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Wednesday, July 14, 2010
029 - Colorado greed fuels Wyoming water heist
In the West, whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting.
Mark Twain.
Because I have a boat on Flaming Gorge Reservoir, it makes sense to oppose piping 250,000 acre-feet of Wyoming water per year from the Green River to the Front Range.
And although there are small numbers of folks banding together to fight this Colorado-based project, the reason the project will be defeated is not because of a quality decline of my future aquatic adventures.
No, it will be because good science will show this is the wrong project coming at the wrong time in the wrong place.
The Million Conservation Group of Fort Collins wants to spend $3 billion to pump water from the Green and my favorite reservoir so new houses and new industry can be built on the east side of the Colorado Rockies.
Their project expects to pump 81.4 billion gallons per year, a staggering amount. The pipeline is 560 miles long.
Here is why plans like these are destined for the dustbin of history:
• Despite the fact that a compact signed by four states would indicate Colorado owns unused shares of its water in the Green River and the Gorge, Colorado’s own experts say the water is not there. The most knowledgeable people on the subject say the Colorado River is already over-committed. There is no water left to be put into a trans-basin diversion pipe.
• Wiser heads will prevail and realize that the secret for good economic health for the Front Range is conservation when it comes to its water usage. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter said, “Conservation has to become an ethic of the West,” at the 2009 Western Governors Conference
• Much of the West is still in a drought and the worst place in the country this past year is the aptly-named Sweetwater County in SW Wyoming, where all this water will come from. This area gets just 8 inches of precipitation per year.
• Colorado law can be nasty when it comes to how it treats entrepreneurs who are playing fast and loose when peddling water rights. Could be a big hurdle for this outfit.
• Wyoming law says water in our state, even when it is allegedly signed away by a 60-year compact, still cannot be moved out of state without approval of the legislature. Good luck to these greedy Coloradoans on that.
• The headwaters of the Green River are in the massive Wind River Mountain Range. The glaciers in that range have declined dramatically in the past ten years to where most are in danger of disappearing. Prominent Western Wyoming College professor Charlie Love has documented this.
• The Endangered Species Act will come into play, as it will be proven that pumping the water out of these locations will kill off important native species. It will also negatively affect plants and land animals. There is also the opposite problem of this pipeline providing a way for invasive species to travel from one part of the country to another.
• One of Wyoming’s best attorneys, Ford Bussart of Rock Springs, predicts lawsuits on this project will extend for decades.
These are just a few of the more obvious reasons why such a project is going to fail. Those of us who are trying to stop this project need the help of eastern Wyoming communities that are wasting their valuable money seeing if they can catch a few drops of this water as it races on by to Colorado.
Besides Million, another effort sponsored by Colorado water districts, has signed up several Wyoming cities and towns to help explore such an effort. A waste of money and a not too friendly gesture toward their fellow citizens in Southwest Wyoming.
So despite the best efforts of the Denver Post editorial writers to promote the project, plus the support of big money by Front Range entrepreneurs, this newly constituted border war is a lost cause.
Its private enterprise promoter, Aaron Million, should follow his own advice and “stick a fork in it” now before too much more time and money is wasted on this ill-fated venture. And Frank Jaeger of Parker, CO., who is promoting the other venture involving water districts, should call it a day, too.
Disclosure: this writer’s company was recently hired to compile a list of talking points concerning this project by the Communities Protecting the Green River Committee. This column, however, is the writer’s personal point-of-view and was written before this occurred.
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