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The water war in Indian Wells Valley

By
The Food & Environment Reporting Network
-

By Brent Crane

Photography by Justin Maxon

Originally published by the Food & Environment Reporting Network on December 14, 2020

John Conaway has lived in and around the town of Ridgecrest since before it was much of a town. In 1967, when he moved his young family to the remote Southern California community, Ridgecrest had been incorporated for only a few years. “It was all dirt roads,” he says. “No stop signs, no nothing.” Mostly, the town was there to support the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, an arms-testing base built nearby during World War II. The military contractor Grumman, which employed Conaway as an engineer, had given him a bonus to relocate from New York. Like many of his colleagues and their families, he and his lived on base.

A handful of years later, the Navy decided China Lake contractors would have to find their own housing. The Conaways bought 4 acres and built a house in the adjacent town of Inyokern, which like Ridgecrest is nestled in the Indian Wells Valley, a roughly 11,000-square-mile stretch of desert in the eastern Sierra Nevada about three hours north of Los Angeles. When Conaway learned there were tax incentives for farmers, he started planting. By the early 1980s he’d settled on pistachios as his crop of choice.

That was the right call. California’s pistachio industry, which comprised only a few thousand acres then, today spans 300,000 acres and takes in about $1.6 billion a year. Conaway’s business grew, too. He gave up engineering and now, at age 83, owns 175 acres’ worth of nuts. A decade ago, that was enough to make him one of the more serious farmers around. Successes like his attracted the attention of a Bakersfield pistachio magnate named Rod Stiefvater. In 2011, Stiefvater’s company, Mojave Pistachios LLC, acquired about 1,600 acres near Conaway and planted more than 100,000 trees.

John Conaway, being helped by his sons, arrived in Ridgecrest, California, in 1967 to work at the U.S. Navy base there. He eventually became a pistachio farmer and now, at age 83, owns 175 acres of nuts. Photo by Justin Maxon.

Mojave sells most of its nuts to the Wonderful Co., one of America’s most powerful agricultural enterprises and the reason pistachios now rank among the country’s bestselling salty snacks. Mojave has established a farming operation on a scale unprecedented for the area. If they’re well-tended, its trees will be fully mature by 2025, turning the once-barren land into a fertile realm worth an estimated $25 million a year.

That’s a bigger “if” than it might seem. In the arid, isolated Indian Wells Valley, underground aquifers are the only reliable sources of fresh water. To make its trees grow big and strong, Mojave says, it will need almost as much groundwater as the entire Ridgecrest area uses today.

China Lake has grown at a pace faster than that of Conaway’s and other small farmers’ pistachio trees. The naval base now encompasses 1.1 million acres, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. Ridgecrest, home to about 30,000 people, remains a sort of company town for the naval installation, which employs about 10,000 active-duty military, civilians, and contractors. The base contributes $36 million in state and local taxes each year, representing about 90 percent of the town’s economy. In 2019, China Lake said one of its top concerns was encroachment on its groundwater supply, based on a recent assessment of the aquifer’s use, and implied that water shortages could mean the base would have to shut down permanently.

Local officials have taken steps to assuage the Navy. The government of Kern County, where Ridgecrest is located, banned new development of farmland in the valley in 2015, against Stiefvater’s protests. This past September, Ridgecrest announced that, as part of a groundwater sustainability plan set to take effect in January in compliance with state law, all farmers would have to pay costly new fees to pump water from the Indian Wells Valley basin. The idea is to offset the expense of importing sufficient water for the area’s future needs.

Since then, Conaway and other locals have found themselves aligned with Stiefvater in suits against the valley’s groundwater regulator. Small and big farmers alike are pushing for much lower pumping fees. Stiefvater, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is demanding that the sustainability plan be struck down and that the town fork over more than $255 million in damages. “My client has made a huge investment in the valley,” says Anthony Brown, a Mojave hydrological consultant. “Why rush to put him out of business?”

Climate change, comes the answer. Global warming has exacerbated the region’s droughts and their consequences, up to and including the record-breaking wildfires that have become California’s nightmare. In Ridgecrest, rainwater and melting snow aren’t recharging the valley’s aquifer the way they used to, and with the local population growing along with the naval base, thirsty crops such as pistachios make a more noticeable dent in the water supply every year. A state review of the valley rated the aquifer as critically overdrafted and called it one of California’s worst-managed. Ridgecrest’s hydrological consultant, Steve Johnson, estimates that 60 percent of the outflow goes to farming, the most “upside down” he says he’s ever seen.

In California, agricultural interests tend to win the usual battles between long-term community needs and short-term sales targets, but the Navy’s influence has given the Ridgecrest area a fighting chance. Some 18 percent of the state’s water now flows into vineyards, orchards, and fields, giving life to most of America’s pistachios, almonds, avocados, oranges, grapes, tomatoes, and lettuce. The tree nuts have emerged as California’s reigning cash crop, their acreage almost doubling over the past decade as demand has soared. The costs to local water tables are obvious, and perhaps unsustainable. In potentially precedent-setting places like Kern County, the question is whether the stakes are finally high enough to force people to farm less—in some cases, much less.

The success of Conaway’s Sierra Shadows Ranch, pictured here, drew the attention of a Bakersfield pistachio magnate named Rod Stiefvater. In 2011, Stiefvater’s company, Mojave Pistachios LLC, acquired about 1,600 acres near Conaway and planted more than 100,000 trees. Photo by Justin Maxon.

California is a desert disguised as a mass of fertile fields. The state’s vast water transport grid, developed after World War II, brings rainwater and melted snow from the misty northwest to inland farms and parched southern population centers. This is the chief reason California can function as Earth’s fifth-largest economy, the world’s technology capital, and the nation’s most productive farming state. It’s also why, really, the state can function at all.

For that reason, little divides Californians more sharply than water rights. The state receives close to 63 trillion gallons of water a year in rain and snow, the vast majority of it in the north, far from thirsty farms and cities downstate. A century’s worth of legal battles over redirecting that precipitation have yielded, among other things, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carries water far south through often parched farmland. Agricultural interests in the dry south have turned to litigation and hoarding to get more water. The Wonderful Co., which declined to comment for this story, has proven particularly adept at such maneuvers. In the 1990s, the company led a successful effort to privatize the Kern County Water Bank, a massive groundwater reserve. It now controls a majority of the water bank and sells some unused water back to the state at a profit. It’s also consistently repelled environmentalists’ lawsuits seeking wider sharing of the scarce natural resource.

Given how many Californians style themselves as hippies, futurists, or hippie futurists, it’s weird that the state still settles the question of water rights based on who called dibs. Much as it was in frontier times, the first person to access a source of California water receives the right of first refusal on its use forever, a legacy of gold rushes and might-makes-right ranching. America’s other Western states have long since recognized that modern economies require much broader and more secure access to water and regulate their residents’ water rights accordingly.

California began trying to tackle its growing water problems in 2014, just as Stiefvater was planting his pistachio trees and digging his wells in Inyokern. That year, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which for the first time required each county to determine how much groundwater it had, figure out whether that total was rising or falling, and phase in detailed plans to make sure it didn’t run out. In 2021 counties and local water authorities have to begin implementing new groundwater sustainability plans and meet locally determined targets. By 2040, the law says, they must be fully sustainable. Putting the sustainability plans into practice is complicated, because SGMA hasn’t overturned the dibs-based system of groundwater rights.

In Kern County, the site of the highest-profile SGMA lawsuits to date, the job of accounting for the water falls to a board of five publicly elected supervisors. Mick Gleason is the supervisor for District 1, which includes Ridgecrest and much of the Indian Wells Valley. He’s also the chair of the valley’s groundwater authority.

Gleason, like Conaway, is an engineer originally from the East Coast who moved to the area to work at China Lake. Unlike the pistachio farmer, Gleason was a captain in the Navy when he arrived, a fighter pilot who moved to Ridgecrest in 2004 to become the commanding officer of the naval base. He won election as supervisor in 2012, a few years after he retired from the military.

Mick Gleason, a county supervisor and chairman of the valley’s groundwater authority, has drawn the ire of growers, who accuse him of using the water dispute to try to drive out agriculture and strengthen the military. Photo by Justin Maxon.

Gleason has big hands, a big nose, a big presence, and until January to enact the sustainability plan and start getting the valley’s water consumption under control. If not, SGMA stipulates that he’ll have to turn water use over to the state Department of Water Resources, the agency that rated the Indian Wells Valley basin as critically overdrafted. Gleason says the state agency would likely take a more draconian approach than the ban on new agriculture and the pumping fees for farmers. “Their main tool is going to be how many showers I take a week,” he says.

