Local resident Mely Whiting stepped up to the microphone following last week’s Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) rollout of a revised — and much more expensive — $357 million Dry Gulch Reservoir proposal. Whiting and the rest of the half-full audience had just heard assertions — by PAWSD Special Projects Manager Sheila Berger, Durango water engineer Steve Harris financial consultant Tom Pippin — that Archuleta County ought to expect steady 4 percent growth in water demand for the next 50 years, and that this unstoppable growth justified a 19,000 acre-foot reservoir — and development fees levied on all new building projects, in the range of $9,200 per Equivalent Unit.
An Equivalent Unit (EU) is approximately equal to the average water demand of a single family home.
Ms. Whiting was questioning the so-called “one year safety supply margin” built into a new 19,000 acre-foot reservoir being proposed that night for the parched Dry Gulch valley about two miles north of downtown Pagosa Springs.
As Ms. Berger had explained earlier during her PowerPoint slide show, PAWSD adopted a “safety supply margin” policy a few years ago, requiring the PAWSD Board of Directors and PAWSD staff to plan for maintaining a one-year supply of water storage. In past PAWSD documents, this enigmatic and ever-changing “safety supply margin” seemed to be equivalent to one year of District-wide water demand.
At last week’s presentation, however, the mysterious “safety supply margin” had inexplicably grown, to include not just a one-year supply but rather a one-year supply PLUS the amount of water needed to get through a 500-year drought such as the one the District experienced in 2002. Berger had presented this “new and improved” supply margin as totaling 19,000 acre-feet by the year 2055. Thus we have the proposal to build a 19,000 acre-foot reservoir.
“What percentage of your proposed 19,000 acre-foot reservoir goes toward your one-year safety supply margin?” Whiting asked the panel of experts assembled to field questions following the one-hour presentation.
Berger responded, “13,600 acre-feet of that 19,000 is the safety supply.”
Indeed, Berger had earlier displayed a PowerPoint slide that explained how the expected community-wide water shortage during a theoretical 2002-style drought — taking place in 2055 — plus the enigmatic 2055 one-year safety supply margin of 13,610 acre-feet, added up to the neatly rounded 19,000 acre-feet.
Ms. Whiting continued, “How does this compare to other municipalities? For example, I understand that Denver has a 450,000 acre-foot demand projected to the year 2050. And they are planning for a 30,000 acre-foot safety margin.”
The panel of PAWSD experts seemed somewhat confused by this assertion by Whiting, and generally responded that they knew nothing about the Denver Water district policies, or any other Colorado water district’s safety supply margin, for that matter.
This surprised me somewhat, because Colorado water districts often learn how to plan for their own future water needs by researching the policies of other Colorado water districts. So while writing this article, I decided that some independent research was in order.
I did an online search for “water safety supply margin Colorado” in Google.com and found out something quite interesting. In reviewing the top 100 websites resulting from that search, the term “safety supply margin” — one year or otherwise — appears on only three Colorado water websites. Two websites belonged to PAWSD and its collaborator on the proposed Dry Gulch project, the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD). The third was at the Great Western Institute website — and was a discussion of the proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir.
It seems that no other water district in Colorado has posted any information about any “safety supply margin” whatsoever on any of their websites. Is it possible that this mysterious “one-year safety supply margin” idea is absolutely unique to PAWSD and SJWCD, among Colorado water districts?
Daily Post writer Glenn Walsh plans to discuss just how many years of drought the PAWSD “one-year safety supply margin” really accommodates, in a future article. After reading that article, our Daily Post readers might have an idea why no other Colorado water district seems terribly concerned about a “one-year safety supply.”
PAWSD desperately needs a one-year safety supply margin, however, precisely because the proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir project has almost nothing to do with water storage — and everything to do with making new growth pay for serious planning mistakes made by PAWSD over the past ten or twenty years. But more about that later…
For now, let’s look at our community’s remarkable need for a brand new 19,000 acre-foot reservoir during a period of completely unremarkable growth.
When the Colorado Supreme Court rejected the PAWSD plan for a $150 million, 35,000 acre-foot in October 2007, and remanded the case to water court judge Greg Lyman, PAWSD continued to collect the $7,120 Water Resource Fee based on the rejected reservoir. A year later, Judge Lyman granted water rights sufficient for a 19,000 acre-foot reservoir, and PAWSD began researching new population projections and construction costs which would help justify just such a reduced project.
Here is where the year 2055 comes into play. The original 2004 application for PAWSD water rights used a 100-year planning period to justify the need for those water rights, but the Colorado Supreme Court insisted that the maximum planning period suitable for the PAWSD project was 50 years. Using the 100-year time span, PAWSD had been trying to base its reservoir plans on the Archuleta County population PAWSD was projecting for the year 2100.
Now, apparently as a result of the 2007 Supreme Court ruling, PAWSD is basing its Dry Gulch planning on the year 2055. So PAWSD needs to show a lot of people moving here over the next 45 years.
Perhaps that’s why the new Dry Gulch plan is using a population growth factor of 3.9 percent per year through 2055 — even though the previous Dry Gulch studies used only a 3 percent growth rate, and even though PAWSD’s own 2009 budget is predicting less that one-half percent growth for this year.
Because, if PAWSD uses the 3.9 percent growth estimate, the numbers work out very nicely — justifying a 19,000 acre-foot reservoir.
Except that, in other to make the numbers work, PAWSD must also assert the need for a “one-year safety supply margin” which appears to be unique among Colorado water districts. And they must also modify that “one-year safety supply margin” to include the estimated water shortage during a once-every-500-years drought.
But here’s the curious part to all that. To make their whole financial plan work, PAWSD apparently feels they have to grossly overestimate growth and then add a uniquely ambiguous “one-year safety supply margin” into the mix. They can then collect the over-sized development fees which they might not actually need after all, when the growth never happens.
But wait? What about the water conservation estimates that the Supreme Court demanded PAWSD include in their calculations? What on earth happened to those?