7777

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7777
• Author: Ward, R. C.
• Title: Proceedings 1993 Colorado Water Convention, Front Range Water Alternatives and Transfer of Water from One Area of the State to Another, January 4-5, 1993, Denver, Colorado.
• USFW Year: 1993.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOORCES -- SURVEY OF OPTIONS FOR
I'lrrud FRONT RANGE METROPOLITAN WATER. SUPPLY

Lee Rozaklis
Hydrosphere

Last night I got a call from a friend of mine. I had just
returned from being out of town visiting family, and he asked if I had
seen the article in the Rocky Mountain News. I said no, I haven't,
and I ran out and got a copy of it and looked it over, and thought to
myself, I'm not sure why I have to go to this conference. It sounds
like all the answers have been found -- we have enough water; all we
have to do is implement certain recommendations and we are on our way.
I got so excited I picked up my report and reread it. I wasn't sure
that I had said all those things in there. In a way that article is
quite overstating what is in the draft report, and I hope all of you
will get a chance to see it and read it. But a lot of what is in that
article is dead accurate.

Let me give you some background, first of all, about the report
that we did, and I will then summarize the report itself, and close
with a few observations regarding where we seem to be now and where
we, I think, should be going.

We were contacted by the Department of Natural Resources in late
1991 to prepare a survey of Front Range water supply alternatives.
This was not to be an engineering report. It was to simply articulate
what we call a systems integration approach to water supply. What do
we mean by systems integration? Very briefly, it is the use,
management and operation of our water rights systems in a way that
involves cooperation of individual suppliers and intergovernmental
planning in a way to make all the pieces come together to yield more
than just the sum of their parts. The paper was to be a survey of
options available in the context of this systems integration concept.
The purpose of the paper was to generate discussion among the water
community and to see whether there was interest on the part of water
suppliers and water planners for further exploration of systems
integration.

What is systems integration and what is it not? It is not a
model-controlled, lock-step supersystem owned by the state of Colorado
that takes over everyone's water supplies and water rights. On the
other hand, it is not what we have today, where we have large,
involved, highly developed systems that all compete with one another
in a piecemeal fashion and don't really interact with each other
except in this competitive manner.

The scope of the study was conceptual in nature. There are no
final answers in the report, only ideas presented, with the
possibilities related to those ideas as well as issues and problems
that would have to be addressed. It was not exhaustive; it was meant
to list examples only of various types of water supply development,
projects or concepts. It did not dwell on specific, institutional and
legal issues in great detail. Any new idea, anything you want to
build or put together or advance in Colorado bears with it inevitably
a large number of institutional issues and problems that have to be

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