned to help residential water users, many of whom were now living in newly developed subdivisions along irrigation company canals. Improvements were made to lateral headgates, piping open ditches, and where feasible, allowing residential water users to pump directly from open canal systems. However, even with these important innovations, many of which lessened the pressure on the valley's precious potable water supplies developed by the Ute Water Conservancy District, people continued to experience difficulties irrigating lawns and ornamentals. Each residence became a "farm" with new, unique demands on the canal company's delivery system. The number of stockholders in GVIC soared due to land splits.3 Rather than having a fully pressurized secondary irrigation system serving the entire GVIC service area, there developed a wide variety of open and partly pressurized irrigation systems for residential area watering, many of them operated by small homeowners' associations. Figures 17 and 18 show some of the many kinds of secondary systems in the Grand Valley. Aside from a few planned unit developments with their own dedicated secondary system (much to the credit of innovative subdivision developers), the development of secondary water delivery in the Grand Valley has seemingly not achieved the levels of simplicity, efficiency and durability shown by the newer variety of secondary systems emerging in other areas of the Rocky Mountain region. Irrigation company and irrigation district efforts to modernize irrigation systems in the Grand Valley, and elsewhere in Colorado, have been beset by inadequate cooperation from local jurisdictions, the lack of ordinances to protect canal property, and a rather indifferent attitude by local jurisdictions toward accommodating housing subdivision development needs to pre-existing agricultural production needs. In the mid-1990s, interest in pressurized secondary systems began to grow along the Colorado Front Range, particularly north of Denver where surface water supplies were ample. The decade of the 1990s combined wet years with rapid urban growth. The interest in secondary supply systems emerged 18