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1993 Colorado Water Convention SECTION I KEYNOTE ADDRESSES WELCOME Tyler Martineau, Chairman Colorado Water Conservation Board Good morning. If many of you are like me, you have one foot in the Stouffer Concourse Hotel and some idea that this is January 4th, but the rest of you is still back in the part of the holidays that you found enjoyable. As I was trying to shift gears from where I have been the last week, I realized that one thing the holidays did for me was to emphasize our commonality of interests in water. That commonality spreads many miles, in fact, it spreads far beyond Colorado. Over the holidays, I had a chance to visit with some of my relatives, and I was amazed by the fact that, although those relatives are scattered allover the United States, water came up in our conversations. For example, I have a 75-year-old aunt who, of all things, manages a large shopping center. She was concerned about how they were going to find their way through the maze of the environmental regulations that they have in Connecticut, in order to provide a water supply for that shopping center. I have 20 year-old cousin, who will be going to what was the Soviet Union, right on th~ Mongolian border, to the town of Irkutsk, .which. is right on Lake Baykal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. He is going to be studying water quality issues in that great body, which is half way around the world. I have an 80-year-Old uncle, who has a cabin on Lake George in the Adirondacks. He was talking to me about the fact that on that lake one can still stick a pipe in the water, run it into your house, and drink that water without doing anything to it. He thought that was a wonderful thing in 1993. What this said to me is that water is a lot like weather. It is a topic that binds us together -- no matter how many miles we reach across, or what differences we might have on other issues. It is also a topic like weather in that it is hard to do anything about. Why are we here today? I think it is appropriate, at the beginning of 1993, to try and seek commonalities. In many forums, we emphasize the differences, and there certainly are many differences among Colorado water users. I hope that over the next two days we will be able to focus on commonalities. I think it is appropriate to take a moment and talk about: where did the idea of this conference come from? Over the past year, the Colorado Water Conservation Board has taken on several new studies, both of which were authorized by the Colorado Legislature last spring. One of those was a $25,000 study to scope the issues related to basin- of-origin. The other was a $100,000 study to take a look at the issues surrounding the proposed Colorado Interstate Gas Proposal to