COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—When fire tore through the eastern plains town of Ordway in the spring of 2008, destroying two dozen buildings and resulting in the deaths of two firefighters, some blamed the dry conditions that turned fields into tinder boxes or the farmer whose controlled burn sparked the inferno.
But some blamed Colorado Springs and other Front Range cities for buying water rights from Crowley County farmers, deals that left much of the formerly fertile landscape unkept and overgrown. Colorado Springs Utilities gets 17 percent of its water through rights it bought to the Colorado Canal and Lakes Meredith and Henry in the 1980s.
Critics call the practice “buying and drying.” A Pueblo lawmaker spent this fall traveling the region, talking to cities, utilities and water districts about legislation he says will protect communities that sell their water.
“We?ve all seen examples in southeastern Colorado and the corners of the state, of communities that have turned into ghost towns when the water has left,” said state Rep. Sal Pace, a Democrat. “I?m trying to protect a way of life in Colorado so that when our grandchildren are adults, they will still have rural communities that look like Colorado has for the last 100 years.”
Pace said his bill would “encourage and incentivize mitigation agreements to look at the environmental and the economic effects of the transfer from the area from where the water is moved from to where it is moved to.”
When cities buy water rights in rural communities, either to move the water by pipeline or use the water as transfers, physically withdrawing the water elsewhere in a basin, as Colorado Springs does with its Colorado Canal water, they agree to mitigation measures. These have included providing water to revegetate former farm fields and agreeing to keep certain flows on the Arkansas River.
But in Crowley County the cattleman who sold water to Colorado Springs agreed to revegetate thousands of acres, and many here have called the revegetation inadequate. Some also say the sale crippled the community, leading to a drop in the tax base and plummeting property values.
Pace?s bill would give water court judges the authority to consider what the water is worth to the buyer and require an amount equal to that be spent on mitigation measures where the water is being sold. He said that would occur only if the two parties could not reach an agreement on measures.
“My hope is to create an incentive for the applicant in water court to work with the water conservancy and conservation districts, to reach a mitigation agreement on how to best help the rural communities,” Pace said.
It could play a major role in Colorado?s water supply future, since Front Range communities will probably keep looking west to find water to meet a projected future shortfall. The legislation would only apply to new water transfers, so current transfers and projects, including Colorado Springs? Southern Delivery System pipeline from Pueblo Reservoir, would not be impacted.
Still, Colorado Springs officials, who have spent decades casting around the state for water to meet the growing population, harbor concerns. Utilities chief water services officer Bruce McCormick disputes the notion that Colorado Springs bought and dried out Crowley County.
“We worked on mitigation agreements, revegetating the land and making sure water was available for that. Our approach has always been to work with those who were involved in water agreements to make it good for those parties,” McCormick said.
In Crowley County, the collapse of the once-thriving sugar beat industry had occurred long before Colorado Springs bought any water.
“From our perspective, that water didn?t take agriculture out of production. It was water that was no longer in production,” he said.
He said last month legislation may be unnecessary, because water utilities usually reach mitigation agreements without having to settle the mitigation issue in water court.
Utilities officials have seen some of the language of Pace?s proposal and they hope to be involved in negotiations and discussions on the measure as it moves forward.
“Colorado Springs wants to ensure that any legislation does not place unreasonable standards on water transfers or further drive up the costs associated with water supply development,” said Utilities government affairs manager Andy Colosimo.
Pace said transfers within any of Colorado?s seven water divisions, which coincide with river basins, would not be impacted by his bill, nor would current water transfers. So Colorado Springs? purchase of Crowley County water would not have been affected, though the city of Aurora?s purchases would, because it is in the South Platte River Basin.
But continued population growth on the Front Range is expected to force cities to reach across the Continental Divide for water—Colorado Springs gets 60 percent of its water from the Western Slope—and similar new transfers would be subject to Pace?s bill.
Pace plans to introduce the bill when the General Assembly convenes in January. Of the water districts and cities he has visited, only one has taken a stance on it. The Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District in October voted unanimously to support the bill.
