EDITORIAL: Strange Diversions in a Strange Land, Part One

A Daily Post reader sent me a link, a few days ago, to a lengthy article on the Politico.com website, written by Annie Snyder and entitled, “The Rancher Trying to Solve the West’s Water Crisis”.

The story would be familiar to anyone who’s been following recent Colorado water issues… issues like “buy and dry”, and “demand management”, and “climate change”, and “compact calls”, and “transmountain diversions”, for example.

The article begins like this:

Paul Bruchez’s family has ranched cattle in Colorado for five generations. And twice in his lifetime, his generation has nearly become the last.

The first time, it was the city of Denver that squeezed them out. By the 1990s, when Bruchez was still in high school, the city’s fast-growing suburbs had swept north and totally surrounded their roughly 2,000 acres in Westminster. Bruchez’s father had taken dirt roads to get to school, but by the time Bruchez was a teenager development had engulfed the family homestead so completely that at one point the city needed to send a police escort to help move their harvest equipment safely between fields on what were by then city roads. Running a full-scale farm operation in the middle of a city soon became untenable and the family opted to cut a land deal with the city and start fresh on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.

The second time, it was a drought.

The ranch near Kremmling, Colorado purchased by Paul Bruchez’s family, after they left Westminster, seemed to be blessed with water. The Colorado River literally ran through it, ready to supply more than enough water for irrigating 2,000 acres of hay through a network of irrigation ditches. Or so it seemed.

The family had one good year before the ditches went dry.

Ms. Snyder does an excellent job, with her 6,400 word story, of touching on many of the water issues facing ranchers, governments, and communities in the American West in 2020. Rancher Paul Bruchez plays the role of the story’s hero — organizing his neighbors to take cooperative action, engaging with government leaders, connecting with scientists, starting a fly fishing business, and finding a measure of success in preserving a way of life that seems threatened from several directions.

A few days before reading the Politico article, I had attended a board meeting for the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD). (I am a SJWCD board member, but this article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the District’s other board members or District policies.) The board was discussing a project that’s been underway for about two years: the creation of a “strategic plan” that will presumably guide the work of the District over the next few years. Many water districts and other government entities — and many businesses — develop strategic plans with the general idea of ‘getting all their ducks in a row’, so to speak.

The plan is nearly done, and an earlier draft received comments from a few local activists.

SJWCD had adopted a strategic plan back in 2013, but it had addressed only one single subject: the proposed construction of a water reservoir in the Dry Gulch valley, on property jointly purchased by SJWCD and the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) in 2008. The original plan involved extracting water out of the San Juan River, and (somehow) delivering it to the tens of thousands of new residents who would locate within the PAWSD district boundaries by 2020 or thereabouts.

The predicted flood of new residents did not, however, materialize as expected. And the reservoir is no closer to being built than it was in 2008.

Meanwhile, both PAWSD and SJWCD have seen complete turnovers in their boards of directors, with resultant changes in priorities. The current PAWSD board has taken a “hands-off” approach to the Dry Gulch project, and allowed SJWCD to drive the project forward, if possible.

The SJWCD board, meanwhile, has become interested in “other water issues”, not directly related to Dry Gulch. In fact, I would characterize the current SJWCD board as more interested in keeping water in the San Juan River than in taking water out. (Not all SJWCD board members would agree with that characterization, I suspect.)

Some of those “other water issues” were touched upon in the Politico article.

For example. The apparent conflict between ranchers and farmers, on the one hand, and city dwellers, on the other.

Ms. Snyder writes:

Over the past century, Denver, Boulder and other cities on Colorado’s dry Front Range have steadily bought up farmers’ water rights on the wet, western slope of the Rockies and built massive, transmountain tunnels to ship the water to thirsty city dwellers. Today, roughly 65 percent of the water that would naturally flow into Grand County, where Kremmling sits, is diverted elsewhere. Many farm and ranch families nurse a grudge to this day, holding tight to the old Mark Twain adage that “whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.”

This diversion — 65 percent — might strike some readers as a significant amount of water diverted out of Grand County, where Colorado River (once known as the Grand River) has its snow-fed source.

The diverted water flows through the Grand Ditch to serve folks on the opposite side of the Continental Divide. And that’s only one of several transmountain diversions that drain water from the Colorado River and send it elsewhere.

Some Pagosa residents may be unaware that we have our own transmountain diversion… one that begins right here in Archuleta County and delivers water to Albuquerque, New Mexico?

Read Part Two, on Monday…