Elected officials and the Navy have both said they’re basing their assessment of the area’s needs on a study of the local aquifer conducted by the Desert Research Institute, the research arm of the University of Nevada at Reno. Neither party has released the institute’s baseline numbers on groundwater reserves. Brown, the Mojave Pistachios consultant, says that based on the published data, he estimates the aquifer holds more than 67 million acre-feet or 21.8 trillion gallons, of which about 2.9 trillion gallons are in shallow, easily reached areas. Gleason doesn’t dispute those figures. He does, however, dispute the conclusion reached by Brown, Stiefvater, and the local farmers that the problem isn’t urgent. The town uses 10.8 billion gallons of water each year and replenishes only 2.5 billion gallons, leaving an 8.3-billion-gallon annual deficit—a paltry amount compared with the area’s vast reserves, they say. “Why rush to start the pumping reductions?” Brown asks. “Why rush with huge fees?”

One reason to rush is that, as it stands now, the town can’t afford to import water into the valley, a key longterm component of its sustainability plan. Such a pipeline will require tens of millions of dollars in funding by 2035, which Gleason calls a “tremendous challenge” and says he hopes the fees will offset.

For the pistachio farmers, who’ve been careful not to pick a fight with the Navy directly, the county supervisor has become the scapegoat. “I take Gleason to talk out of both sides of his mouth,” Conaway says. “I believe his intention is to get rid of farming and to strengthen the Navy any way he can.” In a statement, Stiefvater, too, stressed that his lawsuit against the groundwater authority seeks no relief from the Navy. “It is made necessary by the madness and arrogance of former Navy Base Commander Mick Gleason and his intention to destroy agriculture and specifically us,” Stiefvater said.

Gleason doesn’t seem intimidated by the outcry. One afternoon in October, he listens dispassionately while locals call in to a socially distanced meeting of the groundwater authority and complain about the forthcoming pumping fees, $2,130 per acre-foot (about two-thirds of a penny per gallon). Farming in the valley, he says, will eventually require the groundwater authority to import water from elsewhere, so best to start financing pipeline construction now with fees from the people using most of the water. The farmers say that would drive them out of business.

Tree nuts, like these pistachios from Sierra Shadows Ranch , have emerged as California’s reigning cash crop, their acreage almost doubling over the past decade as demand has soared. The costs to local water tables are obvious, and perhaps unsustainable. Photo by Justin Maxon.

“I hope that you all hear lots and lots of seriously irate comments from all kinds of people in this valley in the coming days and weeks,” says local Mike Neel. “Just know that when you hear it, you’re getting what you deserve.”

Later, in his dull, brown office on China Lake Boulevard— former Navy land—Gleason says he wasn’t swayed by Neel’s argument, but he appreciates the civic engagement. “He’s a concerned citizen,” Gleason says, dressed in a checkered jacket and yellow tie. “I wish all citizens were as concerned as he is.”

The legal disputes under way in the Indian Wells Valley offer an early taste of what might happen throughout California as various local authorities turn SGMA’s broad principles into actionable demands. As one of the U.S.’s farthest-reaching and most aggressive climate-mitigation efforts to date, SGMA also offers a preview of what backlash to a similar national policy might look like.

The water-pumping fees lie at the heart of the lawsuits Stiefvater, Conaway, and others have filed against the groundwater authority, none of which have set court dates yet. If these are proxy fights between the Navy and the Wonderful Co., both parties have stayed pretty quiet so far. Margo Allen, a public-affairs officer at China Lake, says, “The Navy is engaged in consistent, proactive, and cooperative participation” with the local groundwater authority. The company, owned by billionaire couple Stewart and Lynda Resnick, also sells almonds, grapefruit, mandarin oranges, wine, Fiji Water, flowers, pest control products, and its namesake pomegranate juice.

Within Indian Wells Valley, the face of the farming interests is Paul Nugent, a local consultant for Stiefvater who previously spent decades working for a farm credit bank. Toward the end of an October afternoon, he drives through Stiefvater’s pistachio orchards in his white Denali pickup truck, its front license plate framed by a Wonderful Co. decal that reads “Get Crackin’. ”

Out of the truck, Nugent strolls through rows of pistachio trees and black irrigation lines stretching out in every direction, his red-checkered button-down tucked into bluejeans that taper into handsome leather boots. The fields are only now turning out quality harvests. “It takes seven years to get your first decent crop,” he says, touching an unpicked clump of pinkish pistachios as crows flit about. “Love those big old fruiting buds.”

Workers pruning trees in a Mojave Pistachios orchard. Photo by Justin Maxon.

After leaving the orchard, Nugent motors west into the Sierra, up a dirt road to a lookout point above the valley. The ascent takes him past the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which was also once a source of consternation to farmers. At the lookout point, Nugent stops and walks outside into a cool wind. He says SGMA’s 20-year sustainability targets give farmers plenty of time to adapt without having to take stronger measures that put people out of work. “See, it’s a big valley,” he says, gazing out across the vista as the sunset tints his face orange. “There’s a lot of water here.” Below, the landscape is a slate of dull brown with bright patches of pistachio fields that look, from a distance, like great globs of green paint.

Across California, a half-dozen lawsuits similar to the Indian Wells cases are making their way through the courts, and a decision on Ridgecrest’s water could prove a key precedent. Although the farmers have a chance to prevail—water law is notoriously tricky—the Navy’s interest makes their odds look worse. “The farming community in general is very troubled by what it sees in Indian Wells Valley, and people are watching closely,” says Brown, the Stiefvater consultant.

Whatever happens in the valley, California farmers have reason to worry. To comply with SGMA, at least 535,000 acres of irrigated farmland, about 6 percent of the state’s total, will need to stop producing crops by 2040, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank created by Hewlett Packard Co. co-founder Bill Hewlett. At today’s prices, that translates to billions of dollars in lost annual revenue. It’s a considerable challenge that will require farmers and farming communities to rethink how they do business and, likely, grow less.

Conaway and other farmers say they’re worried about today, not 2040. The octogenarian is paunchy and battling kidney cancer. Seated in a small office on his farm, the door left open to a warm breeze, he says that concern about sustainability in the valley is overblown, that the situation is “not as critical as they’re making it out to be,” and that the old dibs-based groundwater laws leave him plenty of room to play hardball. “If they shut me down, I still own the land and I still own the water,” he says. “I will go to heaven or hell and will not sell one goddamn gallon of water to the bastards for the next hundred years.”

That’s a bit of an oversell; the county doesn’t need Conaway to sell them the water, only to make him stop pumping it. But it’s also a reminder that in many communities throughout California, the stakes of the next water wars will probably be even higher than they are in Ridgecrest. After all, this is still very much a company town. As Gleason says in his office, there is no Ridgecrest without China Lake, and he’s betting on a future that puts the base’s water needs first, including any future expansions. “My vision is, by 2035, we have a Navy that is content and growing at the rate that they want to grow,” the county supervisor says. “So the economy of this community is also moving in the same direction as the Navy.” If he prevails in court, it will likely be a community where farming isn’t worth the tax breaks.

CORRECTION: The story has been updated to reflect that 6 percent of the state’s irrigated farmland—not 40 percent—will need to stop producing crops by 2040 to comply with SGMA, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Lead image: Paul Nugent, a local consultant for Mojave Pistachios LLC, looks out of Indian Wells Valley, insisting that growers here have plenty of time to adapt to the shrinking aquifer. But global warming has exacerbated the region’s droughts and their consequences. In Ridgecrest, rainwater and melting snow aren’t recharging the valley’s aquifer the way they used to, and with the local population growing along with the naval base, thirsty crops such as pistachios make a more noticeable dent in the water supply every year.

You made it this far so we know you appreciate our work. FERN is a nonprofit and relies on the generosity of our readers so that we can continue producing incisive reporting like this story. Please consider making a donation to support our work. Thank you.

This article was originally published by Bloomberg Green. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.

This article was supported by The Water Desk at the Center for Environmental Journalism, University of Colorado Boulder.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Drought and dry soils again will diminish Colorado’s spring runoff

By
Aspen Journalism
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Ruedi Reservoir, near the headwaters of the Fryingpan River, was still frozen in early April. Water forecasters are predicting low spring runoff this year, which could affect whether Ruedi fills. Photo by Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

By Heather Sackett

Water forecasting agencies in Colorado have released their April streamflow predictions, confirming what many already knew: Drought and dry soils will diminish rivers this spring.

“The main story of this water supply outlook season is the effect of last year’s drought going into winter,” said Karl Wetlaufer, a hydrologist and assistant supervisor with the Natural Resources Conservation Service Colorado Snow Survey. “We are anticipating significantly lower runoff compared with the snowpack because we entered winter with such dry conditions that the soils are going to have to soak up a ton of moisture before it actually makes it through the system into the river.”

