Water effort fails in Senate committee

Bill Jackson, (Bio) bjackson@greeleytribune.com
May 3, 2008

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A last minute effort to provide some relief to irrigation well owners on the South Platte River died in a Colorado Senate committee Friday afternoon.

Senate Bill 247, which would have allowed the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District to lease Colorado-Big Thompson Project water to the Central Colorado Water Conservancy District, was introduced late Wednesday, then bounced around between a couple of committees Thursday before being defeated 4-3 in the Senate Agriculture Committee in the afternoon.

The bill's sponsors, Sens. Greg Brophy, R-Wray and Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus, managed to salvage the measure and tried to get it re-introduced Friday with amendments. That effort also failed.

The measure would have allowed Central to lease upward of 10,000 acre feet of water from Northern Water to use as substitute water in its augmentation -- water replacement -- plan, during a 10-year period. That would have freed up water the Greeley-based water district owns, which could have been used by wells within the district to irrigate crops.

In 2002, the state engineer shut down several hundred irrigation wells in Adams, Weld and Morgan counties for fear using the water would result in injury to surface water users downstream on the South Platte River. Central Colorado then filed an augmentation plan for about 200 of its wells with the Division 1 water court in Greeley. Following a 45-day trial last year, that plan was given a tentative approval by Weld Judge Roger Klein, who has not yet released his final decree on that plan.

In Thursday's initial vote before the Senate Agriculture Committee, Brophy and Isgar were joined by Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, in voting in favor of the measure while Sens. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch and Jack Taylor, R-Steamboat Springs, voted against it.

The bill had the backing of Gov. Bill Ritter, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, the Denver Water Board, Northern Water and state agricultural groups.

Brophy said there were Western Slope concerns that voting in favor of the measure would mean more Western Slope water would be diverted east.

"But that's not the case. That's water we already own and we ought to be able to use it the way we want," Brophy said.

The Colorado-Big Thompson Project, built between 1938 and 1957, provides supplemental water to 30 cities and towns in northern Colorado. The water is also used to help irrigate about 693,000 acres of northeastern Colorado farmland.

The project has rights to 310,000 acre-feet of water and averages deliveries of about 213,000 acre-feet annually.