PUB00048

• Year: 1992
• Title: Systems Integration as a Water Supply Source for the Denver Metropolitan Area
• CWCB Section: Water Conservation & Drought Planning
• Author: Hydrosphere Resource Consultants
• Description: Overview of water supply alternatives and suggestion for process to address future water supply needs of the Denver Metro Area
• Publications - Doc Type: Historical

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DRAFT 8/24/92, Page 24

This water could come from several potential sources. Several Windy Gap shareholders
have expressed continuing interest in selling up to 30,000 acre feet of Windy Gap supplies.
The pipeline could provide those shareholders with an expanded market for their water.

The City of Thornton has acquired over 30,000 acre feet of agricultural water rights in
the Poudre basin and is in the process of changing those water rights in water court. These
water rights could be integrated into the operation of the CBT/Windy Gap system to further
increase the amount of water potentially exportable to Metro Denver in a manner more
acceptable to the Northern region than permanent agricultural land dry-up. This could also
eliminate the need for costly and redundant delivery facilities for Thornton.

Under cooperative agreements which invested in agriculture and compensated farmers,
the agricultural portion of the region's native and CBT supplies could be used as a dry year
"pool" to insure the reliability of deliveries of municipal water from the North during dry
years.

A Carter pipeline could also provide opportunities for increased water management and
delivery flexibility for Denver's Moffat diversion system on the West Slope and increased
overall system yield. These opportunities are discussed in the following section.

Issues To Be Addressed

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A number of different institutional issues exist regarding use of Colorado-Big
Thompson, Windy Gap and native base supply waters by metro Denver communities. The
utility of a pipeline would be greatly enhanced if these various sources of water could be
managed in a more unified fashion. Some communities may have reservations about
participating in such a pipeline because of institutional uncertainties regarding what sources of
water they could bring south. Ideally the existing CBT and Windy Gap market structures could
be used as a means to distribute high quality water sources among municipalities the Northern
District and the metro Denver area as well as interruptible supply arrangements among
agricultural water users in northern Colorado.

Issues regarding pipeline ownership and control, access and resulting land use
implications, and cost allocation must also be addressed in an equitable manner.

2. Coordination of Existing Projects
a. Coordination Among South Platte Water Providers

The major owners of water rights and water supply facilities on the South Platte within
and upstream of the metro Denver area include Denver, Aurora, Thornton, Englewood, the
Burlington system and others. Each of these systems has been designed to operate in
accordance with the prior appropriation doctrine but largely independent of one another.
Integration of the water rights and associated storage and diversion facilities could yield
additional water supplies over and above the sum of the parts.

As an example, Aurora's Spinney Mountain reservoir was designed to capture and
reregulate west slope diversions from the Homestake diversions projects as well as infrequent
South Platte river flows storable under Spinney Mountain's junior storage decree. If a p0rtion
of Denver's Two Forks storage rights were transferred to Spinney Mountain, Spinney could be
more easily filled and its yield increased. While this increase in yield may not ultimately be
additive with the combined yield of a 1.1 million acre foot Two Forks reservoir and the
ultimate build-Dut of the Homestake projects, such an integration of water rights and facilities