The volunteer San Juan Water Conservancy District board held a regular meeting this past Monday, February 11, to discuss a number of items related to water resources in Archuleta County. The meeting included an executive session, during which the Board received information about its water rights from the District’s new attorney, Jeff Kane.
DISCLAIMER: I serve on the SJWCD board. This editorial reflects my personal perspective and is in no way intended to reflect the policies and perspectives of the SJWCD Board as a whole.
I’ve been writing about Archuleta County water resources, off and on, for the past decade here in the Daily Post. For nearly all of that time, I’ve held the opinion that certain policies of the San Juan Water Conservancy District were misguided — especially those related to the construction of the proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir.
Over the past 12 months, however, the composition of the volunteer SJWCD Board has changed significantly, and some of the policies are now being reconsidered. This coming Monday, February 18, the Board will continue work on a new ‘strategic plan’ in an open public meeting, starting at 1pm at the District office on Village Drive. The planning session will be facilitated by Renee Lewis Kosnik, formerly the general manager for the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD).
The San Juan Water Conservancy District holds a number of water rights related to municipal water needs — drinking water, fire protection, recreation — and also some related to agricultural water uses. Those water rights are the result of court cases dating back to the 1880; the most recent water rights date from 2004. The past court decisions are public information; the Board discussions about how to maintain or relocate publicly-owned water rights are typically a matter of closed-door executive sessions.
Water rights — whether owned by public agencies or by private individuals or by corporations — come in two flavors: direct diversion rights and storage rights. The Town of Pagosa Springs, for example, benefits from direct diversion rights from the West Fork of the San Juan River. The drinking water for downtown Pagosa and nearby neighborhoods flows directly into the Snowball Treatment Plant, without sitting in a storage reservoir. The drinking water delivered to the residents in the numerous Pagosa Lakes subdivisions, however, comes mainly from a storage reservoir known as Lake Hatcher.
These deliveries are handled by PAWSD, whose operations are funded by various customer fees and by local property taxes. The water deliveries depend upon adjudicated water rights, and upon Mother Nature’s activities in the (currently snowy) San Juan Mountains.
SJWCD does not deliver water, and its operations are funded mainly by property taxes. At this point in time, the main function of the San Juan Water Conservancy District is to hold and protect certain water rights. But SJWCD is also charged with overseeing the development of the Dry Gulch Reservoir — also known as the San Juan River Headwaters Project — per an agreement with PAWSD and the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB).
As I understand it, SJWCD holds direct diversion rights — totaling about 71 CFS (cubic feet per second).
To put that number into perspective, the total deliveries of PAWSD water to its drinking water customers (as I understand it) could be fed by a direct diversion of less than 3 CFS. (3 CFS is equal to about 2,200 acre-feet per year, and PAWSD sells about 1,300 acre-feet per year to customers, and also provides around 300 acre-feet to the Pagosa Springs Golf Course.)
Which is to say: SJWCD holds enough direct diversion rights to theoretically service a residential community of about 315,000 people. The population of Archuleta County is currently around 13,000, and about 10,000 are served by PAWSD water delivery. (PAWSD has its own water rights, of course, to facilitate those deliveries.)
SJWCD also holds a total of about 35,000 acre-feet of storage water rights. If SJWCD were able to develop all of these storage rights into actual reservoirs, we would have enough stored water for about 270,000 residents, based on the current PAWSD delivery rates.
These numbers were generated by a pocket calculator, and I can’t claim to understand the finer details of adjudicated water rights. But it would appear that the main job of our volunteer SJWCD Board is to protect enough water rights to (theoretically) service a population of about 585,000 people.
More than the population of Colorado Springs (population about 494,000) — the second largest city in Colorado, right behind Denver (population 732,000).
I guess it’s possible that Pagosa Springs will someday be larger than Colorado Springs. I don’t expect that to happen in my lifetime.
A couple of interesting thoughts. PAWSD also holds water rights, in addition to the water rights held by SJWCD. I don’t have a list of the PAWSD water rights, but it’s probably not a stretch to imagine that, between our two little water districts, the public owns enough water rights to service 1 million people at current delivery rates.
These numbers do not include the agricultural water rights allocated to the numerous ranches and smaller subdivisions in Archuleta County. And numerous downstream water users are also claiming rights to the water in the San Juan River. I would guess that all of the water rights along the river are as incredibly generous as those held by PAWSD and SJWCD.
But Mother Nature has been delivering roughly the same amount of water into the San Juan River for the past 1,000 years — according to scientific estimates. Some scientists are telling us that ‘climate change’ is likely to bring about severe drought conditions in the American Southwest.
Should we be getting water smart?
What does that mean, exactly?