Questions simmer about Lake Powell’s future as drought, climate change point to a drier Colorado River Basin

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May 28, 2020

A key reservoir for Colorado River storage program, Powell faces demands from stakeholders in upper and lower basins with different water needs as runoff is forecast to decline

Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon Dam, shows the effects of persistent drought in the Colorado River Basin. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

By Gary Pitzer

Sprawled across a desert expanse along the Utah-Arizona border, Lake Powell’s nearly 100-foot high bathtub ring etched on its sandstone walls belie the challenges of a major Colorado River reservoir at less than half-full. How those challenges play out as demand grows for the river’s water amid a changing climate is fueling simmering questions about Powell’s future.

The reservoir, a central piece of the storage program for the Colorado River, provides water, hydropower and recreation to millions of people. It was designed to ensure that Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico can meet their legal obligation to let enough water pass to Arizona, California and Nevada, as well as supplying water to Mexico.

But persistent drought in the Colorado River Basin over the last 20 years and the need to keep Lake Mead, Powell’s twin reservoir downstream, from reaching critically low levels have left Lake Powell consistently about half-full. Some environmental advocacy groups, aiming to restore Glen Canyon, have called for the dam’s decommissioning.

Water managers say that’s unlikely, given Lake Powell’s key role in meeting downstream obligations and the interest of some upstream who hope to tap its waters. Recent studies point to warmer and drier conditions ahead, with reduced runoff into the river. A rewrite of the river’s operating guidelines is on the horizon, and already there is talk about how those guidelines could affect Powell.

Lake Powell and Lake Mead currently adhere to an operations protocol that determines release volumes from Lake Powell to Lake Mead and how Lower Basin water users enjoy the benefits of surplus conditions or the shared sacrifice of delivery cuts during shortage. The rules for these scenarios are found in the 2007 Interim Guidelines, the 2019 Drought Contingency Plans and international agreements with Mexico.

“I think an honest and thorough look into the future of Lake Powell is absolutely warranted.”
~Matt Rice, director of American Rivers Colorado Basin Program

Chief among the Guidelines’ provisions is better coordination of the operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead each year.

As key stakeholders prepare to forge the next set of management guidelines that will update those from 2007, there may be a reassessment of Lake Powell’s operations so that it can take on the coming challenges.

“I think an honest and thorough look into the future of Lake Powell is absolutely warranted,” said Matt Rice, director of American Rivers Colorado Basin Program.

Rice, part of a February forum on the future of Lake Powell, said the crisis wrought by the coronavirus pandemic shows how rare “black swan” events can emerge and shatter existing management plans, such as those for watersheds.

The dry conditions have prompted Colorado River water agencies to undertake unprecedented, collaborative efforts to ensure water supplies are not disrupted. In Las Vegas, for instance, rebates to homeowners by the Southern Nevada Water Authority have converted 193 million square feet of thirsty grass lawns into water-efficient landscaping.

Staying ahead of future crises is critical, and officials are informally discussing the parameters of the next set of guidelines. How those talks affect future water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be significant.

A reliable Lake Powell

Conditions on the river are never static. In some years, a large snowpack produces voluminous runoff, but the science is showing a pattern of decreased flow from tributaries into the mainstem Colorado River. Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center projected inflow to Lake Powell from April to July would be 65 percent of average.

Upper Basin users, meanwhile, want to access their share of Colorado River water to meet growing demands. In Utah, a 140-mile pipeline proposal would divert as much as 86,000 acre-feet annually from Lake Powell to growing communities in the state’s southwest corner. Utah officials believe the $1 billion plan is necessary for places such as St. George that are bumping against their limits of water supply.

Furthermore, Utah officials say the state is well within its right to access water it has rights to.

The Colorado River Compact divided the basin into an upper and lower half, with each having the right to develop and use 7.5 million acre-feet of river water annually. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

“Utah’s right to develop water for the Lake Powell Pipeline is equal to, not inferior to, the rights of all the other 1922 [Colorado River] Compact signatory states,” Eric Millis, then-director of the Utah Division of Water Resources, said in a 2019 statement by the state’s Department of Natural Resources. The Colorado River Compact divided the Basin into an upper and lower half, with each having the right to develop and use 7.5 million acre-feet of river water annually.

Meanwhile, the Navajo Nation is also looking at tapping Lake Powell water via pipeline so it can supplement limited groundwater supplies.

“The continued existence of Glen Canyon Dam is imperative if the Navajo Nation is to obtain a reliable supply of water from the Colorado River,” said Stanley Pollack, an attorney for the tribe. “A water line only works if you have Lake Powell.”

“The continued existence of Glen Canyon Dam is imperative if the Navajo Nation is to obtain a reliable supply of water from the Colorado River.”
~Stanley Pollack, an attorney for the Navajo Nation

In the Upper Basin, there is concern that Lake Powell has been increasingly called on to help Lake Mead, with not much to show for it.

“We are not improving the health of Lake Mead and … until and unless the Lower Basin addresses its overuse … Mead is not going to improve and it’s just going to bring the elevations of Powell down,” said Amy Haas, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission.

The storage/release paradigm between the two reservoirs has caused the most tension since adoption of the 2007 Interim Guidelines, said Colby Pellegrino, director of water resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

The Upper Basin recognizes its obligation to let enough river flow pass to the Lower Basin, but occasional machinations with Lake Mead’s storage can be touchy. “Sometimes water is moved from Lake Mead downstream to other reservoirs or water users in a different pattern or timing, prompting concern from people in the Upper Basin that its neighbors seek to game the system,” she said.

Jeff Kightlinger, general manager, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (Source: MWDSC)

The largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead receives the lion’s share of attention because of the efforts to keep it viable and supplying water to the many farms and urban areas – Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix, among them – south of Hoover Dam. In 2015, a third, deeper intake was completed at the lake to keep water flowing to Las Vegas’ 2 million residents and 40 million annual visitors. The lake supplies about 25 percent of the water needs of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California – even more during drought.

Having a reliable Lake Powell to back up Lake Mead is crucial especially during a period of uncertainty, Lower Basin users say.

“As we get into flashier, more volatile hydrology cycles with climate change we can likely see the occasional huge storm years with less snow and more rain,” said Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of Metropolitan Water District, the largest supplier of treated water in the United States. “Having readily available storage capacity for the occasional mega year will be extremely valuable.”

‘The most wonderful lake in the world’

Controversial from the start, Lake Powell remains polarizing to some degree. Former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy, who spearheaded construction of Glen Canyon Dam that created Lake Powell in the early 1960s, said in a 2000 interview that Powell is “the most wonderful lake in the world [and] my crowning jewel.”

At capacity, Lake Powell holds more than 26 million acre-feet of water that originates as snowpack from the Upper Basin. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

Former Reclamation Commissioner Dan Beard, who served in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, opposes the continued existence of Glen Canyon Dam. Because climate change and further reductions in runoff will cause Lake Powell to keep dropping, he said, stakeholders should focus their energy on saving Lake Mead.

“Lake Mead is the heartbeat of the Colorado River,” Beard said. “It is a vital and important part of the delivery system for water to the Lower Basin states and to Mexico. It is a critical facility and yet it continues to decline.”

Beard is a board member with the advocacy group Save the Colorado, which, along with the Center for Biological Diversity and Living Rivers last year sued the federal government to force examination of climate change science in the management of Glen Canyon Dam.

The litigants say Reclamation and the Department of the Interior should conduct a revised analysis and include a full range of alternatives based on predicted climate change-related impacts on the flow of water in the Colorado River.

“Such a full range must include an alternative that incorporates the decommissioning and removal of Glen Canyon Dam because the projections from the best available climate science indicate there likely will not be sufficient flow in the Colorado River to keep Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam operational,” a press release accompanying the lawsuit said.

At capacity, Lake Powell holds more than 26 million acre-feet of water that originates as snowpack from the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. That water gets released to Lake Mead via the Grand Canyon and helps supply the Lower Basin — Arizona, Nevada, California – as well as Mexico.

At 710 feet, Glen Canyon Dam is the second highest concrete-arch dam in the United States. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

However, since 2002 Lake Powell’s water elevation has rarely gone above its historical 50-year annual average of 3,639 feet above sea level, the point at which it contains about 15.8 million acre-feet of water. The operating system is flawed, some experts say.

Two years ago, the Colorado River Research Group, a highly respected group of Colorado River scholars including Colorado State University’s Brad Udall and University of Arizona’s Karl Flessa, produced a publication called It’s Hard to Fill a Bathtub When the Drain Is Wide Open: The Case of Lake Powell. In it, they noted that the system is stacked against Lake Powell in part because of an overallocated Colorado River system.

Lake Powell and Lake Mead operate under multiple laws and agreements that are collectively known as the Law of the River. Under the rules, Lake Powell is obligated to release a certain amount of water each year to Lake Mead for the Lower Basin states.

The Lower Basin states, however, collectively draw about 1.2 million acre-feet more water from Lake Mead than Lake Powell releases in a normal year. The result is a so-called “structural deficit.”

Amy Haas, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, is critical of the 2007 operating guidelines. (Source: UCRC)

“The structural deficit is the true villain in this story, mixing with the operational rules to drain Lake Powell,” the Colorado River Research Group publication said. “If storage in Lake Powell cannot rebound in an era where the Upper Basin consumes less than two‐thirds of its legal apportionment, then the crisis is already real.”

Answers, the authors say, lie partly in the ability of Lake Powell storage to recover in wet years, reducing use in the Upper Basin and re-thinking exiting reservoir management. “Lakes Mead and Powell, after all, are essentially one giant reservoir and … thinking of these facilities as two distinct reservoirs, one for the benefit of the Upper Basin and one for the Lower, now seems outdated,” the publication said.

Haas, with the Upper Colorado River Commission, said the existing operating guidelines leave room for improvement. “I feel very strongly that as long as our reservoir operations are coordinated … the future of Lake Powell hinges on the future of Lake Mead,” she said. “We need to find a more equitable mechanism by which reservoir operations are coordinated.”

Marlon Duke, spokesman with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the river, acknowledged that Lake Powell draws scrutiny.

“I often get asked, ‘What’s the deal with Lake Powell?’” he said. “Shouldn’t we just drain it or is it really doing what it is supposed to do?”

The answer, Duke said, means looking at the lake’s performance and how it has met expectations during difficult times. Powell was near capacity in 2000. Then a period of record-setting dryness set in. Through it all, enough water was released to meet the Upper Basin’s obligation to the Lower Basin.

People in the respective basins view Lake Powell and Lake Mead with a certain degree of ownership, and perspectives vary. Upper Basin interests generally want a more robust Lake Powell. South of the lake, the desire to tap into it further is not uncommon in the Lower Basin. The degree of change, ultimately, will likely fall between those sentiments.

Jack Schmidt, with Utah State University, analyzed the concept of “Fill Mead First.” (Source: Jack Schmidt)

All of that notwithstanding, it’s important to understand the two reservoirs are tightly woven, said Jack Schmidt, the Janet Quinney Lawson chair of Colorado River studies at Utah State University.

“It’s one big system and whether Powell [or Mead] goes up or down …those are intentional societal decisions of management that have little to do with climate change,” he said.

Schmidt co-authored a 2020 white paper, Managing the Colorado River for an Uncertain Future, which cautions that future flows will be “lower, more variable and more uncertain.”

“Powell, even less full going forward, remains a valuable piece of very expensive infrastructure that will remain part of the Colorado River storage pool for decades to come.”
~Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of Metropolitan Water District

Schmidt in 2016 analyzed the concept of “Fill Mead First,” the idea of establishing Lake Mead as the primary water storage facility on the mainstem river and relegating Lake Powell to a secondary storage role when Mead is full. The savings in evaporation and seepage losses would be relatively small, Schmidt said, but the idea shouldn’t be completely discounted.

