The Colorado Division of Wildlife has withdrawn from litigation involving rights to water that supplies its Wray Hatchery, a move that might forestall a threatened farmer boycott of the 2008 pheasant season in key eastern Colorado counties.
The complicated scenario involves a battle between holders of historic surface rights and those who irrigate crops from wells. Issues are tangled in a greater interstate dispute over rights to all water in the Republican River drainage.
DOW currently uses surface water for the Wray Hatchery, which has operated since 1937 and processes approximately 40 percent of the state’s warmwater fish. With the aid of key legislators, the agency now plans to use an alternative water source.
Farmers who use irrigation wells that would have been shut down by the lawsuit had reacted angrily, forming the Eastern Colorado Lockout to close their lands to hunting. The lockout centered in Yuma County, but spread to several neighboring counties. Proponents threatened to withdraw their lands from the Walk-In Program operated by DOW.
Whether this latest DOW initiative will dissolve the lockout in total or in part remains to be seen.
“We haven’t talked things over and I don’t know how the other landowners feel,” said Don Brown of Yuma, a key figure in the boycott. “I don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but for my part, it’s over.”
Charlie Meyers, The Denver Post
