The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Passionate about water
When you see the crystal clear water flowing down the East River, they are helping protect it.
When you float down the Gunnison River, they are keeping the water high.
And when you fish in the Taylor, you can thank them for the abundance of fish living in the waterway.
The Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District (UGRWCD) was created in June 1959 to work along with the federal government in creating a series of water storage projects throughout Gunnison County.
The Upper Gunnison Storage Project, as it came to be known, was never entirely feasible or cost effective. The idea was finally abandoned altogether in 2008.
But well before the Gunnison Storage Project was abandoned, the UGRWCD found many other projects to occupy its time.
Early Years
Gunnison area resident Richard Bratton served as the District’s attorney from 1959 to 1999.
Bratton says he was in the office when the district was first created in 1959. Note, however, the “office” at that time consisted of Bratton and board members like Bill Trampe and Lee Spann, talking on the phone at 7 a.m.
Bratton says the true beginning of the district happened in 1956 when the Colorado River Storage Project was authorized by Congress and construction began on a number of large reservoirs across the southwest, such as the Navajo, Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa
reservoirs.
Alongside the big reservoirs, the government agreed to provide financing for “participating” water storage projects, Bratton says. The state water court formed the UGRWCD in 1959 to act as a liaison between the local participating project and the federal government. “Gunnison had a project called the Upper Gunnison Project. They had reservoirs and ditches all across the basin,” Bratton says.
But in order to get the funding, there had to be an equal cost benefit ratio on each project—the cost of constructing the water storage project had to be equal to the benefits water users would receive.
“We searched for years to find a project that met that demand. We did engineering and feasibility studies. We scaled it way down. To make a long story short, we never could find a project,” Bratton says.
A changing mission
While the Gunnison Storage Project was ultimately shelved, by the late 1960s the district was already pursuing other goals.
Bratton says one of the first major accomplishments was the 1975 Taylor Park Reservoir Agreement between the UGRWCD, the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Group, the state of Colorado, the Colorado River District and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The Taylor Reservoir was created in 1937, as part of the Uncompahgre Project, to provide irrigation water on more than 75,000 acres of land in the Uncompahgre Basin via the Gunnison Tunnel.
Prior to the agreement, Bratton says there was bad blood between the Uncompahgre water users and local entities due to the management of the Taylor Reservoir. The 1930s decree on the Uncompahgre Project meant that water could be swiftly diverted from Taylor Reservoir early in the year, providing less than ideal conditions for fishing and boating in the Taylor drainage for much of the summer.
The 1975 agreement allowed the Uncompahgre users to store their allocation of water in Blue Mesa, and in turn would allow for better management of Taylor Reservoir to serve fishing and boating purposes.
With the assistance of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Colorado Division of Wildlife, Bratton says the entities came up with some experimental schemes to manage flows on the Taylor River. “The net result is we increased the brown trout population by 90 percent. I don’t know the value of that, but it has to be at least a million dollars a year,” Bratton says.
Bratton says the entities involved in the agreement still meet each year to discuss the management of the Taylor Reservoir and ways to make the flow regiment better. The Taylor Reservoir Agreement was amended in 1991.
He says the second major accomplishment was successfully blocking a number of trans-mountain water diversions to the Front Range. The city of Aurora, among others, was proposing the Collegiate Range Project, and Arapahoe County was proposing the Union Park Project. Both were proposed diversions of more than 100,000 acre-feet of water from the Taylor River and East River basins.
After spending $2 million in litigation, Aurora dropped their project in the early ‘90s. The Union Park Project was ultimately determined unfeasible in 2006, after Arapahoe County spent more than $4 million in litigation.
Lasting alliances
The district’s first manager, Tyler Martineau, says as a result of the Union Park and Collegiate Range litigations, as well as the district’s changing mission and involvement in a number of water policy issues across the state, the district formed some strong alliances.
“I think something the district has been very good at is working with other water interests, the state, federal and local governments, to arrive at solutions that protect the water in the basin. They know how to pull various players together and come up with a solution that’s really in the best interest of the basin,” Martineau says.
Gunnison rancher and former district board member Bill Trampe says, “I think the Upper Gunnison staff and board hold themselves up very well to the state.
“They’re respected, maybe not admired, but respected among the various water interests for the stand they take. To many they’re looked up to as a leader for developing policy for western Colorado,” Trampe says.
Current board member Steve Glazer says, “We have been very creative and progressive over the years in figuring out other ways to protect the water users in this basin.”
Glazer points to the district’s purchase of some of the water in Meridian Lake Reservoir in 2002 as a more recent accomplishment. With Meridian Lake, the district provides water augmentation plans for junior water rights owners on the Slate River who could be left without water in the event of a water call. The state of Colorado holds an in-stream flow water right on the Slate River, which requires that a certain level of water flows through the river at all times. The state has made four such calls on the Slate River since 2002, and water augmentation from Meridian Lake has been required almost every time.
Trampe agrees that augmentation through Meridian Lake is one of the important services the district now provides. “Without that service there would be a lot of homeowners up there in some dire straits to meet the rule of the law… Those things are very important to what our community has become,” he says.
Glazer says the district is now looking at similar ways to provide water augmentation in the Ohio Creek Valley. Glazer also wants to get the public more interested in the district’s activities and local water issues.
“I am proud to participate with the district in continuing to protect the historical uses of water, to meet the ongoing and never-ending threats, as well as trying to figure out modest ways to meet our future needs,” Glazer says.
Former water engineer Frank Kugel is the current district manager. “The people in the Upper Gunnison Basin are quite passionate about the water resources we have in this valley. I am charged with both protecting and utilizing those resources to the maximum benefit… It’s a fascinating position dealing with a variety of water interests,” Kugel says.
Kugel says the board is planning a celebration of the District’s 50th anniversary in September 2009.
“Over the last 50 years the district has done a lot to protect the water in the basin,” Martineau says. “I expect they’ll continue to do that in the next 50 years.”
All of the people interviewed for this story wished to credit a number of other people for the previous and ongoing success of the district. Among those credited were Lee and Ken Spann, Greg Peterson, Mark Schumacher, John McClow, Dennis Steckel, Diane Lothamer, Perk Vickers, and Rile Lake. Both Martineau and Bratton noted they were in all likelihood overlooking some people who should receive credit.