Fill Mead First “generates passions and emotions,” Schmidt said. It is embraced by some as a restorative opportunity for Glen Canyon. “Then there is the world of traditional water managers who say that’s a ludicrous idea and we don’t pay any attention.”

The disparate views “live in two worlds completely.”

But Kightlinger, with Metropolitan Water District, discounts the idea of draining Powell. “Politically, I don’t see any real support or push for a fill Mead first strategy,” he said. “Powell, even less full going forward, remains a valuable piece of very expensive infrastructure that will remain part of the Colorado River storage pool for decades to come.”

A warmer and drier basin

A small army of water professionals and experts constantly analyze the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to 40 million people and fuels a huge agricultural economy.

For years, scientists have looked at the drying conditions of the Colorado River Basin, employing techniques such as tree ring sampling. Analysis of that method has shown that the years 1905 to 1922 – just as the river’s waters were being allocated among the states — were exceptionally wet.

In 2012, Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study confirmed there are likely to be significant shortfalls in coming decades between projected water supplies and demands in the Colorado River Basin. Since the study, a steady stream of research points to warmer and drier conditions.

Pearce Ferry Rapid prevents predators such as catfish, bass and pike from getting upriver and destroying native fish. (Source: Cory Nielson, Arizona Game and Fish Department)

In April, a study published in the journal Science said the current dry period in the Southwest is one for the record books, and that its “megadrought-like trajectory” is fueled by natural variability superimposed on human-caused warming. Also in April, experts with the Western Water Assessment, whose researchers work out of the University of Colorado, Boulder and several other institutions in the region, noted that the severity and length of drought conditions can be difficult to quantify.

“This is especially true for the Colorado River system, in which total consumptive use plus other depletions typically exceeds supply, such that under even average hydrologic conditions the levels of Lake Mead and Lake Powell will tend to decline,” according to Colorado River Basin Climate and Hydrology: State of the Science, the study conducted by the Western Water Assessment.

The continued variability justifies a robust Lake Powell, said Haas, with the Upper Colorado River Commission.

“We know that future flows are going to be more variable and almost clearly lower, but we also need to ensure that our non-depletion obligation is satisfied,” she said. “Powell is our repository for this water. Doing away with the reservoir, in light of our 1922 Compact obligation, is not realistic,” she said.

Furthermore, an improved, more accurate forecasting approach is needed ahead of the next set of operating criteria. “That’s especially true given the vicissitudes of hydrology and the impacts of climate change,” Haas said.

Increasing Lake Powell’s releases is potentially problematic because of the likelihood that predator fish from Lake Mead could make it upstream and devastate native fish in the Grand Canyon.

Matt Rice, director of American Rivers’ Colorado Basin Program, believes an honest evaluation of the future of Lake Powell is needed. (Source: Matt Rice)

As it stands, Pearce Ferry Rapid, a rugged, impassable cataract located near the downstream end of the Grand Canyon, prevents predators such as catfish, bass and pike from getting upriver and destroying native fish. The rapid exists because Lake Mead, sitting at just 43 percent of capacity, is so low that the inflow to it from the river has carved a new entry where the river plunges over a bedrock ledge.

If Lake Mead ever began to fill again, it would inundate Pearce Ferry Rapid, allowing the non-native fish to migrate upstream and prey on native Colorado River fish. “They would just eat and eat,” said Rice, with American Rivers. “All the recovery of endangered fish could be for naught.”

Playing the waiting game

During a period of great uncertainty about what the next water year will bring, Colorado River water users will need to think creatively while using all their tools, including storage.

“Glen Canyon Dam exists because you need all that potential storage,” said Schmidt, with Utah State University. “In some freak years you are going to get really big runoff, and nobody wants to see that go through the system.”

Meanwhile, the lake’s future role in the Colorado River Basin is a key topic as Reclamation reviews the performance of the 2007 Guidelines, with results expected at the end of this year at the annual meeting of Colorado River water users.

Colby Pellegrino, director of water resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. (Source: SNWA)

Pellegrino with Southern Nevada Water Authority said it would be nice to get past the controversy about Lake Powell’s releases and instead find ways to store more water in it. “We have had a lot of consternation … more because of the balancing releases than the actual behavior of any water user or basin,” she said. “Going back to something that’s more constant or more fixed would remove an element of consternation between the Basins.”

What’s likely to happen is an approach that builds upon the years of collaboration and cooperation established between everyone working on Colorado River water management, said Tina Shields, water manager with the Imperial Irrigation District, the largest user of Colorado River water.

“We know how the river works – its incrementalism,” she said. “Nobody wants to make wholesale changes because it’s too big of a deal and what if it went south? We are not quick to change these relationships and negotiations. They took a lot of time.”

Chris Harris, executive director of the Colorado River Board of California, said Reclamation’s findings will be key in considering the continued conjunctive management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

“There are 40 million people who rely on water from this river and over the last 20 years, we would not have been able to supply that water reliably without these storage reservoirs.”
~Marlon Duke, Bureau of Reclamation

“Certainly, the [2007] Guidelines have shown that managing the reservoirs together has kept Lake Powell from crashing and has kept Lake Mead from a shortage condition,” he said. “I believe that there will be significant interest in evaluating opportunities, including with Mexico, for even more effective management of the reservoir system.”

That process will most likely look at different elevations and trigger points for excess releases from Lake Powell in a manner that’s acceptable to the Upper and Lower Basins.

“The question is, how do you get movement either way without someone saying, ‘That doesn’t work for me,’” Shields said. “Sometimes the status quo is easier to continue than the fear associated with changing those trigger points.”

As with virtually all Colorado River issues, the ramifications of actions can run far and wide. “This sounds like an esoteric argument about something hundreds of miles away, but the reality of it is what happens at Lake Powell affects the amount of water available to the Lower Basin states, Southern California and, indirectly, Northern California,” said Beard, the former Reclamation commissioner.

California’s extensive water plumbing network relies on a careful balance of imports to Southern California from Northern California and the Colorado River.

Even with Reclamation’s review of the guidelines expected to be issued at the end of the year, Schmidt with Utah State University said he believes stakeholders will let multiple years pass before committing to any radical operational changes.

Solutions to Colorado River management are built on the legacy of collaboration and cooperation, said Tina Shields, water manager with Imperial Irrigation District. (Source: IID)

“Every year that we wait buys a little more information about climate change and decreasing runoff and whether we go into a wet cycle,” he said. “There’s a lot of things that could happen and people will hope that nature provides a favorable condition so there can be a tiny bit more wiggle room and we don’t go into dire crisis.”

Haas echoed the comments of many stakeholders in noting that all options for Powell’s operation should be considered. “It’s not heretical to be thinking outside the norm on things,” she said. “It spurs a more robust discussion and we should not shy away from that.”

Reclamation’s Duke harkens back to Powell’s ability to consistently meet and sometimes exceed its release obligations during severe conditions.

“That is a testament to the people who came before and had to make those tough calls,” he said. “They built that reservoir and it’s done what we needed. Looking into the future, everything’s on the table, but we also need to remember there are 40 million people who rely on water from this river and over the last 20 years, we would not have been able to supply that water reliably without these storage reservoirs.”

Reach Gary Pitzer: gpitzer@watereducation.org, Twitter: @GaryPitzer
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This story originally appeared on Western Water on May 15, 2020.

Thirsty future for American West, as “megadrought” grips some of the fastest-growing U.S. cities

By

FairWarning

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May 21, 2020

*A subdivision under construction in Nevada. (Kenneth Kennemer/U.S. Air Force)*

By Alexandra Tempus, Fair Warning

In 2002, Utah was reeling from four years of dry conditions that turned the state “into a parched tinderbox,’’ as the Associated Press reported at the time. “Drought Could Last Another 1-2 years,” the headline proclaimed. Right on time, in 2004, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a similar article, on “Coming To Terms with Utah’s Six-Year Drought,” that was “believed to be the worst to strike the Southwest in half a millennium.”

Almost two decades later, the drought has raged on. In October 2019, the water supplier for St. George, a rapidly growing resort and retirement community in southwest Utah, released a statement declaring the city’s longest-ever dry spell: 122 days without rain.

A study published last month in the journal Science identified an emerging “megadrought” across all or parts of 11 western states and part of northern Mexico—a drought likely, with the influence of climate change, to be more severe and long-lasting than any since the 1500s. The area includes Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California and portions of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.

This region is also experiencing explosive population growth—with Idaho, Nevada, Arizona and Utah topping the list of states with the highest percentage increase in residents from 2018 to 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For decades, these states and their mushrooming municipalities have been grappling with the twin concerns of rapid growth and dwindling water supply projections. Now, in the midst of an historic megadrought predicted to last many more years, the issue has grown increasingly urgent.

For the megadrought study, scientists analyzed tree rings from nearly 1,600 trees that had grown across the region over hundreds of years, says the study’s lead author, A. Park Williams, an associate research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Examining the rings under a microscope, the researchers could see when growth was slow, indicating time periods when the region was especially dry.

The authors identified megadroughts—droughts more severe and much longer than anything observed in the written record, says Williams—over the last 1200 years. The most recent was in the late 1500s, until now. Today’s megadrought has been marked by more frequent and severe wildfires, a decline in groundwater, lake and river levels and a reduced snowpack.

And climate change, added Williams, is “making it easier to go into a megadrought without the ocean and atmosphere needing to team up in as extreme of a way” as they did to create such conditions in the past.

In Utah, the situation might be considered dire.

“Our population is one of the fastest-growing in the country and we’re also one of the driest states in the country and our water supply in large part is mountain snow,” said Michelle Baker, an aquatic hydrologist at Utah State University who was project director for iUtah, a years-long research effort to transition the state to sustainable water usage.

With the mountain snowpack dwindling due to climate change, iUtah researchers identified several ways to help close the supply gap, said Baker. One included storing more water underground than in reservoirs to limit the amount of water lost to evaporation. Another involved replacing Utah’s old-fashioned dirt-lined irrigation canals with pipes to curb evaporation and seepage.

In March, Utah adopted a law creating a new water banking program, similar to those in other states, that will allow water rights holders to “bank” their unused water rights and lease them temporarily to others without selling them outright.

This might help a place like St. George, the fifth-fastest growing metro area in the U.S., according to the Census bureau. Since 1980, its population has grown nearly seven-fold from 26,000 people to nearly 178,000.

“We’re projecting it to reach about a half a million people in the next 50 years,” said Pam Perlich, the senior demographer at the Kem C. Gardner Institute at the University of Utah. She warned of the city’s particular vulnerability to water shortages, even compared to other parts of Utah. “It’s got a different climate. It’s very arid, it’s consistently 20 degrees warmer.”

St. George currently uses 33,000 acre-feet of water per year, Karry Rathje, a spokesperson for the Washington County Water Conservancy District, told FairWarning in an email. (An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of land with one foot of water, and is roughly enough to supply three homes for a year.)

*Crop irrigation in Yuma, Arizona. (Jeff Vanuga/U.S. Department of Agriculture)*

Washington County, which includes St. George, “is projected to need an additional 86,000 acre feet of water to meet the demands of a population that’s projected to nearly triple by 2060,” Rathje said.

This is to say nothing of exponential growth in greater Salt Lake City, which by 2060 could swell to the size of the Seattle metropolitan area of 3.7 million residents, according to one estimate.

Battles over water have long plagued the West. For St. George, a proposed pipeline from Lake Powell on the Colorado River is a contentious issue, with city water officials saying it’s necessary to meet the growing demand and environmental advocates claiming that it would be damaging, costly and unsustainable over the long run. The Colorado, the primary water source for seven western states, is overallocated, meaning there is not enough water to meet the volume promised to all rights holders. In the spring of 2019, representatives of these states completed a drought contingency plan, each agreeing to take less water.

