summer 2009 water administration

C o lo r a d o F o u n dat i o n F o r Wat e r e d u C at i o n | S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Administering ColorAdo’s WAter resourCe

Scarcity Rules

All in a Day’s WorkJerd Smith heads to the field with two water commissioners from vastly differing regions

Water’s Top CopPolicing scarcity from the State engineer’s office

Reservoir “Rules”

A Stream of En-GaugementWater measurement’s ongoing evolution

Right to Remainnon-consumptive water rights pose a worthwhile administrative challenge

Water Undergroundoptimizing use of an unseen resource

Toward a Sustainable Horizon

Dick Bratton,Gunnison Water Wheel

CFWE: The Next Five Years

Colorado’s State Engineer, Dick Wolfe

I have a confession.

Water administration is not something I was very familiar with until now. I can’t say I had a clear picture of what the State Engineer’s job was exactly until I met with Dick Wolfe last month to find out what he expects will be his most pressing issues over the next five years. Then I got to read Allen Best’s write-up, including views from Wolfe and the previous two state engineers, Hal Simpson and Jeris Danielson, on playing the role of Colorado’s top water cop, which cleared things up even more. Next, Jerd Smith transported me to the Blue River Basin and then the lower South Platte Basin for an on-the-ground perspective from two of Colorado’s 114 water com-missioners. These guys (and gals, if Erin Light has anything to do with it) are truly getting their feet wet implementing the nuances of delivering water to the right place at the right time in the right amount, to the extent nature allows. Their job keeps getting more complicated as the years roll by, which

George Sibley reports on in his story on administering rights for water to stay in the stream, as the non-consumptive uses of water gain perceived value and recognition. We find out through Sibley that water measurement is incredibly important to the effort of enforcing Colorado’s instream flows, bring-ing us back to Smith’s report on the history of Coloradans’ efforts to calculate the volume and speed of an ever-flowing, liquid target. Finally, Josh Zaffos fills us in on groundwater administration, and how the advancing understanding of this hidden resource’s connection to surface flows has been quite the brainteaser, and possibly the source of more than one migraine, for almost everyone involved in its use or its admin-istration. So, read on and discover the myriad responsibilities of the Division of Water Resources, or State Engineer’s Office as it is also called, and you may just gain a healthy sense of appreciation, as I have, that someone else is doing the stats.

Jayla PoppletonJayla Poppleton, EditorJayla Poppleton (left) and Nicole Seltzer ven-

tured out to the Windsor Reservoir to check out a Rubicon Gate, the latest in stream measurement devices. (See Stream of En-Gaugement on page 12.) Read Nicole’s update on the Foundation’s mission statement and strategic plan on page 29.

Colorado Foundation for Water Education1580 Logan St., Suite 410 • Denver, CO 80203

303-377-4433 • www.cfwe.org

Board Membersmatt CookPresident

Justice Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr.1st Vice President

rita Crumpton 2nd Vice President

Wendy HanophySecretary

taylor HawesAssistant Secretary

dale mitchellTreasurer

alan HamelAssistant Treasurer

Becky Brookstom Cech

rep. Kathleen Curryalexandra davisJennifer Gimbel

Callie HendricksonSen. Jim isgar

Chris PiperJohn PorterChris rowe

rick Sackbauerrobert Sakatatravis Smith

Steve Vandiverreagan Waskom

Staffnicole Seltzer

Executive Director

david HarperOffice Manager

Kristin mahargEducation Program Associate

On the Web Please visit www.cfwe.org, the Web site of the Colorado Foundation for Water education, for additional content related to this issue, including multimedia “all in a day’s Work” presentations created by photographer Kevin moloney.

Headwaters is a magazine designed to provide Colorado citizens with balanced and accurate information on a variety of subjects related to water resources. Copyright 2009 by the Colorado Foundation for Water education. iSSn: 1546-0584 edited by Jayla Poppleton. designed by emmett Jordan.

Acknowledgments the Colorado Foundation for Water education thanks the people and organizations who provided review, comment and assistance in the development of this issue.

All in a Day’s Work Jerd Smith heads to the field with two water commissioners from vastly differing regions. .......................................................... 2

Water’s Top Cop Policing scarcity from the State Engineer’s Office ......................... 9

Reservoir “Rules” ................................................................................. 11

A Stream of En-gaugement Water measurement’s ongoing evolution ................................... 12

Right to Remain Non-consumptive water rights pose a worthwhile administrative challenge ................................................................ 15

Water Underground Optimizing use of an unseen resource ......................................... 20

Toward a Sustainable Horizon ........................................................... 24

Dick Bratton, Gunnison Water Wheel ................................................ 27

CFWE: The Next Five Years ................................................................ 29

On the Cover: State Engineer Dick Wolfe, usually knee-deep in paperwork, explains his vision for the future—see page 25. Photo by Kevin Moloney

HEADWATERS | Summer 2009

C o lo r a d o F o u n dat i o n F o r Wat e r e d u C at i o n | S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Administering ColorAdo’s WAter resourCe

Scarcity Rules


Water’s Top CopPolicing scarcity from the State engineer’s office

Reservoir “Rules”

A Stream of En-GaugementWater measurement’s ongoing revolution

Right to Remainnon-consumptive water rights pose a worthwhile administrative challenge

Water Undergroundoptimizing use of an unseen resource



CFWE: The Next Five Years

Colorado’s State Engineer, Dick Wolfe

Mission Statement the mission of the Colorado Foundation for Water education is to promote better understanding of water resourc-es through education and information. the Foundation does not take an advocacy position on any water issue.

http://www.cfwe.org

http://www.cfwe.org

2 C o lo r a d o f o u n dat i o n f o r Wat e r e d u C at i o n

Water commissioner Brent Schantz (above and top right) oversees part of one of the fastest-changing regions of the state, Water Division 1—the South Platte Basin. Schantz is responsible for an area stretching from Kersey to Julesberg. On any given day, he drives hundreds of miles doing field inspections and checking gauges like the Kersey gauge pictured above. Scott Hummer is his counterpart in Water Division 5, which includes the headwaters of the Colorado River. Below, Hummer checks a gauge at the inlet to the Hoosier Tunnel above Breckenridge.

H e a d Wat e r s | s u m m e r 2 0 0 9 3



Story by Jerd Smith | Photos by Kevin Moloney

A white jacket of snow covers the Continental Divide and solid ice blankets Lake Dillon, Denver Water’s largest water storage reservoir. Beneath the stillness of the ice, water, as always, is moving into the mouth of the Roberts Tunnel, destined to travel 60-some miles down the east side of the Front Range to 1.2 million Denver Water customers.

Summit County water commissioner Scott Hummer has already checked stream gauges this morning from his home above Lake Dillon, eyeing reservoir levels and flow rates. By 9 a.m. he has plowed through the paperwork at his tiny office in a Silverthorne industrial park.

Hummer is one of 114 commissioners who over-see the day-to-day operation of Colorado’s rivers. A 20-year veteran of Colorado’s Division of Water Resources, Hummer, 49, is well aware that when the mountain snowpack begins to melt, all eyes

turn to Summit County and the Blue River Basin he oversees in Colorado Water Division 5.

Here in the headwaters of the mighty Colorado River, most of the state’s largest water utilities have a major presence. Their massive transmountain delivery systems supply drinking water to millions of people on the Front Range. The utilities, farmers and ski areas have spent millions of dollars over the years battling one another over who gets how much water and when. Hummer is the water cop responsible for keeping the peace and ensuring water is being mea-sured and delivered properly.

He knows, for instance, that the Roberts Tunnel is taking about 56.6 cubic feet of water per second out of the lake, based on satellite feeds that auto-matically gather data from dozens of river and reser-voir gauges. Later today he will visit critical gauging stations to make sure the automated readings com-

Like many water commissioners Hummer is part historian, part sociologist, part hydrographer and part naturalist.

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ing in via satellite to the state’s monitoring system match those he sees on the river itself.

As utilities, farmers and regulators gear up for the spring melt—a time to fill reservoirs and carefully balance the flow of water between the east and west slopes—everyone goes into a sort of hyper-alert mode, a ramp-up period that has people like Hummer carefully monitoring mountain snowpacks and checking gauging stations and tunnels to ensure they’re ready for the season.

Above Dillon, the snowpack on that April day was 109 percent of average, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a healthy reading given the chronic drought cycle that has plagued Colorado since 2002. But to Hummer and other commissioners, a slightly above average snowpack doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a good water year. “One month ago we were still below average,” Hummer says. “This is nothing to write home about.”

Still, the snow in April is heavy and wet. On a deeply rutted dirt road heading over the Continental Divide, melting water sluices down through the snow, turning clay to a deep, greasy mud. Hummer is on his way to check the Hoosier Tunnel, which delivers water from the Blue River Basin to Colorado Springs. Inside this massive, old structure, completed in 1951, water drips from the granite ceiling as Hummer checks the gauge. It’s reading about 1 cubic foot per second, barely a trickle compared with the spring rush that will occur in a few short weeks. “Things are just getting started,” Hummer says. “In another month, it will be at 1,500 cfs.”

Like many water commissioners Hummer is part historian, part sociologist, part hydrographer and part naturalist. He has a degree in geography, and he loves the diversity of his work. “In a district like this,” Hummer says, “you have every type of water right that has ever been adjudicated being used, from irrigation water, to water for snowmaking, to water from a geothermal well that is being used to heat a local hardware store.”

Last week, he took snow shoes and hiked up to a ridge line to check a small mountain lake on which a nearby property owner had filed for a new water right. Later, he’ll write a formal report that the water court will use to evaluate whether to approve the water right.

“The process of deter-mining what a new water right will be starts with the

water commissioners,” Hummer says. “Most people don’t even know that water commissioners exist. Yet commission-ers are the individuals who are responsible for allowing the people who hold and own water rights to divert their water. Denver Water has to deal with the water commissioner just like a rancher down in Durango has to deal with a water commis-sioner. Pretty much what we say goes.”

Later this summer, he’ll be going door-to-door in the ever-growing mountain subdivisions of Summit County, checking wells to make sure people aren’t using water outdoors on lawns and in hot tubs. Here, about 3,500 wells operate but water is allowed only for indoor use because the wells draw from the same aquifer that supplies the Blue River. If hom-eowners and others over-pump, they must buy extra water to replenish the river.

“If anyone had told me 20 years ago that I would be going to door-to-door checking hot tubs, I would have said, ‘You must be nuts.’”

Just as Hummer is gearing up for spring runoff, on the east side of the Continental Divide, water commissioner Brent Schantz is at work in his Greeley office. Schantz oversees Districts 1 and 64 in one of the fastest-changing regions of the state—Water Division 1, the South Platte Basin. At 7:30 on a cold, cloudy April morning, he’s already taken a half dozen cell phone calls in his office. Two large computer screens offer him views of a slew of gauge readings from Kersey out to the Nebraska state line at Julesberg.

Stacks of records and paper charts still used to graph read-ings at old monitoring stations cover an ancient wooden desk. New portable electronic devices that allow commissioners to automatically download data from stream gauges during field expeditions lie around, as do batteries and cables.

