House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, & Natural Resources

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together, and if you would both introduce yourselves for the record and then proceed with your testimony, I'd appreciate that. Ron Cattany: Madam Chair, thank you. My name is Ron Cattany. I'm Deputy Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and I'm here today on behalf of Greg Walsh [sp], our Executive Director. And with me is Rod Kuharich, the Director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. And I just want to say on Greg's behalf that we would like to thank the Colorado Water Conference, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Denver Water Board, the Northern Water Conservancy District, the Colorado Water Partnership, Creekside Associates, Rio Grande Water Conservation District, Colorado Ski County USA, the Farm Bureau, and the cities of Colorado Springs, Thornton and .Aurora for working with_us in the drafting of this bill. Also Chris Castillian [sp] could not make it today on behalf of CCI, but he asked me to pass on to the committee the support of CCI for this bill as well. And in the packets that the committee received over the last couple of days, there are also letters of support from K.en Salazar [sp], Attorney General, and from Hal Simpson, the State Engineer. And so with that I'll turn it over to Rod to hit any of the high points of the bill. Rod Kuharich: Thank you. Madam Chair, my name is Rod Kuharich, Director of the Water Conservation Board. If I could briefly summarize the bill, the bill would create a new class of water right where none had existed prior to this point, at least legislatively. The courts had identified a water right associated with boat chutes in the Ft. Collins case. We have seen a spate of filings that are attempting to appropriate all the water in the stream for in- channel recreational or boating courses. This bill is an attempt to add equity to the process where the Water Conservation Board would review applications and make recommendations to the court. • The recommendations have a rebuttable presumption, which the burden of proof is not a very stringent burden of proof. It's not the way the bill started out originally, which was arbitrary and capricious. So that the burden of proof is more reasonable in this process where both parties actually have the ability to present evidence to the court, the bill limits the parties that can apply for these water rights to agencies of local government. The reason for this was that we felt there were — these are primarily local control issues. There are local boat chutes that should have a measure of local control rather than national special interest groups or quite possibly the agencies of the federal government. May 7, 2001 Page 4