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of a plan for augmentation, the neighboring agricultural users and <br />others potentially harmed downstream would have already had a fair <br />and full opportunity to protect their interests and this Board would <br />have been presented with a series of court decrees protecting the <br />general welfare of your citizens and giving you the technical and legal <br />information you need to approve such an application. As it is, <br />however, the Applicant truly has no idea where or when it is going to <br />get its water from, how or where it is going to be impounded and <br />what steps it will need to take to insure that historical agricultural and <br />other water users vested property rights remain protected. <br />Through no one's fault but the Applicant and his consultants, in order <br />to protect the vested property rights of those around the pit, you have <br />no choice but to deny this application and tell the Applicant and his <br />consultants not to come back until they have their water rights <br />adjudicated. <br />V. THE APPLICANT LACKS LEGAL RIGHT TO USE OR CHANGE USE OF <br />UVWUA WATER SHARES. <br />Perhaps the most problematic aspect of this application with respect to <br />water rights and the protection of Montrose County's agricultural heritage <br />is the Applicant's brief statement in the last paragraph of Page 16 that it <br />intends simply to "obtain approximately 159 shares of water from the <br />UVWUA ...which will be used as processing water." <br />The Applicant, and perhaps the UVWUA, if it agrees with the Applicant's <br />statement, has lost track of some very important, leally binding <br />conditions imposed upon the Project and its irrigators: <br />a. No Legal Ownership. <br />No change in the beneficial use of water can be effected without <br />approval of the Water Court.` Only the legal owner of a water right <br />can apply for such a change in use. The individual owners of the <br />UVWUA shares do not own the Project water rights. Those water <br />rights are owned by either the United States Department of Interior, in <br />the case of the Gunnison Tunnel water, or by the UVWUA in <br />conjunction with the Department of Interior with respect to Ridgway <br />Reservoir Storage Water. <br />See, C.R.S. § 37-92-30513). <br />5 <br />