Colorado River drought task force achieves consensus — but some water experts say recommendations “fell short”

The final recommendations from a statewide task force charged with finding water-saving solutions for the drying Colorado River focus largely on expanding and tweaking existing programs.

That outcome has underwhelmed some water experts, prompting calls for more decisive action to address overuse and drought on the river that’s the lifeblood of the American Southwest.

Delivered after four months of hours-long meetings, all but one of the eight recommendations would expand or change current programs, including initiatives aimed at continuing the measurement of snowpack, improving water infrastructure and boosting a program to replace thirsty grasses with native plants.

The task force’s prescriptions fail to meet the gravity of the crisis, said Kelly Nordini, CEO of Conservation Colorado. While some recommendations would mark good steps forward, Nordini said, other substantive topics discussed by the task force did not make it to the final proposals for action.

“We just felt that there really wasn’t enough focus and urgency for the scale of the problem we’re facing,” she said. “This is a 1,000-year drought and no one thinks that picture gets better in the long term.”

State lawmakers formed the 17-member Colorado River Drought Task Force in May, charging it with drafting recommendations for legislation to address drought and overuse in the Colorado River Basin. Members of the task force spanned a wide range of water interests, including representatives from environmental nonprofits, utility companies, the agricultural sector, state and local government, the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes.

The task force’s formation sparked controversy at the time and water experts told The Denver Post that they considered the creation of yet another study group to be procrastination.

“We’re not short on ideas, we’re short on action,” Dan Beard, a former U.S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, said in the spring.

The new task force and a sub-task force on tribal matters began meeting July 31. Its members have since heard hours of public comment in meetings across the state. They drew up a list of 25 potential proposals, which were winnowed to eight formal recommendations.

Some of the other ideas were incorporated into the task force’s final report, due Friday, as part of the broader narrative — but not as official recommendations.

The strength in the eight final recommendations is that they attracted support from the wide range of voices that made up the task force, said Kathy Chandler-Henry, an Eagle County Commissioner and the chair of the task force. Such consensus can be difficult to find in water policy, she said.

When the task force was convened, Chandler-Henry said, commenters speculated that either nothing would come out of it or that it would devolve into an uncivil bloodbath between people with different interests on the river.

Neither happened, she said. Instead, the group managed to agree on water-saving solutions through a transparent and public process — another rarity in the water world, she said.

“On a meta level, that’s a huge outcome,” Chandler-Henry said.

“It’s our job to plan for the worst and hope for the best”

The Colorado River, flowing from headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, provides water for 40 million people, irrigates 5.5 million acres of agricultural lands that feed the country, generates electric power, fuels recreation-based economies across the West and provides important habitat for several endangered species.

Overuse by the three states in the river’s Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — combined with long-term drought and continuing aridification of the West means users take more water out of the river than it can support sustainably.

State Sen. Dylan Roberts, one of the lawmakers who created the task force, said in an interview that he was disappointed in the final recommendations.

The task force discussed but did not recommend action on some of the biggest questions about the Colorado River, he said, such as what the state should do if it’s forced in the future to cut its water use.

“It’s our job to plan for the worst and hope for the best,” the Democrat from Avon said. “And I think, overall, the task force, for a variety of reasons, didn’t have that mindset.”

The task force faced an aggressive schedule and worked hard, Roberts said. He sees the group’s recommendations, and the conversations behind them, serving as an important base for future work.

Lawmakers will have strong interest in turning the recommendations into policy during the next legislative session, which begins in January, he said.

“It certainly wasn’t a failure or a waste of time at all,” Roberts said. “This is going to be an iterative process — we’re not going to be able to pass one bill and fix all the water issues.”