Nowhere is the collision between water scarcity and population growth more evident than in Buckeye, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb that was the fastest-growing large city in the country from 2017 to 2018.

Right now, it is home to about 74,000 people, but it has enough land area to eventually be bigger than Phoenix.

Buckeye uses 11,800 acre-feet of water per year, said the city’s hydrologist Ron Whitler. But based on estimates of population growth, the city council anticipates that it will need 200,000 acre-feet annually.

“We have adequate water supply for the next 20 years, for the current population and growth,” said Alisha Solano, director of the Buckeye Water Resources Department. But, she added, “We’re absolutely concerned about conserving water.”

About 70 percent of water used in Buckeye is for outdoor landscaping, while 30 percent is for indoor use, said Whitler—a common ratio in arid regions.

The water department is trying to educate residents on growing desert-hearty flora, said Whitler, and has goals to scrap “turf that is just for appearances” throughout the city.

Buckeye has a small allocation from the Colorado River, Whitler said, but mostly draws on groundwater. Yet the reliance on groundwater in fast-growing parts of Arizona comes with its own tangled knot of water shortage issues tied to rapid development.

Arizona has long required developers to demonstrate a 100-year water supply in order to carry out their projects. But a legislative workaround in 1993 has allowed them to source less-renewable groundwater for their century supply, as long as they enroll in their regional groundwater replenishment district. The idea is that groundwater mined in a replenishment district is eventually replaced by another water source somewhere within the district.

“Now there is a real question about where the water core replenishment would come from given that we are facing reductions in the Colorado River supply” and other water sources, said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

In Buckeye, as in St. George, there is no formal plan to limit new development. But some officials have ideas for the way things might evolve.

“Not all developments necessarily have to look alike,” said Sharon Megdal, a board member of the Central Arizona Project, which manages and distributes the state’s Colorado River supply. “We’ve gone down the road in this country for a long time of spreading out, large lots, always thinking that larger is better.”

Meanwhile, agriculture is being considered as a potential source for freeing up more water. In Arizona, agriculture consumed 74 percent of the water supply in 2017.

“I think the concern is mostly that in order to supply a growing population the water rights probably will need to be transferred from agricultural to urban usage,” said Baker of Utah State University.

For example, the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water utilities throughout Southern California, has arrangements with agricultural water districts in California and Arizona. The deals often involve paying farmers to fallow their fields at times to meet increased urban needs.

But Porter warns there is danger in depleting too many of the agricultural sector’s now-plentiful water rights.

“If you got rid of [agricultural water use] and instead you built out all of that urban demand,” she said, “then when a shortage came, you would really be hurting.”

This story was produced by FairWarning (www.fairwarning.org), a nonprofit news organization based in Southern California that focuses on public health, consumer, labor and environmental issues.

Study: $3.2B-plus collaborative water system on South Platte River could work, may signal new era of cooperation

By

Fresh Water News

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May 18, 2020

The South Platte River near Evans. A new study indicates that a proposal to create a regional water system on the South Platte River is feasible. Credit: Jerd Smith

By Jerd Smith

As COVID-19 continues to roil Colorado and the world, experts are suggesting that the pandemic may teach all of us to work together better. If that’s the case, then a collaborative water system for the Front Range may be a harbinger of things to come, according to a new study.

Released March 10, just days after Colorado reported its first cases of COVID-19, the study indicates that if Front Range cities band together to build a large-scale water reuse and delivery system, water sufficient to serve 100,000 homes could be developed.

It would rely on moving water between cities and farms, building new pipelines, as well as storing water underground and in off-channel reservoirs, and could be done without tapping new sources on the West Slope.

Such a project, if built, would cost $3.2 billion to $4.4 billion, according to the study, a price that is in line with other water delivery systems now being developed.

That cost includes 50 years of operations and maintenance and assumes the water would likely need to be heavily treated.

The study comes as the Front Range faces the most acute water shortages in the state, with a gap between water supply and demand for municipal and industrial users of as much as 540,000 acre-feet projected by 2050, according to a recent analysis by the state. Farmers could face a gap nearly twice that large, particularly in dry years.

Lisa Darling, executive director of the South Metro Water Supply Authority, helped oversee the study. She said once Colorado recovers from COVID-19, she hopes communities will be able to use it as a roadmap toward future water supplies. (Editor’s note: Darling is president of Water Education Colorado, the nonpartisan nonprofit that sponsors Fresh Water News.)

“It shows that it’s feasible, and it will allow people to see exactly what it might look like,” she said.

The South Platte Regional Opportunities Water Group (SPROWG), a group that includes dozens of Front Range water districts, sponsored the work. The study analyzed different alternatives for capturing water in the South Platte River as it approaches the Nebraska border, an area where flows are typically more abundant than they are closer to metro Denver, where the river is heavily used and its waters largely claimed by existing users.

Because the river’s supplies in average years are already spoken for, any new water would be developed by capturing some during flood years and, in other years, reusing water already diverted from other basins via new water treatment plants and pipelines, making that water supply go farther.

Funded by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) and several cities, including Denver and Aurora, the study was geared to help taxpayers from metro Denver to Brighton to Greeley and beyond determine whether they want such a project, how it would be configured, and who would benefit and shoulder the cost.

The South Platte Regional Opportunities Water Group proposal could serve cities from Denver to Greeley and beyond.

“The price tag sounds like a lot, but it is comparable to other projects in the South Platte Basin,” said Mary Presecan, a consultant with Leonard Rice Engineers and one of the study’s authors.

Water sold through the Loveland-based Colorado-Big Thompson Project is selling for $78,000 to $92,000 an acre-foot, Presecan said, while the SPROWG study analysis shows water developed through this new partnership would cost from $44,000 to $58,000 an acre-foot. An acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons, enough water to serve on average two urban homes for one year.

In addition to water for fast-growing small communities, the study examined providing water to farmers on the Eastern Plains. These farmers control some of the oldest, most senior water rights in the region, but the water is increasingly being sold to thirsty cities, threatening local economies and the livelihoods of farmers left behind, and ultimately reducing the state’s ability to grow food.

A collaborative reuse project could provide additional water to water-short farms, as much as 35,000 acre-feet a year, allowing them to maintain their agricultural production.

“If there is an opportunity to be part of a regional partnership and address the ag gaps, we are all for it,” said Joe Frank, general manager of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District, a sponsor of the study.

“SPROWG is a concept where we are starting at a high level and drilling down. Can we bring the whole [South Platte River] Basin together to figure out if this can work,” Frank said.

Early on, the study drew fire from West Slope interests and environmental groups, who feared it would inevitably lead to bigger efforts to tap the drought-stressed Colorado River and could harm the South Platte River.

But feedback from dozens of meetings with citizens, environmentalists, taxpayers and water officials during the past year led the study’s authors to conclude that the project can be structured in such a way to provide environmental benefits, as well as water for cities and farms.

“This is a collaborative way, and an innovative way to conjunctively manage and use a variety of water sources for multiple beneficiaries,” said Matt Lindburg, a consultant with Brown and Caldwell and one of the study’s authors.

State water officials, such as Gail Schwartz, who represents the Colorado River Basin on the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said she believed the regional, collaborative premise underlying the early work could be utilized elsewhere.

“It’s a great model for collaborative thinking,” she said, at the CWCB’s March board meeting in Lakewood. “I think it could work for other parts of the state too.”

Whether the pandemic will bench the work on this new South Platte water delivery planning isn’t clear yet.

But Frank is optimistic work will continue. “The pandemic could slow us down, but it definitely won’t stop us. Now the next step will be determining [which communities] are really serious about coming together and taking this to the next level,” he said.

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.

This story originally appeared on Fresh Water News on April 1, 2020.

New gambling tax revenue forecasts in free fall; cash for water plan in limbo

By

Fresh Water News

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May 14, 2020

Streets are empty in Central City, with casinos shuttered and hundreds of workers laid off. The pandemic is bad news for the state's new sports-betting tax, which was to have helped fund the Colorado Water Plan. April 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith — Streets are empty in Central City, with casinos shuttered and hundreds of workers laid off. The pandemic is bad news for the state’s new sports-betting tax, which was to have helped fund the Colorado Water Plan. April 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith

It’s hard to generate money from a sports-betting tax when COVID-19 has wiped all athletes worldwide from the fields, courts and stadiums where they would normally play.

And that’s a problem for the Colorado Water Plan, a 2015 citizen-backed guide for helping Colorado stave off future water shortages and protect the environment while sustaining agriculture and other heavily water-dependent parts of the economy.

Tax revenues from the new gambling initiative, slated largely to help fund the plan, were initially expected to start streaming in later this year, after the May 1 start of newly legalized sports betting here.

But one look at the empty streets and shuttered casinos in Black Hawk and Central City makes clear that the future of sports betting and its promised tax revenues are uncertain at best, at least in the near term.

Estimates presented to the legislature late last year, after voters approved Proposition DD in November, indicated that the new tax might generate as much as $9.6 million in its first full year of operation, enough to pay for regulatory and administrative costs, and provide perhaps as much as $6.3 million for the Colorado Water Plan.

The pain from the pandemic is clear in Central City, where a church message board poses the question everyone is asking: When will things return to normal? April 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith

That’s a fraction of the $100 million or so water officials believe it would cost to fully fund the plan on an annual basis, but it was an important first step in setting up a sustainable source of revenue.

Those early revenue numbers are out the window now, however, thanks largely to the pandemic.

“There’s just nothing to bet on,” said Doug Kemper, executive director of the Colorado Water Congress, a nonpartisan industry group that represents several hundred of Colorado’s key water interests.

But sports-betting revenue estimates were in trouble even before COVID-19 shut down sports.

By late December, the Department of Revenue had determined that the license fees on which revenue estimates had been partially based originally were set too high and would have to be brought down significantly, from $125,000 to roughly $1,200, according to the Division of Gaming.

Now gaming officials estimate annual revenue will be just $1.5 million to $1.7 million, far below the original $9.6 million.

“The Department’s internal revenue expectations are much lower than [the earlier] fiscal note estimates,” according to a Department of Revenue report to the legislature dated Dec. 19, 2019.

“It’s definitely a major blow,” said Floyd Ciruli, a political analyst who followed Proposition DD, and who tracks water issues for the Colorado Water Congress.

Sports-betting revenue could have been a bright spot this year, when the state budget is facing an estimated $2 billion budget deficit, one roughly twice as high as that generated during the Great Recession of 2008 to 2010.

Dan Hartman, director of Colorado’s Division of Gaming, said there are too many unknowns right now to predict what, if any, revenue the sports tax might generate this year.

Whether even the lower $1.5 million revenue estimate will hold is unclear, he said. “That’s going to depend on how quickly people come back. We just have to wait and see. I’m hoping it’s a lot more.”

But Hartman said the Division of Gaming did approve a new operations fee, which will at least cover the cost of overseeing betting.

“While we didn’t get those license fees that were written into statute, we did impose a fee [on operators] that takes the cost of regulation out of the tax money,” Hartman said. “So whatever tax money comes in will all go to the beneficiaries,” including the water plan and gambling addiction programs.

How much state money, if any, can be salvaged elsewhere for the water plan this year isn’t clear.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), which implements the plan, also receives funding from tax revenues generated by oil and gas production and those funds have helped pay for water plan programs. But that money is drying up as well due to the crash in oil markets. Because those revenues don’t flow to the CWCB in the year in which they’re received, their loss won’t hit the CWCB until the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, 2021, according to the Joint Budget Committee.

State agencies are expected to have a clearer picture of how much cash they will have to operate with once the Joint Budget Committee finishes work on a revised spending plan in early May. Until then each is evaluating various alternatives, officials said.

Becky Mitchell, executive director of the CWCB, said the agency hadn’t planned on big cash from the sports-betting tax anytime soon and that the news wouldn’t deter her staff from continuing to implement the plan.

