We’re going to talk about water today, but don’t tune us out just just yet. This isn’t some boring tale involving complex water rights or pie-in-the-sky plans that take years to develop before some obscure bureaucrat or judge pulls the plug on them.
No, this is a story of how human ingenuity, resolve and cooperation can overcome complacency. And it’s an example of how the sustainable use of a precious resource can eventually replace a model of risky overuse.
As recently as a decade ago, some officials in metro Denver’s south suburbs were still minimizing the perils of relying so heavily on dwindling groundwater supplies. And this was in the face of breathtaking residential growth during the 1990s and the resulting surge in water demand.
Meanwhile, a top Aurora water official was quoted as saying, “Why would we help Douglas County?”
Fast forward to Tuesday, when 15 entities within the South Metro Water Supply Authority along with Denver Water and Aurora Water announced a draft plan to help free the southern suburbs from reckless reliance on groundwater.
Greg Baker at Aurora Water, reflecting the prevailing attitude of cooperation, called the arrangement “historic.” He went on to explain that it was difficult to locate a single example elsewhere where so many districts had come together to share water, short of a crisis that forced them into the same room. If the communities in this deal sign on, Denver and Aurora will funnel purified water to the south, with the authority’s members paying the agencies in return.
According to The Denver Post’s Bruce Finley, Denver and Aurora would supply “as much as 1.6 billion gallons of purified water a year to suburbs by 2013, increasing to as much as 3.2 billion gallons by 2020. Engineers say necessary new pipelines and hook-ups eventually could send as much as much as 19.5 billion gallons — 60,000 acre-feet a year — to the suburbs.”
This bonanza won’t totally unwind the south suburban groundwater problem, but it will go a long way. Nor will it be cheap. But any other reasonable alternative to the status quo wouldn’t be cheap, either.
So if water is so precious, how does it happen that Aurora and Denver have some to spare? In Aurora’s case, Baker explained to us, the treatment plant that allows water reuse was built to protect the city from drought. “In wet years,” Baker said, “we have excess water.”
What that means, of course, is that some suburbs will have to revert to non-renewable supplies in times of drought. But relying on aquifers during drought actually makes sense.
If you’ve followed local news in recent weeks, you might have thought metro cooperation was a thing of the past given the rancor over the National Western Stock Show’s desire to move to Aurora. Yet in some ways, this proposed water deal is the most impressive example of metro cooperation our region has witnessed in many years.
Well done.
