Cities Hunt Water to Feed Growth: Utilities Managers Say West Can Find New Ways to Fill Burgeoning Needs of Cities.

By Chris Woodka, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.

Apr. 15–COLORADO SPRINGS — Las Vegas is the hottest, driest, fastest-growing major city in the United States.

Growth in Colorado Springs, located relatively far from reliable water sources to sustain its 400,000 residents, has outpaced other cities in the Arkansas basin.

Water managers from both places see their jobs as providing more supply to meet the demand rather than looking at policies that would limit growth.

“We’re working to respond to growth and we have not looked at using water as a way to limit development,” Gary Bostrom, Colorado Springs Utilities projects manager, told an audience of about 100 people during the unveiling of the Colorado College State of the Rockies Report Card last week.

“We may have 40 to 50 years if it grows the way it has in the past, and then we’re going to have to look at moving water from other basins,” said Kay Brothers, deputy general manager for the South Nevada Water Authority.

After a report that detailed the growing reliance of the West on developing municipal water supplies in overappropriated basins, with potential climate change and at the expense of agricultural uses, members of the audience peppered the panel with questions about growth and sustainability of water supply.

Bostrom showed a map of pipelines that now serve Colorado Springs from the northwest, west and south, as well as a photograph of a blowout on the Homestake Pipeline last fall that interrupted water deliveries while it was repaired.

Homestake brings water in from the Eagle River basin to the west, while the Blue River Pipeline takes water across the Continental Divide to the northwest and the Fountain Valley Authority Pipeline connects to Pueblo Dam.

Colorado Springs needs another pipeline, the Southern Delivery System, to provide backup for its current systems as well as water for future growth, Bostrom said.

SDS is another pipeline from Pueblo Dam that would bring up to 78 million gallons a day 43 miles north through a 66-inch-diameter pipe. The Bureau of Reclamation is conducting an environmental impact statement on the proposed pipeline and seven alternatives, which Bostrom said should be complete by 2009.

That would allow Phase I of the project to be constructed by 2012 at a projected cost of $600 million. More than $1 billion more would be needed to build two reservoirs and construct other features of the project in Phase II, projected to be built from 2014-30.

“We need another pipeline,” Bostrom said.

That viewpoint was challenged by several in the crowd, who questioned the expense of pumping water uphill, the impacts on other Arkansas River communities and the long-term reliability of the water supply.

Bostrom responded that the expense of SDS is part of the environmental review now going on.

Colorado Springs has initiated conservation measures to reduce water use and will replenish flows in the Arkansas River through water court decrees and intergovernmental agreements.

“We’re not ‘sucking’ someone else’s water,” Bostrom said.

Bostrom said Colorado Springs has one of the lowest per capita water usage rates in the West, but even that drew criticism.

“It seems we have to cut our water consumption in half every 100 years. What’s your solution in the long-term?” asked Dave Gardner, an advocate for limiting growth in Colorado Springs.

“At some point, there is a limit as to how much growth there can be on the Front Range,” Bostrom acknowledged. “I don’t know what that point is.”

Cooperative programs, such as the “Super Ditch,” a water lease management, rotational fallowing program proposed by the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District, could help relieve pressures from water transfers, Bostrom said.

Brothers gave an example of how growth is accommodated in Nevada, where the water supply is more finite. Las Vegas gets water from wells, surface water rights in its own watershed and the Colorado River.

It is using the Colorado River water to recharge aquifers and has initiated severe measures like paying customers to rip up bluegrass.

“If you’re a developer in Las Vegas, you spend a significant amount of money before you even know if there’s water,” Brothers said. “It’s much different in Nevada. We look at how much the aquifer recharges every year and that’s how much you can take out.”

Brothers and Bostrom both said water utilities have to balance conservation measures which save water with the revenue they might lose.

Bostrom said Colorado Springs keeps its conservation programs “revenue neutral.”

“Our job is to provide customers water,” Brothers said. “The expense is really investing in water, and you will find a lot of people are willing to pay for it.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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