Schantz, 41, took over supervision of District 1 in 2002, one of the driest years on record. It was a year that had groundwater-reli-

ant farmers battling surface water-dependent farmers day after day. Conditions created by the prolonged drought, in addition to a Colorado Supreme Court case and a new state law, have mandat-ed that well users put more water back into the river. Problems between well users and those who rely on surface supplies were first addressed in a 1969 law that established that the aquifer that supplied the wells also supplied the South Platte. Replacement

Listen to Scott Hummer and Brent Schantz describe their work and view additional photos at www.cfwe.org.

Scott Hummer checks the gauge in the Hoosier Tunnel near Alma, which delivers water from the Blue River Basin to Colorado Springs. The flow was about 1 cubic foot per second, barely a trickle compared with the spring rush.

http://www.cfwe.org


for out-of-priority well pump-ing was required begin-ning in 1974 when the State Engineer’s Amended South Platte Rules were approved. Still, there had usually been enough water to go around in the South Platte, enough to keep both surface and groundwater users happy.

But 2002 changed that, and the drought made it clear that water demands on the South Platte—thanks to growing cities and a massive irrigated farm economy—had out-stripped the river’s ability to supply everyone.

Since then, bitter court battles have been fought and hun-dreds of wells have been shut off. Well users who’ve survived have spent millions buying water to augment their well use. Rules dictate that every time a well pumps out of priority, it automatically incurs a depletion debt to the river that has to be paid to prevent injury to senior water rights. They’ve built dozens of recharge ponds to ensure they can store extra water and return it to the river as their wells draw from the aquifer. All of these must be closely monitored by Schantz and his small band of deputies.

The added activity means the winter season—once a quiet time for water commissioners—has become almost frenzied because it is the time when well users can draw water from the river to fill their recharge ponds.

“I never thought I’d see the day when I looked forward to irrigation season starting,” says Schantz. “But I do. The recharge periods are far more busy and hectic.”

Schantz is on the cutting edge of an effort to automate and publish the thousands of measurements that are made daily on this fiercely contested river. Now, many farm-

ers using surface water or groundwater have access to satellite telemetry data that tells them how much water they are diverting almost instantly, not days or weeks later after hun-dreds of acre feet of water may have already been improperly used. This near real-time data is now avail-able for all major diversion structures along the South Platte from Brighton to the Nebraska state line.

The slightest changes to the river’s flows may imme-diately alter whose water rights can be exercised,

with the senior, or oldest, surface water right holders getting their supplies first. Now the moment supplies in the river change, Schantz alerts users whether they can divert more or less water or whether their surface water or well right is no longer in priority for the available water. In that case, well users either need to shut down or prepare to incur a liquid debt to the river that will have to be paid out of their recharge ponds. On a good day—and there have been several this spring—the river’s flow is abundant and “free,” and users can take what-ever they need.

Free river days are rare on the South Platte. And with each year, with each new row of houses, the river’s supplies are further stretched. That painful reality pushes Schantz to work 12-hour days gathering data, monitoring recharge ponds, watching for peaks and free river conditions, and informing well users when they must pay back water to pump.

Like Hummer, Schantz spends at least part of his days in April preparing for the spring runoff, verifying automated satel-lite data. When the numbers don’t match what is actually occur-ring on the river, he checks instruments and calls for repairs.

From his Greeley office, Brent Schantz monitors satellite-equipped river gauges that provide instant feedback on fluctuating river conditions.


As heavy clouds wrap the eastern plains in a cool, grey drizzle, Schantz ven-tures out from Greeley to check the Kersey gauge, a critical measuring site just below the confluence of the Cache la Poudre and the South Platte rivers. As he drives, a massive set of keys held on interlocking silver rings cascade from the ignition of his white truck, rattling against the steering column. There are hundreds of keys to head gates, diversion structures and well houses. If mayors hold the keys to their cities, Schantz holds the keys to the South Platte.

At the Kersey gauge, he pulls off Highway 37. First he checks gauge readings inside a small white station house, then he hikes back up to the highway and onto the bridge that spans the river. Semi-trucks sail by as Schantz leans over the railing to unlock a small metal box that holds a mea-suring cable. Slowly he turns a crank lowering the cable until it touches the river’s surface 20 feet below. This measure-ment will help him calculate the volume of water moving through the river that day.

On the South Platte this is a tricky proposition because, says Schantz, “The river bed is constantly moving.” One gauge, the Balzac, is on a sand channel that is so shifty that the gauge has to be flushed daily because it becomes plugged with sand. “The level at the top of the river may be the same, but from one day to the next, the bottom could have scoured out by a foot.”

On any given day, Schantz drives hundreds of miles doing field inspections, ghost-riding the Overland Trail, hoping he doesn’t sink into the sandy river bottom soil that also snagged

the wheels of pioneer wag-ons. He travels for miles on unmarked ranch roads, thoroughfares the early pio-neers built along irrigation ditches and across fields. He’s been stuck near the Riverside Reservoir three times since becoming com-missioner. It’s an experi-ence he now takes pains to avoid. “On some of these roads, all you can do is grab the wheel, drive as fast as you can without going into the ditch, and hold on. Sometimes you make it. Sometimes you don’t.”

Though Hummer and Schantz preside over widely differing river basins, each has an appreciation for what the other must do in the field--educating the public, calming angry water users, taking one phone call after another from those jockeying for position on the streams.

And though Hummer is often reluctant to go door-to-door to stop hot tub violations, he knows that his well-enforcement problems pale in comparison to those Schantz is trying to man-age on the other side of the divide.

“It’s hard to compare sending someone a violation because they have an illegal hot tub in an accessory apartment to telling a family in the South Platte that they are no longer going to be able to irrigate 3,000 acres of corn,” Hummer says.

Still, Hummer’s work high in the headwaters is critical to the South Platte because much of the water the Front Range relies on originates in his territory. Spring “State-of-the-River” meetings lure hundreds of people from both the West Slope and Front Range, and sometimes the gatherings turn raucous. But Hummer is used to the tumult.

As one sign pinned to the bulletin board in his tiny office reads, “There are no rules above 10,000 feet.” q

Brent Schantz checks diversion structures along the South Platte River to make sure water right owners are taking only what they’re allowed.


By Jerd Smith

Erin Light oversees the remote, lush Yampa River Basin, one of the last places in the American West where almost anyone can take water without a water right. Because of increasing use, however, the river is slowly being integrated into the state’s regulatory system, and Light, the first and only female division engineer in the state, is charged with bringing the wild-charging Yampa in line.

Unlike her colleagues in the heavily-regulated Colorado River and South Platte River basins, Light doesn’t have to keep tabs on hundreds of stream gauges and measuring devices because until recently there haven’t been any, at least not on the Yampa’s mainstem.

“When people from the Front Range come over here, they’re just shocked,” Light says. “The concept of being able to divert without a water right is baffling to them.”

But not to Light. The Yampa Basin is a place of liquid plenty, and those ranchers whose families helped settle this stunning region have fought long and hard to keep state water commis-sioners from regulating how much water they divert.

Light’s job is to convince them to join the regulated water world. It hasn’t, however, been easy. In the past two years she’s ordered 90 new measuring devices to be installed. At least 10 water users have failed to comply, forcing her to issue cease-and-desist orders.

“I really hope they don’t try to divert this spring because we’ll just have to shut them off,” Light says. And that’s almost unheard of on the Yampa.

So are female division engineers. Light, however, grew up listening to stories of Elwood Mead, for whom Lake Mead is named, and of Howard Bunger, co-inventor of the Howell-

Bunger valve. Both are her distant uncles, and both worked for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. She followed in their footsteps, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from Colorado State University, focusing on hydraulics and hydrology. After college, she worked first in consulting, but then landed a job with the USBR in Denver before eventually finding her way to the Steamboat office of the Colorado Division of Water Resources. After working for five years as a hydrographer, she was named division engineer.

After her appointment two years ago, she anguished for days over how to tell her boss, then-State Engineer Hal Simpson, that she was pregnant with her first child, though he had hired her and served as a mentor. He proved her fears groundless, taking the news well.

Now Light’s staff of 11 includes seven women, five of whom are water commissioners, another oddity in the water world. Light hired one of those commissioners last fall, a 25-year-old who had been working in the Yampa as a ditch rider. Now she is overseeing a particularly contentious region of the basin. “She’ll have a lot to learn this summer,” Light says. “But I think I helped pave the way for her.” Light also paved the way for another soon-to-be mother, the water commissioner of the Piceance Creek basin of the White River. “I bet it was easier for her to come tell me she was pregnant than it was for me to tell Hal Simpson.”

That so few women work in water administration beyond Light’s small universe is puzzling to her. “Sometimes I think it may be that they lack confidence,” Light says. “I really hope that’s not it, but it may be. To be a water commissioner you have to be a really tough person.” q

The Yampa’s First LadyErin Light, pictured on the Elk River, is Colorado’s first female division engineer.


Water’s Top Copby Allen Best

Policing scarcity from the State Engineer’s Office

If water were eternally abundant in Colorado, no dams would be needed for storage, their structural safety in annual need of inspection. Anyone could drill a well because, well, why not? Monitoring the allocation of streams, rivers and ditches would be unneces-sary. Interstate water compacts—what are those?

Instead, scarcity is the enduring real-ity, even in periods of relative plenty, which is why Colorado adopted the doc-trine of prior appropriation at statehood in 1876, establishing an orderly process for who gets how much water, from where, and when.

Having a process, however, is one thing. Adhering to it is another. Hence the need for water commissioners, water division engineers and, atop the pyra-mid in the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the State Engineer.

“Water wars. Chaos,” replies former State Engineer Hal Simpson quickly, when asked to imagine having no agen-cy to administer the 173,000 water rights filed in the state. “We provide stability and certainty on the river. If we didn’t have water commissioners, if there was nobody to enforce water rights, people would steal water.”

Blood has, in fact, been spilled in Colorado because of water. Whether the violence has been frequent enough to justify the large legend may be another matter. The prevailing story has been of quiet order and an attentive devotion to the efficient governance of every creek, ditch, and river—and, since the 1960s, every well.

Yes, controversies have erupted. Opinions have differed in interpretation

of the law, with court decisions later rendering revisions to procedures with far-reaching consequences. In recent decades, urban growth and the emer-gence of new environmental values have impacted water distribution. Sustained drought in the early 21st century sobered users, administrators and policy-makers alike. Yet through these changes there has been coherence and clarity. The sys-tem has worked.

At the bottom of this pyramid, but crucial in every way, are the water com-missioners. Until 1969, they were depu-tized sheriffs, authorized to carry weap-ons as they carried out their duties of

fairly allocating water. When Simpson joined the agency in 1972, about half were former farmers and ranchers. Now they come from varied walks of life, although many have college educations, particularly in resource administration. More important than the degree is the skill set, says Simpson: technically com-petent but also peacemakers by nature, long on courage, and able to listen well and express themselves.

The agency has seven water division offices, corresponding to each major river basin, with each division administered by a division engineer. As an agency, it is domi-nated by people with engineering degrees. This prevails, too, at the top. Simpson has master’s and bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering. His predecessor, Jeris Danielson, who served from 1979 to 1992, has the same plus a doctorate. Current State Engineer Dick Wolfe has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural engi-neering. All of their degrees are from Colorado State University.