“Just because we don’t have [that additional] money, doesn’t mean we stop working. It means we up our game,” she said.

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.

This story originally appeared on Fresh Water News on April 22, 2020.

Q&A: former top Interior Department officials assess agency under Trump

By

The Water Desk

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May 12, 2020

By Jenna Sampson and Julia Medeiros

The Department of the Interior is supposed to manage both environmental conservation and mineral extraction. Because of these opposing interests, the balance between these imperatives tends to vary greatly under different administrations. As one might expect, priorities tend to shift toward conservation during liberal administrations and toward extraction during conservative ones. However, no administration has managed to diminish the pride and morale of career civil servants as much as the present one, according to two former top officials at the department.

The Water Desk spoke with Rebecca Watson and John Leshy, who visited the University of Colorado Boulder campus recently for an armchair debate hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center. Watson worked as Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management under the George W. Bush administration and now is president of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation. Leshy, now a professor of law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, previously held the post of Solicitor for the Department of the Interior under President Clinton, and received the Defenders of Wildlife Legacy Award for lifetime contributions to wildlife conservation in 2013.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Water Desk: An ice breaker for both of you: What is your favorite national park?

Rebecca Watson: It’s easy for me: it’s Yellowstone and that’s why I moved to Cody, so I could live next to Yellowstone National Park. I was really struck by Hayden Valley the first time I went through.

John Leshy: I love them all. Yosemite probably is the one. Actually, my book is going to make the point that Yosemite was really the first national park, not Yellowstone … the feds gave it to the state, but to be managed in perpetuity under federal law, so that to me makes it kind of the first national park.

WD: So many environmental protections are being changed by executive order. What is the impact of using this governing tactic as opposed to passing bills in Congress?

JL: It’s certainly more durable to do it by legislation, although the formal executive orders do tend to have a bit of staying power. For example, when President Reagan came in in 1980, he did a number of executive orders on cost-benefit analysis and stuff like that, which subsequent Democratic administrations did not really change. I mean they tinkered with them, but they didn’t really change. So there is some stability in executive orders. But when you do something by executive order you always raise the question of do you have authority to do it, so it makes it challengeable in court.

WD: You both have talked about how the system is broken and there’s not as much working together as there used to be. Do you think that is one of the reasons we’re seeing so many of these rules change by executive order?

RW: Well, you saw it begin in President Obama’s administration when he faced kind of an intransigent legislature…So I think this is the response of the executive when they can’t work with a Congress. So, it’s not a surprise it’s been done before. Once somebody does it, then the next guy does it—or woman.

WD: What do you think the impact of that style of governing is at the ground level for the people who are impacted by these constant changes by executive orders, such as the recent Waters of the United States rule?

RW: This Waters of the U.S. rulemaking has been ongoing in the Clinton administration, Bush administration, Obama administration, and now Trump. It goes back and forth, and it’s a very important question of who has the authority over water in a state. Some is federal water. Some is managed by the state. Where’s that dividing line? So it’s a pretty fundamental question, and the different parties have a different viewpoint of it, so there is no settled opinion. The Supreme Court didn’t help things with a fractured five-part decision, which has led to all this confusion.

JL: It goes back actually to an ambiguity in 1972 [Clean Water Act], the first major claim to water, which gave the federal government regulatory authority over waters of the United States but had a very ambiguous definition of what Waters of the United States are. So, for the last 50 years, people, agencies, courts, administrations, have been sort of wrestling with this problem because it’s a difficult issue. If there were an easy answer somebody would have solved it a long time ago. And it does raise, as Rebecca said, not only the question of how do you define waters, but it raises this pretty fundamental question about local land-use authority versus national authority, because traditionally in this country, most land-use regulation has come through state and local governments. Not all—there’s always been some federal regulation—but this issue raises where’s that dividing line and that’s what makes it very controversial, very political.

The other reason it’s controversial and difficult is that the Clean Water Act was all about water quality. That’s what the regulation is designed to do, to protect water quality. But in protecting water quality you almost inevitably affect the allocation of water supply, which is a water rights issue. So you have water quality and water rights, and this rule, and this issue, is where that intersection is. Because water quality, by and large, is regulated by the federal government and water rights are regulated by the state government, you have conflict, so it really touches a lot of hot buttons.

WD: What implications might this new rule have for the way legislation like the Endangered Species Act is enforced?

JL: Well that’s complicated because the Endangered Species Act is a very complicated statute, but it has two thrusts, I mean the two sorts of places it goes. One is that it requires a consultation: anytime the federal government takes an action that could affect a listed endangered species, that’s when you have the consultation process and biological opinions, and there’s a whole regulatory apparatus that does that. But that only applies to federal action that the federal government takes, supports, permits or funds. And if there’s no federal funding, permitting, etcetera, the consultation process does not apply. But there’s another part of the Endangered Species Act, which makes it illegal for anyone—state, private, federal, anybody—to “take” a listed species, meaning harass, harm, kill, etcetera. That part is a universal application. So whatever the Waters of the United States rule says, and allows, the take problem is still a problem. The federal government really has no power under the Endangered Species Act to exempt anybody from the take except by the so-called God Squad, a cabinet-level committee with the head of the Corps of Engineers, the Interior Secretary and the EPA. These three people were given the power to exempt a project from the Endangered Species Act, which meant they were deciding that this species could be exterminated.

Anglers on the Colorado River, near Lees Ferry, Arizona. Source: Adobe Stock

WD: Do you have a sense of how the culture has shifted in the Department of the Interior from the last administration to this one? Is it a starker contrast than in years past?

RW: I think the shift in this administration has been different from the perspective of the career employee. And I think, always when you have political appointees come into a building where they’re a thin layer on top of thousands of people, there’s always an “us versus them.” Especially when you’re following an administration that was the opposite party, you know…typically over six months or so you learn to work with them, learn to trust them and understand the role of a career civil service in our system, which is that they are to be apolitical. The people speak, they elect a president, he sets a policy and they help the political appointees implement that policy. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. And I think in this administration we’re seeing this play out right now with lists of suspected political appointees, much less the so-called “deep state” of career appointees that this administration has targeted. [The administration] has said very negative things about career people, and that matters to career people. That, I think, is a significant difference in my opinion and it’s not positive.

JL: I agree 100%. I mean, we both had experience in the Interior Department and I think probably agree on a lot of how it really works. And she’s exactly right that that layer of political appointees is, about as I remember, 50 people out of 70,000. Okay, so 69,950 people in the Interior Department are career civil servants, and they make the government go, and they actually make 99% of the decisions that you never hear about. And then the political people, you know, obviously have the power to because of elections to control and decide the big policy issues. And they do, they may decide them in the way that a lot of career people disagree with. But I think anybody who spent time in those big bureaucracies understands the bureaucracies have enormous responsibilities and the authority and the responsibility to make decisions that affect a lot of people’s lives. But they’re made, hopefully, in predictable, stable ways and life goes on, regardless of the administration. It is troubling what’s happening now because there really is this sort of assault on the career people and they feel under siege. I don’t know how it’ll turn out, but it’s not a healthy thing.

RW: People that work in the government, in those positions, they view themselves as public servants. They’re, you know, not people wearing halos necessarily, but they do have a source of pride. They work for the federal government, they are public servants, they’re doing something that matters to the American people. And to be denigrated and treated in a suspicious manner that has never ended for, you know, over three years of this administration—nobody would want to work under that kind of situation. It’s soul destroying, I think.

WD: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Geological Survey have been told to scrape the phrase climate change and this is one of the cultural implications of the new administration. Do you have a sense of how unique this is?

JL: It’s certainly unusual. Everybody tries to shake things, I suppose, to serve your sort of political ends regardless of which administration it is. But I think the degree to which the control on the basic facts in this administration is pretty unprecedented. I don’t recall anything like that.

RW: In the Bush administration, one of our mantras, or clichés if you will, but was something we took seriously was “sound science.” You don’t hear that phrase anymore: “sound science.”

JL: You hardly even hear the phrase “science,” which is too bad because certainly natural resources, public lands, water facts control a lot of the policy. What’s going to happen if you do “x”? The basic facts are the bedrock of good resource management. And if you’re denying the facts, we’re in trouble.

RW: Science doesn’t set policy but it informs policy, and you have to trust the science and the basic facts to make decisions. So, being married to a scientist, I don’t like the disregard for scientific evidence. And, of course, as lawyers we need to get what the facts are. We have to hear from our clients, but then we have to look—okay, what’s the other side? The facts are important. I think scientific data is critical for the Interior Department.

JL: It’s not just sort of controlling what the factual reports are, but I think there’s a problem with the funding. Government does an awful lot of basic science, and the USGS does an awful lot of basic things that you never hear about in terms of assessing water quality and water quantity and earthquakes—it’s an essential function. Michael Lewis is a well-known author and his latest book [“The Fifth Risk”] is really interesting. It’s on what might be the most boring subject you could think of, which is science in the federal government and what’s happening to it. It’s about NOAA and the USGS. He’s a wonderful writer and he really tells a great story about this problem of destroying the kind of bedrock scientific capacity of the government and how dangerous it is, basically for everybody.

WD: John offered a book, so do you have any recommendations, Rebecca?

RW: I just read this book called “The Swamp” by Michael Grunwald on the Everglades. It’s just fascinating because he’s a reporter, so he writes really well. And he just takes a look at the Everglades, but it’s really the history of Florida. What were the Everglades like? He went back to the original diaries of the soldiers that were down there chasing the Native Americans that lived there. What did they see? And then the idiotic ideas they had to drain the Everglades: water flows downhill, they thought it’d be really easy. Well, they managed to screw everything up. So then during the Clinton administration I think was the first federal action to try and restore some of the functionality of the Everglades. So it’s just this amazing ecological history, Florida history. And, of course Florida, is full of really weird characters, so it’s a great read.

John Leshy biographhy
John Leshy joined the University of California, Hastings College of Law in fall 2001 after serving as Solicitor (General Counsel) of the U.S. Department of the Interior throughout the Clinton administration. Previously, he taught at Arizona State University College of Law (1980-1992), and served in the Interior Department in the Carter administration as special counsel to the Chair of the Committee on Natural Resources, U.S. House of Representatives, and with the Natural Resources Defense Council in California. He started his legal career as a litigator with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2008 and 2009, Leshy co-chaired the Obama administration transition team for the Interior Department, after heading the Interior transition team for the Clinton administration in 1992 and 1993. In 2013, he received the Defenders of Wildlife Legacy Award for lifetime contributions to wildlife conservation.

Rebecca Watson biography
Rebecca Watson is a shareholder in the law firm of Welborn, P.C. in Denver and serves as president of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation. She is the fourth woman to serve as president and is leading the foundation through its first strategic plan in its 66-year history. In her 40-year career, Watson has represented natural resource, oil and gas, and renewable energy clients as well as served in the federal government. As Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management in the U.S. Department of Interior in the George W. Bush administration, she had oversight over three bureaus, including the Bureau of Land Management. Earlier, she served as Assistant General Counsel for Energy Policy at the U.S. Department of Energy. Watson was named the 2011 Distinguished Natural Resources Practitioner-in-Residence at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, her alma mater. Watson is on the board of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a five-museum complex in Cody, Wyoming, where she recently moved.

Framework for agreements to aid health of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a starting point with an uncertain end

By

Western Water

-

May 8, 2020

Voluntary agreement discussions continue despite court fights, state-federal conflicts and skepticism among some water users and environmental groups

The Delta and the rivers that feed it serve many functions -- a source of water to meet the drinking water and irrigation needs across California, as well as providing key habitat for wildlife — The Delta and the rivers that feed it serve many functions — a source of water to meet the drinking water and irrigation needs across California, as well as providing key habitat for wildlife. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)

Editor’s note: Since original publication of this story on April 17, 2020, voluntary agreements have fallen apart.

