BRECKENRIDGE — Sandy Kucharczyk had no problem getting a county permit to install a hot tub outside her ski-town home.
Filling it was another story.
Kucharczyk, like hundreds of other Summit County residents, had waded into a full-blown water war. She was told her well water was for indoor use only — no car washing, no lawn sprinklers and no hot tub.
“We decided to go to Wal-Mart and just buy the water,” Kucharczyk said. She and her husband lugged almost 200 one-gallon jugs home.
The increasing demand for a limited amount of water in the state has prompted crackdowns on illegal use by everyone from second-home owners in resort areas to ranchers on the Eastern Plains.
“If you’re using water outside the terms and conditions of your permit, you’re literally stealing someone else’s water,” said Scott Hummer, a state water commissioner who issued warnings to more than 200 residents near Breckenridge this fall.
That someone-else includes Denver and a string of small ranches with senior water rights.
In Summit County, the illegal use of water from about 3,900 “household only” wells siphons flows from the Blue River, which supplies the ranches and runs into Denver’s Dillion Reservoir.
Hummer found illegal uses at about half of the 500 homes he visited in the upper Blue basin, spying new sod planted around a wellhead, ornamental ponds, mother-in-law apartments and outdoor hot tubs — lots of outdoor hot tubs.
“Little sympathy”
“When you hear about ranchers along the Republican River losing their livelihood and cutting our food production, I have little sympathy for second-home owners who complain that they can’t fill up their hot tubs,” Hummer said.
The crackdown has some residents resorting to creative solutions.
The Kucharczyks looked into buying water rights and paying a water hauler to fill their hot tub, but both options proved prohibitively expensive.
Then they went to Wal-Mart, even photographing their efforts and saving receipts to prove to the water cops that they were complying — at 66 cents a gallon — with the law.
“We wanted to do it the right way,” Sandy Kucharczyk said. “I figured if I’m not using well water, if I’m getting water from a certified commercial dealer, it should be OK.”
Glenn and Judith Nichols ferried water in their 42-foot motor home from a campground hookup to the hot tub outside their Breckenridge home.
“You’re allowed to fill up wherever you go. You pay your $50, and you get your water,” Judith Nichols said.
Chris Mendrick is installing a faucet inside the garage of a home he is building in Breckenridge Heights so that the owner can wash a car inside, where it is legal.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “When they first said we had a problem, I said no big deal. We’ll just install cisterns on the roof to collect water.”
Every drop claimed
“They told me we couldn’t do that either,” Mendrick said, “because every raindrop and snowflake that falls is someone else’s.”
Water rights are valuable and marketable property under Colorado’s water law, which is based on a seniority system but includes many idiosyncrasies.
New wells can be drilled when homes are built, for example, even though they tap groundwater that would have percolated into rivers and been available for other users.
Water from the restricted wells can be used for a potted plant on the windowsill inside a house, but not one out on the porch. It is the increasing number of these wells that has become a problem in Summit County, where they are drying the Blue River.
Andy Carlberg, the manager of the Breckenridge Sanitation District, noted that some homeowners have tried to compensate by buying “augmentation” water from Summit County or a private provider.
That replacement water is stored downstream in the Dillon Reservoir, so it doesn’t help the upper Blue River where the flows are reduced.
“Augmentation plans don’t really work in the upper Blue,” Carlberg said. “They hurt our existing customers.”
The problem has worsened as septic systems in many homes have begun to fail.
Homeowners then are required by county ordinance to connect to sanitation district sewers, with the result that less waste water filters underground and makes its way to the river.
Tracy Mayo, who owns a second home in Breckenridge Heights, found herself in a regulatory dilemma when she was denied permission to replace her failing septic system with a link to the sewer line because she had a hot tub and a restricted well.
“At that point, our house was virtually uninhabitable,” she said.
Mayo has since been allowed to make the switch after promising to use “alternative means” to fill the hot tub.
Frequently, Phil Morse, a water hauler from Bailey, has become that alternative, filling hot tubs from a 1,235-gallon tank on the back of his four-wheel-drive truck.
“The day after the crackdown, I got a ton of calls,” the owner of Water Boy Inc. said while pumping 500 gallons into a new hot tub behind an oversized log home.
Morse charges $300 for a single hot tub, less if he can avoid extra 140-mile trips by having neighbors bring him out at the same time.
“When I go to Breck, I’m gone for half a day,” he explained. “I think these people can afford it.”
Steve Lipsher: 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
