PUB00007

• Year: 1993
• Title: Proceedings 1993 Colorado Water Convention
• CWCB Section: Water Conservation & Drought Planning
• Author: Robert C. Ward
• Description: Front Range Water Alternative and Transfer of Water from One Area of the State to Another
• Publications - Doc Type: Brochure

burden of being considered by many both inside and outside the state
of Colorado as not yet needed, and that more acceptable, practical
projects can be built to provide yield with less impact. And that is
one of the major messages that was in the Two Forks veto.

In addition to new major projects, there are smaller projects
that people are considering building and are building that add on to
the existing system or connect pieces to the existing system. They,
again, bear a lot of cost, environmental impact, institutional
problems that may ultimately be solvable, but you couldn't categorize
them as easy to solve.

Besides new projects, there are four other major categories that
we looked at in the report. One involved the use of water between
agriculture and municipalities -- municipal use of agricultural
water -- and this, I think, is an enormously important area for the
state and for the Front Range. Agriculture in Colorado, in fact, is
in a very tough position right now. Real prices for agricultural
crops have continued to decline, the federal government is beginnning
to scrutinize more and more crop commodity prices, and at the same
time farmers face increased capital costs for new technology for
meeting environmental rules and regulations. As a result, one of the
most important assets that irrigated agriculture has is its water
supply. That creates a pressure for the potential sale and transfer
of that supply to municipal use. And it is a vast supply. There is
over two-million acre-feet of water diverted annually to agriculture
in the South Platte basin.

There are several ways that agricultural water can be used for
municipal water supply. Conventionally and historically, cities have
simply purchased farms and dried them up or simply grown into farm
areas and acquired agricultural water rights and changed them to
municipal use. There are not very many cities in Colorado that don't
have, as part of their water supply portfolio, water rights that were
at one time agricultural. And that continues to go on today. One of
the problems is that it does impact irrigated agriculture. It reduces
the amount of land irrigated: it does not necessarily address the
change of water rights and the no-injury provisions added on to those
decrees in water court. It does not necessarily protect against all
the injury in the local regional economies. There are socio-economic
impacts, tax-based impacts, and Mayor Carpenter talked about some of
those.

A second approach, and one that we have been intrigued with, is
the notion of going a little bit less than permanent purchase and dry-
up of agricultural land. That is what we have called interruptible
supply arrangements under which cities would come to agreements with
groups of farmers or ditch companies that would let them interrupt and
use that agricultural water supply in specified, critical dry years in
exchange for payment to those farmers for the water used. There are a
lot of issues involved with that, but we see that as a potentially
very interesting prospect that could provide additional water in dry-
year periods and have the additional benefit of being essentially
supportive of agriculture. It does not result in a net reduction or a
net loss of irrigated agriculture. It could done in a way that the
interruptible supply burden could actually be shared among several

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