By Gary Pitzer

Voluntary agreements in California have been touted as an innovative and flexible way to improve environmental conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the rivers that feed it. The goal is to provide river flows and habitat for fish while still allowing enough water to be diverted for farms and cities in a way that satisfies state regulators.

In a state with an array of challenges related to water, this is arguably one of the most pressing in California because of its potential to impact the millions of people who depend on water from the Delta’s key watersheds for drinking and irrigation. The Delta and the rivers that make up its vast watershed are also key habitat for the survival of imperiled chinook salmon runs.

Yet, no one said it would be easy getting interest groups with sometimes sharply different views – and some, such as farmers, with livelihoods heavily dependent on water — to reach consensus on how to address the water quality and habitat needs of the Delta watershed. Adding to the complications is the Delta’s role as the switching yard for water exports serving vast areas of the state as far south as San Diego, more than 500 miles away. Voluntary agreements would require water users to provide new flows for the benefit of rivers and streams throughout the Central Valley and outflow in the Delta, and commit money to fund habitat restoration, science and management to gauge the effort’s impact.

U.S. Geological Survey map showing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the rivers that feed it.

The voluntary agreement effort, initially begun in 2017, got a boost in early February when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration released a framework for such agreements. That framework outlined a 15-year, $5 billion program that calls for as much as 900,000 acre-feet of new flows and 60,000 acres of new habitat to improve Delta water quality and help reverse the decline of salmon and other native fish in the Delta and its watersheds.

While water agencies throughout the sizeable Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds — from Fresno to Redding — embrace the voluntary agreement approach as a means for practicable and reasonable compliance with the state’s Bay-Delta water quality regulations, the idea of voluntary agreements is controversial. They are an alternative to a prescriptive regulatory policy, and that draws concern from some environmentalists and state regulators charged with enforcing water quality in the Delta. But many water users and some nongovernmental organizations view them as a viable compromise that can improve conditions for fish in a more flexible manner.

“We know there are going to be some parties that will oppose this. That’s the nature of California,” said Thad Bettner, general manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, the largest irrigation district in the Sacramento Valley covering about 175,000 acres. “This is a lot of hard work – how do you use water for the benefit of the fishery, how do you get projects done, how do you do the science and how do you spend money wisely? Some would rather litigate because that’s their business path, but we believe all these rooms are open for folks to participate.”

Bettner and his cohorts in the vast farmland of the Sacramento Valley were concerned that the second phase of the State Water Resources Control Board’s Bay-Delta Water Quality Plan, now on hold as voluntary agreements are hammered out, would have required a substantial amount of water to stay in the Sacramento River and its tributaries rather than irrigating fields and orchards.

“We know there are going to be some parties that will oppose this. That’s the nature of California.”
~Thad Bettner, general manager of Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District

“To meet that would be devastating,” Bettner said. “I don’t know how we would start to address that type of shortage impact.”

The Bureau of Reclamation, which stores and delivers about 12 million acre-feet through the Central Valley Project, was concerned that requiring percentages of unimpaired flows as the State Water Board sought “would create chaos in California water and result in years of litigation,” Ernest Conant, director of Reclamation’s Mid-Pacific Region, said in a statement.

Instead, he said, voluntary agreements “make the most of scarce water resources and address the landscape-level habitat stressors on species that flow alone cannot overcome.”

Reaching agreement in the midst of litigation

Lawsuits are a chronic fact of life in California water policy, especially in the Delta. There is a multitude of interests, and regulatory actions are often challenged as biased against one or more groups.

The State Water Board adopted (but hasn’t yet implemented) a regulatory plan in 2018 that would require as much as half of the flow to remain in the San Joaquin River system between February and June each year to aid Delta fisheries and combat salinity levels. Although the plan left room for incorporation of a voluntary agreements element, the State Water Board chose not to defer approval of its regulatory plan.

Water users, some of whom had prepared voluntary agreement proposals, promptly sued.

California Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot believes the state’s lawsuit against the federal government should not derail voluntary agreement talks. (Source: California Natural Resources Agency)

And as the federal government pressed ahead in February with new Endangered Species Act permits used to govern operations of the CVP pumping plant near Tracy, the Newsom administration sued over the adequacy of the environmental requirements. In a statement, California Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot said the state’s lawsuit against the federal government would not derail voluntary agreement talks.

In a Feb. 24 letter to Gov. Newsom, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt called the suit “ill-founded,” adding that, “over time, I suspect this litigation, like many other California water cases before, will end up with many parties and many twists and turns.”

He added that California and the federal government will face significant administrative and operational challenges related to the intertwined operation of the federally operated Central Valley Project and the State Water Project through the Delta and San Luis Reservoir, with the lawsuit creating “further uncertainty” of water supplies to people, farms and ecosystems.

This is a sticking point for which resolution seems especially challenging: The federal government’s updated CVP operations plan targets more water deliveries to contractors south of the Delta, many of whom use the water to irrigate farmland.

Reclamation said the new CVP operations plan is based on “robust modern science” that enables officials to quickly respond to agricultural, environmental and endangered species conditions.

For the second year in a row, a survey by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife found zero Delta smelt from September through December 2019. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)

Meanwhile, California’s Department of Water Resources in late March received what’s known as an incidental take permit for the long-term operations of the State Water Project, creating a separate set of operating rules for its Delta pumping operations. The permit covers four species protected under the California Endangered Species Act: Delta smelt, longfin smelt, winter-run chinook salmon and spring-run chinook salmon.

The permit, which contrasts the federal government’s aim of increased exports, mandates most of the additional outflow that would have been provided in the voluntary agreements, but without their flexibility, adaptive management or habitat provisions, said Paul Helliker, general manager with the San Juan Water District, a federal Central Valley Project contractor on the shores of Folsom Lake, an American River reservoir northeast of Sacramento.

Maurice Hall, associate vice president with Environmental Defense Fund, said the permit “just clouds everything and makes it difficult to see how a voluntary agreement can be landed at this point in time.”

California congressional representatives, led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, urged Gov. Newsom to work toward coordinated operations of the state and federal pumping facilities.

“This conflict, if allowed to continue, will not only reduce water deliveries just as drought may be returning to California, but also block the successful negotiation of voluntary agreements to meet Delta water quality requirements, which we support,” they wrote April 15.

Despite the difficulties, water users believe the state’s lawsuit against the federal government is not necessarily the death knell for voluntary agreements, although some are worried.

“The voluntary agreements remain the best opportunity to address the flow and non-flow factors affecting our native fish, and we urge the state and federal agencies to remain committed to a negotiated resolution despite the state of California filing suit,” the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts said in a Feb. 24 joint statement. The statement noted that even though the two districts had sued the state, “that hasn’t prevented us or the state from negotiating in good faith [and] we see no reason why the federal government and the state of California can’t do the same.”

Thad Bettner oversees the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, the largest irrigation district in the Sacramento Valley covering about 175,000 acres. (Source: Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District)

The State Water Contractors echoed that sentiment, saying in a Feb. 21 statement that the differences between the state and federal governments are resolvable. “We encourage the public servants at both the state and federal levels … to get back to the negotiating table and settle these issues,” said Jennifer Pierre, the contractors’ general manager. “The outcome of those successful discussions will be far more effective than anything arising from a lawsuit that may take several years to resolve.”

Others are less sanguine. The litigation has “frozen a lot of people out of what’s even possible going forward,” said Bettner, with the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District.

Water for people, fish and the environment

Implementing unimpaired flows – essentially keeping more fresh water in rivers – to meet Delta water quality standards requires a separate water rights amendment process to determine who gives up water and how much. The plan would affect communities far and wide, including many urban areas. Michael Carlin, deputy general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which receives water from the Sierra-fed Tuolumne River, said a comprehensive voluntary agreement plan for the Sacramento and San Joaquín river watersheds requires many individual agreements – an exhaustive process that takes months to sort out.

“Unfortunately, the reality of where we are with voluntary agreements has not matched up with our hopes and our expectations.”
~Rachel Zwillinger, water policy adviser for Defenders of Wildlife

“There are many parties in the room and not all of them are that far along in their agreements,” he said, referring to the process. San Francisco, the Modesto Irrigation District and Turlock Irrigation District emerged from their process successfully to assemble the Tuolumne River Proposal, a voluntary agreement that includes investments of flows, habitat improvements and $80 million in funding commitments. “It’s a really big package,” Carlin said.

Environmentalists and fisheries groups have long decried a paradigm in which they say the Delta’s water quality and ecosystem needs consistently take a backseat to the needs of municipalities and agriculture. The 2009 Delta Reform Act recognized that in calling for reduced reliance on the Delta for water exports and improved regional self-reliance.

The deteriorating environmental conditions that have contributed to the decline and near-extinction of native fish in the Delta are an intractable problem that defies solution. Advocacy groups chafe at the perceived glacial pace of an oft-delayed bureaucratic process (the Bay-Delta Water Quality Plan update is 15 years overdue) in which results are measured incrementally.

Rachel Zwillinger, water policy adviser for Defenders of Wildlife, said her organization supports the concept of voluntary agreements because they offer the promise of faster implementation, habitat restoration and are collaborative in nature.

“Unfortunately, the reality of where we are with voluntary agreements has not matched up with our hopes and our expectations,” she said. “We are in a place where we have not been able to support what the administration has put forward.”

Kim Delfino, former California director for Defenders of Wildlife, said the governor’s framework contains inadequate flows, habitat commitments and other protections for fish. (Source: Water Education Foundation)

Kim Delfino, former California director for Defenders of Wildlife, said “something has to give,” with either environmentalists relenting or federal water contractors being willing to put more on the table. A voluntary agreement, she said, is supposed to be a part of the State Water Board’s Bay-Delta Water Quality Plan update for which the benchmarks are viable fish populations and a doubling of the salmon population.

There are other complexities as well. The Oakdale Irrigation District and South San Joaquin Irrigation District share rights to the Stanislaus River, which feeds the San Joaquin River. They believe the governor’s framework “appears to be even more onerous” than the State Water Board’s unimpaired flows plan and would be troublesome for fish management.

The problem is well-known: Operating reservoirs to serve the needs of flood protection and instream flow requirements while protecting water rights holders is a delicate balancing act. A certain amount of water has to stay in rivers and tributaries to maintain conditions for fish and to repel salinity in the Delta. Throw the needs of municipalities and farmers on top of that and the finite amount of water gets stretched to the point that tests flexibility.

Describing the basis of the Bay-Delta Water Quality Plan update in 2018, State Water Board staff noted that spring-run and winter-run chinook salmon, longfin smelt, Delta smelt and Sacramento splittail are in distress because of reduced and modified flows, loss of habitat (including access to floodplains), invasive species and water pollution. Flows, they said, “are an essential part of restoring a healthy ecosystem, and flows are the responsibility of the State Water Board.”

But finding a middle ground between the unimpaired flow requirements of the State Water Board’s Bay-Delta water quality update and the alternative of the flow commitments within voluntary agreements is not a fait accompli.

Steve Knell, general manager of the Oakdale Irrigation District, said he’s concerned whether the state’s voluntary agreements framework provides the sustainability that instream fisheries and agriculture both need. (Source: Oakdale Irrigation District)

Steve Knell, general manager of Oakdale Irrigation District, believes the voluntary agreements framework as it’s currently conceived would force the draining of the federal New Melones Dam, east of Stockton, as well as the district’s facilities at Donnells, Beardsley and Tulloch to the detriment of the cold water pools in the basin. The framework, he said, “may provide water to the Delta but doesn’t provide the sustainability that instream fisheries and agriculture both need.” In a Feb. 7 letter to state and federal officials, the Oakdale and South San Joaquin irrigation districts urged leaders to carefully account for the water designed to aid rivers and the water aimed at the greater Delta ecosystem, and to also ensure the State Water Project and Central Valley Project, which are junior water rights holders, contribute equitable amounts.

