BOARD00531

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

I

I think everybody in this room is proba-
bly acquainted with the salvage plan that
the Bureau of Reclamation came up with to
help satisfy the compact problem that Colorado
has with New Mexico and Texas. We have now
constructed an analog model for this .area and
have come up with a conservative estimate as
to how the water levels in the area will be
affected by that plan. It is pretty much in
accord with what the Bureau of Reclamation
did by hand. We think we did it a little bit
faster. I don't know.

The thing I want to point out real quickly
here is that this diagram illustrates that
even the Geological Survey can make mistakes.
The area that is shown here from minus one to
minus ten represents our first preliminary
analysis and, being anxious to present it to
the people down in the valley, we prepared
this illustration and then we checked our
figures and found that we were off by an
order of ten. Off by an order of magnitude
in other words. So the people down there
in Fort Garland who heard about this said
that they didn't want this plan lowering
their water by any ten feet. When we actual-
ly recalculated and checked the figures, it
turns out that instead of being lowered ten
feet at Fort Garland it is only lowered one
foot.

I

This is the end of my formal report but
I wanted to make a couple of comments. Dur-
ing this last year, as most of you know I
think, our program is tied not only to the
federal budget but it is also tied quite
closely to the state budget. To give you a
clue as to the proportion of the state budget
that We are involved with, our cooperative
program, 72 percent of our total program is
in cooperation with the state and local agen-
cies and the bulk of it, the major and lion's
share, is with the Colorado Water Conservation
Board. When the federal budget is cut, we're