Cities, conservancy districts, energy companies own rights for 2.6 million acre-feet of additional water storage on the Western Slope.
Editor’s Note: This is the third and final part of an in-depth story published by Aspen Journalism in December.
RBC | One reason these proposed reservoirs don’t seem to worry many water managers is because nobody believes they will ever all be built. Although these projects represent the desires of the Upper Basin, this scale of development may be just a pipe dream.
Eric Kuhn, a Colorado River expert, author and former general manager of the Colorado River District, doubts that many of these reservoirs will be built, but not because the water isn’t there or because of the permitting hurdles, environmental impacts or expense of construction. Rather, Kuhn says there’s no longer a need for many of these storage buckets.
Some of these conditional rights, especially in the Yampa-White-Green River basin, are associated with oil shale development, which has become less economically feasible in recent years. There are no new large-scale federally subsidized irrigation projects on the horizon. And as more agricultural land is converted to residential developments across the West, water use goes down.
Cities such as Aurora and Las Vegas have implemented aggressive conservation programs and have proved they can grow without using a lot more water. As the Upper Basin continues to urbanize, it may never grow into its 7.5 million-acre-foot allocation. The only reservoirs that will realistically be built, Kuhn said, will be small (1,000 acre-feet or less) and on a creek where there’s municipal demand.
“Maybe you need additional storage for streams that don’t have enough storage today, but that’s a tiny, minute amount,” he said. “Conditional water rights are a product of 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, when they had a purpose. I don’t even see that they have a purpose anymore. They also represent a whole bunch of projects that, if they had been economically feasible, would have been built a long time ago.”
Although many entities continue to hang on to conditional water rights that they are unlikely to develop, some are starting to take a more clear-eyed approach, recognizing that some of these phantom reservoirs are dreams of the past and letting them go.
The River District has abandoned conditional reservoir rights on the Crystal River and other places; in January, a company with ties to oil shale development abandoned rights for a reservoir on Thompson Creek south of Carbondale; Colorado Springs recently gave up water rights for reservoirs in Summit County; and in October, the town of Breckenridge let go of water rights for two reservoirs on the Swan River but kept rights for a third: Swan River Reservoir No. 4.
James Phelps, director of public works for the town of Breckenridge, said they didn’t file the diligence claims this time for Swan River Reservoirs Nos. 1 and 2, which had water rights dating to 1981, because the town doesn’t need to develop that much reservoir capacity. Other factors in the town’s decision to not keep the reservoirs alive were the huge financial costs; the fact that housing developments encroached on the reservoir sites; and disturbance to the ecosystem in a place where residents place a high value on the environment.
“It was determined that if there was a need for the water in the future, whatever that need may be, we wouldn’t need to develop all three of those,” Phelps said. “We know that developing reservoirs is not an easy thing to do.”
Despite Colorado water courts’ tendency to rubber-stamp most diligence applications to keep alive decades-old unused water rights, there is at least one recent example of legal pushback on a reservoir enlargement project.
In October, a federal judge ruled that Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir expansion violated the Clean Water Act because it didn’t take into consideration the potential for a Colorado River Compact call and the declining hydrology of the basin. Although it’s unclear if this ruling would set a precedent for any other dam and reservoir project in Colorado, it signals a growing understanding of the risks that new water development could pose to the entire Colorado River system.
“The Colorado River Compact rests on a politically unpalatable truth — the Compact promised the basin states water that simply does not exist,” a footnote in the ruling reads. “The Court emphasizes this context for good reason: The cracked foundation of the Colorado River’s management system all but demands skepticism over any proposal that will affect the hydrology of the Colorado River basin.”
This story was produced by Aspen Journalism, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Center for Environmental Journalism.
(For the full story with graphics, please visit https://aspenjournalism.org/colorado-has-big-dreams-to-use-more-water-from-the-colorado-river-but-will-planned-reservoirs-ever-be-built/)
By HEATHER SACKETT
ASPEN JOURNALISM