Glade will help us save for a not-so-rainy day

Tribune Opinion
May 9, 2008

Comments Print Email

You've heard the saying "saving for a rainy day." In the arid, semi-desert region we live in, the opposite is true. You have to save for a non-rainy day. And as was the case during the drought in the early part of this decade, many, many non-rainy days.

We're talking about saving water, of course, and in the West, water is more valuable than gold -- and particularly, stored water.

Without it, major metro areas like Phoenix and Los Angeles wouldn't be able to exist like they do today, and closer to home, much of the Eastern Slope of Colorado wouldn't be able to accommodate the population and agricultural practices vital to the region's economy.

It just doesn't rain enough, and regularly enough, from year to year for us to live and farm without a water reserve (even with groundwater aquifers, the allocation of which is another story altogether).

And that brings us to Glade Reservoir, a massive, $426 million proposal that, if built, would provide 40,000 acre-feet of water each year, enough for 80,000 families. This is no small undertaking. To build the reservoir northwest of Fort Collins, seven miles of U.S. 287 north of Ted's Place would have to be relocated, and a good portion of the Poudre River's flow -- up to 71 percent from the canyon mouth to south of Timnath -- would be reduced during peak months so the water could be redirected to the reservoir. No dam would be built on the river. If given the go-ahead, Glade would have a 170,000 acre-feet capacity, slightly larger than Horsetooth Reservoir, and could be finished by 2014.

Such a project isn't without consequences -- at times the river's flow could slow to a trickle through Fort Collins and farther downstream -- and thus isn't without critics. The fight to get the Glade Reservoir built may create as much ill will as with the doomed Two Forks Dam proposed on the South Platte River in the 1980s.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on April 30 issued the draft environmental impact statement for the Northern Integrated Supply Project, which includes Glade and another reservoir, Galeton, east of Ault. The 700-page draft is a required step in the process, and it did nothing to sway either proponents or opponents of the project, which wasn't unexpected.

Critics of the project have called it a Band-Aid, because the 40,000 acre-feet the Glade Reservoir would supply is just the bare minimum of water we'll need in the future. If that's the case, what will our future be like without it?

Conservation alone is not enough. And it strikes us as disingenuous for critics -- many of whom reside Fort Collins and are fairly new to the state -- to look down their noses downstream and tell Colorado natives and other third- and fourth-generation farmers they need to change their lifestyles and conserve more. Farmers are the ultimate conservationists -- their survival depends on it. Stricter water-use policies are worth considering, but low-flow toilets and xeriscaped yards won't help irrigate corn fields or provide water for the growing population, which is expected to be more than 500,000 in Weld County come 2035.

Much of the region's prosperity can be credited to the visionaries in the 1930s who pushed for and built the Colorado-Big Thompson water project, which brings water from the Western Slope to the Front Range. It's time -- past time, actually -- for us to do something to provide water for future generations.

It just doesn't make sense for us to watch so much "gold," particularly in years like this when the mountain snowpack is so great, flow downstream to Nebraska and beyond, when instead we could hang on to some of it for a non-rainy day.