The three living state engineers have

other commonalities. All rose through the ranks, toiling at DWR before appoint-ment to the top job. Moreover, all three men have lived on or near farms of the South Platte Valley—Danielson near Brush, Simpson at Severance, and Wolfe near Platteville.

It’s fair to say that all three see them-selves as public servants. In that respect, they have company with another State Engineer, M.E. Hinderlider, who worked out of a basement office in the Capitol from 1923 to 1954. “He was utterly, utterly devoted to Colorado,” says his grand-daughter, Maureen Elliot. Today, carry-ing the torch as Colorado’s 21st State

Engineer, Wolfe says he couldn’t have done the job when his children were small. Most evenings he is still working from home, catching up on emails and other piled-up tasks, and he says the work is his hobby as well as his career.

The State Engineer’s duties require orderly processing of voluminous paper-work and crunching staggering numbers. Division personnel process permits for 5,000 new wells each year and another 1,200 new water right filings. Just one augmentation decree can run 100 pages.

But the core work lies in the field, where the division records 30,000 diver-sion and storage measurements annually. In 1879, when the Legislature appointed the first water commissioners, measure-ments were retrieved by horseback. That has changed, of course. Colorado contin-ues to push the technological envelope to make real-time water readings available to all. More than 480 stream, ditch and reservoir gauges are monitored by satellite in a program operated in cooperation with the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

“We provide stability and certainty on the river. If we didn’t have water commissioners, if there was nobody to enforce water rights, people would steal water.”

—Hal Simpson, former State Engineer

1 0 C o lo r a d o f o u n dat i o n f o r Wat e r e d u C at i o n

“We can do our jobs as well as we can do because we have been given assets that I don’t think any other state has,” says Simpson. Questions now involve whether such technologies as Facebook and Twitter have a role in water administration.

Yet at the end of the day—some very long days, perhaps, during irriga-tion season – the responsibility of water administration literally involves wet feet. The 300 full- and part-time employees of the division drive 2.4 million miles per year checking stream gauges and diver-sion structures, inspecting wells and evaluating the safety of dams. The State Engineer communicates weekly with his division chiefs, but occasionally gets his feet muddy himself.

In some respects, laws tightly define the duties of the State Engineer, though Danielson, looking back to the 1980s, remembers a great deal of lat-itude in interpreting laws. Simpson believes two court decisions in the last 15 years constricted the authority of

the State Engineer to create solutions to depletions caused by wells. Yet the job demands more than numbers and calculation. “I have found my job tends to be 80 percent sociology and psychology and 20 percent engineer-ing because so much of what we do now requires us to work with a lot of stakeholders,” says Wolfe. He regularly speaks to groups such as real estate agents, as he perceives educating the public about water as one of his pri-mary responsibilities. Legislators, who increasingly hail from cities instead of farms, also need education in water administration-related issues.

The State Engineer is also tasked with administering the nine interstate water compacts as well as two federal appor-tionment decrees to which Colorado is a party. In most cases, compact require-ments are treated just like another senior water right. For Wolfe, it also means communicating with corresponding offi-cials from the relevant states. In the case of the two Colorado River compacts, the State Engineer assists the CWCB in ensuring compliance.

The landscape of water use has

shifted in many important ways since Danielson joined DWR in 1969. At that time, significant development of trans-mountain diversions from the West Slope’s headwaters remained under-way. Dillon Reservoir was still relatively new. The Homestake diversions had just begun. Work continued on the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. Reservoirs filled rap-idly, as it was a time of deep snows and cold winters. Cities planned for drought, but their worst-case scenarios assumed nothing more severe than the multi-year drought of the 1950s.

Much has changed, affecting admin-istration of water and hence the complex-ity of the State Engineer’s job. Most pro-nounced has been population growth, with the 2.2 million residents of 1970 now dwarfed by today’s 5 million-plus Coloradans. The most explosive growth has been in Douglas County, focusing attention on the south metro region’s unsustainable reliance on diminishing aquifers. Front Range urban growth has

also accelerated ag-to-municipal con-versions, posing large questions about economic and social tipping points in farm-dependent communities.

Ascendance of environmental values further constrained the options for devel-opment of raw water resources. Instream flow rights, also called minimum stream-flows, first authorized in the early 1970s, became salient in water administration in 2002 and successive drought years. Endangered Species Act requirements for flows to sustain endangered fish in the Colorado River and waterfowl on the Platte have also limited development options. Applications for decreed rights for recreational in-channel diversions, something likely unimaginable in the 19th century, have flooded water courts in recent years. Simpson and his deputies testified in several cases that applications exceeded the amount of water needed by whitewater boaters. The broader concept, however, has been upheld, adding com-plexity to water administration.

Pivotal to the work of Simpson, and now Wolfe, was the drought of 2002. Alone, it dwarfed 1976-77 and every other drought in recorded history, but

then was shadowed by five successive years of mostly below-average precipi-tation. Urban districts, realizing great-er vulnerabilities than they previously assumed, hastened to buy agricultural water rights. Farmers needing to buy rights for well augmentation couldn’t compete with rising prices. In total, Simpson and Wolfe have ordered 2,000 wells in the South Platte and 1,000 wells in the Arkansas Valley to cease pumping. “Everything tightened up because of that extended drought,” says Simpson.

As reservoirs ebbed, threatening to dry altogether, water managers were forced to reconsider the razor’s edge between supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin. Revised calcula-tions took into account the potential for the kind of extended droughts that vis-ited the Colorado River Basin 1,000 years ago. Overlaying that possibility is the likelihood that accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will yield earlier runoffs, more intense summer heat and

perhaps less precipitation. The conclusion drawn from both of

these potential futures is an upright-in-bed-at-4-a.m. realization: It’s entirely possible at some point in the future that lower basin states could issue a call on the Colorado River. With many transmountain diversions still relatively junior in priority, the effect would be like a bug hitting a spider’s web, with ripples in the tension out to the Kansas and Nebraska borders.

Coming to grips with these and other possibilities is how Wolfe defines an important part of his job moving forward. Water users without good planning in 2002 reacted, he says. Better is to produce a “very thoughtful, systematic response” to future water shortages. Within the lim-its of the laws prescribed by legislators, rulings by the Colorado Supreme Court, and the vagaries of weather and climate, he sees his job as delivering the maxi-mum achievable certainty to farmers, cities and other water users.

In this very fundamental way, the job of the State Engineer has changed very little since the Legislature created the post in 1881. It is all about avoiding chaos. q

“…my job tends to be 80 percent sociology and psychology and 20 percent engineering because so much of what we do now requires us to work with a lot of stakeholders.” — Dick Wolfe, State Engineer

H e a d Wat e r s | s u m m e r 2 0 0 9 1 1

Westerners prudently store water from each spring’s abundant runoff to use throughout the year. Colorado now has about 2,000 reservoirs statewide, which the Division of Water Resources must administer. In an attempt to informally codify the state’s reservoir administration practices, Water Division 1 Assistant Division Engineer Claudia Engelmann and Division Engineer Jim Hall, along with Water Division 5 Division Engineer Alan Martellaro, assembled a set of guidelines intended to provide a common starting point for the many dif-ficult decisions DWR staff must make every day. The guidelines are currently being reviewed by State Engineer Dick Wolfe. Here is a sampling of the issues covered:

One-fill rule—Established by historical court opinions, the “unwritten” one-fill rule limits a storage water right to filling a reservoir once in any given seasonal year. A seasonal year typically begins Nov. 1, but for many municipal reservoirs, April 1 is the start date.

Second fill—A decreed refill right allows the owner of the water storage right to begin to fill a second time once available space is made in the reservoir. This is only allowed when the refill right, which often has a later, more junior date, is in priority.

Paper fill—Using this accounting method, division engineers document when a storage right is fulfilled on paper, even if it has not been physically filled. Some reservoirs have more than one owner or more than one decreed stor-age right with different priority dates. They are required to take the most senior water first. However, they may be allowed to fill first under their junior water right while division engineers use a paper fill to book the water against the senior right. That way, they keep track of how much less the owner can later call under the senior water right, if the junior right comes out of priority. Engelmann acknowledges that “the accounting gets extremely com-plicated when you have to track the different priorities and owners of water.”

Why the complication? According to Martellaro, who has served as Division 5 engineer for almost 9 years, a common example would be if a senior water right is limited under its decree to irrigation uses but the junior water right’s decree is more flexible. In this case, the owner may consider the junior right more valuable and elect to store that water first. Martellaro says this is becoming more common as “people are coming up with good, creative ways to better use what water’s out there.”

“Owe-the-river” account—Some reservoirs are literally built on the stream. When an on-stream reservoir’s storage right is out of priority, DWR staff attempt to administer the reservoir as if it didn’t exist, says Engelmann. To mimic the natural streamflow and maintain peaks in flow through the system, they track inconsistencies through an “owe-the-river” account. If the reservoir releases too little water one day, it must release more the following day to compensate.

Exchanges and substitutions—Exchanges and substitutions may be made between reservoirs or between a reservoir and a direct-flow diversion. “A substitution is when we make a release from one reservoir for the purposes of another,” says Martellaro. “It’s not done at the same time, whereas an exchange happens at the same time.”

A frequently occurring substitution in his division occurs between Green Mountain Reservoir and Wolford Mountain or Williams Fork Reservoir when Denver Water’s Dillon Reservoir fills out of priority. By state statute, an upstream reservoir can fill out of priority if allowed by the State Engineer, but if a downstream reservoir with a more senior right doesn’t end up filling, the upstream reservoir must pay the water back. If Green Mountain Reservoir, downstream from the more junior Dillon Reservoir, doesn’t fill, Denver often pays back the water directly to the mainstem of the Colorado River where Green Mountain’s water would otherwise be destined. In-lieu of Green Mountain sending water there to meet a call on the river, Denver would use its Williams Fork Reservoir or its interest in the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s Wolford Mountain Reservoir to make releases to pay back Green Mountain indirectly. Division 1 has adopted its own requirements that must be met before any reservoir on the South Platte’s mainstem can store out of priority.

An exchange might occur to allow a more junior water right to continue diverting even when out of priority by replacing the same amount of water at the same time from another source. Another Division 5 example is when Denver releases water from Williams Fork Reservoir into the Colorado River so that it can continue out of priority diversions through Roberts Tunnel to the city.

Again, Martellaro says, “Substitutions are becom-ing more and more common to make better use of what we have.” q

Reservoir “Rules”By Jayla Poppleton

Blue Mesa Reservoir, located on the Gunnison River, is Colorado’s largest reservoir.

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In 1884, Colorado State Engineer E.S. Nettleton (right) developed the Colorado Current Meter.

In 1925, Ralph Parshall (left), a professor at Colorado State University, patented a flume now

used worldwide to measure streams. (Photo courtesy of CSU Water Resources, Archive)

Automated devices (facing page), such as this one on the South Platte River near Kersey, are

increasingly common in Colorado.

Photo courtesy of City of Greeley Museums, Permanent Collection.

A Stream of En-Gaugement


Water measurement’s ongoing evolution By Jerd Smith

In 1881, Colorado’s first State Engineer, Eugene Stimson, rode 30 miles each way on horseback between the Big Thompson River and the Cache La Poudre checking gauges he had set in the rivers. He car-ried a tent and a portable drafting table.

