9356

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9356
• Author: Wigington, R.
• Title: Water Right Marketing Strategies to Protect Instream Flows in Colorado.
• USFW Year: 1990.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

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Species Act to ensure the survival and recovery of the endangered
fish. If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is to streamline
permitting requirements under the Endangered Species Act for
water projects upstream of river habitat occupied by the
endangered fish, the protection of their last instream stronghold
on the Yampa River must have some legal certainty.
It is possible for the Conservation Board to file for an
original instream water right on the Yampa River with a very
junior priority date but that water right could be wiped out by
the development of the Juniper-Cross Mountain water rights or any
of a host of other upstream conditional filings. There would be
no legal certainty about the amount of protection afforded by
this junior water right until each and every upstream, senior
conditional water right was bought out or abandoned. It is also
not clear how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would have any
remedy to back up the enforcement of any original appropriation
of a junior, instream water right made by the Conservation Board.
The Juniper-Cross Mountain water rights, on the otherhand, are
senior to most of the conditional filings on the Yampa River and
are amenable to contractual or reversionary enforcement by the
federal government under an agreement negotiated pursuant to S.B.
212. Such seniority and enforcement back-up would afford the
legal protection for the Yampa River required by the Endangered
Species Act.
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