BOARD00531

• Board Meeting Date: 5/7/1969
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

If you remember the supply and demand
curve that we showed you earlier, the makeup
of the deficient supply of surface water by
pumping the ground water, you can see, if
there are reservoir engineers in here and
we are talking about a firm supply, if this
dashed line along here were considered as a
firm supply, we have been able to obtain a
firm supply for the South Platte since along
here in about 1945. So this is the benefit
of using wells. Hopefully, the kind of law
that we will ultimately have and the way it
will be administered is to provide ground
water to supplement the surface water supply
and to regulate the supply and not have the
law so it curtails the use of ground water.
The problem, of course, is coming up with
an equitable solution. One that recognizes
the rights of everybody.

I

Finally then, I would like to show a
little of the progress that we have made
in the San Luis Valley. The San Luis Valley
is now an area where an abundant amount of
water is available but the abundance of
water is only exceeded by an abundance of
problems. There is surface water inflow to
the area of about l~ million acre-feet
annually. The precipitation in the area is
about one million acre-feet. That totals
to about 2~ million acre-feet. Well, out
of that 2~ million acre-feet only one-half
million of it flows out to New Mexico and
Texas, out through the tailend of the proj-
ect. The rest is consumed by evapotranspir-
ation within the area. The system is
currently in balance and nature sees to it
that it stays that way. The beneficial con-
sumptive use in the valley is one million
acre-feet, the nonbeneficial consumptive use
is another million acre-feet. So obviously
there is plenty of room for improvement of
this supply. You can't always overcome all
of the nonbeneficial consumptive uses but
certainly you can overcome some of them.

I