Even then, the public need for accu-rate water measurements was clear, especially in those regions on the Front Range where settlers, miners and farmers were battling over streams as demand for water was already outpacing supplies.

And though the prior appropriation doc-trine was incorporated in the new state con-stitution in 1876, establishing Colorado’s system of water rights, little was known then about how to measure the precious liquid and guarantee each water right hold-er received the correct amount.

In 1878, counties began hiring water commissioners, according to Dick Stenzel, water historian and former South Platte division engineer. They were paid $5 a day. Three years later, the State Engineer’s position was created, and by statute, was handed responsibility for computing the amount of water in each stream and providing each water com-missioner with a copy of the results. The water commissioners then determined who could divert. Colorado was the first state to provide for such public oversight of water distribution, but it wasn’t easy.

“The State Engineer was constantly moving during the irrigation season,” says Stenzel. “He tried to hire an assistant, but the state wouldn’t pay for one.”

Early measuring devices were crude and famously imprecise. Miners’ inches were among the first measures used. They were calculated by forcing water through a 1-inch square opening in the floor of a box placed in the stream. As water flowed through the opening, it was timed, establishing the flow rate.

With each passing decade, Colorado’s efforts to quantify water rights and dis-

tribute them fairly improved. The state’s groundbreaking efforts helped lead the world into a modern era of measurement.

One of the first mechanical water meters was developed here by the second State Engineer, E.S. Nettleton, in 1884. Known as the Colorado Current Meter, and now housed in the Smithsonian Institute, the device consisted of three cups that hung from the bottom of a rod. The State Engineer or his staff would wade into a stream, lowering the meter at different points across the chan-nel. It was considered an advancement because the cups could clear themselves of debris as they spun, where previous-ly-used meters would quickly become clogged and cease operating.

Nettleton also installed continuous recorders on stream gauges so that commissioners and irrigators didn’t have to manually measure flows mul-tiple times a day.

In 1925, Ralph Parshall, an engi-neering professor at Colorado State University, patented a flume now used worldwide to measure streams. Known as the Parshall flume, it is sturdy and simple to construct. Today, the flumes are typically made from sheet metal. They are three-sided, with two walls and a floor. When the flume is installed in a stream, water is forced through in a con-sistent pattern that allows hydrologically-engineered rating curves to be applied to physical water measurements. The uniformity of the structure and the use of rating curves made field measurements much more precise.

Despite such advances, gauges and flumes were still installed at very few locations statewide. And Colorado’s small band of water commissioners—there were only 70 in 1939—scrambled to take measurements and record data in places without such devices to ensure they could deliver water equitably.

Several regions of Colorado still wrestle with outdated water systems. In the Yampa and White River basins, for instance, stretches of the rivers’ main-stems lack measuring devices, both on diversion structures and in the river. The state is pushing water right holders to install them in order to protect reservoir releases intended to reach endangered fish. The need for sufficient measuring devices will only increase if the Yampa is tapped by the Front Range or by major oil companies hoping to develop oil shale on the West Slope.

Water commissioners in the Yampa, working on remote tributaries, still some-times calculate cubic feet per second manually, measuring stream depth by hand and calculating water speeds by tracking how long it takes a floating twig to travel between two fixed points.

Because there has always been plen-ty of water in the Yampa, there’s been little need to determine the mechanics of the river, such as how long it takes to deliver water on certain stream seg-ments. To solve that problem, commis-sioners use special dyes that color the water and allow its travel time to be visu-ally tracked.

These days, 114 water commission-ers monitor streams across Colorado’s seven water divisions. The Division of Water Resources, the state’s primary water regulator, has an annual budget of $27 million and nearly 300 employees. A significant part of that budget - more than $850,000 annually – is spent install-ing satellite telemetry on gauging sta-tions, a technology that allows water level readings to feed into state data-bases at 15-minute intervals.

“All the major diversion structures from Denver down to the state line are equipped with these devices,” says State Engineer Dick Wolfe. “That’s real-time monitoring. It’s live on our Internet. Our


water commissioners and our users uti-lize that on a daily basis.”

In 1881, when Stimson began work, he installed Colorado’s first gauging sta-tion. Now the state owns and operates more than 480, Wolfe says, and each has a satellite telemetry system. Another 270 stream gauging stations are operated by the United States Geological Survey.

Today, Colorado is awash in water data and is racing to employ new tech-nologies and the Internet to make it widely and quickly available. Data that was once distributed monthly in the South Platte Basin is now available to water users continuously online so that everyone who has an interest in a given stream segment, from farmers to city utility managers, can find out how much water is moving through the system and who is diverting at any given time.

“People expect transparency of gov-ernment and they like this transparency,” says Wolfe. “They can see what their neighbors are diverting. But now we like to say that the division has 114 water commissioners and 3,000 volunteers, which include all the users looking at things on the Internet.”

Pressure continues to build to do more.“The opportunity and the demand and

the need is greater now than it ever was before,” says Stephen Smith, president of Fort Collins-based Aqua Engineering.

New automated measuring and con-trol devices known as SCADA systems are helping streamline water deliveries. The term stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. “It’s kind of a catch-all phrase,” Smith says. It brings together sensors, processors and actuators into a computerized, radio-controlled system. Once seen only in industrial settings, the systems are now being used in high-stakes water regions like the South Platte, where millions of dollars worth of water must be carefully shared between fast-growing cities and farmers.

“About seven years ago, we began tak-ing these systems out to ditch companies and saying, ‘Here’s a way you can read this

flume remotely and not have to drive five miles twice a day to read it,’” Smith says.

New automated gates can also be run via SCADA systems so that when a gauge reading shows the river has fallen and a user no longer has the right to divert, the gate can be closed immedi-ately. Water users without this technol-ogy must wait for a gauge reading and a water commissioner’s call before physi-cally going out to the field to either shut off or turn on a diversion structure. In the time that takes, thousands of gallons of water can be lost downstream.

“The sociology of all of this is very interesting,” Smith says. Many canal managers, for instance, have never seen SCADA systems. “They’ve always opened head gates, then read the flume, then traveled back and adjusted the head gate again. They’re quite skilled at it.” But when they see these systems work, they realize how quickly and efficiently the work can be done, Smith says. “I call it the ‘Oh, duh’ moment.”

As year-round, hour-by-hour water management gains ground, water man-agers continue to worry about preci-sion. Even with satellites and hundreds of gauges, determining exactly how much water is flowing through a head gate or past a gauge at any given moment is still difficult.

A Parshall f lume, for instance, has an accuracy rat-ing of plus or minus 5 percent. New automated Rubicon Gates, manufactured in Australia, have an accuracy rat-ing of plus or minus 2 percent, Smith says, and they have been installed in some locations on the South Platte.

“The fact is that all of these devices have some inaccuracies,” says Smith. “And though you’re always going to have people who want more precision, it’s good for all water users to understand there is an inherent inaccuracy in water measurement and you just have to deal with it.”

For every stretch of stream that has 2009 technology on it, there are several more whose diversion structures date back to the late 1800s. It is these struc-tures that Wolfe says are likely to cre-ate issues in the future. “Irrigation and reservoir companies are going to have big challenges just to meet the cost of replacing these structures. If you’re try-ing to manage water with them, it’s very difficult. They have cracks in them, or they seep water. You really don’t know how much water you’re ultimately getting down the river,” he says.

Upgrading these structures and bring-ing record-keeping practices up to mod-ern standards is critical as water supplies continue to tighten in Colorado.

“We’ve measured water for centuries in the world,” says Wolfe. “I don’t think there are questions about data collection itself anymore. I think the bigger challeng-es are to maintain the structures and to transmit the information quickly and accu-rately. These records are our legacy.” q

Real-time flow information, including gauge height and discharge, is available at www.dwr.state.co.us/SurfaceWater/Default.aspx.

“…all of these devices have some inaccuracies. And though you’re always going to have people who want more precision, it’s good for all water users to understand there is an inherent inaccuracy in water measurement.”

— Stephen Smith, president, Aqua Engineering

http://www.dwr.state.co.us/SurfaceWater/Default.aspx

“It’s a work in progress.” That’s how water commissioner Richard Rozman

describes Colorado’s ongoing efforts to fit a river’s

instream flow rights into a legal system originally

designed to govern the removal of water from rivers.

Rozman fits the traditional image of the water com-

missioner, the guy responsible for administering water

law in the sometimes contentious social environment of

a head gate. Rozman is a big man, for one thing, which

sometimes helps in that environment. But he is also a

friendly and reasonable man, which helps a lot more.

He also grew up in the valley where he is now water

commissioner, son of a rancher on the Slate River branch

of the Upper Gunnison River. For most of the 20th centu-

ry, it was practically required that a water commissioner

know well the majority of the people on whom he might

have to impose some hardship in the name of the law.

But over the past half century, Rozman’s District 59 in

the Upper Gunnison watershed has gone from a mining

and ranching economy to a resort and recreation mecca,

changes reflected by new water uses. Similar evolutions

statewide have forced changes in Colorado’s water law,

and the water commissioner’s job has gotten more com-

plex accordingly. Commissioners still primarily administer

agricultural water—more than 90 percent of the water used

in the Upper Gunnison —but new mandates and rules have

elbowed their way into the sacred precincts of priority.rightto remainNon-consumptive water rights pose a worthwhile administrative challengeBy George Sibley


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If the many changes impinging on Rozman’s job could be summarized in one sentence, it would probably be this: Water today is at least as valuable eco-nomically in the river as it is out of it. Prior to World War II, the right to use water required the user to put it to ben-eficial use in the human economy. With the exception of hydropower, this meant taking it out of the stream for irrigation, domestic use or industry under the 1876 constitutional promise that “the right to divert the unappropriated waters of any natural stream to beneficial uses shall never be denied.”

But after World War II, with the West increasingly urbanized, much of the non-urban West, with its mountains, rivers and deserts, became the playground for city-dwellers. There was also a grow-ing national awareness of environmen-tal deterioration following a century of heavy industrial development. These cul-tural changes were resolved with a kind of seismic lurch of federal and state leg-islation during the mid-1960s and mid-70s. The cultural perception of beneficial uses for water resources lurched along with everything else. Relatively suddenly, non-consumptive uses of water—water for instream recreational and environ-mental needs, from fishing to rafting to ecosystem maintenance—were seeking parity with traditional consumptive uses, primarily irrigated agriculture.

One important new law was Colorado’s 1973 Senate Bill 97, which created the West’s first legislated instream flow pro-tection program “to correlate the activi-ties of mankind with some reasonable preservation of the natural environment.” The concept of allocating rights for water to be left in the stream for environmental purposes, with no diversion required, was fairly revolutionary. Ownership of such rights was limited to the state, through the Colorado Water Conservation Board. According to Steve Sims, a for-mer Colorado Assistant Attorney General for resource issues, proponents of the instream flow program hoped this step would “alleviate the fears of the water development community.”

