BOARD00198

• Board Meeting Date: 1/15/1969
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

I

I only say that we must take the broad
view, we must do the best we can for Color ado
with the waters we have. We're down to the
last waterhole: there's no argument about it,
we'll have to face it. And we are going to
have to use our water more carefully, spread
it thinner and get the ultimate out of it, with
as little waste as possible. I know, as well
as all of you fellows who are here who have
been associated with the farming practices,
that you absolutely cannot divert water from
a stream and apply it to farmland without a
reasonable small operational loss. It just
cannot be done. The point now is how best
can we put all of the waters to use without
flagrant waste, without losses at the state
line? To give you a specific instance, with
some more wells in the lower South Platte
Valley I can totally supply the needs below
about Sterling, without one drop of water
being diverted from the stream. I can do
the same thing in. the Arkansas Valley below
perhaps the City of Lamar without a drop of
water being delivered from the stream. At
the present day we are capturing and storing
every drop of water in the South Platte River
from above Denver to about the Morgan-Washing-
ton County line in Off-channel reservoirs.
Then there is 250 cubic feet per second, 500
acre-feet a day, going across the state line
into Nebraska which We are losing. We should
have some means of holding that back for use
next summer.

I

We need some reservoirs. We need to
allow our people with groundwater uses to
amalgamate their ground water uses with their
ditch waters. I take this view - every per-
son who has a decreed water right to supply a
block of irrigated land through a canal sys-
tem, perhaps in conjunction with a reservoir
system, is entitled to divert and put to use
the full amount of his decreed water rights,
be it from stream, ditch, reservoir or by
pumping from underground supplies. As jim