BOARD01670

• Board Meeting Date: 7/28/2003
• Description: CDP Section - Technical Assistance to Covered Entities
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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Therefore, HB 91-1154 apparently motivated the submittal of water conservation plans, but the
statute does not necessarily promote or discourage effective water conservation because plan
submittal cannot be linked to meaningful water conservation.

In relation to current statutes and policies:

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Submitted plans do not currently need to be updated or upgraded on a regular or
regimented basis. It is up to the covered entity to decide when and if a plan needs to be
resubmitted.
No formal mechanism exists to track and compile information, on a state-wide basis, related
to individual entity water use or delivery. The lack of tracking impacts the State's ability to
identify covered entities or other entities that may be approaching the defined threshold of
2,000 acre-feet.

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Limited discussions with selected covered entities indicate that water providers believe the state
has a technical, a coordinating, or a combined role to play in promoting and understanding the
implications of water conservation planning throughout Colorado. Some possible categories of
assistance include:

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Data warehouse on "state of the science".
Information clearinghouse to encourage consistent conservation messages, goals and
measures for Colorado communities.
Technical assistance to those in need, including workshops and web-based information.

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The best-available data indicate that at the current threshold of 2,000 acre-feet, almost 50
percent of the total non-irrigation and non-storage deliveries recorded by the State Engineers
Office is controlled by entities with water conservation plans. Approximately 17 entities that
use or deliver over 2,000 acre-feet do not have CWCB-approved water conservation plans, and
they represent over five percent of non-irrigation and non-storage deliveries. Altering the
threshold for requiring water conservation planning would require the following numbers of
entities to submit plans if they wanted to pursue state funding:

. Changing the threshold to 1,500 acre-feet would add an additional 19 entities (with the 17
above 2,000 acre-feet threshold, this makes a total of 36 entities above 1,500 acre-feet).
. Changing the threshold to 1,000 acre-feet would add an additional 21 entities (57 total).
. These 57 entities would represent approximately nine percent of the total water
use/ delivery in Colorado (non-irrigation and non-storage).

Recommendations
A thorough strategy to guide allocation and management of state resources for water
conservation planning will be developed over the coming months. Some preliminary and
central themes that emerge from this review are the need to:

. Review the intent and requirements of existing statutes, rules, and/or policies to evaluate
the need for a deliberate definition of:
. Mechanisms for standardizing content, technologies, and definitions for complying
entities;

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