BOARD00270

• Board Meeting Date: 8/15/1960
• Description: Table of Contents, Agenda and Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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stipulation concerning Green Mountain Reser-
voir and, in general, the Blue River decrees.
Then we set forth all the correspondence that
we thought was pertinent in order to demon-
strate some basic conflicts of interest and
an interpretation of both the court decrees
and Senate Document 80. Now again I'll state
that Senate Document 80 - I'll state without
hesitation - is one of the worst documents
I've ever seen as an operating document for a
reservoir. Purportedly it was for the purpose
of solving the many problems concerned with
the transmountain diversion of the Colorado-
Big Thompson Project and so on, but it was
left so open and so vague that it was bound
to create future difficulties.

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In any event, regardless of what con-
flicting opinions may exist and will continue
to exist concerning Green Mountain, yo~ will
recall that Senate Document 80 in effect
states that 52,000 acre-feet of storage in
Green Mountain Reservoir is reserved for the
Colorado-Big Thompson Project for replacement
for its transmountain diversion. Now the
total capacity of that reservoir is 154,000
acre-feet which leaves 102,000 acre-feet of
water unaccounted for. In Senate Document 80
you can arrive at any interpretation you want,
depending on what particular place you put
your finger in the document, but overall I
think it is clear that the primary purpose of
the remaining water was for the generation of
power to assist in the repayment of the proj-
ect cost. And then the document says that
this excess water, this 102,000 acre-feet,
'shall be released without charge'. Well, I
always shudder when I run into something like
that in any document. It's the same thing we
run into in the John r~artin Reservoir -
'shall be released without charge for other
appropriators'. Not specifying which ones, or
where. So it is somewhat difficult to place
a construction, from the document itself, as
to what it means.

In any event, there is 102,000 acre-feet
of water in the reservoir, (that is, when it
is full and it does not always fill), which
can be released for beneficial uses andcer-
tainly in Colorado on a federal project, we