The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center and NRCS both released streamflow forecasts this week for the months of April through July. This is the second year in a row parched soils will rob rivers of their water.

If soils were not so dry, streamflow predictions would track closely with snowpack. But this year, in many areas streamflows are predicted to be down by 15% to 20% compared with the snowpack, and streamflow for all river basins in the state are predicted to be below average.

NRCS relies heavily on data from SNOTEL (short for snow telemetry) sites for its water supply forecasts. These automated sensors collect snow and weather data from remote, mountainous areas around the state. At the beginning of the month, the snow-water equivalent, which is a measure of how much water is contained in the snowpack, was 90% of average for the Colorado River headwaters, which includes the Roaring Fork River basin. Warm weather the first few days of the month had dropped that number to 78% by Wednesday.

According to NRCS models, streamflow for the Roaring Fork River, measured at its confluence with the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs, will be 70% of average. The CBRFC model predicts just 68% of average. Throughout the Colorado headwaters, streamflow predictions range from 57% to 77% of average.

According to CBRFC hydrologist Cody Moser, most river basins in Colorado were in the bottom five driest years for soil moisture going into the winter and some places, like the San Juan River basin in the southwest corner of the state, had record low soil moisture.

“We had poor soil moisture entering the season,” Moser said. “We also have below normal snow, so a lot of things are working against a good runoff season.”

The Lake Powell inflow forecast, at 3.2 million acre-feet, is just 45% of normal and a 2% decrease from the CBRFC March forecast.

The Roaring Fork River (left) joins with the Colorado River in downtown Glenwood Springs. Despite a snowpack that was 90% of average at the beginning of April, streamflow forecasts at this location are only 68-70% of normal. Photo by Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

Another tricky year for Ruedi

Tim Miller, a hydrologist at the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Ruedi Reservoir, said predicting inflow into the reservoir from the Fryingpan River and surrounding tributaries is like “looking out into the crystal ball.”

It’s Miller’s job to release enough water from the reservoir to make room for the inflow. Filling it to capacity — roughly 102,000 acre-feet — requires precision and can be tricky. Last year Miller missed the mark by about 5,000 acre-feet, leaving reservoir levels a bit low. It was because streamflow forecasts didn’t fully account for the spring’s lack of precipitation, warmer-than-normal temperatures and dry soils, he said.

“We were over-forecasting until right at the very end,” Miller said. “It wasn’t until the end of May and early June that we realized we just weren’t going to get that volume. Last year, because of those forecasts, I was releasing quite a bit more water at this time because I was expecting a bigger inflow.”

This year, Miller said he plans on releasing just the minimum needed to meet the instream flow needs of the lower Fryingpan until he knows there will be enough runoff to fill the reservoir. Much of the water stored in Ruedi is either “fish water,” released for the benefit of endangered fish downstream, or contract water, which has been sold by the bureau to cover the costs of building and operating the reservoir. Many different entities and water providers, including Ute Water Conservancy District and the Colorado Water Conservation Board, own some of this contract water.

The reservoir has a decent chance of filling this year, Miller said, but there is another factor that could negatively impact those chances. Ruedi is currently 57% full, down from where it was at this time last year, about 66% full, according to Miller.

“Ruedi is lower starting out than what it would have been starting out last year, so that’s going to be an issue,” Miller said. “There are just a lot of things to juggle.”

The bureau is predicting about 112,000 acre-feet of runoff for the upper Fryingpan River basin this year, but about half that will be taken through the Boustead Tunnel system to the Front Range, Miller said.

The dam at Ruedi Reservoir, seen here in early April. The reservoir is currently 57% full and Bureau of Reclamation officials predict it will be possible to fill this year if they keep releasing just the minimum downstream for now. Photo by Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism

Local effects

So how might low runoff affect local water providers and users? For starters, the city of Aspen is still in Stage 2 drought restrictions, a carry-over from last August. That means restrictions on washing sidewalks and vehicles, and outdoor watering. One of the biggest water uses in Aspen is outdoor watering of lawns and landscaping.

“We are going to do our damnedest to make sure people are responsible,” said Steve Hunter, utilities resource manager with the city of Aspen.

Hunter said he has been talking with other local water managers about creating a valley-wide unified message about the drought, to target residents and visitors alike. The next city drought response committee meeting is April 23.

Despite the bleak streamflow outlook, weather is still a big unknown. Late spring storms and the summer monsoon season — which mostly failed to materialize in 2020 — could begin to turn things around.

“We are just going to be prepared,” Hunter said. “We need to be adaptable. It may get worse, it may get better, it may stay the same.”

Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times. This story ran in the April 9 edition of The Aspen Times.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Denver investment fund raising $5M for water tech startups

By
Fresh Water News
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The Denver skyline reflected in Sloan’s Lake. Photo by Mitch Tobin, The Water Desk

By Jerd Smith 

Can technology save the Colorado River? A growing number of entrepreneurs and investors think so. To that end, the Denver-based Colorado River Basin Fund is raising $5 million to help promising new water technology companies bring their wares to market.

“We want to nurture startups that need access to money,” said Will Sarni, a general partner in the fund. “That’s where we think we can be part of the solution.”

Worldwide dozens of investment funds target water, through stocks in publicly traded utilities and direct investments in existing technology and infrastructure companies, among others. Just like some mutual funds focus on gold stocks or energy stocks, there are funds that focus on water stocks, such as the Invesco S&P Global Water Index.

But Sarni says that the newly formed Colorado River Basin Fund is the first private investment initiative focused on one place, the Colorado River.

The launch of the new investment fund comes as concern over the Colorado River intensifies. The river is mired in a 20-year drought which has caused its flows to decline by more than 16 percent since 2000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Those declines are expected to continue as the climate warms and mountain snow packs shrink.

Lon Johnson, a general partner in the new fund, said it is focused not on profiteering off the sale of water rights, but in finding technical solutions to keep the seven-state Colorado River system viable.

“Often when you think about investment into the West, your mind would go to the exploitive side. How do we profit off this crisis? That is not what this is about,” Johnson said. “What we’re seeking to do is identify the technologies that address scarcity and water quality within the basin. And then help them commercialize and scale.”

Researchers and entrepreneurs are pursuing dozens of technologies that could help the river become more sustainable even as population demands grow and climate change threatens to further reduce flows.

Sarni said the Colorado River Basin Fund will focus largely on satellite and digital technologies that will help farmers use their water more efficiently and help smart homes do the same.

Sarni and Johnson join a growing group of investors and accelerators hoping to speed the creation of new solutions by backing promising startups. Among these is an international initiative called Imagine H20, which has raised more than $500 million to date, according to its website, to help fund new technologies tackling worldwide scarcity and water quality issues.

Closer to home, Denver’s TechStars has partnered with The Nature Conservancy to create a business accelerator for startups focused on sustainability, water and climate change. The Denver Metro Small Business Development Center’s Trout Tank program has a similar mission.

And several young water technology companies are already in the market, including Boss DeFrost, a Denver-based company whose device allows restaurants to dramatically slash the amount of water they use to thaw meat and other foods.

In Montrose there is the Delta Brick and Climate Company, which is dredging reservoirs and using the clay to make bricks. The brick ovens eventually will be fired with methane captured from leaking coal mines. The strategy frees up space in reservoirs, allowing them to store more water. And by removing methane from the atmosphere, the company plans to generate carbon credits that can be sold, generating revenue in addition to that generated from the sale of bricks. Chris Caskey is founder of the three-year-old startup and has won small government grants to fund operations thus far.

He said he’s been frustrated by the traditional investment community, which often requires entrepreneurs to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed capital before it will formally invest, and which can impose aggressive timelines on products to allow investors to cash out quickly.

But Johnson said he and Sarni have years of experience working in the water sector and that they are aware of the challenges.

“We believe traditional ‘tech’ investors aren’t always a natural fit for water entrepreneurs because those investors may have unrealistic expectations for growth and scale, and then ultimately on the investment return,” Johnson said. “The water sector is fragmented, and growth takes time and skill…our investment strategies and how we intend to work with companies after we invest will reflect this.”

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Storage and new water sources to be proposed in Aspen water plan

By
Aspen Journalism
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Aspen Utilities Resource Manager Steve Hunter, left, and Aspen Utilities Director Tyler Christoff stand in the building that houses the infrastructure for the city’s Castle Creek water diversion. A consultant working on the city’s “integrated resource plan” will be recommending that storage and new sources be part of Aspen’s water future. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

By Heather Sackett

A consultant working for the city of Aspen is presenting both new sources and storage as part of its water future.

Denver-based Carollo Engineers is working on Aspen’s Water Integrated Resource Plan, which aims to predict and plan for water needs through 2070.