“Many senior water right holders, including the districts, have been willing to offer contributions in the settlement process that benefit their local rivers, and the districts understand that these contributions may also assist the state’s goals for the Delta,” the letter said. “However, these contributions are voluntary, and the needs of the Delta, if any, must be met first by junior water rights holders [such as the SWP and CVP] under California’s rules of water right priority.”

Solving Delta water quality challenges

The State Water Board is required to regularly update its Water Quality Control Plan for the Bay-Delta. The December 2018 approval of the first phase of the plan requires 30 percent to 50 percent of the flows from February through June to remain in the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Merced rivers. Water supply agencies protested.

“The district believes non-flow measures (such as habitat improvements) have as much or more advantage in helping fisheries in our river than just sending water down,” Knell said.

During the transition between the Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov. Gavin Newsom administrations in late 2018, the outgoing and incoming governors told the State Water Board that voluntary agreements “could result in a faster, less contentious and more durable outcome [and] are preferable to a lengthy administrative process and the inevitable ensuing lawsuits.”

Michael Carlin, deputy general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, said a comprehensive voluntary agreement plan for the Sacramento and San Joaquín river watersheds requires many individual agreements. (Source: San Francisco Public Utilities Commission)

The basis for voluntary agreements began in 2016 when then-Gov. Brown voiced strong support for them and directed the Natural Resources Agency to explore the potential for environmental flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins. He tapped former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as chief mediator for stakeholder talks that began in 2017.

Release of Newsom’s framework is encouraging to stakeholders who spent 2019 building the concept of voluntary agreements.

“This is really the first tangible response that we have seen,” said Helliker with the San Juan Water District. “This is more comprehensive … and builds on previous efforts such as CalFed and the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.”

Andrew Fecko, general manager of the Placer County Water Agency, was the principal representative for the Sacramento region on voluntary agreements. He said the Newsom framework could in some respects mirror, but on a larger scale, previous settlement agreements such as the 2000 American River Water Forum Agreement where Sacramento regional stakeholders committed water and habitat improvements to benefit the lower American River.

“The Water Forum process was in many ways the first of the voluntary agreements, along with the Yuba Accord,” Fecko said, noting the 2008 agreement that committed water from the Yuba River watershed for salmon and steelhead fisheries. “The principal difference with this new statewide effort is that we are expanding the pace and scale of habitat construction on the American River by approximately five-fold, plus offering additional water for the health of the Delta. It’s a tremendous expansion of the regional commitment, but the success we have had with the Water Forum regional effort gives us confidence that we can improve the American River and the Delta.”

Source: California Department of Fish and Wildlife

Reclamation, which was on board with the 2018 version of a voluntary agreements framework, balked at what the Newsom administration presented in February, saying it was not consulted prior to the document’s release.

“The state has had minimal engagement with us on their proposal, so the rationale for the approach, and the expectations for Reclamation participation, are not clear,” said Conant, the regional Reclamation director.

Crowfoot, California’s Natural Resources secretary, disagreed, saying Reclamation was an active participant in voluntary agreement discussions throughout 2019, including the run-up to releasing the 2020 framework.

“Clearly more work lies ahead to shape the framework into an enforceable agreement to propose to the Water Board,” Crowfoot said. “This includes detailing clear expectations for all parties, including Reclamation.”

“Clearly more work lies ahead to shape the framework into an enforceable agreement to propose to the Water Board.”
~Wade Crowfoot, California’s Natural Resources secretary

Stakeholders resigned themselves to the state’s lawsuit against the federal government. Tom Birmingham, general manager of Westlands Water District in Fresno, the nation’s largest agricultural irrigation district, said discussions on voluntary agreements could proceed, though it would be difficult, and a final agreement could not be reached without Reclamation’s involvement.

California farmers have a lot riding on the successful resolution of the water quality plan. Chris Scheuring, senior legal counsel with the California Farm Bureau Federation, said the decision to pursue unimpaired flows or voluntary agreements is “a tectonic shift either way.”

Voluntary agreements, he said, “hold more promise because they offer the possibility of not doing wholesale damage to the water rights system … as opposed to an unimpaired flows approach, which is a ham-fisted way to go about it.”

Un-ringing the bell

After decades of wrestling with the challenge of finding the right regulatory approach to improve fish survival and water quality, the argument about voluntary agreements represents the latest chapter in a long-running, complicated saga. The state’s legal feud with the Trump administration about CVP operations is an obstacle.

“It’s pretty hard to un-ring the bell at this point,” said Bettner, with the Glenn-Colusa district. “The state and federal governments … could enter into some settlement, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. We are probably in this cooling off period for a time, then we’ll see where things go after that.”

But there is widespread belief that something is better than nothing regarding improving the Delta ecosystem. Longtime California water scholars Ellen Hanak and Jeff Mount with the Public Policy Institute of California say a negotiated agreement is the way to navigate the thicket of Delta issues.

In a Feb.10 commentary published in CalMatters that called the Newsom administration’s framework “imperfect but necessary,” they noted that current Delta management overemphasizes a handful of endangered fishes and that the voluntary agreements framework “makes an earnest attempt” to go beyond that approach.

California farmers, whose livelihoods depend on water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed, have a lot riding on the successful resolution of the Bay-Delta Water Quality Plan. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)

“We can appreciate why many parties would want to hold out for a better deal, and absent that, turn to the courts in the hopes of getting their way,” they wrote. “But as seasoned veterans of the Delta know well, the delay-and-litigate strategy has inherent risks because the outcomes are hard to predict.”

Whether through unimpaired flows or voluntary agreements, the way forward is something that “is not going to go unnoticed in history,” said Scheuring, who alluded to the early laws and policies that spurred water development.

“We were encouraged to use the water to make the landscape prosper – to have farms, and to have cities to populate this semi-arid region called the western United States,” he said. “Some people have kind of changed their minds about that human landscape, and hopefully there is a softer way to accommodate that change in thinking through voluntary agreements [and] supply and demand options.”

Reach Gary Pitzer: gpitzer@watereducation.org, Twitter: @GaryPitzer
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This story originally appeared on Western Water on April 17 , 2020.

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. The Water Desk is seeking additional funding to build and sustain the initiative. Click here to donate.

Major South Platte River basin project would maximize reuse of Western Slope water, report says

By

Aspen Journalism

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May 5, 2020

The South Platte River runs by an electricity plant near I-25 in Denver. A project proposed by the South Platte Regional Opportunities Water Group would allow Front Range water managers to maximize the reuse of Colorado River water. Lindsay Fendt/Aspen Journalism

By Lindsay Fendt

DENVER — A multibillion-dollar reservoir and pipeline project may one day pull more than 50,000 acre-feet of water per year from the South Platte River before it reaches Nebraska. That’s more than 16 billion gallons of water, enough to fill 25,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The possible project is laid out in a new report from the South Platte Regional Opportunities Water Group, or SPROWG, a group of water managers from the Front Range. If built, the project would enable Front Range water managers to repeatedly reuse water diverted from the Colorado River, something Western Slope water managers have long encouraged and see as a welcome shift.

“There is a lot of fully reusable water that makes its way down the South Platte,” said Eric Kuhn, a retired manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District who now writes about Colorado River issues. “This is something that people on the Western Slope have been trying to encourage for probably 70 years.”

The group used a $350,000 grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the South Platte Basin and Metro Basin roundtables to complete the year-long study, which was released in March. The group members hope the project could help close a water-supply gap of as much as 540,000 acre-feet that the state is projecting for the South Platte River basin by 2050.

Since the 1930s, Front Range water planners have looked west to bolster their water supplies. An elaborate series of reservoirs, underground tunnels and pipelines now conveys about 400,000 acre-feet of water annually from the Colorado River headwaters to the South Platte basin.

Water is diverted from the Colorado, Fraser, Blue, Eagle, Fryingpan and Roaring Fork rivers in Grand, Summit, Eagle and Pitkin counties and sent under the Continental Divide to the South Platte basin.

Large projects on the South Platte were previously written off due to the high costs of water treatment, but as the cost and controversy surrounding transmountain diversions have grown, a project such as SPROWG — which would have seemed expensive decades ago — is now on par with most other supplies of water. Depending on which concept configuration is used and whether the water will need to be treated, building the project would cost between $1.2 billion and $3.4 billion to build.

The South Platte River runs near a farm in Henderson, Colorado, northeast of Denver. Henderson is the site of one of the possible reservoirs for the regional water project proposed by SPROWG. Lindsay Fendt/Aspen Journalism

Use to extinction

Each of SPROWG’s storage concepts would capture stormwater and native South Platte water during wet years. While the project would not be used to store water from existing or future transmountain diversions, it would capture water from the Colorado River that made its way back to the river as a return flow after being used elsewhere within the basin.

“SPROWG is not intended to store supplies from an existing or new transmountain diversion project (though it will provide a means to utilize unused reusable return flows from transmountain diversions),” the report said.

Once water is transferred over the mountains to the Front Range, it can legally be used to extinction, meaning that it can return to the river as runoff, be recaptured and be used again perpetually. By decree, certain volumes of Colorado River water can only be reused within a certain area, something the SPROWG project would need to ensure.

“If they are going to take the water in the first place, they should make sure they are reusing that water to the full extent possible,” said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which was formed in 1937 to protect Western Slope water.

Although the SPROWG project does not require more water from the Western Slope, it is not considered a replacement supply for any of the existing water that the region takes from the Colorado River system. Despite the continued need of existing transmountain diversions, Mueller sees the project as an acknowledgement by at least some on the Front Range that the Colorado River is no longer a feasible option for future water supplies.

“I think there are a number of operators of Front Range systems that recognize that the Colorado River system has hit its limit,” he said.

While Western Slope water managers interviewed for this story were all generally supportive of the project, the Colorado Basin Roundtable, which represents different water districts and users within the basin, has not yet taken a formal opinion on it.

Conceptual project

The concepts outlined in the report are still far from a fully formed project, as no steps have been taken toward permitting, acquiring land or even identifying a user for the water. But SPROWG members hope that the analysis could be the first step toward a basinwide water project, a cooperative effort not typical of other large water projects.

“It just seems like something that we need to do, organizing the basin and helping the basin function as efficiently as possible,” said Matt Lindburg, SPROWG’s senior engineering consultant. “It will definitely be a project and concept that folks want to pursue.”

The report analyzed four possible storage and pipeline configurations that would collect agricultural water returned to the lower South Platte as runoff from the region’s farms, and then pump it back to the Denver metro area.

Three of the four project alternatives include an approximately 80-mile pump-and-pipeline system that would move water from a reservoir in Balzac, northeast of Denver, uphill to the metro area. The pipeline would allow the metro area to reuse some water that it already returned to the river as runoff or through water-treatment plants. The conceptual reservoirs could store between 220,000 and 409,000 acre-feet of water.

The idea to design a basinwide water project came from conclusions in the South Platte Storage Study, a 2018 analysis of basin-water supplies that was funded by the Colorado legislature.

That study found that the state was sending an average of 293,000 acre-feet more water down the South Platte and into Nebraska than what is required by the South Platte River Compact, an agreement between the two states that governs how much water Colorado is able to take from the river.

The SPROWG project would be designed to capture some of this water while remaining within the confines of the compact. The report suggested that water could be reused rather than the basin continuing to rely on either Western Slope or agricultural water.

In recent decades, agriculture along the South Platte has been the other main source of water for growing municipalities. Municipal governments buy out farms with senior water rights and dry up the fields, sending the water to the cities.

“This is probably the only other option on the table,” said Joe Frank, general manager of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District. “We want to do as much as we can to minimize the pressure on those other sources of water.”

