Nobody knows who owns all of Colorado’s water.
Though the right to use water is treated like property, it’s not recorded like property.
Changes in ownership often are not recorded publicly anywhere.
The state keeps records of every water right – its amount, location and when it was appropriated – but not necessarily who owns that right today.
A right acquired a century ago may still carry the name of the person who first claimed it. The records are kept in the archives of seven regional water courts. Counties keep careful records of land sales, including the price, and deeds sometimes mention water rights. But counties do not require separate filings that detail water sales alone.
For example, when a large Weld County ranch was sold two years ago, the recorded county deed showed the sale price as $3.25 million. It contained no hint that water rights on the same ranch sold for $16.75 million.
Many Colorado water sales occur within private ditch companies that control much of the water diverted from state rivers. The companies keep records of such transfers, but those are not public records.
“It’s just like selling stock in AT&T,” said Craig Harrison, the real estate broker who made the deals to replace Broomfield’s water supply.
Broomfield’s water came from the Colorado-Big Thompson project, recognized in trade publications as the nation’s busiest water trading center. The water conservancy district that approves those sales lists a buyer and seller – though not always the actual owners – and amount of water transferred, but not the price.
And while land and building sales prices can be calculated from documentary taxes charged by Colorado counties, no such tax is applied to sales of water rights alone.
The fog this creates benefits lawyers, engineers and title companies that get paid to ferret out the identities of the owners and the values of their rights. Those experts don’t come cheap, and their bills contribute to the high price of Colorado water.
“We have a very good tabulation of water rights,” said state engineer Hal Simpson, who administers Colorado’s seniority-based system, “but as to owner, we just don’t know.”
Simpson said the state doesn’t have to know the owners in order to govern those rights. It just needs to know how much water to let through the headgates.
“For whatever reason, Colorado has never required a registry of ownership of a water right,” he said.
In the private sector, “many attorneys have gotten wealthy doing title searches to prove someone owns a water right,” he said, so the owner “can turn around and sell it.”