A main goal of the plan is figuring out how to address what they say are potential future water shortages, especially in late summer under hotter and drier conditions fueled by climate change. Carollo expects to submit a final IRP with recommendations and a plan to implement them in late spring or early summer.

Engineers define a shortage as the inability to meet all water uses — potable, irrigation, goals for instream flow (ISF), and hydropower generation — at the same time. ISF water rights are held by the state of Colorado and set a requirement for minimum flows between specific points on a stream. They are aimed at improving the natural environment to a reasonable degree. The ISF for the creeks that provide Aspen’s municipal water is 14 cubic feet per second on Maroon Creek and 13.3 cfs on Castle Creek.

The city’s consultants calculated future water demands using the variables of population, occupancy rates, climate change, water-use efficiency and unmetered water use. They claim that Aspen’s future water demand for the next 50 years, depending on these variables, could be between 4,900 and 9,300 acre-feet per year, according to a slide show presented at a public engagement meeting March 3.

Consultants say they are planning for the worst and, instead of hoping for the best, making the IRP flexible and adaptable. The factors that, according to the consultants, would contribute to Aspen having 9,300 acre-feet of water demand would include a 3.6 degree (Celsius) increase in temperature due to climate change and an annual population increase of 1.8% by 2070, according to John Rehring, senior project manager and vice president of Carollo Engineers.

This demand forecast already includes conservation measures and drought restrictions, which would decrease indoor use by 2% and outdoor use by 5% to 15% by 2070.

Rehring said that even under stage-three drought restrictions limiting water use, his firm’s projections show future supply gaps.

For the past several years, Aspen’s water demands have hovered between about 4,000 and 5,000 acre-feet per year. A 2016 study by Wilson Water concluded that Aspen did not need any storage, although drought years could cause the creeks to dip below the ISF standard without more water conservation.

Aspen Utilities Director Tyler Christoff stands with an ice-breaking machine at the city’s Castle Creek diversion. With the help of a consultant, the city is exploring other sources of water in addition to Castle and Maroon creeks. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Looking for storage locations

In this month’s earlier public meeting, consultants presented six different portfolios for meeting a potential projected shortage. Five of the six — all except the current status quo — included storage as a component.

The city has identified five potential reservoir sites: the city golf course; the Maroon Creek Club golf course; Cozy Point open space; the Woody Creek gravel pit; and a 63-acre parcel of land next to the gravel pit. Officials believe water could be stored underground at some of these sites.

A map included in the presentation with city officials and Carollo representatives on March 3 included three new possible sites: the Aspen airport, Zoline Open Space and North Star Nature Preserve.

But Aspen Utilities Resource Manager Steve Hunter said it’s highly unlikely the city would pursue water storage at these locations. Hunter said they were included on the map because the consultant used a geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool to pick out large tracts of city-owned land that would be big enough to store water.

“The three are low if not off the list,” he said. “I don’t see the city pursuing any of these three.”

According to Hunter, Zoline is probably too small and the airport too fraught with logistical challenges. North Star is valued for its natural beauty and important riparian habitat, and building city water infrastructure there is something Hunter said won’t happen.

“I don’t ever see it happening in my lifetime due to the pushback they would get,” Hunter said. “I’m almost 100% confident that is not going to fly.”

The pushback to which Hunter is referring would be of the same sort Aspen faced when it attempted to hang onto conditional water rights to build dams and reservoirs in the Castle and Maroon valleys. The Maroon Creek Reservoir would have held 4,567 acre-feet of water and the Castle Creek Reservoir would have held 9,062 acre-feet of water.

After a lengthy water court battle in which 10 entities opposed the city’s plans, the city gave up its water rights, which date to 1965, in those particular locations. The final water court decree in the case granted Aspen the right to store up to 8,500 acre-feet from Castle and Maroon creeks combined.

Now that the Castle and Maroon valleys are out of the question, part of the IRP process is figuring out where the city should store the water granted by those conditional water rights.

Consultants are proposing two different storage pools: seasonal/operational and emergency.

The seasonal/operational pool would be used as a traditional reservoir to retime flows by capturing spring runoff and saving it for use later in the summer, when creek flows have dwindled but demands — especially outdoor watering — are still high.

Emergency storage would be left untouched most years and only tapped if there was a disaster such as a wildfire or a flood that made the city’s water sources temporarily unusable. The two pools could be combined in the same reservoir or stored in two different locations.

The city of Aspen gets most of its potable water through this diversion on Castle Creek. Consultants for the city say both storage and new supplies should be part of Aspen’s water future. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Diversified supply of water encouraged

Consultants are also working toward a recommendation that the city develop additional sources of water in order to protect supply.

The city takes nearly all its water from Castle Creek and some from Maroon Creek, which consultants say makes Aspen vulnerable to drought, wildfire or avalanches. In addition to storage, the portfolio options included combinations of new sources from groundwater wells, tapping the flows of Hunter Creek, reuse of wastewater and enhanced conservation measures.

“We see strength in diversity, when we diversify the supply sources,” Rehring said.

Each of the six portfolios were ranked based on six criteria: supply availability; supply resilience; community and environmental benefits; affordability; ease of implementation; and ease of operations. (Supply availability is the most important of these.) Portfolio 6 — which includes storage, groundwater wells, enhanced conservation and reuse, in addition to current supplies from Castle and Maroon creeks — scored the highest.

The portfolios did not include an “everything but storage” option; storage was a part of all the portfolios except for the “do nothing” option. Rehring said storage is an effective way of helping the city use its current sources of Castle and Maroon creeks and avoid or defer bringing another water source online as quickly.

Hunter said he sees conservation, wells and reuse leading the charge on the front end, but he adds that the city will also use storage.

“Yes, storage will be a component,” he said. “It’s a phased approach — we don’t need to go out and put in … a 2,500 acre-foot reservoir and fill it up tomorrow.”

Aspen’s Leonard Thomas Reservoir, which feeds the city’s treatment plant, holds about 10 acre-feet of water. The city is exploring other locations where it could store water as part of the development of a water integrated resource plan. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Stakeholder input

In addition to holding three public-engagement sessions on the IRP, the city also formed a technical working group — with representatives from Pitkin County, the Bureau of Reclamation, Western Resource Advocates, Aspen Global Change Institute, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and other entities — to provide input.

Laura Belanger, a senior water-resources engineer and policy adviser with Western Resource Advocates and a member of the technical working group, said the city is doing a good job getting input from stakeholders, including those who have been opposed to some of Aspen’s water plans in the past. WRA was one of the 10 opposing parties in the city’s conditional water-rights case.

Belanger said it’s encouraging that the city is considering enhanced conservation and reuse as part of the IRP.

“I think we actually like the way the city is approaching this,” Belanger said.

Aspen Journalism covers rivers and water in collaboration with The Aspen Times. This story ran in the March 20 edition of The Aspen Times.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

California weighs changes for new water rights permits in response to a warmer and drier climate

By
Western Water
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The American River in Sacramento in 2014 shows the effects of the 2012-2016 drought. Climate change is expected to result in more frequent and intense droughts and floods. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)

By Gary Pitzer

As California’s seasons become warmer and drier, state officials are pondering whether the water rights permitting system needs revising to better reflect the reality of climate change’s effect on the timing and volume of the state’s water supply.

A report by the State Water Resources Control Board recommends that new water rights permits be tailored to California’s increasingly volatile hydrology and be adaptable enough to ensure water exists to meet an applicant’s demand. And it warns that the increasingly whiplash nature of California’s changing climate could require existing rights holders to curtail diversions more often and in more watersheds — or open opportunities to grab more water in climate-induced floods.

“California’s climate is changing rapidly, and historic data are no longer a reliable guide to future conditions,” according to the report, Recommendations for an Effective Water Rights Response to Climate Change. “The uncertainty lies only in the magnitude of warming, but not in whether warming will occur.”

The report says climate change will bring increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as atmospheric rivers and drought, prolonged fire seasons with larger fires, heat waves, floods, rising sea level and storm surges. Already, the state is experiencing a second consecutive dry year, prompting worries about drought. “The wet season will bring wetter conditions during a shorter period, whereas the dry season will become longer and drier,” the report said.

The State Water Board report catalogues 12 recommendations — inserting climate-change data into new permits, expanding the stream-gauge network to improve data and refining the means to manage existing water rights to ensure sufficient water is available to meet existing demands. At the same time, the report says, the State Water Board should build on its existing efforts to allow diverters to capture climate-driven flood flows for underground storage.

Because floods and the magnitude of the peak flows are expected to increase under many climate change projections, “there may be greater opportunity to divert flood and high flows during the winter to underground storage,” the report said. The State Water Board could build on the flood planning data used by the Department of Water Resources to help inform water availability analyses and to spell out conditions for the resulting water right permits for floodwater capture.

