Colorado River District, Western Colorado boards of county commissioners, local economic groups oppose Proposition 112
From the Grand Junction Sentinel
Add a Western Slope water entity to the growing list of institutions coming out against a state initiative to require 2,500-foot setbacks between oil and gas development and homes or vulnerable areas.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District’s Board of Directors is unanimously opposing Proposition 112, the drilling setback measure. It likewise is opposing Amendment 74, which requires state or local governments to compensate property owners if laws or regulations reduce the fair market value of property.
The 15-county, taxpayer-funded river district is the lead water policy and planning agency for the Colorado River Basin in Colorado.
The district board’s resolution on Proposition 112 characterizes it as “an overly-aggressive proposal creating a de facto statewide ban on oil and gas production with attendant adverse impacts on essential state and local services, employment and infrastructure.”
The river district says the measure also would significantly reduce state severance tax revenues that support water projects in Colorado, including environmental, conservation and water-quality programs administered by the state.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has estimated that the measure, which wouldn’t apply to federal land, would prevent drilling on 85 percent of private land and 54 percent of all land in the state. That analysis found that much of the reason for so much land being affected is because of its provision for protecting vulnerable areas such as streams and recreation areas.
Entities including Mesa and Garfield counties’ boards of commissioners, the Colorado Mesa University Board of Trustees, and a statewide coalition including the Grand Junction Economic Partnership, the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce and Club 20 oppose the measure.
Colorado Rising, the group behind it, says it is needed to protect residents and the environment. The group questions the COGCC analysis and says the measure wouldn’t shut down drilling because of the federal-lands exclusion and the ability to drill laterally underground for miles through the use of horizontal drilling.
Under Amendment 74, a law or regulation resulting in any decrease in fair market value of property would become a regulatory taking requiring compensation. The current legal standard in Colorado is that a taking must involve almost a total loss of value or use.
Among other things, the change could result in mineral owners filing claims if a government limits oil and gas development, reducing the value of the mineral ownership.
The river district says in its resolution that the measure “would severely limit the ability of Colorado’s state and local governments to do anything that might even indirectly or minimally affect the fair market value of private property, including establishing protective water quality standards or fulfilling Colorado’s interstate water compact requirements.”
It predicts that Amendment 74 would result in dramatic and often prohibitive increases in delays and costs for responsible, widely supported water supply projects.
From The Colorado River Water Conservation District
The Colorado River Water Conservation District (River District) is a public water policy agency chartered by the Colorado General Assembly in 1937 to be “the appropriate agency for the conservation, use and development of the water resources of the Colorado River and its principal tributaries in Colorado.” We are the principal water policy and planning agency for the Colorado River Basin within the State of Colorado and provide legal, technical, and political representation regarding Colorado River issues for our constituents.
Our district is comprised of 15 West Slope counties in which a majority of the Colorado River Basin in the State of Colorado exists. These counties are:
Moffat
Routt
Grand
Summit
Eagle
Pitkin
Gunnison
Delta
Mesa
Garfield
Rio Blanco
Ouray
and portions of Montrose, Saguache and Hinsdale
The River District covers approximately 29,000 square miles, roughly 28% of the land area of Colorado. The southernmost part of the Colorado River basin in Colorado that encompasses the San Juan River and its tributaries and the upper reaches of the Dolores River are not included within the Colorado River District.
The River District is governed by a Board of Directors. Each of the 15 counties appoints a representative. All policies, resolutions, budget actions and other major activities of the River District are approved by the Board.
As states near deal on Colorado River shortage, California looks at water cuts of as much as 8%
From the Los Angeles Times
After years of stop-and-go talks, California and two other states that take water from the lower Colorado River are nearing an agreement on how to share delivery cuts if a formal shortage is declared on the drought-plagued waterway.
Under the proposed pact, California — the river’s largest user — would reduce diversions earlier in a shortage than it would if the lower-basin states strictly adhered to a water-rights pecking order. California’s huge river take would drop 4.5% to 8% as the shortage progressed.
With occasional years of relief, the river that greens farm fields and fills faucets from Colorado to California has been stuck in drought since 2000. A shortage declaration has been looming over the seven-state basin for more than a decade, only to be narrowly averted time and again when rain and snow in the upper basin pushed reservoir levels above the trigger point.
But flows into Lake Powell — one of the Colorado’s two massive reservoirs — fell to a little more than a third of the average for the April-through-July period this year. And September’s inflow was negligible, less than 1% of the average. Looking at those numbers, federal officials say the U.S. Interior Department could declare a shortage in 2020.
“It’s pretty clear we’re in a deepening long-term drought cycle,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has been importing Colorado River water to the region since the early 1940s. “It’s in everybody’s interest to prevent the system from cratering.”
The basin’s entire storage system is 47% full. Lake Powell, which stores runoff from the upper basin and releases it to Lake Mead, is 45% full. Mead, the source of Southern California’s river water, is 38% full.
The Interior secretary has never declared a shortage on the Colorado. But it has been known for years that the river is over-allocated. The basin states divvied up the flows in the early 20th century — a period that in hindsight was unusually wet and presented an unrealistic picture of what the Colorado could produce year in and year out.
Diversions are regulated by a complicated system of river compacts and water rights that call for Arizona and Nevada to take the first cuts in times of a lower-basin shortage. California, with some of the oldest river rights, is further down the line.
The sprawling Imperial Irrigation District and other farm districts in southeastern California control roughly 75% of California’s 4.4 million-acre-foot share. Imperial is the single largest user on the entire length of the river, which starts at the Continental Divide in the Colorado Rockies and has an average annual flow of roughly 15 million acre-feet.
Metropolitan has nearly doubled its base allocation of 550,000 acre-feet through agreements with Imperial and other irrigation districts that fallow crop land and sell their unused river supplies. Those deals would help cushion Metropolitan, which serves Southern California, if a shortage is declared. (An acre-foot is enough to supply more than two households for a year.)
Metropolitan would also benefit from water it has been able to bank in Lake Mead under 2007 drought guidelines that have allowed states to leave unused portions of their river allocations in the reservoir. Under the previous use-it-or-lose-it rules, states had to take their full allocation every year.
The 2007 framework specified that the Department of the Interior would declare a shortage when Lake Mead’s elevation hit 1,075 feet. Nevada and Arizona, which have rights junior to California, would then start delivery reductions.
Under the proposed drought contingency plan, Arizona and Nevada would continue to take the first cuts, which would be deeper than outlined in 2007. At the same time, California would reduce its river diversions when Mead levels hit 1,045 feet — earlier in the shortage than previously envisioned.
California’s cuts, shared by Imperial and Metropolitan, would increase as the lake level dropped but be no greater than 350,000 acre-feet a year.
Arizona is still working out the details of how to apportion its cuts among in-state users. And the lower-basin water districts have yet to approve the drought plan, which parties are hoping to finalize by December.
“I’ve got my own people asking tough questions. But I believe we can do it,” Metropolitan’s Kightlinger said.
A drought plan will not end debate among lower-basin users, who are confronting the fact that their use is outstripping the long-term supply.
“It’s not sustainable,” Kightlinger said. “We have to push it down or grow supply” with other sources.
