3-18 House Committee on Appropriations

• Title: 3-18 House Committee on Appropriations
• IBCC - Doc Type: Legislation

3-18 House Committee on Appropriations

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Chair:

Representative Henry, come on up. House Bill 1177. I know that
you're a freshman member, and I can appreciate that.

H elllY

This is a first.

Chair:

And I want you to know that very rarely do we see the director of
the department actually come down to watch the freshman member
present a bill. I'm sure that won't make you nervous.

(Lallghtel~

Chair:

He is a harsh critic, but please continue.

(Lallghtel~

Henry:

Thank you Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice Chairman. Actually the
Executive Director of the Department of Natural Resources told
me that when he was speaker, the fight song in this committee was
"I Can't Get No Satisfaction."

(Lallghtel~

Henry: I don't know that that's still the case. Let's hope that it's not. Let
me briefly describe House Bill 1177. House Bill 1177 is a really
important piece oflegislation. It's premises on a pretty simple
motion. That is that in - in the throws of the worst drought in 500
years in the state of Colorado, the state has spent way too much
time quarreling with itself and not enough time solving real world
problems on the ground in terms of meeting our water supply
challenges. And so what House Bill 1177 would do is create a new
and negotiating framework to hopefi.Jlly urge and bring about a
new round of progress in terms of meeting our state's growing
water supply needs. The way it does it - 1177 achieves that is it
creates basin round tables broadly representative of a whole range
of stake holder groups with a stake in this issue and each of the
nine basins - the eight basins and one unique sub basin around the
state which will do a needs assessment and evaluate sort of what
their needs are going forward. Then it creates a second tier
statewide in our basin compact committee which will be a venue
for negotiation between the various basins around the state. I can
go into greater specificity if there are questions about that. Let me
just briefly describe how the bill is fi.Jl1ded. As you know, the bill
costs just shy of $250,000 - point five FTE. The appropriation has
been identified. It's not new money we're talking about, but the
money to - to pay for this bill has been identified by the executive
director in the CWCB as coming from CWCB' s five percent share
of the severance tax operational account. So again this is not new
money we're talking about. This is money that the CWCB would

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