“Water rights can either be something that helps us adapt and create resiliency … or it can really hinder us.”
~Joaquin Esquivel, State Water Resources Control Board Chair

“The recommendations are a menu of options,” said Jelena Hartman, senior environmental scientist with the State Water Board and chief author of the report. The goal, she said, was to “clearly communicate what the water rights issues are and what we can do.”

The result of a 2017 State Water Board resolution detailing its comprehensive response to climate change, the report could be the first step toward a retooled permitting system for new water rights applications. (The Board has averaged about a dozen newly issued permits per year, mostly for small diverters, since 2010.) The State Water Board is seeking public comments on the report through March 31.

And while the report does not call for reopening existing permits, it does sound a warning for those permit holders: With droughts projected to become longer and more severe, the State Water Board may need to curtail water diversions more often and in more watersheds.

Time to ‘reset expectations’?

During a March 18 webinar on the report, Erik Ekdahl, the State Water Board’s deputy director for the Division of Water Rights, said it may be time to “reset expectations” regarding curtailments for water use permits, given that curtailments have only been implemented by the state in 1976-1977 and 2014-2015.

“That’s not an overuse of curtailments,” he said. “If anything, it’s an underuse. We may need to look at curtailment more frequently.”

Climate change is expected to move the snow line in Sierra Nevada watersheds higher, which will likely change the timing and volume of winter and spring runoff. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)

Some water users fear the report could be the beginning of a move to restrict their access.

“To the extent climate change is incorporated into water rights administration, it should be to respond to a changing hydrology in a manner that is protective of existing users … and not to turn back the clock on water rights or to service new ambitions for instream flows that aren’t in the law,” said Chris Scheuring, senior counsel with the California Farm Bureau Federation.

The report notes that many of California’s existing water rights are based on stream gauge data drawn during a relatively wet period (since about 1955). Although California has had some of its most severe droughts on record since the 1970s, annual flow on many streams is highly variable due to California’s Mediterranean climate. Fluctuations in year-to-year precipitation are greater than any state in the nation, ranging from as little as 50 percent to more than 200 percent of long-term averages.

If climate conditions swing drier overall, the report says, it will be difficult for those existing water right holders to divert their permitted volume. Expanding the network of stream and precipitation gauges will be critical, the report says, to improving the accuracy of water availability analyses.

Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board. (Source: State Water Resources Control Board)

But the report’s focus is on new water rights applicants and the need to weave climate change data into their permits to provide a clear description of projected water availability. “We take the long view in asking if there is sufficient water available for a new appropriation,” Hartman said.

State Water Board leaders said the water rights response is part of the umbrella of actions needed to confront climate change.

“Water rights can either be something that helps us adapt and create resiliency … or it can really hinder us,” Chair Joaquin Esquivel said at the Board’s Feb. 16 meeting where the report was presented.

Writing climate change into new permits

The fingerprints of climate change are increasingly evident in California’s seasonal weather. Extreme conditions are on the upswing. Peak runoff, which fuels the state’s water supply, has shifted a month earlier during the 20th century. The four years between 2014 and 2017 were especially warm, with 2014 the warmest on record. Annual average temperatures in California are projected to rise significantly by the end of the century.

“We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change,” said Amanda Montgomery, environmental program manager with the State Water Board. The continuous warming creates an “unambiguous trend” toward less snow, she said, and shifts in snowpack and runoff are relevant for water management and water rights.

Jennifer Harder, a professor at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and an expert on water rights law. (Source: McGeorge School of Law)

Jennifer Harder, a water rights expert who teaches at the University of Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, said integrating climate change considerations into water rights permits is good policy that aligns with the State Water Board’s mission of ensuring the highest and most beneficial use of water.

“It’s beyond dispute that the changes in precipitation and temperature patterns resulting from climate change will affect water availability,” she said.

Kimberly Burr, a Sonoma County environmental attorney and member of the North Coast Stream Flow Coalition, told the State Water Board at the Feb. 16 meeting that knowledge about the effects of climate change on water is sufficient enough to be incorporated into new water rights permits. It’s an important issue, she said, because the state must ensure adequate flows exist to protect endangered species, vulnerable communities and public needs under the public trust doctrine.

“There is a finite amount of water and we have to prepare for the worst and move forward with great caution,” she said.

A challenging water rights system

Water rights in California are based on a permitting system that includes several specifics, such as season and point of diversion and who can continue taking water when there is not enough to supply all needs. Getting a water right permit can take from several months for a temporary permit to several years for a permanent right.

In deciding whether to issue permits, the State Water Board considers the features and needs of the proposed project, all existing and pending rights, and the necessary instream flows to meet water quality standards and protect fish and wildlife.

The priority of a water right is particularly important during a drought, when some water right holders may be required to stop diverting water according to the priority of their water right. Suspension of right is done through curtailments of the user’s ability to divert water.

If the State Water Board implemented the recommendations in the water rights and climate change report, critics say, it would add another component in a system that aims to meet the demand for additional water. Already, local groundwater agencies are lining up to get access to available water sources for aquifer recharge and groundwater banking so they can comply with the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.

Dorene D’Adamo, a member of the State Water Resources Control Board. (Source: State Water Resources Control Board)

Some question whether putting the report’s recommendations into action would possibly hinder the permitting process.

“The concern I have is we have quite a big backlog already and it’s already challenging to get through the system,” said State Water Board Vice Chair Dorene D’Adamo, who serves as its agriculture member. “How do we incorporate all of this and still be nimble and move with deliberate speed?”

Incorporating a climate change response into new water rights permits would be complicated, but necessary, State Water Board member Tam Doduc said.

Striving for complete data

Adding climate change data to water rights permits applications is problematic because of questions about the precision of existing data and the degree to which it can be localized.

A State Water Board report on adapting water rights permits to address climate change impacts says the state needs to improve its system of stream and precipitation gauges to better track climate change impacts on water availability. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)

“Current climate change models have disparate findings, and many are calibrated for a global scale but not regional areas,” Lauren Bernadett, regulatory advocate with the Association of California Water Agencies, told the Board. “The recommendations insert significant uncertainty for any person or agency applying for a permit.”

Harder, the law professor, said good data is critical for determining water availability, but perfect data to achieve absolute certainty is unattainable. “There are many different facets of water management and it requires us to give careful thought into how we make decisions in the face of the data we have, knowing it will never be perfect and always be changing” she said.

Better streamflow data is crucial to knowing whether the water exists to support new permits. The report notes that the low number of gauges, particularly on the smaller stream systems in California, means there is often not enough information to accurately characterize hydrologic variability over years or decades. That significantly limits the ability to reliably estimate water availability.

The report says the state may need to rethink how it estimates water availability. It added that one way to improve accuracy may be temporary installation of portable stream gauges at requested diversion points.

Moving from theoretical to practical

Addressing how to respond to climate change in water rights permitting would be a substantial undertaking, particularly given the existing array of complex and controversial matters on the State Water Board’s agenda.

“We don’t have all the details yet and this won’t be an easy task. Too often we focus on our water quality activities because water rights are too difficult.”
~Tam Doduc, State Water Board member

“We don’t have all the details yet and this won’t be an easy task,” Doduc said. “Too often we focus on our water quality activities because water rights are too difficult.”

Said Esquivel: “There is a lot of work to be done and it can seem overwhelming. But there is a lot of great groundwork and a commitment to making sure the water rights system is going to adapt and be here for us when we need it most.”

The State Water Board already has broad authority under existing law to take on climate change in water rights permits should it decide to do so, said Harder, with McGeorge Law School.

“What the board is trying to do,” she said, “is snap those tools together in a new way and polish up the edges.”

However the issue proceeds, Harder said, the state should recognize that water resources are best understood by the local agencies that have the most pertinent information about them.

“We need to approach this as a partnership as opposed to looking at it through the lens of … state power vs. local power,” she said. “There is an important role for both here.”

Reach Gary Pitzer: gpitzer@watereducation.org, Twitter: @GaryPitzer
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The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Forest Service approves test drilling for Whitney Reservoir site

By
Aspen Journalism
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These wetlands, located on a 150-acre parcel in the Homestake Creek valley that Homestake Partners bought in 2018, would be inundated if Whitney Reservoir is constructed. The Forest Service received more than 500 comments, the majority in opposition to, test drilling associated with the project and the reservoir project itself. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

By Heather Sackett

The U.S. Forest Service on Monday approved an application from the cities of Aurora and Colorado Springs for geotechnical drilling in the Homestake Valley, one of the first steps toward building a new dam and reservoir on Homestake Creek.

