The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Meetings leading up to July deadline
After a promising start to the snow season fizzled out by mid-month, a late January storm could bring an above-average snowpack back to the Gunnison Basin. Under blue skies and a blazing sun, the snowpack that started the year at more than 140 percent of average had shrunk to just over 90 percent during January’s high-pressure period.
Still, following two years of unimpressive snowpack, this was starting to feel like a banner year, with nearly all of Crested Butte Mountain open to skiers and snowboarders.
For the final few days of the month, the National Weather Service is issuing a Winter Storm Warning for the Upper Gunnison River Valley. Colorado OpenSnow meteorologist Joel Gratz is predicting a snowfall of two to four inches in the upper valley on Wednesday night, twice as much the following day, and a couple more inches on Friday.
While we’re celebrating it as snow now, soon snow will be the most precious resource in the arid southwest. And for the rest of the year, our powder days will be great news for everyone from Colorado to California.
For Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District (UGRWCD) manager Frank Kugel seeing snow in the forecast brings cautious optimism but for every trace of optimism, there’s a measurable amount off caution.
“This is typically a big snow month for us,” Kugel said after a string of sunny days last week. “But we are less than halfway through our snowmaking season.”
Uncertainty takes hold in watching a good snow year turn to an average one in the course of a few dry weeks, and then go back to good with a passing storm. Everyone hopes and no one knows what to expect. And for Kugel and the UGRWCD board, that uncertainty lends a sense of urgency to their part of the water plan being hammered out in river basins across the state.
With a massive gap projected between the state’s water supply and demand, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper issued an executive order last May that started a statewide water planning process. Since then, the state’s nine basin roundtables have been working to finalize their respective Basin Implementation Plans by July of this year. The governor is expecting a presentation of a draft statewide plan by December 2014.
The UGWCD isn’t waiting until December to see how the Gunnison Basin will be treated in the state plan. With the help of a consultant, Kugel et al have been looking for the best ways to show that there is no water here available to be pumped elsewhere. Every drop, he says, is already spoken for.
Blue Mesa Reservoir, the largest body of water in the state and a crucial link in the Colorado River Water Storage project, is sitting at 47 percent of capacity.
“At this point it would take several years of significantly above-average snowfall to fill Blue Mesa,” Kugel says. In the meantime, California and Nevada are experiencing a prolonged drought, being made worse this season, and Lake Powell, which is the last and largest link in the chain of Colorado River reservoirs, is only 41 percent full.
“We’re concerned with the drought in the lower basin. In recent years we felt there was minimal risk from a shortage for the Colorado River Compact because we’d built up a bank of water in Lake Powell,” Kugel says. “Unfortunately that bank has been drawn upon pretty heavily over the last few years.”
According to the Colorado River Compact, the upper basin states are required to supply no less than 7.5 million acre-feet of water to California and Nevada over any ten-year period.
UGRWCD board member Bill Nesbitt told the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council last week that the projected decrease in the amount of available water flowing from Colorado could make that commitment hard to meet in coming years if even some of the Western Slope’s water is diverted to feed population growth on the Front Range.
“We’re not only being targeted by the Front Range. It’s those guys downstream: Nevada, Arizona, California. The water that comes out of the combination of the … Gunnison serves 35 million people. It’s hard to fathom, but it goes all the way to California. When you start looking at everyone’s need and then look at Mead and Powell and how far down they are, if there’s a compact call I think we could all be in serious trouble.”
Kugel pointed out that the southwestern United States is in its third year of severe drought and aquifers are dropping. Water managers in California, Arizona and Nevada are already looking to the Colorado River to bolster their own water supplies.
“Our position has been that there’s a risk with future development of Colorado River water,” Kugel said.
If everyone starts relying too heavily on the Colorado River and its tributaries, the statewide water planning process and the interests of individual communities in Colorado could run headlong into the requirements of the Colorado River Compact that was signed in 1922.
A default on the compact could jeopardize water rights that were established after 1922, which would be three-quarters of the water rights in the Gunnison Basin, Kugel said.
“We’ve been exploring and promoting the concept of ‘risk management’ and what it comes down to is that any future development of Colorado River water would put us at great risk of post-1922 water rights being curtailed,” Kugel says.
But that hasn’t stopped Front Range water interests from considering a fresh supply of Western Slope water a foregone conclusion, he said.
UGRWCD’s Nesbitt, who stays abreast of the water conversation on the Front Range, says, “It’s changed in that it may not be Denver Water Board but it may be the Arkansas, it could be Colorado Springs. I go to Colorado Water Congress every year and these folks have made no bones about what they’re calling the Blue Mesa Project and another project that’s been proposed for the Taylor.”
While dry parts of the state have been pumping in water from wetter parts of the state for a century, a more recent method of acquiring water for growing municipalities has been to transfer agricultural water rights to towns, a practice known as buy-and-dry, because it leaves the farmland without irrigation.
In Hickenlooper’s State of the State Address, delivered January 9, he mentioned the statewide water plan and said, “We must create alternative choices to buy-and-dry. No matter where we live, we cannot afford to let our farm and ranch land dry up.”
Kugel acknowledges, “Pretty much every water group and every interest group is opposed to that approach. All you have to do is go down to Crowley County in the Arkansas Valley to see what happens when you transfer water out of a basin.”
With one historically available option for acquiring water rights politically unavailable, Kugel says there are still other ways of bridging the impending supply and demand gap.
Individual basin roundtables could require their water users to conserve water and thereby reduce the demand. The state could also save or store more water “through existing projects and processes,” Kugel said, whether that means more reservoirs or better retention of the existing water.
The last available option for augmenting a water supply is to take it from someplace perceived as having more water than it needs.
In a work plan passed around by the state’s 27-member Interbasin Compact Committee, which leads the planning effort, there is an emphasis placed on “Preserving the Option for New Supply,” which can be interpreted as “moving water from one basin to another.”
The work plan also acknowledges, “Preserving the option for new supply comes toward the end of this discussion arc. Past experience suggests that all of the other topics must be addressed first to give people sufficient comfort to engage in a discussion on which actions must be taken to preserve the option for new supply.”
Finally, the IBCC recommends that Front Range basins, like the South Platte and Metro basins, start conversations with their Western Slope counterparts in March. A meeting has been scheduled for March 6.
“The last piece of the puzzle is new supply. That may sound innocent enough but as we get further down the process it’s been defined as ‘new supplies from the Western Slope’ and that’s a key component,” Kugel said. “The Front Range Roundtables—the Arkansas, the South Platte and the Metro—have identified that new Western Slope water is key to their ability to meet the growing gap.
As a disclaimer against work that might be coming related to diversion strategies, the work plan says, “However, there is substantial work that must be done to flesh out the specific actions that could be taken, and we do not want those discussions to wait until July.”
So Kugel is preparing his arguments against taking water out of the Gunnison Basin—a threat he said this basin has faced since the 1930s.