The report also shows that the cost of the water from the projects would be consistent with other projects in the region — between $18,400 and $22,600 per acre-foot for untreated water and between $33,600 and $43,200 for treated water.

Whether cities will need additional South Platte water in the future, some of it is already spoken for. In March, 600,000 cranes — 80% of the world population — will visit an 80-mile stretch of the mainstem of the Platte River in Nebraska, where the birds fatten up on grain before a long migration north. Water flowing in the river makes this spectacle possible.

Even if the SPROWG concept were built, it would need to work within the confines of the Platte River Recovery Program, which was created to help protect these cranes and other endangered species on the river.

The recovery program, which secured additional water and land for habitat, has led to a dramatic increase in the population of endangered birds during migration season in Nebraska. SPROWG’s designers say they would work within the program, timing reservoir releases and saving water for specific ecological needs, but the report does not include a full environmental analysis.

Aspen Journalism is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization covering water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times and Swift Communications newspapers. This story ran in the April 25 edition of The Aspen Times and the April 27 edition of Aspen Journalism.

Editor’s note: This report has been updated from its original version to correct that 50,000 acre-feet of water per year is more than 16 billion gallons of water.

This story was supported by The Water Desk using funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

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. The Water Desk is seeking additional funding to build and sustain the initiative. Click here to donate.

Polis signs five major water bills into law: instream flows, anti-speculating, and more

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Fresh Water News

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May 5, 2020

The Colorado State Capitol remains quiet as COVID-19 forces lawmakers home. April 28, 2020 Credit: Jerd Smith

By Larry Morandi

Gov. Jared Polis, even as COVID-19 swept across the state, gave his stamp of approval to five major pieces of water legislation, paving the way for everything from more water for environmental streamflows to a new study on how to limit water speculation.

Lawmakers announced March 13 that they would temporarily suspend work to comply with stay-at-home orders, and now plan to return May 18 to complete the session.

Signed into law in late March and early April, the new measures represent months if not years of negotiations between farm, environmental and legal interests that came to fruition this year thanks to hard-fought bipartisan agreements.

Three of the new laws address water for streams, fish and habitat, allowing more loans of water to bolster environmental flows, protecting such things as water for livestock from being appropriated for instream flows, and using an existing water management tool, known as an augmentation plan, to set aside water rights for streams.

Expanded instream flow loans

House Bill 1157 expands the state’s existing instream flow loan program, which allows a water right holder to loan water to the Colorado Water Conservation Board to preserve flows on streams where the state agency already holds an instream flow water right. The CWCB is the only entity in Colorado that can legally hold such rights, intended to benefit the environment by protecting a stream’s flows from being diverted below a certain level. Under existing law, a loan may be exercised for just three years in a single 10-year period.

The new law, however, expands the loan program by authorizing a loan to be used to improve as well as preserve flows, and increases the number of years it can be exercised from three to five, but for no more than three consecutive years. It also allows a loan to be renewed for two additional 10-year periods.

“This bill becoming law is crucial for our state’s rivers, our outdoor recreation businesses, and downstream agricultural users who depend on strong river flows,” said Rep. Dylan Roberts, D-Avon. After a similar bill he sponsored failed to pass last year, he said, “I knew I needed to work to bring more people to the table and improve the bill so we could garner the support we needed, and that is what we did. I am thrilled that we were able to get this done with strong bipartisan support.”

To ensure protection of existing water rights, House Bill 1157 increases the comment period on loan applications from 15 to 60 days; allows appeal of the State Engineer’s decision on a loan application to water court; and requires the CWCB to give preference to loans of stored water over loans of direct flow water where available.

“There’s no injury to other water uses. And there’s a methodology if someone feels they are injured they can go to the water referee in an expedited manner,” said Rep. Perry Will, R-New Castle and one of the bill’s sponsors.

Protecting existing water uses

House Bill 1159 provides a means for existing water uses, such as water for livestock, that have not been legally quantified to continue when an instream flow right downstream is designated. Current law is unclear as to whether preexisting uses that lack a court decree are protected. To provide clarity, the bill requires the State Engineer to confirm any claim of an existing use in administering the state’s instream flow program.

Augmentation of instream flows

House Bill 1037 authorizes the CWCB to use an acquired water right, whose historic consumptive use has been previously quantified and changed to include augmentation use, to increase river flows for environmental benefits. Farmers have long used so-called augmentation water to help offset their water use, particularly of groundwater, when that use is not in priority within Colorado’s water rights system. Now that same water can be used to boost environmental flows.

Anti-speculation study and water conservation in master planning

Beyond instream flows, Gov. Polis signed Senate Bill 48, which requires the Colorado Department of Natural Resources to form a working group to explore ways to strengthen anti-speculation laws. The agency must report its recommendations to the interim Water Resources Review Committee by Aug. 15, 2021.

Also signed into law was House Bill 1095, which authorizes counties and municipalities that have adopted master plans that contain a water supply element to include state water plan goals and conservation policies that may affect land development approvals.

Larry Morandi was formerly director of State Policy Research with the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver, and is a frequent contributor to Fresh Water News. He can be reached at larrymorandi@comcast.net.

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 www.wateredco.org.

This story was originally published on Fresh Water News on April 29, 2020.

State demand-management investigation moves ahead

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Aspen Journalism

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April 28, 2020

The Government Highline Canal, seen here just before its filled for irrigation season, irrigates farmland in the Grand Valley near the Utah state line. Some Grand Valley irrigators may welcome the chance to be paid to leave water in the Colorado River. — The Government Highline Canal, seen here just before it’s filled for irrigation season, irrigates farmland in the Grand Valley near the Utah state line. Some Grand Valley irrigators may welcome the chance to be paid to leave water in the Colorado River. Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

By Heather Sackett

LAKEWOOD — State workgroups charged with making sense of a program to add water to a savings account in Lake Powell have begun narrowing down the complicated questions such a program would have to grapple with.

But some state officials worry that a Western Slope group is going its own way, possibly undermining the state process.

Water managers and experts from around the state met for two days in early March to compare notes on their current investigation of the feasibility of a voluntary, temporary and compensated water-use-reduction program, known as demand management.

The workshop brought together many of the participants who sit on the eight workgroups created by the state to explore different aspects of a demand-management program: law and policy; monitoring and verification; water-rights administration and accounting; environmental considerations; economic considerations and local government; funding; education and outreach; and agricultural impacts.

At the heart of a demand-management program is a reduction in water use in an effort to send up to 500,000 acre-feet of water downstream to Lake Powell to bolster levels in the giant reservoir and meet 1922 Colorado River Compact obligations. Under such a program, agricultural-water users could get paid to temporarily fallow fields and leave more water in the river.

Russell George, a former Colorado lawmaker and chair of the Interbasin Compact Committee who helped create the state’s basin roundtables, rallied participants and acknowledged that tackling demand management was a hugely ambitious and thorny project.

“It’s time for this and here we are, to wrestle to the ground this monster that just does not want to give,” he said.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board is heading up the investigation into demand management and is about nine months into the process. Workgroups have met two or three times so far, and many have acknowledged the chicken-or-egg dilemma in front of them.

“It’s like going on vacation, but we don’t know if we even want to go on vacation or where we are going or who’s going with us,” said CWCB Interstate and Federal Manager Amy Ostdiek.

Some groups say they can’t complete their work because they need the input of other groups to inform their work. Some want to know what the alternative to demand management — shutting off water rights in the event of a compact call, known as curtailment — would look like before they commit to creating a water-use-reduction program.

Under the terms of the Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) are required to deliver 75 million acre-feet over 10 years to the Lower Basin states (Arizona, Nevada and California). If the Upper Basin fails to deliver the water, the Lower Basin could make a “compact call,” triggering cutbacks — something water managers want desperately to avoid.

Some members of the Colorado Water Conservation Board expressed concern that the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s demand management study may be at odds with the state process. From left, back row: Steve Anderson, Dan Gibbs, Kevin Rein, Jim Yahn, Heather Dutton, Russell George, Curran Trick, Greg Felt; front row: Jessica Brody, Gail Schwartz, Celene Hawkins, Jaclyn Brown, Becky Mitchell. Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Equity

Equity is one topic that demand-management discussions keep turning to again and again. Some Western Slope water users fear that their ranches and fields will be ground zero for a water-use-reduction program. And with temporarily dry fields comes the potential for secondary negative economic impacts to agricultural communities.

“The other side of the fairness coin is mistrust,” George said.

But members of the agricultural-impacts workgroup pointed out that equity means equity of opportunity, not just shared burden. Some irrigators may welcome payment for their water.

“There are many people in ag that don’t want others being too quick to take away potentially profitable opportunities for their farm or ranch,” said Mark Harris, general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association. “If demand management can be considered a different kind of crop, farmers and ranchers will consider it because they have an economic incentive. Farmers and ranchers are not dead-set against it.”

But for all the uncertainty still out there, workgroups have begun to narrow the focus of their work down to “threshold” issues, some of which overlap among the eight workgroups.

The two-day workshop concluded with a group exercise that found the following issues to be the most important for those who could be crafting Colorado’s demand-management program: simplicity of monitoring; state-wide resiliency; environmental impacts and benefits; agriculture viability; and shared responsibility.

Some said it was time to stop talking and start acting. According to a real-time text poll, 57% of the workshop participants said the demand-management feasibility investigation was moving too slowly.

“It’s time to take the next step and start doing some pilot projects,” said Barbara Biggs, general manager of Roxborough Water and Sanitation District. “We can’t answer questions sitting around a room talking about it.”

This cornfield in Fruita is an example of agricultural land that could be temporarily fallowed and farmers paid under a demand management program. State workgroups are working toward narrowing the scope of a demand management feasibility investigation. Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

River District study

A week after the state-led demand-management workshop, Colorado River Water Conservation District general manager Andy Mueller stood before the CWCB board at its regular meeting and told board members that the River District had received a grant for its own study of demand management and water marketing on the Western Slope, a move that some board members saw as subverting the state’s grassroots process.

“All the conversations we had in this room for two straight days and to preempt that discussion, that bothers me somewhat because I think we are getting out in front as a river district,” said Gail Schwartz, a former lawmaker and Basalt-based CWCB board member who represents the Colorado main stem on the board.

CWCB South Platte River Basin representative Jim Yahn agreed.

“We have to be careful because it could be somewhat confusing,” he said. “We want to project this unified front. We are looking at everything we can, but we want to be on this path together.”

Mueller said the study, which will be funded in part by a $315,721 WaterSMART grant from the Bureau of Reclamation, is meant not to compete with the state process but, rather, to feed into it. He said the decision to undertake the study is not a result of dissatisfaction with the CWCB’s work but, rather, is based on the need to fulfill the River District’s mission.

“We think our district has an obligation to the water users in the communities within our district to make sure that the water supply within our district and for water users in our district is adequate for all our needs,” Mueller said. “(The CWCB) is not the only governing body that has the right and obligation to be involved with demand management; the River District shares that obligation.”

The mission of the River District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, is to protect, conserve, use and develop water in the Colorado River Basin. Mueller said the study is meant to come up with policy recommendations for the state if and when it develops a demand-management program.

Still, the move had echoes of a lingering and long-standing mistrust between Western Slope and Front Range water users, which George had alluded to the week before.

“There can be a perception in rural Colorado that people on the Front Range don’t have our best interest in mind,” Mueller said.

This story was originally published by Aspen Journalism on March 24, 2020.

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. The Water Desk is seeking additional funding to build and sustain the initiative. Click here to donate.

One year later: What the March 2019 avalanche cycle hints at on climate change

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Aspen Journalism

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April 28, 2020

A large natural avalanche released on Garrett Peak, which can be seen from Snowmass Ski Area, on March 13, 2019. Scouring the entire mountain along with some adjacent slopes, the slide was one of the three most destructive in Colorado’s history, all occurring last March. Photo by Colorado Avalanche Information Center.