The approval allows the cities, operating together as Homestake Partners, to drill 10 bore samples up to 150 feet deep and for crews on the ground to collect geophysical data. The goal of the work, which is expected to begin in late summer and last 50 to 60 days, is a “fatal flaw” feasibility study to determine whether the soil and bedrock could support a dam and reservoir.

The project, known as Whitney Reservoir, would be located near the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, which is six miles south of Red Cliff. Various configurations of the project show it holding between 6,850 and 20,000 acre-feet of water. The area is home to a rare kind of groundwater-fed wetland with peat soils known as a fen.

Eagle-Holy Cross District Ranger Leanne Veldhuis approved the project despite receiving a total of 775 comments on the drilling proposal during the scoping period. According to the public scoping comment summary, the most common topics commenters had concerns about included the potential loss of wilderness, the destruction of fens and wetlands, impacts to water quality and disturbance to wildlife.

But just 80 letters — about 10% — were individual comments that the Forest Service considered substantive and specific to the geotechnical investigation. Most comments were form-letter templates from organizations such as Carbondale-based conservation group Wilderness Workshop or pertained to concerns about the Whitney Reservoir project as a whole, not the geotechnical drilling.

“A lot of the public comments were pertaining to a reservoir, and the proposal is not for a reservoir; it’s for just those 10 geotechnical bore holes,” Veldhuis said.

Many commenters also said the level of analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act wasn’t appropriate and questioned why the proposal was granted a categorical exclusion, rather than undergoing the more rigorous Environmental Analysis typical of big projects on Forest Service land. Veldhuis said the geotechnical investigation, a common occurrence on public lands, didn’t rise to the level of an EA; that could come later with any reservoir proposal.

“If the future holds any additional sort of proposal, then that would trigger a brand-new analysis with additional rounds of public comments,” she said. “Any future proposals for anything more would undergo an even bigger environmental analysis than this underwent.”

Homestake Creek flows from Homestake Reservoir near Red Cliff. Front Range municipalities are proposing a new reservoir downstream from here that would send more water under the Continental Divide. Credit: Bethany Blitz/Aspen Journalism

Whitney Reservoir

The proposed Whitney Reservoir would pump water from lower Homestake Creek back to Homestake Reservoir, about five miles upstream. Then it would go through a tunnel under the Continental Divide to Turquoise Reservoir, near Leadville, and then to the cities of Aurora and Colorado Springs. The idea of expanding the intrastate plumbing system to take more water from the headwaters of the Colorado River over to thirsty and growing Front Range cities doesn’t sit well with many people and organizations.

Wilderness Workshop issued a news release saying it would oppose the reservoir project every step of the way. The organization also launched an online petition Monday to rally opposers, which had already garnered more than 200 signatures as of Monday evening.

“We would like to see the Forest Service change course,” said Juli Slivka, Wilderness Workshop’s conservation director. The decision was discouraging, she said, but Wilderness Workshop will continue pressuring the federal agency. “The idea of moving water from the Western Slope to the Front Range is not very appreciated out here.”

A map from Colorado Springs Utilities that shows how tunnels could bring water to Whitney Reservoir from Fall and Peterson creeks, and from the Eagle River. The map also shows the route of a pipeline to pump water from Whitney Reservoir to Homestake Reservoir. Credit: Colorado Springs Utilities

Eagle River MOU

But Front Range municipalities are not the only ones set to benefit from a new water-storage project. The Eagle River Memorandum of Understanding lays out a plan for both Front Range and Western Slope entities to develop water in the upper Eagle River basin. The agreement, signed in 1998, provides 20,000 acre-feet of water a year to Homestake Partners and 10,000 acre-feet a year to the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority and Vail Resorts, known collectively in the MOU as the “Reservoir Company.”

The Reservoir Company is not an applicant in the drilling proposal and none of the Western Slope entities that are parties to the MOU submitted comments on the drilling proposal.

Diane Johnson, communications and public affairs manager for the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, said the water provider supports Homestake Partners’ right to pursue an application for their water.

“We trust the permitting process to bring all impacts and benefits to light for the community to consider and weigh in total,” Johnson said in an email.

The Forest Service also determined that impacts to wetlands from the drilling are negligible. Homestake Partners plans to place temporary mats across wetland areas to protect vegetation and soils from the people and machinery crossing Homestake Creek. In a June letter, a representative from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the work did not require a permit from that agency.

The Forest Service also conducted a biological assessment and found that the drilling would not impact endangered Canada lynx.

This story ran in the March 23 edition of The Vail Daily and The Aspen Times.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Despite blizzard, Colorado’s critical mountain snowpack shrinks

By
Fresh Water News
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Snow covers cars in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood March 14, 2021. Credit: Jayla Poppleton

By Jerd Smith

Despite the recent history-making blizzard on Colorado’s Front Range, statewide snowpack sits at 92 percent of average as of March 19, down from 105 percent of average at the end of February, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Just two river basins, the Arkansas and the Rio Grande, are registering above average at 101 percent and 106 percent respectively. Among the driest are the Gunnison Basin, at 86 percent of average, and the San Juan/Dolores, at 83 percent, both in the southwestern part of the state.

“The snowpack numbers are still below normal though they don’t look that bad,” said Peter Goble, a specialist with the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University. “But based on how dry soils were to start this accumulation season, we’re still pretty nervous about what water availability is going to look like.”

Those numbers are hard to believe for some, given that nearly 30 inches of snow fell in and around Denver the weekend of March 13, with some portions of the foothills and higher receiving more than three feet of snow. It is considered the fourth-largest storm in Denver’s history.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the entire state remains mired in drought, with nearly half classified as being extremely or exceptionally dry, the most dangerous categories.

Mountain snowpack is watched closely in Colorado and other Western states because as it melts, it fills rivers and reservoirs to supply the state’s cities, farms and industries with water for the coming year.

Thanks to 2020’s severe drought, in November, for only the second time in its history, the Colorado Water Conservation Board activated its municipal emergency drought response plan in an effort to help cities cope with the dry conditions.

As part of that effort some 14 metro area cities have agreed to coordinate how they inform community members of potential drought restrictions.

“The biggest thing is we don’t want to be counter-messaging anybody,” said Greg Baker, spokesperson for Aurora Water. Aurora is one of the members of the new drought coordination group. “Towns that have robust storage like Denver and Aurora may not need restrictions. But there are about 50 water utilities across the Front Range.”

Those that don’t have hefty storage systems might have to declare drought emergencies, as many did in 2012 and 2013, Baker said.

And when, for instance, major TV stations broadcast that there are no restrictions in Denver or Aurora, it makes it difficult for communities that have to impose limits to help customers understand the vast differences in drought response, he said.

How this year will play out isn’t clear yet, Baker said. Aurora’s reservoirs are at 63 percent of capacity, the low end of normal. Aurora draws its water from the mountains in the Arkansas, Colorado and South Platte river basins.

“A lot of customers forget that we may have had some good snow down here but that is not where we collect our water. It happens up in the mountains,” Baker said.

Even as mountain snows approach the average mark, soils remain dry and therefore capable of absorbing much of the snow that will melt in the spring.

“We’re getting reports that soil moisture is 10 inches below normal,” Baker said. “Will runoff be sucked up? We don’t know.”

Of particular concern to hydrologists and water watchers across Colorado is the forecast for the seven-state Colorado River Basin. The river begins high in Rocky Mountain National Park and, together with tributaries in Colorado like the Gunnison, Yampa, and Dolores rivers, it supplies all of the state’s Western Slope’s water as well as roughly half of the water for Front Range cities and tens of thousands of acres of farms in the Eastern Plains.

As it flows south and west, the river supplies not only Colorado but also Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, a region known as the Upper Basin, and Nevada, Arizona and California, known as the Lower Basin. It also supplies Mexico.

The basin has two major storage reservoirs in the U.S. and they are filled almost entirely from the mountain snows generated in the Upper Basin. The forecast for the basin remains grim, with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimating that Lake Powell will see inflows of just 47 percent of average as of March 3, the most recent data available.

According to Reclamation, the last half of 2020 was one of the driest periods on record in the Colorado River Basin, and closely resembles the deep droughts of 2002, 2012, 2013 and early 2018. These are, according to the March 3 report, four out of the five driest years on record.

Levels in Powell and Mead are likely to drop low enough this year to trigger additional cuts in water deliveries to Lower Basin states. The recent blizzard in Colorado, because it did not benefit Colorado’s Western Slope and the headwaters of the river as much as it did the Eastern Slope, aren’t likely to change that, according to Reclamation.

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Colorado, USDA double down on soil, water conservation with $5M program

By
Fresh Water News
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Farming in Larimer County, Colorado. Photo by Adobe Stock.

