Hearing on HR 3881: Testimony of Steve Arveschoug

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The support from the local communities that represent the nine - county service area of the District comes as a result of a nearly five -year effort to study District - wide water and storage needs, assess storage and resource management alternatives, address water quality and recreation needs, and provide assurances that existing uses and entitlements in the Fry-Ark Project would be protected. It involved thousands of hours of work by the local Storage Study Committee (the SSC), which included municipal, agricultural, recreation, environmental, and state and federal resource management agencies (a membership list of the Storage Study Committee is attached as Exhibit No. One). This Storage Study Committee first developed a "Water and Storage Needs Assessment Report" (December 1998) to determine District -wide demands for water and storage to meet domestic and agricultural needs into the year 2040. That report indicated a need for an additional 173,100 acre -feet of storage to provide for growth and to sustain agricultural water supplies. The SSC, through the District, then asked the Bureau of Reclamation to do an investigation of the technical feasibility of enlarging Pueblo Reservoir (August 1999). In addition to Reclamation's study of Pueblo Reservoir, the SSC working with hired and staff engineers, evaluated over 30 different alternatives to meet the projected demand. That evaluation lead to the conclusion that we were best served by focusing our efforts on the existing Fry-Ark Project reservoirs as a means to help meet future demands. The SSC then began to evaluate how the existing reservoirs could be better used, and that effort, after many hours of study and consideration, and public meetings, lead to the development of the Preferred Storage Options Plan and the PSOP Implementation Committee Report, which provides the operational details for the PSOP. Elements of the Preferred Storage Options Plan- -The Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District's Preferred Storage Options Plan, as adopted by the District Board in September 2000, (PSOP) includes the following elements: 1. Re- operations Storage --use of excess capacity in existing Fry- Ark Project Reservoirs to store non - Project water under long- term contracts with Reclamation 2. Enlargement of Pueblo Reservoir and Turquoise Reservoir —up to 75,000 acre -feet of conservation storage added to Pueblo Reservoir (needed by the year 2013), and up to 19,000 acre -feet of conservation storage added to Turquoise Reservoir (needed by the year 2025) 3. Enterprise Water Management Storaqe —to provide storage for irrigation purposes and for a water bank 4. Long -term Water Quality Monitoring Program —to establish a water - quality baseline so that any potential changes in water quality can be determined and responded to accordingly 4