BOARD00453

• Board Meeting Date: 2/26/1975
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Resolution
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

18,500 acre-feet of water. But you will notice that generally is
below our service area. But we exchange that water with No. 2 over
here, allowing them to irrigate this whole area ahd for that we receive
other waters and we move their point of diversion up here thus utilizing
this water to a good advantage and taking their water here with some
Horsetooth water to irrigate here. We have exchanges with North Poudre
which bring it over into here. We have 22,000 acre-feet in Cobb Lake,
but the court only gives us a 60 second-foot decree to empty the lake. 1
So this means that unless we can exchange with Water Supply and Storage
to irrigate these crops up here we can only take out 60 second feet
and put it into our system. And thus we lose a greater portion of this
22,000 acre-foot lake. Right now, our river decree would allow us to
fill Big Windsor here. But we recognize that Chambers Lake being high
mountain storage is more important. So right now our Windsor water is
going up into Chambers Lake. We will get a credit from them for their
stream flow when the time comes to fill here and at such time in the
spring as all the reservoirs are filled the division engineer cancels
out the debits and credits.

These are just some of them. The yellow parts of the areas we are
irrigating by exchange from our waters. We irrigate down here largely
from somebody else's water. But by doing this we save this horrendous
long transportation problem and we can get this water utilized for
crops that would otherwise go barren. We feel that our exchange program
on the Poudre River is one of the greatest utilizations of water that
you can have. We generally don't have reservoirs and crops that are
going dry because the water is under the right system. Horsetooth and
North Poudre have created a tremendous system. We get a tremendous
amount of water in Horsetooth, much of which is through exchange. We
exchange with virtually every user in the system and the debits and
credits equal out at the end of the year. It used to be before
Horsetooth and even now, that when it got good and cold and the river
was down in the winter time that the city of Fort Collins would start
sweating it'out on whether it would have enough water. Now, through
an exchange they can take water out of a high altitude lake and keep
the stream high.

This is the No. 2 that takes out of the Windsor. We know that this
stream is drying up all the time. Now, we feel that it would probably
be unwise to kill our stream flows when you are not going to be able
to grow the fish in here anyway. Actually, this river is dried up at
several points around eleven months a year. The way the exchanges work
are through debits and credits. You say we should go into court and
get them decreed. We can't go to court and get them decreed because
we don't know what we are going to do. Every year our river commissioner 1
and our users come up with some beneficial exchange. Now, we could go .
in and try and get conditional decrees on everything conceivable. We
would get a conditional decree and if we don't use these magic exchanges
we would soon lose. We feel that the debits and credits of this are
like the debits and credits of a bank. Certainly if I came down here
and cashed a check for ten dollars, it would be unwise to think that
somebody literally is going to have to take ten dollars from the
Holiday Inn and deliver it to my bank to Fort Collins and vice versa.
We are very, very proud of this exchange program. We feel that to

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