Colorado Water Dec 2003

• Year: 2003
• Title: Colorado Water
• CWCB Section: Administration
• Author: Water Center of Colorado State University
• Description: December 2003 Issue
• Publications - Doc Type: Newsletter

acre -ft. of water that is committed to irrigation. Recall the fore-
casted 550,000 acre -ft. that I have identified before that would
be needed to accommodate future municipal water needs. If
all that water came from the state's agriculture sector, then its
relative use of water would change from about 85 percent to 81
percent. In other words, we will still primarily be an agricul-
tural water user within the state.
It was interesting when I was listening to the conversation this
morning from the Arkansas Valley. We just completed an
IGA with the Southeastern District, and one of the provisos is
that Aurora would no longer
pursue claims for agricul-
tural water use that would be
permanently transferred out
of the basin for a forty year
period.
Now, you would expect that
everyone would say, "Hoo-
ray, that's great. You are
out of our hair ". But one
group concerned about that
agreement is the farmers who
won't be able to sell their
water to Aurora. They are
very disappointed that they
will not be able to participate
in the "water rush" that we
have to find water for Aurora.
With water trades and the short-term leases that we acquired,
we were able to get our reservoirs up to 62 percent of capac-
ity this year; that will be down to around 40 percent in April
of next year. When we talk about stresses on the water supply
system, I think this is representative of what you are going to
see in the South Platte in the future unless additional water
sources are developed.
Aurora purchased the City of Thornton's water rights in the
South Platte, water off eleven ranches; we gave them $51 mil-
lion and also gave them the return flows and other traded water
sources, which they will now
use for their peoples' water
supply. So, I think what
we have been doing over
the last several years, these
trades, we will see more of
in the future, and we'll have
Figure 3. Homestake Reservoir.
I think that this is part of the policy change
that we are going to have to go through as
we realize that a lot of past practices will change. That is now
the case in terms of the water reality and water planning on the
South Platte.
As we look at the current drought conditions, we see that the
centroid has just moved over to Utah and up into Alberta. The
federal forecasters confirmed again just last week the severity
of the ongoing drought conditions. What's happened is the
drought moved over about 500 miles to the west. But the State
is still in drought conditions. We are going to have to deal
with drought and we are going to have to deal with the water
demands associated with population growth.
Aurora's water supply system — We have water projects for
municipal water along the Front Range. This is the Homestake
Reservoir on the upper east fork of the Eagle. It is a facility we
co -own with Colorado Springs Utilities. We also have water in
Spinney Mountain Reservoir — one of twelve reservoirs where
Aurora stores its water. While we designed our municipal
water supply systems to take us through three to four years of
drought, drought conditions brought our water reserves down to
26 percent of capacity last year. We were almost down to the
lifeline for delivering a reliable supply of water just to the City
of Aurora.
comprehensive demand
management of water.
The Denver Basin aquifers
-- Everybody thought there
were hundreds of millions
of acre -ft. of groundwater
available to us. I was se-
verely disappointed to spend
$5 million of our water rev-
enues for about 85 gallons of
water per minute in each of
ten wells' production capability. There
is no city of 300,000 people with that
type of financial resource. We need to go back and redo some
of the Denver Basin regulations that are not based on the theory
of one- percent withdrawal per year. Rather, those regulations
should focus on how to get water out of that aquifer at econom-
ic and sustainable rates.
Trans -basin Diversions -- Fifty percent of our water comes
from trans -basin diversions. I get very upset when I see legisla-
tors considering bills relative to trans -basin diversions, because
that means I'm going to look at water from agricultural lands
along the Front Range. Our future municipal water will either
come from other river basins or from water uses in the South
Platte River basin. If we make trans -basin diversions so oner-
ous, the only avenue left is transfer of agricultural water in our
backyards, and that will come from either permanent transfers
or from leases.
Eighty percent of our water comes from snowmelt in a six -
week period from May through July 31. You will therefore see
Aurora looking to develop additional storage. That is what we
need, more reservoirs. It's not just to keep water from Cali-
fornia. It is the only way we are going to capture peak flows
or wet -year flows for use in urban areas and provide drought
protection without massively oversizing direct flow or pump -
back systems.
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