SB01-216 Senate Committee on Public Policy and Planning

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have been told, which is in order to solve the problem of the impending crisis in supply along the eastern slope, you need to be very careful about how you use and reuse the supply you currently have. If you have one community in the middle of the stream or even worst case scenario, down at Sterling, build a park without consideration of the policy implications to the rest of the state, if they just do it because they want to, and there's no arbiter of public policy, then you destroy the ability of this state as a policy matter to try and encourage the maximum utilization of the water in the rest of the stream segments. As I discussed with Senator Perlmutter just a few minutes ago, I'm not sure that you have to have the Conservation Board make these public policy decisions. But you've got to have as a matter of your determination, what criteria you're going to use, to just enable people to run to Water Court, and in the past, I've decided that's a great idea, that's the way to do things, to run to Water Court and hire lawyers. Make sure you hire a lawyer. To just have them do it because they want, without any consideration of what you folks think, is important from a public policy standpoint, is the same kind of lack of foresight and lack of public policy input that resulted in the California energy crisis. Because basically there you had people who wanted to use cheap electricity. Here you have people that want to use water based on a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that said for the first time you could file on recreational uses. This is not some God -given right that's been in existence in our water system forever. There was a.1992 case. And now less than ten years later, what you have in front of you is the major policy decision about has the Supreme Court opened a Pandora's Box that the legislature is going to choose not to have any public policy input into. That's what you would be deciding if you kill this bill. You would say that's not a matter for Colorado public policy makers to have any input into, because by this time next year, if there is no bill this year with no criteria, you will have many more of these applications and you will destroy the exchange potential in exactly the places where public policy should dictate that we use the water to extinction or exchange it as many times as possible. Mme. Chair: Senator Matsunaka. Sen. Matsunaka: Thank you, Madam Chair. When I looked at this bill originally, when it was first brought to me, one of the questions I had was shouldn't we be establishing standards for .the Water Court? Wouldn't that be a much easier way to go? But trying to wrestle with issue and this bill trying to revamp it, at least in my mind, a real big headache because I couldn't even, having thought about it, couldn't come up with any standards that made any sense. And so I don't know what the answer is. To me that seems to be a cleaner avenue than perhaps the way April 12, 2001 Page 24