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

This doesn't mean there needs to be no political homework done.
The institutional implications of combining systems to any degree, of
changing the rules, are enormous. I think there needs to be homework
done there, but I would suggest that the actual technical
possibilities be allowed to take the lead, and some of the people
within the staffs of Denver, Northern and individual providers out
there get together on a cooperative basis.

Questions for Lee Rozaklis

Q: LARRY SIMPSON: I have two questions, both related to your two
million acre-feet of agricultural diversion. (1) How much of this is
original, since it is diverted water, and how much of it is reuse of
return flows? (2) What percentage of this is stored water useable by
a city and how much of it is direct-flow spring diversion or
opportunity water which is unusable for drought protection without
additional storage facilities?

A: I can always rely on Larry to ask a few easy questions. We looked
at irrigation water in the South Platte, and let me refer to actual
numbers. Of the two million acre-feet we spoke about, about a million
acre-feet of that is what I will call first-use water. It is water
that is being diverted, high-quality mountain water, and about 70
percent of that is native and about 30 percent of that is transbasin
water. You probably have around 300,000 acre-feet of transbasin and
about 700,000 acre-feet of first-use water, and the additional million
plus is water that has been used once and will be reused again. I
don't think we actually categorized in the report what fraction of
that might be storage and what fraction of that might be direct flow.
I don't see that distinction as being something that limits its
potential use under a cooperative arrangement between agriculture and
municipalities. Obviously, the more of that water you have stored and
regulated, the more useful it would be to either agriculture or
municipalities. I wouldn't preclude in any larger-scale
implementation of agricultural-municipal sharing the need for some
additional storage to make that concept work better, given the fact
that a significant amount of that water is probably direct-flow water
that is not easily regulatable.

Q: MESA CITY WATER ASSOCIATION: Why did not your report consider
tertiary treatment of sewage and direct delivery to municipal water
intakes? Wouldn't this approach be cost-effective in the near future,
especially in view of stronger water quality standards for both
publicly owned treatment works discharges and drinking water
standards?

A: We did not look at that. As I said at the beginning, the report
was not meant to be exhaustive. That is certainly a viable option for
water supply. There are cities in this country that are coming very
close to doing that as an exclusive basis of water supply, but you can
understand the obvious public reluctance to do that. I think the
people who are looking at that are looking at it more in the context
of blending those sources with other supplies. Many municipalities in
this country drink treated effluent directly or indirectly because of
their location on river systems. But we did not look at that exactly
simply because the report was not meant to be exhaustive. We

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