Essay by Ed Quillen
Water – February 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
IF WE HAD THE RESOURCES, this magazine could probably keep a full-time writer busy on regional water issues, everything from snowpack and river flows to adjudications and Front Range schemes.
Indeed, our own Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District could have kept a writer fully occupied, perhaps with overtime, in recent weeks.
We can start with a proposal to lease water from the City of Salida. Under Colorado law, you’re not supposed to speculate in water. That is, you can claim only as much water as you can put to “beneficial use.”
However, cities get some exemption from that, and for good reason — cities have to anticipate future needs. Salida, for instance, holds about 2,400 acre-feet of annual surface water rights. If you figure that an acre-foot is a year’s supply for four people, then Salida has enough water rights for about 10,000 people, almost twice the current population.
Therefore, if Salida’s population grows, the city won’t have to scramble for water rights. It might have to improve its delivery system or expand its treatment plant, but at least the rights will be there.
Salida’s also fortunate because most of the water it uses returns to the river. The area has sandy soil, so a lot of the water that citizens pour onto their lawns runs right back into the Arkansas. And the water that goes into our sewers, gets treated, and put back in, too. So a lot of Salida’s precious water runs right downriver.
But what is the city supposed to do with it? For the most part, we’ve already used it.
So now we enter the strange world of “paper water.” Salida has a right to divert a certain amount of water out of the Arkansas River and its tributaries. But it doesn’t have the right to consume all of the water it diverts. A certain percentage must be returned to the stream.
But due to low consumptive use and a generous water supply, Salida returns more water to the river than it’s required to. That doesn’t mean that the water’s simply gone, however. The city gets credit for a lot of its extra water from a storage account in Pueblo Reservoir.
But thanks to recent changes in state water administration, Salida can’t get as much credit as it used to get for this water. Therefore, according to the city government, there’s about 260 annual acre feet now available.
Enter the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District, which offered to lease this water for 10 years, renewable for another 10. The District would be able to use this water for its augmentation program.
So what’s an augmentation program?
Well, if you drill a well and get water, you’re taking water out of your basin (basin describes the drainage area for a river or stream). But if a lot of people put in wells, the river could be depleted (because a lot of underground water would eventually flow into streams if left to its own course).
Thus new wells could damage downstream water rights — rights that are clearly senior to those wells. So Colorado water law allows for augmentation of some wells. To augment a well, you buy some surface water and send it downriver, and that makes up for the water your well consumes, and thereby protects downstream users.
There are, of course, many ways to obtain water. You could buy ditch rights or reservoir shares. But people with wells generally want to use water all year long, despite drought and dried-up ditches — and regardless of whether other users have senior rights. Augmentation lets users take water without regard to priority dates (because that water will be replaced).
So let’s imagine that you’ve found the perfect site for your dream ranchette/ranchito (or whatever they’re calling them these days), but you need to augment your well. In Chaffee County, that means you call the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District.
DESPITE THE NAME, however, Conservancy Districts weren’t formed to “conserve water.” They were started in 1937 to help develop water. At the time, there were municipal water systems and irrigation districts (for farmers and ranchers), but it was obvious that sometimes towns and cities and irrigation districts could fare better by building and/or organizing waterworks together. Thus Conservancy Districts were born.
But different districts vary greatly in what they do. The big ones build dams, reservoirs, pipelines…. While other districts, like UAWCD, help develop water by handling necessary accounting, water storage rental, and/or augmentations.
Augmentation is a major activity of the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District. UAWCD buys water rights at wholesale, and sells them at retail. The current price in most of the district is $2,500 for 1/10 of an acre foot, or $25,000 an acre-foot. But the District offered to pay Salida about $17 an acre-foot for 260 acre-feet.
At a city council work session, several officials pointed out that the proceeds — about $4,500 a year — was essentially found money for the city. That water was just flowing by anyway, and the city could pick up the money without doing anything except signing the contract.
That’s true, but there’s a bigger picture here. Councilwoman Nancy McAninch saw some of it, when she asked “Suppose this goes on for ten years, or twenty, and then we need the water for the city, and we take it back from the District. Are we going to be the bad guys then? What sort of political situation will that put the city in?”
Another consideration, one that didn’t come up: That 260 acre-feet is enough to augment 2,600 wells on rural lots. Is it in Salida’s interest to encourage the development of 2,600 more exurban dwellings on two-acre or five-acre lots?
PERHAPS IT IS. Perhaps it isn’t. I know it’s not something I want; I think we should build homes on small lots in or next to towns. Then maybe we could use less gas and perhaps even live in a healthier country that wouldn’t need to go to war for oil.
But on the other hand, many citizens in our region make their living building, selling, furnishing, and/or supplying plants and livestock for new ranchette/ranchinos. So even though five-acre ranchettes may be unsightly, and more persistent than weeds, they feed lots of local families.
Then again, this additional augmentation water could be used to build a considerable crowd of rancharitos, along with horses, barnyards, and residents, upstream from Salida (or from Nathrop, or Howard, or wherever new wells are augmented). And such exurban development has led to numerous problems in other areas in terms of traffic, sanitation, water quality, sprawl….
On the other hand, it’s possible that the UAWCD merely wants some of Salida’s water to meet current obligations, rather than to sell additional augmentation….
So we should ask them. In fact, our city and county officials and local newspapers should be asking the District questions about what it’s doing and the possible consequences of its work all of the time — because UAWCD is a government agency; it works for us. And because augmentation encourages a specific kind of development. And because citizens would never even think about letting their road department sell roads wherever it wanted to. Nor would citizens allow their towns to sell annexations without oversight.
