You Can Steal My Wife, But You Can't Steal My Water

• Description: You Can Steal My Wife, But You Can't Steal My Water. Should the state pour its scarce water into river courses that are good for fish and paddlers or slake the thirst of its growing cities?
• State: CO
• Date: 7/31/2004
• Author: Barcott, Bruce
• Title: You Can Steal My Wife, But You Can't Steal My Water
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: News Article/Press Release

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The Springs Ranchers don't know that the water filling their
bathtubs and nourishing their flowerbeds is sucking the rest of
the state dry. But it is. Because despite its name, Colorado Springs
sits in the middle of a basin with very little water.
To compensate, the. city-owned water and power company
runs a 46 -mile pipe —a Midsize Straw to a reservoir south on
the Arkansas River, upstream of Pueblo. Colorado Springs Utili-
ties pumps 13 million gallons a day out of the reservoir and
through hundreds of thousands of Colorado Springs toilets. The
water is then treated and returned to the river downstream
With Colorado Springs's population expected to reach
goo,000 within 35 years —the size of Detroit —city and local util-
ity officials are pressing to build a second pipe to the Arkansas
River where it courses through Pueblo, a city of ioo,000 that
straddles the river. This pipe would siphon 78 million gallons a
day, six times as much as the current line..
All of this is perfectly legal. Through a series of complex water
transfers and water rights agreements dating from 1962, Col-
orado Springs has the right to pump the water north. Besides,
utilities officials say, they're not really "taking" the water. They're
just using it for a while, treating it, and returning it to the river.
But in Pueblo, local farmers aren't excited about watering their
crops with treated toilet runoff. The city already has an inferiority
complex. Once a bustling railroad hub and steel producer that
rivaled Denverfor political power, Pueblo began a long downward
slide in the late 1920s, when rail traffic was rerouted. The town
became another down -on- its -luck backwater with the collapse of
the national steel industry 5o years later. It struggles with a high
poverty rate (15 percent, compared to g percent statewide) and a
per capita income of $i7,163, which is nearly $7,00o below the
state average. "That's a special kind of hell, Pueblo," a shuttle driver
told me at Denver International Airport. "My sister lives there, and
she's gotta come up here if she wants to see me.'
To make the reverse drive, from Colorado Springs to Pueblo, is to
leave the crisp mountain air of the Rocky Mountain West and
enter the sun- blasted Southwestern desert. The sharp ridges and
peaks of the Front Range turn bulbous, as if the rocks had melted
in the desert heat. For the past quarter century, Pueblo has danced
the economic revival two -step by courting businesses with tax
incentives and cheap real estate. Military contractors relocated to
the area, butthose jobs evaporated at the end of the Cold War.
The next stop was urban renewaL Pueblo has spent $loo mil-
lion on its downtown over the past decade. There are brick
flowerbeds and public sculptures. A picturesque canal and broad
promenade meander through the city center, and a.restaurant
sits in the defunct railway station. "Do you have time to see our
new convention center ?" Tom Florczak asked me when I visited.
Florczak, 50, is Pueblo's deputy city attorney and chief critic of
Colorado Springs. Ooh, he hates those Springers. "Colorado
Springs's craving for water is like an addict's craving for drugs,"
Florczak said.. "The more they use, the more they need. They're
addicted to growth. And who suffers for it? Pueblo!"
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dam west of tower, "and put it back down there:' He ;estu.red
east. "Which will turn the section of river that runs through
Pueblo into a muddy ditch."
Florczak and I stood on Pueblo's Union Avenue bridge, which
overlooks what's already one of the ugliest stretches of river in
America. Beneath us the sometimes mighty Arkansas trickled
thin and brown through an enormous U- shaped concrete culvert.
Folk art murals decorated the 58 -foot high northern embank-
ment. The paintings continue for nearly two miles; out of neces-
sity, maybe, they've become a point of civic pride: Florczaktells me
that Guinness has named the project the world's largest mural. -
It's hard to envision this urban blight Blossoming into a sylvan
glade, but that's Pueblo's $8.8 million plan. Florczak imagines
shaded footpaths and stands of cottonwood trees. At the center
would be the town's hope for rejuvenation: a new mile -long
kayak course. -
Pueblo's kayak course is exactly the kind of "mischief" that Rod
Kuharich, the director of the water board, feared the Golden vic-
tory would spawn. Colorado Springs has rights to the river that
take precedence over Pueblo's. But the state's legal doctrine of
pure prior includes a "no injury rule," which bars the senior holder
of a water right from making changes that would harm a junior
holder. If Pueblo secures a water right for a kayak course now, Col-
orado Springs might not be able to build its Midsize Straw later.
That possibility —and the unsettled questions of law it raises —
has increased the smaller town's negotiating leverage.
Still, as Pueblo and Colorado Springs wait for the district water
court to hear their dispute, the fight doesn't look to be an even
one. Pueblo is so cash- strapped that -some officials think it's futile
to continue fighting their rich and connected northern neighbor.
With 569,000 customers, Colorado Springs Utilities is one of the
four largest service utilities in the nation. The company's posh
glass- and -steel headquarters loom over the city's downtown.'
Kuharich worked at the Springs utility before he became director
of the water board.
Golden's kayak -run verdict has given Pueblo a fighting chance.
But it's hard to believe a kayak course will hold off the people of
Colorado Springs and their new houses for long. The drumbeat
of development there is too insistent.
Six miles east of downtown, where Pronghorn Meadows Cir-
cle meets Antelope Ridge Drive, sits the border of concrete and
prairie. To the west are half -built houses and idle earth movers.
To the east lie the plains: a speckled, shortgrass sea that stretches
a hundred miles. Power lines run horizon to horizon. A soft breeze
carries the rumble of a grain truck on a distant country road. A
beetle scurries across the sandy topsoil. Survey stakes mark the
next housing sites, and a mile downfield squats an enormous,
sand - colored object, surrounded by doomed rangeland. It is a
water tank, and it is waiting to be filled. ■
Bruce Barcott, a contributing editor at Outside magazine; last wrote
for Legal Affairs t bout abusive high school coaches.