Instream flow rights enter the admin-istrative system in priority, junior to all prior decrees, meaning that senior users upstream can dry up a protected instream flow in water-short years. Given the fact, however, that many protected segments are in the headwaters reaches of Colorado’s rivers, above most senior users, calls from senior users down-stream are no hardship since leaving the water in the stream is the instream flow right’s purpose. And, according to Colorado Supreme Court Justice Greg Hobbs, despite its junior status, the pri-mary purpose of an instream flow right is to preserve stream conditions existing at the time of the water right’s appropria-

Chaffee County obtained a recreational in-channel diversion water right on the Arkansas River in 2006. There are now 14 RICDs in Colorado, with another pending for Carbondale.

But after World War II, with the West increasingly urbanized,

much of the non-urban West, with its mountains, rivers and

deserts, became the playground for city-dwellers.


tion. The General Assembly gave a boost

to instream flow seniority in 1986 when it amended the instream flow statute to allow the CWCB to acquire existing water rights through purchase, donation or grant and change them to instream flow rights, assuming no damage to other users. In 2006, this was expanded to enable even temporary loans of water for instream flows. Since 2001, the Colorado Water Trust has actively scouted out and facili-tated such opportunities for the CWCB as part of a larger mission “supporting and promoting voluntary efforts to protect and restore the state’s streamflows.”

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Anyone can propose a stream or lake for instream flow protection, but it then enters a rigorous CWCB vet-ting process, in consultation with the Colorado Department of Wildlife and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of the Interior. It must be demonstrated that “there actually is a natural environment that can be pre-served to a reasonable degree with an instream flow, if granted;” that the decreed right would help maintain that environment; and that the decreed right is only for the minimum flow necessary to “maintain the environment to a rea-sonable degree.”

Despite efforts to ease it gently into the

appropriations system, the instream flow law was challenged—first, on its premise that a water right could be created with no diversion structure at all. The Colorado River Water Conservation District argued in court that this was unconstitutional. But the state Supreme Court backed the instream flow law, concluding that the statement “the right to divert shall not be denied” does not say that no right can exist without a diversion.

There were also disagreements in establishing the minimums for protect-ing streams and lakes “to a reasonable degree.” From the start conservationists did not find the idea of limiting instream flows to minimum amounts to be par-ticularly reasonable. But then some high-altitude water users—primarily ski resorts faced with snow-making needs—found that the minimum instream flows for stream segments whose water they need-ed seemed unreasonably large, given the small size of the streams that high. And because the minimums were often calcu-lated for the streams at a lower elevation, after they had accumulated some inflow, the CWCB agreed that those flows were too high for the upper reaches. It tried to correct that error by remeasuring the streams above the inflows and adjusting the minimums accordingly.

When the agency adjusted an instream flow right on Snowmass Creek, following a complaint from the new Snowmass

Anyone can propose a stream or lake for instream flow protection, but it then enters a rigorous CWCB vetting process, in consultation with the Colorado Department of Wildlife and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of the Interior.

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Ski Resort, the Aspen Wilderness Workshop challenged the action, saying it was illegally reducing a water right that belonged to the people. The citizen’s group lost at first, but the case went to the state Supreme Court, which held that the CWCB did, in fact, have a “fidu-ciary duty” to the people to enforce rights appropriated in their behalf. The General Assembly then passed legislation requir-ing the CWCB to publicly announce any proposed decrease, factually justify the decrease, and delay adjustment for up to one year so the public can collect scien-tific data pertinent to the agency’s deci-sion. Underscoring Rozman’s observation that the instream flow program is a work in progress, Snowmass Creek now has a very complicated set of season-specific instream flow appropriations on four dif-ferent segments of the 22-mile stream.

Despite such difficulties, the CWCB has, as of early 2009, developed lake-level rights on 480 natural lakes and instream flow rights on 8,679 miles of Colorado streams, with more enter-ing the system every year, according

to Jeff Baessler, deputy director of the CWCB’s Stream and Lake

Protection group. Conservation groups have

played a significant role in a d v a n c -ing the

program’s s u c c e s s .

The Colorado E n v i r o n m e n t a l

Coalition, for example, banded together with 90 partner

organizations, including Trout Unlimited, to support passage of HB08-1280, last year’s bill removing the historic consumptive use penalty for owners considering long-term instream flow leases with the CWCB. The same was done for short-term leases one year earlier.

Becky Long, the CEC’s water cau-cus coordinator, believes that legislation was one of the biggest changes to the instream flow program since its incep-tion. “It was the biggest boulder that needed to be moved. The penalty was blocking the work of the Colorado Water Trust and the CWCB because it didn’t make economic sense for someone to lease their water to the state for income,

but then watch the ratchet effect of their historic consumptive use credit getting smaller and smaller every year.”

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Meanwhile, the struggle to establish non-consumptive use rights in the pecking order of water administration has moved on to a new front: recreational in-channel diversions, or RICDs. This began in Fort Collins on the Cache la Poudre River. In the early 1990s, city park managers wanted to modify an existing diversion dam by adding a boat chute for kayakers, and they applied for an instream water right, claiming the chute constituted a new diversion structure for an econom-ically beneficial recreational use. The water court granted the decree, which was challenged by the City of Thornton. But the Colorado Supreme Court decid-ed the structure did, in fact, meet the criteria of controlling the flow of the river and affirmed the water court.

The City of Golden followed by fil-ing for a substantial 1,000 cubic-foot-per-second water right for its own recreational park in Clear Creek, adding and rear-ranging rocks to provide challenges for kayakers and other boaters. When the water court also approved its full request, the State Engineer challenged, perhaps fearing the edge of a slippery slope. Again, the Supreme Court affirmed the decree, and Vail, Breckenridge, Aspen and Littleton jumped in with similar requests.

At that point, the legislature stepped in to bring some governance to what tra-ditionalists decried as water rights based on moving rocks around in the river. First came Senate Bill 216 in 2001, which was strengthened in 2006 as part of Senate Bill 37. The legislation gave the CWCB input into the water court’s adjudica-tion on all such applications to evaluate whether a RICD would 1) promote the maximum beneficial use of Colorado’s water, 2) impair Colorado’s ability to fully develop its compact entitlements, or 3) adversely impact CWCB instream flow water rights. The statute also limited the RICD to the minimum flow necessary for “a reasonable recreational experience” —language growing familiar regarding non-consumptive water uses.

Thus does the world become a more complicated place on the ground, espe-cially in mixed traditional and amenity economies like Rozman’s district on the Upper Gunnison or District 38 across the

Meanwhile, the struggle to establish non-consumptive use

rights in the pecking order of water administration has moved

on to a new front: recreational in-channel diversions, or RICDs.

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Elk Mountains in the Roaring Fork valley, administered by Rozman’s counterpart there, Bill Blakeslee.

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Blakeslee has been the Roaring Fork water commissioner for eight years, but like Rozman, has known most of the traditional users for much longer. He speaks respect-fully about the extent to which ranchers and other longtime valley residents make his job easier by essentially “running the rivers themselves, sharing it out” in dry times rather than asking him to impose strict priority with senior calls on juniors.

But instream flows make his job more interesting—especially when com-pounded by a transitory population of newcomers in the valley’s upper reach-es. Last fall, for example, when streams dropped dramatically in a dry autumn, the CWCB placed calls six different times for instream flows on Hunter Creek, a heavily used stream that joins the Roaring Fork in the immediate Aspen area. Several irri-gation ditches draw from Hunter Creek, but Blakeslee observes that condos and castles have replaced crops and cows on much of the stream. On one of the ditch-es, he says, “The new gold is ponds,” and

they’re not ponds to be used for augmen-tation in dry times but “purely aesthetic ponds, and they don’t want them dried up in August and September.”

Hunter Creek is also one of the feed-er streams for the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which exports water from the Roaring Fork valley under the Continental Divide to the Arkansas River Basin in the east. It was, in fact, the threat that the Fry-Ark Project might dry up Hunter Creek that led to some prototypical bypass flows for habitat protection in the 1950s.

Today—to show how complex this can get on a heavily used stream—Hunter Creek has 23 instream flow rights on the 10 miles of stream below the Fry-Ark diversion, ranging in volume from less than 1 up to 16 cfs, on stream segments from one-tenth of a mile long to 6 miles long.

The task of administering instream flow rights in such a situation is compli-cated by a couple of factors, noted by both Blakeslee and Rozman, who also had an instream flow call to administer last October on his own Slate River. One problem is an inadequate number of stream measuring gauges. Most of the satellite-monitored gauges on instream flow segments are in the lower reach-es, which often makes administration affecting junior users above the gauge an educated guess at best, a prospect not appreciated by those whose water is being curtailed. And Amy Beatie, executive director of the Colorado Water Trust, reports the absence of sufficient gauges has foiled some of her efforts to get existing rights changed to instream flows due to concern from those who might consider contributing additional water to the program.

Baessler acknowledges this problem, noting that “data is the core of water administration.” The agency has been pushing hard to address the problem over the past five years since the legis-lature created a stream gauge fund. But the fund’s annual allocation of $250,000 doesn’t go far. The satellite-monitored gauges are expensive—$20,000 to install and as much as $14,000 a year to operate and maintain each one—and the CWCB has 1,473 instream flow segments to monitor. Baessler is currently exploring new, more affordable cell phone technol-ogy for stream gauges, but there are also considerable expenses associated with maintaining existing gauges in coopera-

tion with the U.S. Geological Survey and the state’s Division of Water Resources.

Another challenge stems from the fact that the commissioners in the Upper Gunnison and Upper Roaring Fork tributar-ies are administering rights in an environ-ment of exurban subdivisions rather than irrigated farmland. Curtailing a junior water user on an irrigation ditch is a simple mat-ter of dropping the slide on a head gate. But most of their junior users now are homeowners served by wells rather than ditches—dozens of wells instead of a few ditches. Rozman hopes “it never comes down to having to go house-to-house, knocking on doors and telling people I’m there to turn off their pumps.”

Property owners with non-exempt wells must have augmentation plans to replace water they use out of prior-ity with water from some other supply. But augmentation water can be expen-sive—in Rozman’s District, $3,500 for one-twentieth of an acre foot, enough for indoor use with no outdoor watering. Not all property owners have complied with the law or even understand the rea-son for it. Blakeslee says, “It takes a while to educate newcomers.”

The impetus toward more attention to non-consumptive uses will undoubt-edly continue. The Interbasin Compact Committee basin roundtables are cur-rently developing non-consumptive needs assessments, a major undertak-ing to identify the most valuable recre-ational and environmental segments of the state’s rivers and lakes and to deter-mine how to protect those segments. Additional instream flow rights and RICDs that may stem from this effort will likely add to the burden of water administra-tion, while at the same time rendering the obvious benefits.

Long is quick to remind that such rights should be seen as a tool rather than an inconvenience that must be worked around. And commissioners like Blakeslee and Rozman are generally stoic about the degree to which the effort to adjudicate, measure and protect non-consumptive uses continues to compli-cate the administration of water rights. “It’s to protect the river,” Blakeslee says, and he has no problem with that. But—it is clearly “a work in progress.” q

The process for developing instream flow rights is outlined on the CWCB Web site: http://cwcb.state.co.us/StreamAndLake/LawsRules.