By Catherine Lutz

Brian Lazar clearly remembers his personal “‘holy crap’ moment” of the March 2019 avalanche cycle.

Early last March 9, the deputy director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center stood atop Highland Peak and saw that the entire Highlands Ridge, which stretches behind Highland Peak and includes popular backcountry skiing areas such as Five Fingers and the K Chutes, had slid. It was the largest avalanche he had ever seen in Colorado.

The avalanche had broken naturally sometime overnight, with a crown later estimated to be nearly two miles wide. It ran more than 3,000 feet downhill, funneling into Conundrum Creek Valley with such momentum that after filling the creek, it traveled 300 feet up the other side. The force took out “hundreds if not thousands of trees,” according to Lazar’s report, and damaged an unoccupied home that was saved from obliteration by a concrete wedge built for exactly that reason.

Along with his 19 CAIC colleagues, Lazar was experiencing the most intense two weeks of his career — dealing daily with forecasting, public-safety concerns and threats to infrastructure as storm after storm delivered unprecedented amounts of heavy, wet snow across the state.

“Almost every corner of the state was producing historic-sized avalanches, so it was all hands on deck,” said Lazar. “No one slept for about two weeks.”

Early in the cycle, Lazar had watched the storms rolling in from the West Coast. He recalled seeing “a shocking, amazing amount of water coming our way” — borne on atmospheric rivers, which are narrow streams of concentrated water vapor in the sky — and thinking it was time to elevate avalanche danger to “extreme” due to anticipated snow loading.

Last March 7, CAIC issued the extreme warning — a 5 (on a scale of 1-5), which recommends avoiding all backcountry terrain — in four of its 10 backcountry zones, including Aspen, for the first time in its history.

Two days later, Lazar was in Aspen to help local officials deal with concerns about municipal water supplies being cut off by slides (which they were not), when he witnessed the Conundrum avalanche.

The avalanche that fractured across a nearly two-mile-wide section of Highlands Ridge in March 2019 was one of the largest in Colorado history. A home in its path survived with minimal damage thanks to a defensive wedge above it. Courtesy of Brandon Huttenlocher/CAIC

The Conundrum avalanche would be classified a D5 on the five-level D (for destructive) scale, meaning it’s among the largest avalanches known and can “gouge the landscape.” This slide and two others, including one that scoured Garrett Peak up East Snowmass Creek on March 14, were the first in Colorado history to be classified as D5s.

According to Lazar, about 1,000 avalanches statewide were reported to CAIC during the first two weeks of last March. Of those, 87 were categorized as D4 or larger. By comparison, 24 avalanches classified D4 or larger were reported statewide from 2010 through 2018. Further analysis of CAIC’s avalanche database, which starts in November 2010, shows that 12 of the 15 observed D4-plus avalanches in the Aspen zone ran last March.

Although the 2019 slides claimed no lives in the Roaring Fork River valley, eight people across the state were killed and a record 136 people were caught in avalanches last winter.

Avalanche experts agree that what happened in Colorado last winter — and across much of the west — was unusual, with some suggesting that kind of widespread, large-scale avalanche activity hasn’t been seen for well over a century.

In studying what led to this avalanche cycle, snow scientists are identifying some elements — such as warmer temperatures, wetter air and snow, and more-intense storms — that are not so unusual and are consistent with a warming climate. Experts are careful to distinguish weather and climate, especially when it comes to individual weather events, but there are links between the two.

“Avalanches are weather-driven phenomena, so if there’s changes in the weather — big or little — it will affect avalanche cycles,” said CAIC director Ethan Greene, a snow scientist. “I don’t think there’s a question that avalanche cycles are affected by changes in climate. It’s more a question of how.”

Anatomy of a cycle

Greene breaks down the March 2019 cycle into three phases. First, early-season snowfall in October formed a weak base layer. Early snow is not unusual, but the fact that it stuck on all aspects was, he said.

The second event was consistent snowfall through midwinter, which Greene considered somewhat unusual because there were no extended dry periods or large-enough storms to slough off the upper layers of the snowpack.

Then came the atmospheric-river succession of warm storms, during which some weather sites recorded the highest 24-hour precipitation totals in their history, according to Greene. The season’s strong snowpack, atop a thin unstable base, couldn’t withstand the weight of the new snow, particularly with its high water content. Avalanches ran long, with huge fracture lines, on all aspects. The fractures from the Conundrum slide were so energetic that they propagated deep into the underlying snowpack, setting loose massive volumes of snow.

“What’s unusual about what happened in March was the magnitude of some of these events and their successive nature — a two-week period with all those events, that’s very unusual,” said Greene.

CAIC is teaming up with the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey and Montana State University to study the March 2019 cycle. Through the Colorado Big Avalanche Project, a study of tree rings collected last summer, snow-science professionals are researching the likelihood of such a cycle happening again and how climate change affects snowpack and avalanches.

Researchers with the Colorado Big Avalanche Project collected hundreds of sample disks from trees downed by the March 2019 avalanches. Tree rings, in some cases from 300-year-old trees, can offer a lot of historical information not otherwise available. Photo courtesy of CAIC.

What the science says

In the U.S., there hasn’t been much scientific study of the link between climate change and avalanche activity, but there has been work on elements seen in the 2019 avalanche cycle.

One trend that’s crystal clear is that winter temperatures are rising. Winters in Pitkin County are nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than they were during the 1950-75 baseline period. And March is the fastest-warming month — with temperatures rising just under 1 degree per decade.

Pitkin County’s average winter temperature has risen by .4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, compared to the baseline period of 1950-1975. Graph from Climate at a Glance Tool, NOAA

Temperatures are expected to continue rising into the future, although by how much depends on greenhouse gas emissions. A 2008 study co-authored by Lazar (before his CAIC tenure) predicts that Aspen will warm around 3.6 degrees by 2030 and nearly 9 degrees by 2100.

Lazar’s study, done for the Aspen Skiing Company, concluded that wet snow avalanches are likely to occur earlier in future winters on Aspen Mountain — in some scenarios, during the operating season instead of after the lifts close. This will pose a new operational challenge for future ski-area managers, he noted.

A related impact on snow and avalanche activity is snow-water equivalent, or SWE, which is the amount of water in snow and is a standard measure of snowpack. Seasonally, low snowpacks can lead to dry soil, drought and wildfire conditions, while high season-long SWE can produce high stream runoffs, healthy water supplies and more stable snowpacks.

A dramatic increase in SWE in a short period of time can overstress the snowpack and produce large avalanches, as it did last March. For example, on April 1 Independence Pass measured its highest snowpack since 1984; but it wasn’t trending that way until the early March storms added several inches of SWE.

Snow science professionals also watched SWE numbers rising rapidly, and observations confirmed that the snowfall from the storms was unusual.

“From a field practitioner perspective,” said Greene, “there were certain parts of the state where the snow just felt different — a little moister, clinging to places in a certain way.”

Chris Wilbur, an engineer and alpine natural-hazards expert based in Durango, has observed and documented warmer winter storms over the past two decades. The snow-loading of March 2019, he wrote in The Avalanche Review recently, was “not inconsistent with climatic trends of warmer and wetter air masses colliding with our mountains.”

Wilbur in 2018 surveyed 240 experienced avalanche practitioners across North America on the impacts of climate change on avalanches. Respondents across all regions both observed and predicted more wet avalanches, more avalanches at higher elevations and, in general, increases in snowpack stability due to wetter, denser snow.

In a phone conversation, Wilbur explained that some of the increased activity will likely be driven by warmer, more extreme storms — such as those in March 2019 — which hold more energy and thus deliver lots of precipitation and wind. Avalanches at higher elevations, which in Colorado is usually above treeline, are likely to be bigger and more destructive. On the other hand, Wilbur and other experts foresee fewer avalanches at lower elevations, where there will be less snow.

“We’re in the early stages of seeing changes, though in my observations, mostly through the literature, the potential effects of climate change on avalanches might be accelerating. That’s just my opinion,” Wilbur said. “The wild card is the variability that comes with climate change.”

Scientific study of climate and avalanches seems more robust in Europe and in the Himalayas. A 2013 study in the Swiss Alps found more wet snow and “glide” avalanches (ones where the entire snow cover runs on smooth ground) happening in midwinter, coinciding with rising temperatures.

In the French Alps, a 2014 study predicted increasing wet avalanche activity at high elevations earlier in the winter season, along with fewer avalanches at lower elevations and in springtime. By the end of the 21st century, however, snowpacks will be getting thinner even at high elevations, reducing avalanche danger.

Using 150 years of tree ring records, researchers in the Indian Himalayas found that a warming climate is producing more and more destructive wet-snow avalanches in winter and early spring.

avalanche cycle 2019 — A large avalanche ran the length of Independence Mountain, near Independence ghost town, early in the March 2019 avalanche cycle. The section of Highway 82 it ran onto was closed for the winter at that time; other highways around the state were impacted by avalanches while open. Photo by Catherine Lutz/Aspen Journalism

The human factor

Overall, a wetter, more stable snowpack is good news for backcountry travelers.

“I’ve definitely noticed that the snow is denser and thicker on average,” said Lou Dawson, founder of WildSnow.com and a local backcountry skier for more than 40 years. “More and wetter Colorado snow as a rule make for safer backcountry.”

But a 2017 study linking atmospheric river events and avalanche deaths suggests that atmospheric rivers are more dangerous for a continental snowpack such as Colorado’s, which is weaker than coastal snowpacks and less able to handle heavy snow-loading.

“Large, late-season storms may lead to decreased snow stability during a time of year previously characterized by increased stability,” the authors of the study wrote in the Journal of Hydrometeorology. “With increasing numbers of recreational backcountry users and changing mountain snowpack conditions, we might expect the future to be characterized by enhanced exposure to avalanche hazard throughout the (western U.S.).”

Dawson argues that high avalanche danger associated with storms like those last March mostly deters people from venturing into the backcountry.

“I was just another backcountry person sitting in Carbondale knowing I couldn’t go anywhere,” he said.

Three of the eight fatalities during the 2018-19 season occurred during the March storm cycle; two of those three were backcountry skiers. Overall, a record 135 people were caught in 92 avalanches — numbers that correspond more to the sheer volume of avalanche activity than any one type of storm.

Last winter’s avalanche cycle also wreaked havoc on homes and infrastructure. Roads and highways closed around the state, and Castle Creek Road was buried by an avalanche that also interrupted power service to some homes.

Eight homes were destroyed or damaged during the March storm cycle, including the Conundrum Creek home with the protective avalanche wedge.

Civil engineer Art Mears, who works with homeowners and governments across the west to mitigate natural hazards, said that the Aspen Snowmass area is not unique in avalanche threats to its built environment. While local building codes consider 100-year avalanches, Mears thinks they should consider 300-year avalanches.

Unpredictability is something avalanche professionals deal with daily, but the increasing variability of weather events in light of climate change adds another challenge.

Although nobody expects to see another avalanche cycle like last winter’s anytime soon, Greene and his team have been surprised to see several similarities this season: a similar weak base layer, progressively strong snowpack and an atmospheric-river event in early February that “produced some interesting avalanche activity,” said Greene. “We saw some 50-year events.”

“There are 50 knobs that affect avalanche conditions, and it’s not the setting of each of those knobs, it’s cumulative,” Greene concluded. “We have to understand how they all come together and affect avalanche activity. What I can say is that climate change will make things more complicated.”

This story was published by Aspen Journalism on March 9, 2020. Aspen Journalism collaborates with The Aspen Times and Aspen Public Radio on coverage of the environment and climate change. A version of this story ran in the The Aspen Times and a conversation about the story aired on APR on March 9.

This story was supported by The Water Desk.

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. The Water Desk is seeking additional funding to build and sustain the initiative. Click here to donate.

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