The task force’s eight recommendations to the legislature are to:

• Expand a program that helps local entities apply for federal grant money for water projects
• Direct more money to state programs that pay for improving and repairing aging water infrastructure, like ditches and headgates. The improvements will help water systems be more efficient and lose less water to leakage or transit.
• Create stronger criteria to receive state funding for Community Wildfire Protection Plans
• Expand a program that allows some water rights holders to loan their water to the Colorado Water Conservation Board to preserve and improve the environment
• Expand statewide a program that allows agricultural water rights holders to lease, loan or trade part of their allotment
• Continue funding improvements to technology to measure stream flows and snowpack statewide
• Pay for a statewide assessment of changes in riparian plant communities and fund a statewide program to control and remove invasive plant species that hurt waterways, such as tamarisk and Russian olives
• Increase funding from $2 million to $5 million for an already established program that incentivizes the replacement of water-sucking turf with native grasses and plants

A sub-task force on tribal matters and the Colorado River also created its own recommendations. Those include funding a pilot program to study the two tribes’ rights on the Colorado River and how much the tribes should be compensated for not using that water.

Jennifer Gimbel, senior water policy scholar at Colorado State University, said that while she originally was skeptical, she was pleasantly surprised by the task force’s recommendations. While some of the bolder ideas discussed weren’t included as final recommendations, talking about them is a good first step, she said.

“They’re good starts, they’re good nuggets for people to noodle on,” she said.

Punting on big water use reduction questions

The task force discussed other critical topics, including increasing water storage statewide. But its members declined to make a formal recommendation to lawmakers. That and other topics are discussed in the task force’s final report, which can serve a resource to lawmakers, Chandler-Henry said.

The task force’s recommendations might do some good but they only “scratch the surface of the problem,” Mark Squillace, a water law professor at the University of Colorado, wrote in an email.

The inherent problem is that people who use Colorado River water are using more than the river produces in an average year, he said.

Solutions must involve permanent reduction of consumption, he said, such as paying farmers to switch to plants that consume less water or limiting water rights so that farmers have a slightly shorter growing season. More broadly, the seven Colorado River states should consider creating a new compact with a promise to modernize their water laws, he said.

Two of the proposals the task force considered but ultimately did not include in its final recommendations would have asked the legislature to pass non-binding resolutions about big issues on the Colorado River.

One would have urged the legislature to pass a resolution setting guidelines for any future program aimed at reducing water use in the state so that more water can flow to downstream states. The other proposal would have called for a legislative resolution stating that overuse by Lower Basin states is a contributing factor to shrinking water supplies on the Colorado River — and nudged the Lower Basin to permanently reduce their use.

That resolution also would have recommended that Colorado not cut its water use for the benefit of other states until the Lower Basin states reduced their consumption.

In rejecting recommendations for either resolution, task force members cited, in part, a reluctance to make promises on behalf of future lawmakers.

“In the end, I think it’s premature,” said task force member Kyle Whitaker, the water rights manager for Northern Water, during the task force’s final meeting this month. He was referring to the scuttled proposed resolution suggesting guidelines for a future water use reduction program.

But thinking ahead on the crucial and complex issue is exactly what the legislature asked the group to do, said task force member Allison Baker, Durango’s public works director, during the final meeting this month. The report will lose a lot of its teeth if it does not address the key issue of potential future water cuts, she said.

“I feel like this is what everyone is shying away from,” she said. “Is it perfect? No. But there is no perfect wording.”

The Colorado River Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, supported both of the proposed resolutions. Andy Mueller, general manager of the district and a task force member, said in a comment on the final report that the resolution about potential water use reduction programs was the only proposal considered by the task force that would have “fully addressed the primary criteria set forth by the General Assembly.”

“Unfortunately, the Task Force was unable to provide clear guidance to the members of the General Assembly with respect to how our state should be prepared to move forward should the pressure to participate in an Interstate Conserved Consumptive Use Program increase in the future,” Mueller wrote.

“We respectfully disagree that the (Conserved Consumptive Use) proposal is premature, and that this conversation should wait until a specific program is implemented. With critical reservoir storage on the Colorado River hovering at or below 35% of capacity, we are only one dry year away from returning to the state of crisis we saw last year at this time.”

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