Pueblo’s half-mile long whitewater park benefits from a recreational in-channel diversion water right.

http://cwcb


optimizing use of an unseen resource

Growing up on his family’s ranch along the Rio Grande River near Alamosa, Ken Knox got an early education in the con-tentious field of groundwater use. The San Luis Valley is a high-altitude desert that averages just 7 inches of precipita-tion a year, so every drop of water—from the sky or the ground—is precious. Knox recalls neighbors fighting over rights to one-quarter of a cubic foot per second of water, equal to about 180 acre feet per year. The argument landed in court, and by the time it was resolved, the only way the families could pay off their legal bills was to sell their land.

From ranch kid to chief deputy state engineer, Knox has spent much of his life thinking about groundwater. Today, after 24-plus years in the Colorado State Engineer’s Office, Knox works for URS, a private engineering corporation.

“The development of every set of

[groundwater] rules is incredibly com-plex,” Knox says, “because you’re talking about people’s livelihoods.”

There’s another reason groundwater administration is complex—the move-ment and replenishment of groundwater itself is complex. The Rio Grande Basin, for instance, sits in a rift valley with mul-tiple aquifer systems. One is a deep, con-fined source that runs more than 1,000 feet below the surface. There are also relatively shallow alluvial aquifers that feed into the Rio Grande and Conejos rivers. And there is a shallow, unconfined aquifer in a closed basin. These sources are all partially interconnected, and their interactions must be understood to pro-vide accurate administration.

The movement of groundwater in other river basins, like the Arkansas and the South Platte, isn’t quite as compli-cated, but determining the impacts from

By Joshua Zaffos

Water Underground

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optimizing use of an unseen resource

groundwater use on stream flows is hardly straightforward. Figuring out how to simultaneously protect senior water rights, meet interstate compact condi-tions and utilize groundwater resources is no simple affair, legally or hydrologically.

“There isn’t a rule of thumb” when it comes to groundwater administration, says water attorney David Robbins, who has represented the State of Colorado in river compact litigation and groundwater users in additional court proceedings. Groundwater administration has devel-oped by “fits and starts,” a function of science and technology, nature and necessity, Robbins adds. “It’s sort of a coming-of-age story.”

TAPPING WEllS AND PASSING lAWSGroundwater regulation was some-thing of an administrative afterthought until 1953, when the Colorado General Assembly passed the Underground Water Act. Up until that time, when someone wanted to drill a well, they just went ahead and did so without much consideration of its effects on the underlying aquifer or nearby stream.

From 1953 until 1957, the law stipulated the Colorado Water Conservation Board would issue well permits. Although the CWCB required well drillers to file a license, it was more of a registration system than any meaningful regulation.

Four years later, the 1957 Colorado Ground Water Law put the State Engineer’s Office in charge of these permits and acknowledged that a well license was not a water right, but only a permit to drill the well itself.

Despite these first steps at adminis-tration, water users with senior surface rights in the Arkansas, South Platte and Rio Grande basins faulted the expan-sion of groundwater use, a response to drought and lower stream volumes, for depleting river flows. Studies backed these assumptions, but there was little regulatory muscle to effectively manage the impacts.

The state legislature responded by passing the 1965 Ground Water Management Act, which provided new laws for application procedures and an injury evaluation standard for high-capacity wells. For the first time, state

law enabled the State Engineer to con-sider—and potentially deny—well appli-cations on the basis of injury to senior surface water rights. The law recognized the tributary connection between sur-face and groundwater in certain basins, a major hydro-legal epiphany that still makes Colorado stand out among other states. The law also created the Ground Water Commission, which could declare Designated Basins where surface water is scarce and/or groundwater is the pre-dominant source of water. There are currently eight Designated Ground Water Basins in Colorado.

A few years later, the 1969 Water Rights Determination and Administration Act represented another advancement in the state’s groundwater administra-tion. Kevin Rein, assistant state engineer for intrastate water supply development and litigation, says the 1969 law is sig-nificant for two reasons: It recognized that previous laws did not adequately address injury to senior water rights holders, and it established augmen-tation plans as the preferred avenue for allowing out-of-priority groundwater

Ken Knox uses a map of the Republican River Basin to explain the dominance of groundwater use in some areas. In Colorado, the Republican Basin is located entirely within the Northern High Plains Designated Ground Water Basin. (Read more about the Republican Basin in Toward a Sustainable Horizon on page 24.)

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pumping under the prior appropriation system, which orders both the use of surface flows and groundwater.

According to Rein, augmentation plans include terms and conditions for obtaining groundwater while protecting against the depletion of river flows that could affect senior water rights. The plans demonstrate how much water will be pumped and consumed and how much will be returned to an aquifer or stream. Each plan must be approved by the water court and stand up to any indi-vidual objections.

The state continues to tweak its groundwater administration, but the framework developed in the 1960s still guides tributary groundwater use today.

Nontributary groundwater, on the other hand, has minimum or no connection to surface flows and is mostly regulated by state statutes adopted between 1973 and 1985. Those rules allow landowners to use nontributary resources, including those within the Denver Basin, at a rate of 1 percent a year for 100 years to pace the depletion. Additionally, the Ground Water Commission regulates non-tributary groundwater as designated groundwater if it’s within a Designated Basin.

“I really applaud Colorado,” says Knox, “because even in that time [dating back to the 1950s], they said we need to manage these resources for the future, in balance with economic development. We are literally decades ahead of some of our surrounding regions.”

COMPACTS AND MODElSJust as Colorado was hammering out its groundwater policies, another challenge presented itself. In 1966, the states of Texas and New Mexico sued Colorado because it was failing to meet the con-

ditions of the 1938 Rio Grande River Compact. The interstate compact divides the annual flows of the Rio Grande between the states it runs through, and Colorado must ensure its downstream neighbors receive their allocated flows. Other compacts also dictate the use of river flows—and groundwater—in the South Platte, Arkansas and Republican river basins.

Water users in the upper Rio Grande began drilling more wells during the 1950s drought to supplement diminished flows in the river and its feeder streams. The fulfillment of senior surface rights and the increased use of groundwater meant Texas and New Mexico weren’t getting their legal share of water. Later lawsuits—by the state of Kansas with regard to Colorado’s overuse in the Arkansas River Basin and by Nebraska in the Republican River Basin—made similar claims.

“We had no rules or regulations that dictated use of groundwater up until that time,” says Steve Vandiver, manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in Alamosa and a former division engineer for that region. “The science hadn’t really caught up to us.”

A tangle of legal action ensued over the following decades—and continues today—to determine the connections between groundwater and surface flows. The State Engineer’s Office insti-tuted a 1972 moratorium on new wells in the unconfined aquifer that feeds into the Rio Grande and Conejos rivers. Well drillers targeted the deep, confined aquifer until another moratorium was put in place in 1981. Small, home wells were exempted from the ban.

Legal and regulatory fixes were lim-ited by the understanding of the Rio Grande Basin’s intricate hydrogeology,

Vandiver says. “Impacts are not one-for-one,” he adds, meaning that tapping an acre foot of groundwater from a well in the Rio Grande Basin won’t directly deplete an acre foot from the river.

Engineers worked to develop ground-water models, both to determine what was going on underground and to figure out how to address depletions for users in Colorado and downstream.

Groundwater modeling, however, remains an evolving science and perhaps something of an art. Prior to the 1980s, electric analog models replicated aquifers using plywood fitted with a grid of resis-tors to simulate flow and capacitators to simulate storage. Computers replaced paper spreadsheets and slide rules in the 1980s, and modeling went digital, provid-ing a more sophisticated understanding of groundwater’s movement.

“The parallel with the technological advancement is the need to have more effective groundwater management tools,” says Knox.

Not that computer models have pre-vented groundwater administration from being debated in courtrooms. The U.S. Supreme Court has had to settle disputes over water use and depletion accord-ing to the compacts for the Rio Grande, Arkansas and Republican. South Platte water users in Colorado have looked to the courts to handle in-state quarrels. That’s because on top of all of the legal bounds, there is another great limit-ing condition, Knox says: “We live in a dynamic hydrologic environment.”

DROUGHT AND DISRUPTIONDrought initiated the first wave of Colorado groundwater regulation half a century ago, and dry times are influenc-ing current management.


Compared with the hydrology of the Rio Grande region, the South Platte is a pretty simple system. Robbins describes the river as “a trough in bedrock,” meaning it’s a shallow and fairly nar-row stream with water moving relatively easily between the ground and the chan-nel. As a result, well drilling has a direct impact on river flows.

Farmers and others along the South Platte have relied on groundwa-ter for several decades. Some users had obtained decrees for augmentation plans, but Ground Water Appropriators of the South Platte and others relied on annual substitute supply plans. Both water court-approved augmentation plans and State Engineer-approved sub-stitute water supply plans aim to ensure that depletions caused to the river by well pumping are replaced by some other source of water. That became a front-and-center problem when the 2002 drought kicked in, and surface and groundwater flows couldn’t measure up to past uses.

In 2001, the Colorado Supreme Court decided the State Engineer didn’t have the authority to approve substitute water supply plans, ruling that plans for replac-ing depletions to the stream system must be approved by the water court. Known as the Empire Lodge case, the decision forced groundwater users in the South Platte and other basins to obtain approved plans of augmentation or shut down their wells, says Robbins. The state legislature later passed a law allowing the State Engineer to approve substitute water supply plans if an augmentation plan is concurrently filed in water court, but hundreds of farmers have essentially lost their ability to legally pump their wells, wreaking havoc on communities

in the South Platte Basin.Rio Grande groundwater users have

also suffered since 2002, Robbins adds, “but we’re trying to avoid the economic destruction and social dislocation” that has occurred on the South Platte. To that end, users have discussed buying out existing wells while preventing the drill-ing of new wells to create sustainable aquifer conditions. “Our job is to solve the problem in the least disruptive way,” Robbins says.

GROUNDWATER MANAGEMENT MATURESIn the Arkansas River Basin, resolution trumps disruption these days, according to Robbins. After Kansas sued Colorado over the Arkansas River Compact in 1985, a decades-long court battle ensued until the U.S. Supreme Court backed Kansas’ claims of depleted flows. Well-measurement rules followed, to monitor Colorado groundwater users’ impacts on river flows.

Like the South Platte, the Arkansas is an alluvial stream where groundwater depletion can be directly detected in lower surface flows. All groundwater users there are now required to have plans to replace depletions resulting from groundwater use, and group asso-ciations have formed to lease augmenta-tion water supplies from cities and other water districts.

Groundwater use in the Arkansas Basin has undergone “intense scrutiny,” Robbins says, due to the compact litiga-tion and subsequent regulation. “The rules have been successful.”

In the Rio Grande Basin, Vandiver describes the region as still “maturing in the groundwater arena.”

Surface and groundwater users have spent decades in court, and Vandiver

says engineers have finally devised a computer model that accounts for the complex relationship between ground-water use and surface flow depletion there. Groundwater users have devel-oped a plan of water management—instead of a plan of augmentation—that will enable many current well opera-tors to continue pumping while guard-ing against injury to senior surface flow rights. After a degree of encour-agement, some users have agreed to cease their water consumption, and managers will measure impacts to sur-face flows.

