Water issue in county on the edge of crisis

Drought predictions through January 2019

By Cayla Vidmar

With a statewide water forecast that includes a 20 percent reduction in water supply and an influx of 50 percent more people by mid-century, water planners in the upper Gunnison water basin are working on possible solutions while trying to avoid involuntary demand management.

Frank Kugel, general manager for the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District (UGRWCD), discussed drought, water and planning updates at the Gunnison County Planning Commission. Topics included current drought and water updates and how we are getting “dangerously close” to violating the 1922 water compact, and possible solutions to guide the upper Gunnison basin into the future.

“The bad news moving forward … the [winter] season drought outlook is predicting that drought will persist through January 2019,” said Kugel, while clicking through slides of drought maps of Colorado. A deep red color, which denotes the highest category of drought, was shown creeping up from the southwest into Gunnison County. Blue Mesa, which Kugel joked is more of a hay field than a lake at this point, has now dropped lower than 2002 numbers and is losing two inches of water per day. Kugel anticipates the reservoir will stop dropping once downstream demands in Delta and Montrose cease at the end of the month.

Throughout the summer, 2002 was the drought benchmark for water discussions, a marker the Blue Mesa has now surpassed. The “record low for a drought year was 1977 and we’re getting closer and closer to that,” Kugel said.

The drought, which is remarkably visible in the comparison photos of the Blue Mesa Reservoir Kugler shared, lead to a bigger discussion of water rights and obligations to those downstream. Kugler summarized the 1922 water compact, which dictates Colorado’s downstream water obligations: When the 1922 compact was created, “They were using rather optimistic hydrology from the early 1900s and saying there were 15 million acre-feet available in the Colorado river basin, and so they split that in half between the upper and lower basin…” meaning Colorado gets to keep 75 million acre-feet of water over a decade, and is required to send 75 million acre-feet downstream to the lower basin states over a ten-year period.

“We are getting dangerously close to having issues with the compact,” said Kugel. He explained that while we’re still ahead on the amount of water we’re delivering downstream over the ten-year period, the issue lies within the elevation of Lake Powell.

The Blue Mesa, Colorado’s largest body of water, supplies almost 40 percent of the stream flow in the Colorado River leaving the Colorado state line, according to Kugler. “If we were to have another 2018 winter in 2019 and hopefully not ever in 2020, but if that were the case, Lake Powell elevations would drop to where we would have trouble meeting our compact obligations because we couldn’t physically get the water though the outlet through Lake Powell into the Glen Canyon dam, because there wouldn’t be enough head on the conduits to push water through at a rate of 7.5 million acre-feet per year,” said Kugel.

The discussion moved into possible solutions, and tackling the low-hanging fruit, while addressing the possibility of involuntary management for Western Slope water users. Low-hanging fruit solutions include using cloud seeding and dealing with invasive water-loving tamarisk along the Colorado River banks, and releasing storage from Colorado River storage project act reservoirs, such as Blue Mesa.

Kugel said the valley sees a 10 percent increase in snowpack through cloud seeding, and concluded, “Even if the benefit is one percent, it’s worth it because it’s cheap water.” Kugel and his team are exploring the potential for more remote generators to increase cloud seeding. While cloud seeding increases snowpack by a small percent, on the opposite side of the coin, Kugel explained how tamarisk and Russian olive trees, which are invasive water-loving phreatophytes that have taken over the banks of the Colorado river, account for a fraction of water demand and shortage. Removal of these plants serves as another relatively simple option.

Blue Mesa serves as a Colorado River storage project act reservoir, along with Navajo Lake in New Mexico and Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming. Another solution is tapping these lakes to fill Lake Powell to maintain water obligations.

The complexity of the issue came full circle when Kugel discussed the desire of Front Range water entities to implement an involuntary, non-compensated water demand plan on Western Slope users. The concern is that current voluntary demand plans and tackling the more simple issues will not have a significant enough impact on the water shortage.

Currently, voluntary demand plans include paying ranchers to fallow hay fields for a season. Kugel explained that asking ranchers to fallow a hay field for one season isn’t a good deal for ranchers because it can take years for the quality of hay to return to what it was pre-fallow. “Wilder Ranch dried up one hay field and five years later, the yield was almost back to normal but the protein in the hay is not,” said Kugel.

Involuntary demand plans include curtailing use of water rights that are junior to the 1922 Colorado River Compact. In a follow-up conversation, Kugel said he doesn’t see this happening in the foreseeable future. “We on the Western Slope are reluctant to pursue involuntary demand management at this time. We wish to exhaust all other options first,” he said.

During the discussion, Kugel also described the complex, and seemingly impossible-to-manage, river user needs along the Taylor River. The Taylor Local Users Group is made up of multiple water users, ranging from Taylor Park Marina, down to Three Rivers Resort at the confluence. All the demands of each user, from agricultural needs to recreation to the fishery, require different flow levels throughout the season. The Taylor River paints an interesting picture of the water issues faced by the Gunnison Basin, and we’ll look at that in a future story.