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i CHAPTER IV UTILIZATION OF AGRICULTURAL WATER RIGHTS I Junior and Upstream Water Rights Rights that are junior to the Cameo call and junior to Green Mountain could be of benefit during the window between 2,260 and 2,380 cfs at the Cameo gage. For these rights to be a benefit, they must be senior to a sufficient number of other upstream rights. When the flow falls below 2,260 cfs, the Cameo call would essentially control the river. Below 2,260 cfs, junior rights would still be of benefit if they could call on Green Mountain Reservoir. The use of Green Mountain Reservoir water for irrigation requirements is clear, but it may be interpreted that the reservoir was not constructed to meet instream flow requirements. How the courts would rule on the change of use from agricultural irrigation to instream flow would impact the viability of using these rights. Due to the limited opportunities to use junior rights and the uncertainty of the use of Green Mountain water, upstream junior rights were not evaluated in any further detail. Upstream and Senior Rights The 1988 Colorado State water right tabulation was sorted and water rights meeting the following criteria were selected: 1) water rights upstream and senior to GVWUA, 2) absolute rights, 3) no alternative points of diversion were included, 4) only "transfers to" were considered, no "transferred from," 5) the decree was within climatic zones 1 through 5. Only irrigation rights were included since it could be costly to purchase industrial, municipal or domestic rights. The resulting list was then sorted according to structure name. Then the decreed amounts for structures with the same name were added together and each structure was represented by one record in the data base. The list was sorted again, this time according to the decreed amount. The WAC developed a 10 cfs minimum diversion rate as a guideline for evaluating direct flow water rights. Using this same criteria, all water rights less than 10 cfs were eliminated. The resulting list of 77 direct flow water rights is included in table 4. This information is useful because it shows that there is a significant amount of senior water rights available upstream of Cameo. It also indicates that it could be a reasonable task to focus efforts on a limited number of existing agricultural rights for the purpose of acquiring instream flow for the Reach. 24