Colorado’s forests — aching after major wildfires and widespread beetle infestation — have found a new champion: water providers across the state.
Under a bill introduced this week in the state legislature, those providers could soon be able to team up and bring millions of new dollars to protect the forests from further harm.
The idea, said Sen. Chris Romer, a Denver Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors, is to spend money now to prevent a catastrophic forest fire rather than spend much more money later cleaning up the ash- and debris-filled water that follows such events.
“This is an effort to get water users to pay now rather than pay later,” Romer said. “The question isn’t if it will burn; it’s when it will burn.”
Senate Bill 221 would allow the Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority to issue bonds on behalf of water providers, acting effectively as a bank giving a loan. That money — Romer is hoping for as much as $20 million a year — would be used to remove trees killed by beetles, clear out undergrowth, thin forests and do other fire-mitigation practices in the participating providers’ watersheds.
The providers would pay back that money to the authority by most likely charging a fee to their customers.
Denver Water manager Chips Barry said in a meeting this week with The Denver Post’s editorial board that Denver Water is looking at charging such a “watershed maintenance fee.” Denver Water has spent tens of millions of dollars cleaning out debris in its reservoirs that was washed down after 2002’s Hayman fire and other major wildfires.
“We think we need to get out in front of this,” he said.
Denver Water Board president Tom Gougeon said discussions of a possible fee are only conceptual and said Denver Water is deciding how best to help the forests that cradle its water.
“How you pay isn’t the first question,” he said. “The first question is, ‘What would be effective?’ ”
Because multiple water providers often share the same watershed and could also bear the burden of protecting it, the bill is appealing to small providers that would be able to do only so much to promote forest health on their own, said Gary Severson, executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.
“This is very creative,” said Severson, whose organization includes 28 local governments and water providers in the northern and central mountains. “It’s brand new. We haven’t seen anything like this.”
Currently, the state has limited resources to deal with looming forest health issues such as the pine beetle epidemic, which has already killed more than a million acres of lodgepole pine in the state. Sen. Dan Gibbs, a Silverthorne Democrat and wildland firefighter who is one of SB 221’s sponsors, said the state spends about $1 million a year right now removing the beetle-kill trees that could fuel a major forest fire.
“On the state level and the federal level, we have been nickel-and-diming this,” he said.
But Gibbs said he is hopeful that SB 221 will frame the forests’ problems in a different way and bring more money to the cause.
“This could potentially be a tremendous amount of money to forest health,” he said.
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