By Sarah Kuta

When he first started farming in 1987, Curtis Sayles went through a new pair of cowboy work boots every year.

These days, he’s still wearing a pair he bought three years ago.

The difference? Sayles stopped using harsh fertilizers on his fields that ate through the leather of his boots. Sayles, a fourth-generation farmer with 6,000 acres near Seibert in eastern Colorado, now practices regenerative agriculture, a multi-faceted style of farming that advocates say has a host of benefits, including improved water efficiency, water quality and profitability.

Above all else, regenerative agriculture can help restore healthy, fertile soils — working with nature, instead of against it.

“I’m really tired of fighting nature — because she always wins. That’s her ace in the hole,” said Sayles, 64.

Farmers like Sayles — and those who want to get started with regenerative agricultural practices but could use some support — are getting a boost thanks to a renewed partnership between federal and state agencies.

In October, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Colorado State Conservation Board entered a five-year, $5 million agreement to help support regenerative agriculture, soil health, water conservation and urban farms.

The agreement itself is new, but is the result of a long-standing partnership between the two agencies, which have entered into similar agreements every five years for the last 15 or so years, according to Clint Evans, Colorado state conservationist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The most recent agreement provides funding for 25 existing conservation positions across Colorado. More specifically, the agreement funds district conservation technicians in some of Colorado’s 76 conservation districts, which date back to 1937 and represent private landowners’ interests in conservation-related work such as water quality, energy efficiency and habitat improvement.

District conservation technicians, which often work out of the USDA’s local service centers and collaborate with federal staffers, provide expertise to help farmers and ranchers address an array of questions or concerns ranging from water and wind erosion to irrigation distribution.

Under the agreement, federal dollars provide 75 percent of funding for those positions, while the remaining 25 percent is split between the state and local conservation districts, Evans said.

The agreement also provides funding for up to six new positions: five positions to support the state’s new effort to focus on soil health and one to support urban farmers with conservation practices.

The Colorado Department of Agriculture launched its new Soil Health Initiative in 2020, with an overarching goal of helping farmers and ranchers boost their land’s productivity and drought resiliency by improving soil health. Other soil health initiatives are also underway in Colorado, led by groups like the Colorado Collaborative for Healthy Soils and Farmers Advancing Regenerative Management Systems (FARMS).

Regenerative agriculture, which prioritizes soil health, has garnered renewed interest over the last 10 or so years as farmers and ranchers grapple with challenges like variable crop prices, climate change and increasing expenses, Evans said. Soil health also appeared throughout the 2018 farm bill, the federal legislation that encompasses a wide swath of agriculture-related issues and programs.

“A lot of producers have started looking at soil health as a way that, over the long term, can help improve their overall sustainability and resources on their farm or ranch and help them become more profitable,” Evans said.

Some of the most common tenets of improving soil health are minimizing soil disturbance while maximizing soil cover, biodiversity, and the presence of living roots. In practice, this means farmers stop tilling the land, or greatly reduce tilling, plant cover crops, grow a strategic rotation of diverse crops, add mulch, and introduce grazing livestock.

Performed together over several years, these practices can lead to rich, productive soil that naturally retains moisture, produces nutrient-rich crops, and staves off weeds and pests without the need for as many added chemicals. By reducing the use of energy, resources and chemicals, these practices also save farmers and ranchers time and money in the long run, Evans said.

According to the USDA, healthy soil practices can help reduce evaporation rates, while healthy soil itself can hold more available water, two outcomes that are especially helpful during drought. What’s more, reducing the use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides helps protect groundwater from chemical leaching. Healthy soil practices also reduce runoff and erosion, which keeps sediment out of lakes, rivers and streams.

Since they’re not tilling the land, farmers can make fewer trips using farm machinery, which leads to lower emissions and improved air quality. Healthy soil also sequesters carbon.

“Soil health could be the baseline to healthy forests, healthy rangelands, healthy croplands,” Evans said. “All across agricultural lands, it could really be the foundation for drought resiliency and higher productivity even as climate and rainfall cycles change.”

Many of these soil health benefits also help support the goals outlined in the Colorado Water Plan, a comprehensive vision for the state’s water future created in 2015, and the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap, the state’s plan for reducing pollution and transitioning to clean energy.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board, which administers the water plan, worked with the Colorado Department of Agriculture to help develop the new soil health initiative to address water management issues across the state and help make progress on the water plan’s objectives, according to Sara Leonard, a spokesperson for the CWCB.

Now, the CWCB is actively promoting soil health as a water conservation tool. For example, the board recently awarded a Colorado Water Plan grant to San Miguel County to study expanding its Payment for Ecosystem Services program, which gives landowners incentives for adopting practices that improve soil health, water conservation, and other ecological goals.

“The water plan identifies soil health practices such as conservation tillage and mulching as promising practices to conserve water while providing other important co-benefits such as water quality enhancement, creating wildlife habitat and improving a producer’s bottom line,” Leonard said. “In particular, soil health practices show potential in enhancing resiliency to drought and reducing pressure on groundwater supplies by improving water-holding capacity and reducing evaporative losses.”

Sarah Kuta is a freelance writer based in Longmont, Colorado. She can be reached at sarahkuta@gmail.com.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

State proposes a new paradigm for Yampa River

By
Aspen Journalism
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The gauging station in the Yampa River near Maybell has documented declined flows in the last century that have led to a state proposal to designate the river as over-appropriated. The designation, if approved, will affect permits for some new wells in the basin. Credit: Allen Best/Aspen Journalism

By Allen Best

Colorado water officials are considering whether to designate the increasingly stressed Yampa River from Steamboat Springs downstream to near its entrance into Dinosaur National Monument as over-appropriated.

If approved by the state water engineer, the designation would require augmentation plans for larger-volume wells along the river from Steamboat to Lilly Park, where the Little Snake River flows into the Yampa.

Augmentation plans document how the water used will be replaced to satisfy senior water rights. Such water is typically delivered from upstream reservoirs, both large and small.

The proposal comes amid growing evidence that the Yampa River can no longer deliver water to all users all the time as they wish. There have been two “calls” on the river in the past three years, limiting diversions of users with later — or junior — diversion decrees until those of older or more senior decrees are satisfied.

The changed hydrology of the river can best be understood at the gauging station along U.S. Highway 40 near Maybell. There, according to Division 6 Engineer Erin Light, annual flows a century ago of 1.5 million acre-feet annually have declined to 1.1 million acre-feet annually. The gauge during one year in the past decade recorded only 500,000 acre-feet.

Light is proposing the over-appropriation designation. When the comment period will begin and how long it will extend has not been determined.

“An existing water right is not going to be injured by this over-appropriation designation,” Light said on a video conference meeting Monday evening with more than 100 viewers. “They would be protected.”

Colorado law considers all groundwater to be tributary to the stream system unless proven otherwise. As Light recently explained to the Yampa/White/Green Basin Roundtable, when a stream system is over-appropriated, drawing water from a well can deplete the stream during times when the water in the stream is insufficient to satisfy all decreed water rights.

The Yampa River famously long had sufficient flows such that it lacked the close supervision of many of the state’s rivers, including all of those on the east slope.

“If you look at the South Platte, the Rio Grande and the Arkansas, these are basins where the surface water was over-appropriated 100-plus years ago,” said Kevin Rein, the state engineer. He will be making the decision whether to approve Light’s recommendation.

Only a few of Colorado’s rivers, mostly on the flanks of the San Juan Mountains, remain free of restrictions that require augmentation plans for wells along rivers as are now proposed for the Yampa.

Regulation of large-capacity wells began in Colorado during the 1960s. The laws were adopted in response to conflicts in the South Platte River Valley between farmers diverting water directly from the river and those drilling wells. State legislators clarified the legal rights of each. The key breakthrough was acceptance that groundwater was, in many cases, part of the same water system as the surface flows.

In the Yampa River valley, this designation would primarily impact new residential wells located on lots less than 35 acres and wells used for purposes other than domestic uses.

Permits for new wells located on lots of less than 35 acres in existing subdivisions may be issued for in-house use. If the well serves additional purposes, such as for livestock watering or a pond that intercepts groundwater on a lot less than 35 acres, then an augmentation plan must be in place before a well permit will be issued.

Well permits may be issued for as many as three single-family dwellings, irrigation of as much as 1 acre of lawn and garden, and for watering of domestic animals, on lots greater than 35 acres.

Based on her experience after designations of the Elk River and the Yampa River upstream of Steamboat Springs in the past decade, Light expects to see no major impacts.

“I have just not seen a tremendous impact on people because of this designation,” she said.

