BOARD00935

• Board Meeting Date: 9/5/1968
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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Every draft of the legislation has
had a similar provision. Neither Texas nor
New Mexico has evidenced any objection.
This is developed water, and, even in the
absence of the express provisions of the
Rio Grande Compact recognizing this water
to be nontributary, would, under western
water law, belong to the developer."

I

MR. ECKLES:

"Mr. Chairman, I have a statement too.
Mr. Toole, I think the basics of this is to
salvage a waste that is occurring now."

MR. SPARKS:

"I think the presentation by the Geologi-
cal Survey points out the many water problems
which exist here in the San Luis Valley. This
is an extremely deep and complicated aquifer.
The estimate of two billion feet of water in
storage is a staggering amount of water. We
have argued and fought over the Colorado
River for a good many years. Based upon the
average historic flow of the Colorado River
it would take something like 133 years for
that river to produce the amount of water
which is stored here in the Valley.

However, only a small quantity of the
total volume of water in storage is recov-
erable, either for economic reasons or be-
cause of quality. Just how much water can
be recovered we do not know. This is the
purpose of the ground water studies now under
way in all of our major aquifer areas. Three
valley areas are now under intensive study
with this same type of program, with the
view of eventually answering many of the per-
plexing problems that confront water users.

There are two major problems in connec- I
tion with these studies. One is the funding
and the other is personnel.

At the Board meeting this summer I men-
tioned the fact that our funding was signifi-
cantly reduced for this fiscal year. This