Vandiver says the Rio Grande district will also create its own subdistrict to manage wells locally. The subdistrict should enable more flexibility and hope-fully prevent well curtailment from being the primary means of regulating ground-water use. If it’s a successful model, the district would form other subdistricts, but so far surface water users have objected to the plan and are in court to make sure the priority system is enforced. The maturation process continues.

Recently, the State Engineer’s Office has fielded an increased number of requests to mine or utilize geothermal resources, says Rein. In some cases, projects will remove water while others might return flows but at different tem-peratures, so the state must determine what constitutes an injury to other water users. The small but growing industry is a prime example of how and why groundwater administration will contin-ue to adapt and change.

“It’s the right thing to do,” says Knox, of the continuing efforts to refine ground-water administration, “to optimize use of this resource for short-term gain and long-term benefit.” q

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“The development of every set of [groundwater] rules is incredibly complex,” Ken Knox says, “because you’re talking about people’s livelihoods.”

State Engineer Dick Wolfe gets his feet wet at Confluence Park on the South Platte, just one of many river systems he aims to bring into balance.



DIvISION 1—THE SOUTH PlATTE AND REPUBlICAN BASINSAn ongoing challenge for the Division of Water Resources, which Wolfe oversees, has been the administration of the South Platte Basin’s 8,200 or so high-capacity wells. “We’ve reached an unsustainable operation of these wells, and the 2002 drought took that mask off,” says Wolfe. “We need to bring that system back into balance.”

To re-calibrate, Wolfe says two elements will be necessary. One is finding the physical supplies to replace depletions asso-ciated with the operation of wells. The other is development of rules regarding well measurement. “We’ve got an available supply out there. We’ve got to know how much of it we’re con-suming. We make estimates. But we don’t know in an absolute sense exactly how much water those wells are diverting.”

Recession-related state spending and hiring freezes have imposed budget constraints on DWR that have delayed imple-mentation of new rule-making in the South Platte for now.

In the Republican Basin, a distinct basin that also lies in Division 1, the state has been out of compliance with the gov-erning interstate compact for the past five years. There is very little surface water diversion from the Republican. Instead, nearly 550,000 acres are irrigated by groundwater diversions, primarily from the Ogallala aquifer. In 1998, Kansas filed suit that the basin’s groundwater depletions should be considered part of Colorado’s compact allocation, and in a 2002 settle-ment, Colorado conceded. As a result, well measurement rules were implemented at the end of 2008, requiring about 4,000 wells to install a meter or acceptable measuring device by March 2009 to keep pumping. Wolfe says measurement alone may result in 5 to 10 percent conservation, simply because people know how much they are using.

In addition, the newly formed Republican River Water Conservation District has bought out the bulk of surface water

rights in addition to approximately 30,000 acres of land irri-gated by wells. Its goal is to take out 30,000 more. And a final proposal to achieve compliance is a $71 million pipeline proj-ect the district hopes to use to pump about 13,000 acre feet of water—bought for $50 million and associated with 10,000 acres of land—from the ground back into the river near the Nebraska state line.

“They’ve spent about $90 million trying to achieve compact compliance,” says Wolfe. “This is local water users trying to solve a local problem.” But, about his own role, he adds, “The compact is the tail that wags the dog. And I’ve got to achieve compact compliance. It’s what drives everything out there.”

DIvISION 2— THE ARKANSAS BASINWolfe says the Arkansas Basin is in good shape concerning compliance with its own interstate compact with Kansas, but the DWR is taking proactive steps to prevent future problems. Kansas’ 1985 lawsuit against Colorado claimed injury due to post-compact well development under a compact provision called Article IV-D, which states system improvements can-not reduce the amount of water available in the river. It took a series of rules developed to govern well measurement—pro-mulgated in 1994 and updated in 2005—and well use—insti-tuted in 1996—to settle the case.

The current development of an additional set of “irrigation improvement rules” is intended to stave off future violations of the same stipulation. As farmers make advances in irriga-tion efficiencies through upgrades like center-pivot sprinklers, historical return flows may be affected. Wolfe’s office is not against such improvements, which many farmers are imple-menting both for labor savings and water quality improvement. However, historical return flows must be protected. Though


Much like the current recession has forced Americans to

think about living within their means, Colorado’s brush

with drought and past interstate river compact violations

have led its top water administrator to preach sustain-

ability. In every water division, no matter the diversity

of water’s interplay between surface and groundwater

or the various river compacts that must be considered,

sustainability is State Engineer Dick Wolfe’s overarching

goal. Here’s Wolfe’s take on how to get there.

By Jayla Poppleton | Photo by Kevin moloney


not a huge problem yet—Wolfe says maybe 1,000 acre feet of diminished return flows per year is currently attributed to irrigation improvements—the goal is to “get it while it’s small.”

He plans to submit the rules to water court for approval in June.

DIvISION 3—THE RIO GRANDE BASINThe Rio Grande Basin has long suffered from the dilemma of how operating wells were impacting senior water rights. As in the South Platte, the 2002 drought added more salt to the already festering wound for surface water users who had their water curtailed as wells continued operating. In 2004, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 222 to give the State Engineer authority to promulgate rules that would curtail those well users unless they demonstrated they were either under an aug-mentation plan or a water management plan through a newly created water management subdistrict.

The first subdistrict, under the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, provides an umbrella to about 3,000 wells out of the 6,000 operating in the basin. “Basically, the rules say that the State Engineer is going to curtail you unless you can demonstrate you’re preventing injury to senior water rights, not impairing the state’s ability to maintain compact compliance, and promoting sustainability of the aquifers,” says Wolfe. With the input of a 55-member advisory committee, Wolfe is working on those rules now and expects to have a final draft to submit to water court by the end of 2009.

DIvISIONS 4, 5, 6 AND 7—THE GUNNISON, COlORADO, YAMPA AND SAN JUAN/SAN MIGUEl BASINSThough there is less well development in these divisions, Wolfe sees big changes for his office’s future. For one, he will have to determine if and when a basin becomes over-appropriated, as has already been declared on the South Platte, Arkansas and Rio Grande. “For example, has the new Shell Oil filing now made the Yampa River Basin over-appropriated?” Wolfe asks rhetorically, referring to a water right requested last December that the company would use to develop oil shale.

Though well users don’t presently need an augmentation plan to operate in a basin that is not over-appropriated, Wolfe believes they will need to develop rules and regulations to deal with that eventuality. “Again it gets to the priority system, sus-tainability, compact compliance….We’ve got to develop those rules. Well-use rules come first, then measurement.”

A new addition to Wolfe’s job description is the recent mandate that he and his office begin administering coalbed methane wells, or CBM wells. On April 20, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the water “produced” by the

industry when water is pumped out to tap the natural gas in underlying coal seams is, in fact, being put to beneficial use. The case, Vance v. Wolfe, was a result of senior well users claiming nearby CBM wells were depleting the groundwater supply. As a result of the decision, oil and gas wells are now under the DWR’s jurisdiction.

Wolfe will get a time-out until early 2010 thanks to House Bill 1303, introduced by Rep. Kathleen Curry and Sen. Jim Isgar. The bill passed on April 28 and was signed by Gov. Bill Ritter on June 2. It appears the Legislature anticipated the court’s decision, wisely preparing its response to avoid the chaos that may have followed. A large coalition of those who will likely be impacted supported the bill.

The legislation recognizes that there are an overwhelming 34,000 active oil and gas wells out there, says Wolfe. About 5,000 are CBM and between 3,000 and 4,000 of those are tribu-tary, or linked to a surface stream. Most of these are in the San

Juan Basin in Division 7 or the Raton Basin in Division 2. Those wells deemed tributary will have to undergo a similar process as well users did on the South Platte in 2003, obtaining well permits and temporary substitute supply plans or augmenta-tion plans. “It’s a new era for our office,” says Wolfe.

The other major issue affecting the four West Slope water divisions is compliance with the Colorado River Compact. Wolfe describes an unnerving scenario in which Lake Powell, the effective water bank of the compact’s four upper basin states, is essentially drained. Colorado and its neighbors get a compact call from the three lower basin states and have to curtail water users in order to pay back the bank. Wolfe acknowledges that no one envisions the state is close to being in that situation, but says, “The time is now to start working toward how we will address that.” He is working with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Colorado River Water Conservation District and the Southwest Water Conservation District on developing rules for how to admin-ister such a call.

Facing an uncertain future and believing what people want is certainty, Wolfe reflects on administering a limited resource: “Peter F. Drucker said, ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it.’ To the extent I can play a role in developing rules and policies that help people understand what we can do…know-ing what can potentially happen and that if that happens, this is what the plan is…it gives them some certainty.”

“What I’m doing,” he continues, “and what I promised the governor, is to be looking for and trying to avoid train wrecks into the future. We need to reach a point of sustain-ability or our systems are going to fall apart. You can’t fool Mother Nature.” q

“To the extent I can play a role in developing rules and poli-cies that help people understand what we can do…knowing what can potentially happen and that if that happens, this is what the plan is… it gives them some certainty.”

—Dick Wolfe, State Engineer


It’s July, and you’re going to the Gunnison Water Workshop at Western State College. Rolling off Marshall Pass on the western side, you’ll glide along the mountain hay meadows of Tomichi Creek, along the riffles, the pools and the lovely curving bends of dancing light into Gunnison.

This is the water conference all of Colorado comes to. Dick Bratton and Duane Vandenbusche started it up in the mid-1970s, hoping to center Coloradans on the virtues of Gunnison, Western State College and water. Vandenbusche, historian, teacher and writer; Bratton, lawyer, entrepreneur and member of the college board of trustees; both seeing an opportunity for open dialogue with other people engaged with water.

A multitude of water topics have been discussed and debated at the workshop during the past four decades. State and federal legislators, county commissioners, city councilper-sons, water utility directors, lawyers, Indians, environmental-ists, representatives of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and other federal agencies, paleo-hydrologists and other citizens interested in their neighboring watersheds all confabulating inside the meeting hall and outside on the courtyard for after-hours barbeques. The idea, says Bratton, “all responsible posi-tions fairly represented.”

Bratton grew up in Salida, on the opposite side of the pass from Gunnison. His mother, Mary, was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse on the east side of Marshall Pass, in Monarch, when the Great Depression hit in 1930. Lyle Bratton, Dick’s father, was working as a miner at the Colorado Fuel and Iron limestone quarry at Monarch. His parents met, married in 1931, and welcomed Dick in 1932.

During summer vacation from Western State College in the early 1950s, Bratton worked as a miner in the same Monarch quarry his Dad had. During the school year, he played football, wrestled, ran track, and majored in accounting and econom-ics, graduating in 1954. Prior to graduating, he married Donna Howard, daughter of a third generation ranching family from outside Lake City. Now they have two daughters, Susan and

Sara, and three grandchildren. They have a beautiful home overlooking Tomichi Creek, where Bratton loves to fish.

COMMUNITY MENTORBratton benefited from a fine mentor in leadership, education and the law, Ed Dutcher, who brought the young University of Colorado law graduate of 1957 back to Gunnison in 1958 after a short stint in Denver practice. “Dutcher was the legal and political brains for Dan Thornton, the Colorado governor from 1950 to 1954,” says Bratton. “Thornton put Dutcher on the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Upper Colorado River Compact Commission. When Dutcher became a Grand Junction district judge in 1961, I inherited his law practice.”