Stagecoach Reservoir, near Oak Creek, has several thousand acre-feet of its 36,000 acre-feet of storage capacity available for augmentation. YamColo, a smaller reservoir located on the Bear River, upstream from Yampa, has lesser quantities available. Both are administered by the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, whose boundary goes to but does not include Craig.

How much augmentation water will be needed from upstream reservoirs will depend upon the use, explained Holly Kirkpatrick, external affairs manager for the district. Does the well provide for livestock water, for example, and if so how many animals?

The conservancy district has enough water in the two reservoirs, especially Stagecoach, to provide for all needs, at least in the near term.

“Individual augmentation plans are of very small magnitude,” said Andy Rossi, general manager. “We might be talking about less than one acre-foot up to three acre-feet” (annually), he said of augmentation plans for new wells.

Traditional agriculture water users would normally seek storage rights in the reservoirs for larger volumes.

An angler in the Yampa River in Steamboat Springs in early March 2020. Designating part of the Yampa River as over-appropriated would require some water users with wells to have an augmentation plan. Credit: Allen Best/Aspen Journalism

New paradigm

It will still be possible to file for new water rights in the Yampa subject to Colorado’s first-in-time, first-in-right pecking order. But the proposal signals a new paradigm for the full Yampa River Basin.

“It should be a clear indicator to those individuals establishing a new appropriation that water may not be available all of the time every year to meet their water needs,” Light said.

One of the key water rights in determining water use upstream are those at Lilly Park.

Twice in the past three years those rights have triggered “calls” on the Yampa River upstream, causing Light, as the water engineer, to require more junior users upstream to end their diversions. That same call could have been made in 2002, but the owner of the water rights at Lilly Park recently confided to Light that he didn’t want to cause the problems upstream in that notoriously dry year.

Enlargement of Elkhead Reservoir, near Hayden, has also allowed more water to be delivered downstream, forestalling the need for the designation of over-appropriation.

The Yampa River upstream of Steamboat Springs and many of its tributaries were previously designated as over-appropriated after a water decree for a recreational in-channel diversion for the kayak park in Steamboat Springs was granted in 2006.

For Steamboat Springs, one consequence was the need to create an augmentation plan for the wells along the Yampa River supplying its water treatment plant. The water from Stagecoach will be needed only if the river downstream is on call, meaning that Steamboat’s water diversions must be curtailed to meet needs of senior users.

Will the over-appropriation designation downstream of Steamboat impact the city’s water supplies?

“No, not that I’m aware of,” said Kelley Romero-Heaney, the city’s water resources manager.

The designation of over-appropriation “just means there’s more accountability” to ensure that new diversions don’t injure existing water users and water-right holders, Romero-Heaney said.

The state also designated the Elk River, north of Steamboat, as over-appropriated Jan. 1, 2011, just a few months after the first call. Water is available from Steamboat Lake for augmentation.

Small reservoirs have also been constructed to deliver augmentation water in the Elk River basin. Small augmentation reservoirs may be needed for new development downstream from Craig, such as for new rural subdivisions.

Light, in recommending the over-appropriation designation, identified no single trigger.

There were the two calls, critical low-flows in other years, and the increasing importance of juggling reservoir releases. She said the most important signal of a new era came in 2018, when the first call was placed on the river.

“I think you could make a good case of climate change and different ecological conditions,” said Rossi. Snowfall remains highly variable, but runoff has consistently arrived earlier followed by more intense heat and, perhaps, a later arrival of winter.

Soil moisture may also be a factor. If soils are dry going into winter, they’ll soak up more of the runoff.

“Start the season with dry soils, and that is the first bucket that needs to be filled when the snow starts melting,” Becky Bolinger, the assistant state climatologist for Colorado, explained last week in The Washington Post.

These changes were evident in 2020. Winter snows were healthy and the snow water equivalent, or the amount of water in the snow once it has melted, was 116% of median. Then came spring, early and warm. By June, the snow-water equivalent of the remaining snowpack had dropped to 69%.

Then came summer, hot and mostly absent rain. August broke records for both the hottest and driest summer month on the 130-year record. This combination of heat and lack of precipitation actually made 2020 worse than the other notorious drought years of recent memory: 2002, 2012 and 2018, according to Romero-Heaney

Designation of over-appropriation, however, would not forecast the climate in the Yampa Valley, cautioned Rein.

“It just recognizes what has been happening recently,” he said.

Climate change has started playing a significant role in declining river flows and falling reservoir levels in the Colorado River basin. These declines have led to concerns in Colorado during the last 20 years that requirements of the compact governing the Colorado River and its tributaries in the seven basin states could force curtailment of water use within Colorado.

From his perspective in Denver, Rein sees the proposed designation on the Yampa being neutral. All groundwater is already considered tributary to the river and hence should have no additional impact on compact compliance matters.

Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with the Steamboat Pilot & Today and other Swift Communications newspapers. This story ran in the March 10 edition of the Steamboat Pilot & Today.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Your favorite fishing stream may be at high risk from climate change – here’s how to tell

By
The Conversation US
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Stream temperature affects the survival of fish like salmon and trout. Peter Adams/Avalon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

By Danielle Hare, University of Connecticut

Many of the streams that people count on for fishing, water and recreation are getting warmer as global temperatures rise. But they aren’t all heating up in the same way.

If communities can figure out where these streams will warm the most, they can plan for the future. That has been difficult to predict in the past, but a new method involving temperature patterns may make it easier.

People have widely assumed that streams fed by substantial amounts of groundwater are more resistant to climate change than those fed mostly by snowmelt or rain. It turns out that this groundwater buffering effect varies quite a bit. The depth of the groundwater affects the stream temperature response to warming, which in turn affects the habitats of fish and other wildlife and plants.

In a study published March 4 in the journal Nature Communications, my colleagues and I describe a simple, inexpensive method that allows communities to look at the temperature history of a stream compared to local air temperature to gauge the depth of the groundwater feeding into it and, from there, assess its risk as the climate changes.

Why temperature matters

While a few degrees of temperature change may not seem like much, the majority of animals living in streams and rivers cannot regulate their own body temperatures, so they move around in the environment to find suitable habitats. Many have adapted over time to a narrow range of temperatures. For example, when the waters are warm, especially during hot summer months with low water flow, fish like salmon and trout that live in colder waters must seek out colder water or perish. These ecological effects can have cascading consequences – for wildlife, humans and local economies.

Most streams flow all the time. During times without rainfall, water in streams mostly comes from below ground. In fact, groundwater is thought to make up an average of 52% of surface water flow across the United States.

Because groundwater is typically colder than surface water in summer, the groundwater flowing into streams can buffer the overall stream temperature from climate warming. However, deeper groundwater tends to have more stable temperatures than groundwater closer to the surface.

Map from the study
A new technique can classify whether the water flowing into streams is primarily from groundwater and whether that groundwater is from shallow or deep sources. Danielle Hare, CC BY-ND

Previous studies have shown that groundwater temperature is tied to the depth that it travels. Shallow groundwater is more readily influenced by climate variability because it’s close to the land surface. It is also more susceptible to drying, which can reduce, or even disconnect, the shallow groundwater flow from the stream.

Our research builds on these observations. We found that streams with shallow groundwater sources are likely to be warming as much as streams fed mostly by snowmelt and rain, and at similar rates.

Figuring out a stream’s risk

The main method currently used to evaluate if streams are fed by groundwater at large scales cannot differentiate between a stream that relies on shallow groundwater and one fed by deep groundwater. That means that plans for how to manage the effects of climate change are likely not accounting for these important differences. Other studies have also shown that changes to the land, such as from wildfires, snow pack changes and deforestation, influence shallow groundwater temperature more than deep groundwater temperature.

Looking at temperature patterns can provide more information about the risks streams might face.

We found that when the temperature of a stream follows the same warming and cooling pattern as the air temperature, with a time lag of about 10-40 days, that stream is likely being fed by shallow groundwater. Deeper groundwater stays cooler in the summer and the stream’s temperature doesn’t fluctuate as much.

Chart of stream water and air temperature
When stream water temperature follows the same warming pattern as local air temperature, but with a lag of about 10 to 40 days, it’s a sign that the stream is fed by shallow groundwater. Danielle Hare, CC BY-ND

We analyzed the water and air temperature at 1,424 sites along streams across the United States and found that approximately 40% of the streams were strongly influenced by groundwater. Of those, we found that half were fed predominantly by shallow groundwater, which was much higher than expected. Comparing this method’s results against field and modeling data in smaller studies has shown its rigor.

Because this method requires only stream and air temperature data, landowners and local communities can gather the data at little cost, or it may already be available. Once that information is known, they can plan for future changes and take steps to protect the water quality in streams that are most likely to provide long-term stability.

Danielle Hare is a Hydrogeologist and Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

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