Colorado’s legislative leadership promised this year that the state’s water problems would be the “centerpiece” of conservation efforts but their keystone proposal focused on the Colorado River and widespread drought plaguing the West is to study the issue further.
At such a late stage in the drying American West, water experts tell The Denver Post that creating another study group amounts to procrastination while time is running out. And, they say, it’s unlikely that evaluating the drought – exacerbated and made permanent by climate change – yet again will yield any new ideas.
Lawmakers introduced the bipartisan bill, SB23-295, late in their session. It is on its way to clearing the Senate and heading to the House of Representatives. Behind the measure are Western Slope Sens. Dylan Roberts, an Avon Democrat, and Perry Will, a New Castle Republican, Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie, and Marc Catlin, a Montrose Republican.
The bill would create a 16-member task force, plus an advisory member, consisting of a cross-section of water users including representatives of the Department of Natural Resources, the Colorado Agriculture Commission, members of the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes, water commissions and environmental organizations.
Once formed, the task force would begin meeting by July and by December recommend ways Colorado could counter drought in the Colorado River Basin and related inter-state commitments. The group would have broad leeway for the types of recommendations it could offer.
“The Colorado River is certainly critical and of concern to everyone in the state,” McCluskie said. “But for me and my communities, it is the romance, the religion and the spirit of what it means to be Coloradan.”
Water issues in the state are “tough,” McCluskie said, with many entrenched interests. She acknowledged that “while this may be just a task force, it is really meaningful in the world of water for the state of Colorado.”
Roberts called water “an incredible challenge,” but was hopeful the task force would be “a responsible thing to do to get buy-in from across the state.”
Officials in Colorado could be doing far more, though, than convening another task force, Dan Beard, a former U.S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, said. He lambasted the proposal.
“It isn’t a flop, it’s a belly flop,” Beard said.
While Colorado isn’t the biggest water user in the Colorado River Basin, it could still contribute meaningful water savings, Beard said.
For example, lawmakers could work to curb the amount of water piped out of the basin, Beard said. Major urban centers along the Front Range (like Denver) draw water from the river and move it across the Continental Divide to their taps. Farmers and Ranchers east of the divide also rely on Colorado River water.
Trans-basin water transfers like those are problematic because all the water taken out of the basin is lost to the Colorado River forever. On the contrary, water used within the basin to irrigate crops will ultimately flow back into the river if it’s not absorbed by the plants.
Lawmakers could also require efficiency upgrades to irrigation equipment, Jay Famiglietti, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, said. Or they could create a series of financial incentives to pay Colorado farmers to draw less from the river, transition to crops that require less water or to strategically fallow portions of their land.
Conserving even a fraction of the Colorado River water drawn by agriculture would amount to a tremendous boost to the entire system, Famiglietti said.
State and federal officials, lawmakers, water managers and farmers already know these options and many more, Beard said. A task force studying the river is unlikely to come up with anything new.
“We’ve had commission after commission, interagency task forces, study groups. We’ve had every conceivable collection of people that you’d want studying the issues within the Colorado River Basin,” Beard said. “We’re not short on ideas, we’re short on action.”
There’s always some benefit to the discussions that would arise from such a task force but Jennifer Gimbel, senior water policy scholar at Colorado State University, agreed that this sort of thing has already been done, repeatedly.
Colorado lawmakers in 2005 formed the Interbasin Compact Committee with 27 members who have held multiple roundtable discussions in recent years to discuss water issues. Roberts previously served on the committee.
Then Gimbel noted there was Colorado’s Interim Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee. Roberts chairs that group now and legislators passed a law transforming it into a permanent fixture of the statehouse rather than an interim one.
“I’m just not sure what they think they’re going to get with this (new) task force,” Gimbel said.
Roberts noted that the proposed task force does not include lawmakers in the hopes of having it “as non-political as possible.” As for the task force being too little, too late? Roberts argued it’s better now than never to work toward meaningful policy. Many groups argued for more action years ago, he said, to no avail. The state needs to be more proactive than it was then, Roberts said, while still moving carefully to avoid unintended consequences.
“I agree, we find ourselves in a precarious position,” Roberts said. “It’s important to do what we can with the reality that faces us at the moment.”
Colorado’s Western Slope did enjoy an above-average snowpack this winter but that’s only enough to delay – not prevent – water levels at the country’s two largest reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, from sinking deeper.
Federal officials are considering whether to order Arizona, California and Nevada to take less water out of the drying Colorado River, a move that could devastate major cities and agricultural centers that feed the entire country. Upper-basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming appear to have avoided cuts for now.
In certain circles, the debate has devolved into a stalemate with upper-basin states pointing the finger downstream (Arizona and California do draw the vast majority of the water, more than their allotment) and demanding cuts before any further action is taken upstream.
Roberts said the most recent task force proposal is, at least in part, a response to possible federal action. That includes possible recommendations on how the state might tap into federal money to pay people for their water rights — though Roberts said anything along those lines would be voluntary, compensated, and as temporary as possible.
“While I hope the federal government looks elsewhere for cuts along the Colorado River, we cannot just sit and hope for that outcome,” Roberts said. “I think it’s important for us to be proactive and create a voluntary, temporary compensated program that will allow Colorado to conserve more water and help with compact compliance, but do it in a responsible way that protects our constituents.”
However the cuts are divided, the seven states in the Colorado River Basin – home to some 40 million people – have just a few months to cement a plan with federal officials, Famiglietti said. And any recommendations that might come from the task force would take far longer than that to officially propose, fund and launch.
“We’re at the end of the road. There’s no more room to kick the can,” Famiglietti, former director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, said. “This is not bold action.”
Andy Mueller, executive director of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, took a different tact, though. Since the most immediate water conservation efforts need to come from Arizona and California, perhaps upper-basin states do have more time to maneuver. And the task force bill would help create the legal framework for new programs in Colorado.
Once lower-basin states agree on a path forward “they’re going to look up here and say ‘What are you guys doing?’” Mueller said. “And our answer can’t be that we’re still avoiding doing anything.”
Mark Squillace, a water law professor at the University of Colorado, noted that those sorts of approaches would likely require the state to redefine aspects of its water laws and change how water can be used and transported. The task force could be the starting point for those legal changes.
The proposal has potential, Squillace said, but much depends on those who would sit on the task force and how they’d approach the job.
“I like the idea,” he said. “But I understand it could also be one of these commissions that really doesn’t do anything. Or it may be a commission of people who don’t want to rock the boat.”