In April 1963, Republican Gov. John Love appointed Bratton to the board of trustees of the State Colleges of Colorado that include Colorado State, Adams State, and Western State colleges. Bratton was 31 at the time. Others on the board called him the “teenage trustee.” He served 12 years in that office. Dutcher had preceded Bratton on the same board. When Dutcher went to the bench, Bratton succeeded him as chief counsel for the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District.

Bratton worked to build his real estate, business, and water law practice; invested in Gunnison Valley property, par-ticularly along Tomichi Creek; and actively pursued local and statewide politics as a Republican—Gunnison’s counterpart to Durango water lawyer and community leader, Sam Maynes, a Democrat. In October 1983, Gov. Richard Lamm, a Democrat, appointed Bratton to the Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority, which he chaired between 1989 and 1990.

Bratton attributes much of his success in the law practice to fine colleagues. In addition to Dutcher, he mentions Tom Whittington, Chuck Alexander, Jim Richards, John McClow and John Hill. And he credits his wife Donna with a business sense and graceful manner that has helped the firm enjoy a good practice and leading presence in the community.

WATER WORKERUnder Dutcher, Bratton worked with the Colorado River Water Conservation District to transfer the Blue Mesa, Crystal, and Morrow Point water rights from the River District to the United States for construction of what is now the Aspinall

by Justice Greg Hobbs


Colorado Foundation for Water Education’s 2009 President’s Award Recipient

Harper’s Weekly, 1886, depicting a water-happy homesteader, a water wheel on the Gunnison River and the “Badlands” with no irrigation water.

The annual CFWE President’s Award honors a Coloradan whose character and career in water resources have yielded lasting benefits for the citizens of Colorado. The award also recognizes this individual’s commitment to the dissemination of balanced and accurate information, as well as the advancement of geographical, gender, ethnic and constituency diversity. This year’s Award was presented to Dick Bratton during a gala reception held at the Cableland Mansion in Denver on April 3.

Unit on the Gunnison River. In the ensuing decades, Bratton has worked to preserve the interests of Upper Gunnison and Uncompahgre Valley water users and to develop Colorado’s share of the 1922 Colorado River Compact and 1948 Upper Colorado River Basin Compact.

Along the way, he has participated as an attorney in some of the most important Colorado Supreme Court cases of his day. For example, in the 1992 Arapahoe County case, he strategized and secured a refill right for the Taylor Reservoir upstream of the Blue Mesa Reservoir. He then obtained a pioneering Supreme Court opinion authorizing use of reservoir releases to enhance fish habitat and rafting flows down a long stretch of stream to Blue Mesa. This showed that water rights could be obtained by others than the Colorado Water Conservation Board to produce instream benefits.

In subsequent cases, Bratton helped ranchers, the River District and the United States prove that only 15,700 acre feet of unappropriated water was available annually for Arapahoe County’s proposed Union Park transmountain diversion upstream of Blue Mesa Reservoir, rendering that proposed project infea-sible and protecting water appropriations in the Gunnison River Basin. On behalf of the Upper Gunnison District, Bratton joined with lawyers for the River District, the State of Colorado, and the United States in arguing that the Aspinall water rights had been subordinated to 60,000 acre feet of in-basin Gunnison use above Blue Mesa Reservoir, and up to 240,000 acre feet of Blue Mesa storage water might be used through USBR contracts to benefit both the West and the East Slope as part of Colorado’s compact entitlements. Coming full circle on his early collabora-tion with Dutcher, Bratton helped through this work to solidfy the local, state and federal partnership that built the Aspinall Unit for Colorado and the United States.

Bratton’s knowledge of Colorado River matters, his focused analytical ability, and his reputation as a listener and a learner led President George W. Bush to appoint him as the federal representative and chair of the Upper Colorado River Compact Commission in July 2002. This commission plays an essential role in preserving the 1922 Colorado River Compact entitlements of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Bratton and the com-mission were instrumental in forging a seven-state Colorado River water shortage agreement, approved by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior in December 2007, which includes annual coordination of Lake Powell and Lake Mead operations. The shortage plan also includes cloud seeding, agricultural to municipal leases, desalina-tion, conservation, and water importation into the Colorado River Basin to cope with drought and climate change. As federal rep-resentative, Bratton has acted as a facilitator, mediator and senior counselor on Colorado River matters.

In the midst of everything, Bratton has never forgotten the

ranching roots of the Gunnison Valley. In the pits of the 2002 drought he counseled a newcomer, who had bought up one of the old ranches and its water rights, to let his water pass to the neighbors. Why? Because “helping those who helped make this place is a good thing to do.”

WATER EDUCATOR Being an educator flows in his lineage. Characteristically, Bratton stepped forward in 1991 when a broad-based coalition of Colorado water, environmental and civic interests formed the Colorado Water Education Foundation, CWEF. The first of its kind, the non-profit had a 33-member board of trustees and described its mission as “to provide a wide range of water-related information from various viewpoints with no advocacy position taken on any issues in order to foster a broader under-standing of water challenges among the general population and aid in the informed and timely discussion of water issues.”

Bratton served from the start as a member of the execu-tive committee, as by-laws chair and later as president. Carmine Iadarola, co-founder of CWEF, described Bratton as bringing “credibility, stature, knowledge, and expertise” to the foundation during its six years of existence. In 1996, CWEF suspended meetings due to a lack of an executive director and stable funding.

In the horrendous drought year of 2002, some former CWEF trustees, the Colorado Water Congress, and other organizations and interested persons met to plan for the new Colorado Foundation for Water Education. Rep. Diane Hoppe and Sen. Lew Entz had successfully carried House Bill 1152 in the just-concluded 2002 Colorado legislative session, which included a provision to establish a water education foundation “to promote a better understanding of water issues through educational opportunities and resources so Colorado citizens will understand water as a limited resource and will make informed decisions.” The General Assembly appropriated a start-up grant and annual monies from the Colorado Water Conservation Board Construction Fund that, paired with other grants and contributions, funds the Foundation and its ongoing educational programs.

As a result, the water education legacy of Dick Bratton and so many others lives on in the CFWE. q

Propelled by colleagues and a genuine concern for Colorado water users, Dick Bratton’s water wheel of a career has kept on turning.


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…he has participated as an attorney in some of the most important Colorado

Supreme Court cases of his day.

Often, when people hear the phrase “strategic planning” they roll their eyes and hope they have a conflict on their calendar. Personally, I find value in stepping back and taking a look at how day-to-day activities fit into a larger set of goals. After all, how do you know when you’ve arrived if you don’t know where you are going?

I am lucky that one of the first tasks the Colorado Foundation for Water Education set its mind to was the creation of a strategic plan. This first plan, adopted in 2003, laid out goals centered on program development, membership recruitment and fundraising. The programs we are best known for, including Headwaters, the Citizen’s Guide series and our annual River Basin Tour, are a direct result of this planning effort. Many of the goals that the Foundation outlined in that plan have been accom-plished, due to a large amount of hard work and the support of our members.

The simplest path for me, as Executive Director, would be to continue along the Foundation’s cur-rent trajectory, publishing Headwaters and an annual Citizen’s Guide, putting on events such as Water Leaders and the Tour, and maintaining our historic membership base. Continued participation in these programs by our members has demonstrat-ed their utility and desirability, and the Foundation is proud that these products and events are so suc-

cessful. But, I know I would be doing a disservice to Colorado’s water community if I did not expand upon the Foundation’s past success and grow the organization to its next logical level.

With that goal in mind, the CFWE staff and Board met in Frisco on a rainy Saturday in May to chart our course for the next five years. With help from the experts at Conservation Impact and con-sideration of input received from interviews with over 50 members and stakeholders, we grappled with questions such as, “Who is our primary audi-ence?” and “To what end are we educating the people of Colorado?” We realized that answering these key questions would be critical to our long-term success.

After a long discussion, the CFWE Board adopt-ed its 2009-2014 Strategic Plan on May 27, 2009. The new plan brings a more defined focus to the

organization’s work and furthers the intent of creat-ing mechanisms to measure the impact that our pro-grams have. Our vision is that Coloradans, through an improved understanding of water’s complexities and trade-offs, will make more informed water resource decisions. We will make progress toward this vision by working towards five new goals in the following areas:

• Audience: CFWE will target its programs at Colorado decision-makers to help them make more informed water resource decisions.

• Partnerships: CFWE will partner with key “gatekeeper organizations” to ensure that their staff and constituents have appropriate knowledge of basic water resource concepts.

• Engagement: CFWE will deepen the value and awareness of our programs by build-ing feedback and measurement mecha-nisms into the work we do.

• Accessibility: CFWE will strengthen its capacity to ensure that all Coloradans have access to unbiased water education programs.

• Financial stability: CFWE will diversify its funding base to maintain the reliability of its educational programs.

In the near term, those not involved in the day-to-day operations of the Foundation will not notice a significant difference in the programs and products that we offer. However, over the next year, staff will oversee an evaluation of all programs, making changes where needed to better target our new goals.

This is an exciting time for the Colorado Foundation for Water Education, and I am happy to lead the organization through this transitional period. As the staff and Board refine the above goals and grow our understanding of the implications for our programs, I will be sure to keep you in the loop.

Thank you for all of your support and encour-agement thus far. We couldn’t do this without you.

Nicole Seltzer, Executive Director

THE COlORADO FOUNDATION FOR WATER EDUCATION

The Next Five Years


Our vision is that Coloradans, through an improved understanding of water’s complexities and trade-offs, will make more informed water resource decisions.

1580 Logan St., Suite 410 • Denver, CO 80203

4th Annual Friends of Water Education Golf Classic

Bring the family! Golf f Tennis f Swimming

SUPPORT WATER EDUCATION in Colorado

by joining the Colorado Foundation for Water

Education for an afternoon of swimming, golf

and tennis. Please come to the Foundation’s 4th

annual golf tournament on Aug. 3 at Pinehurst

Country Club in Denver. This family-friendly

event is a fun networking opportunity, as well

as a great way to experience beautiful Pinehurst

Country Club.

The event is not just for golfers anymore!

It will also be an enjoyable afternoon for tennis

buffs or those who’d like to lounge at the pool.

Registration opens at 12 noon, and the tourna-

ment’s shotgun start will follow at 1 p.m. We will

round out the evening with a prime-rib awards

dinner and silent auction, beginning at 6 p.m.

Registration, as teams or individuals, is

open to the first 144 players. Sign up before

July 27 for early-bird pricing. Those who do

not wish to golf, children or adults, can also

register separately for a swim/tennis pack-

age and for the awards dinner. For more

details and to register online go to www.cfwe.

org/2009Golf/2009GolfHome.asp.

August 3, 2009 | Pinehurst Country Club | Denver

Early registration discounts available—www.cfwe.org

New this year! Golf is just one option. Your family—and extended family—can enjoy an

afternoon of tennis, swimming and socializing at Denver’s Pinehurst Country Club.

http://www.cfwe

http://www.cfwe.org

summer 2009 water administration

Documents

water commissioners

water cop

division of water resources

gunnison water wheelcfwe

water education1580

water commissioners

nonconsumptive uses

state engineers job