Yet for some reason, here in Salida, when the UAWCD proposes projects that would clearly mean more revenue for the District, our local newspaper and city council members seldom talk about possible consequences.
In fact, The Mountain Mail has frequently insisted that we shouldn’t question the district’s decisions because those “old water buffaloes” know more about water than anyone else ever will — and they would never let us down.
That, however, is not the way the system works.
The UAWCD has an established job; it finds water that’s not in use and makes it available at affordable rates. So if you’ve got a piece of land and need a well — or if you want to subdivide and put in six or eight homes — the District can help you find water.
And make no mistake, water availability is important. It aids local farmers, ranchers, builders, realtors, and merchants — and nourishes our economy.
But there’s only so much water available in any given basin, and UAWCD’s augmentation program encourages a specific kind of development. Therefore citizens need to consider whether this is the kind of development they want.
— Because this is where the real decisions are made, at ordinary water board meetings and city council workshops.
Planning meetings and visioning conferences don’t determine what will happen to Salida, or Chaffee County, or Colorado. On the contrary, development is far more influenced by how water is divided, sold, and packaged than by what citizens say they want.
And who decides how water will be apportioned? The Denver Water Board? The City of Salida? The Bureau of Reclamation? UAWCD? The Southeastern Water Conservancy District. Or the citizens?
The answer is: D) All of the Above.
Yet most of us don’t seem to realize what a huge difference water apportionment can make. Whether we recognize it or not, our future is being determined by water decisions that are being made right now.
Therefore, the Salida City Council should be asking questions about the big picture. (But I haven’t heard any.) The city council should ask itself: “Should we be doing this? Is it in the city’s long-term interests?”
UNFORTUNATELY, however, Salida’s council has frequently been admonished for taking such initiative. In fact, local media often seem to regard Terry Scanga, UAWCD’s general manager, as the foremost expert on what should be done with city water.
Yet the interests of cities and towns and the interests of water conservancy districts are not necessarily the same.
Over in Custer County, there’s a direct conflict between the UAWCD and the municipal water supplier. The towns of Westcliffe and Silver Cliff don’t operate municipal water and sewer systems — that’s handled by the Round Mountain Water and Sanitation District.
A year ago, Round Mountain endorsed a proposal by Upper Arkansas to begin offering augmentation in the Wet Mountain Valley, with some restrictions. One restriction was that Upper Arkansas would not operate in Round Mountain’s existing or planned service area in and around the two towns. Another was that Upper Arkansas would not augment wells drilled where they might interfere with Round Mountain’s wells — areas known as “well field protection zones.”
At its Dec. 9 board meeting, Round Mountain voted to withdraw its support for Upper Arkansas’s plan to augment in Custer County.
At issue was the Shining Mountain Estates subdivision, just south of Westcliffe. It encompasses 70 acres, and developer Roger Camper wants to split it into 14 five-acre lots — each with its own well and septic system.
HE DOESN’T WANT TO get water from Round Mountain, he said, because “they would require annexation into the town, and that would mean small lots along with paved streets and curbs and gutters. We want big lots and country roads.”
But if each lot has a well, the wells must be augmented — and Upper Arkansas stands willing to do the augmentation.
Meanwhile, Round Mountain’s directors say they have two problems with Shining Mountain: it encroaches on the district’s well field protection zone, and the septic tanks could contaminate Round Mountain’s wells that supply water to Westcliffe and Silver Cliff.
Since Upper Arkansas was willing to augment Shining Mountain, which Round Mountain considered a sanitary threat, Round Mountain voted to withdraw its support of Upper Arkansas’ augmentation proposal for Custer County.
Bud Piquette, manager of Round Mountain, attended an Upper Arkansas board meeting on Jan. 8. Upper Arkansas wanted to appoint a committee to negotiate with Round Mountain and arrange an agreement.
Piquette agreed to try, but he didn’t really see the point. “I thought we already had an agreement, from a year ago,” he said, “so I’m not optimistic.”
Jeff Ollinger, the only elected member of the Upper Arkansas Board (the others were all appointed by a district judge), said Upper Arkansas should work out something, because Round Mountain could file an objection to the Upper Arkansas augmentation plan for Custer County, and thus the plan could be stalled in water court for a long time.
So there’s a chance the two districts will work something out. But if they don’t, the good people of Westcliffe and Silver Cliff might get to finance both sides of an expensive court battle, through their taxes and fees to Round Mountain and through their taxes to Upper Arkansas.
Similarly, Salidans might get the same privilege of financing two sides of a conflict if something goes askew with any agreement Salida might make with Upper Arkansas concerning currently unused water rights.
The interests of the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District — more rural subdivisions that provide more income from augmentation permits — are not necessarily the same as the city’s interests.
The way things work in our high desert, Upper Arkansas isn’t just a water agency — it makes land-use decisions by enabling rural subdivisions. But it’s not accountable in the way that other decision-makers are.
IF WE DON’T LIKE how a city or county government uses its zoning powers, we can vote the rascals out at the next election. Or if that’s too long to wait, we could petition and recall them.
But conservancy districts are effectively immune from that. While it’s possible to elect a board member, it takes a lot of time and energy. Thus, almost all board members are appointed by a judge, who may or may not care about what the public wants.
Supporters of this system say it isolates board members from politics, so that they can make good decisions. But is having ever more five-acre lots really a good decision?
Our future is clear. If mile upon mile of rancharinas is what you want, then support the present system. But if you want something else, then lobby for elected conservancy boards, learn more about water law, and attend an occasional water meeting.
— Ed Quillen
