At the beginning of this year, the San Juan Water Conservancy District — holder of certain water rights and real estate on behalf of the District taxpayers — was doing some soul searching. Several years of work on a proposed reservoir in the Dry Gulch valley northeast of downtown Pagosa had convinced the SJWCD Board to ask the taxpayers in 2017 to increase the District’s property tax mill levy to help facilitate the Dry Gulch project.
I serve on the SJWCD Board of Directors, but the following essay is not meant to reflect the policies or intentions of the SJWCD Board as a whole.
The ongoing plan to divert water from the San Juan River and store it in a nearby valley has been ‘in-progress’ for almost 20 years, but thus far, the project remains theoretical. Water rights — conditional upon the actual construction of the reservoir — have been granted by the Water Court, and some of the necessary real estate has been purchase with money loaned by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, but a sizable portion of the desired land still remains in the hands of the US Forest Service.
Yesterday in Part Two, we noted that the Hoover Dam — the 726-foot dam that created the 26-million-acre-foot Lake Mead — had a construction cost of about $49 million back in 1936. Converted to 2019 dollars, that would be equivalent to about $600 million. The cost of the dam was reimbursed over a 50-year period by electricity users in California, Arizona and Nevada.
The cost of damming Lake Mead appears to have been about $23 per acre foot of water storage, calculated in 2019 dollars.
Back in 2009, an estimated cost of the 32,000-acre-foot Dry Gulch Reservoir project was generated by a team of professional engineers: $357 million. Had the project moved forward as planned in 2009, the cost might have been about $11,200 per acre foot of storage. Apparently, the per-acre-foot cost of building a reservoir has inflated slightly since 1936.
According to Wikipedia, there are about 59 dams and reservoirs in Colorado. Could Dry Gulch become the 60th… with the help of some additional taxpayer contributions? That was the basic question put before Archuleta County voters in 2017. In spite of the SJWCD board of directors changing the name of the reservoir from ‘Dry Gulch Reservoir’ to ‘The Upper San Juan River Headwaters Project’ a few months before the election, the ballot measure failed.
What to do? A few months later, newly-appointed SJWCD Board member Matt Roane suggested that perhaps the Board could develop a “strategic plan” — a process likely to produce new ideas about the District’s long range future, since the old ideas seemed to be going nowhere.
A ‘Strategic Plan’ process has indeed been underway this year, and rather than do what volunteer boards typically do when they want a plan developed — which is, typically, to use taxpayer revenue to pay a consultant from Denver to write the plan for them — the SJWCD decided to use the energy and expertise of the Board members themselves to write the plan. The Board also hired Renee Lewis Kosnik, formerly the District Manager for Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation (PAWSD) to help facilitate the planning process.
I’m personally pleased with this approach, because there’s nothing quite like the process of writing an informative essay, if you want to learn more about the world you live in — or about the problems that you may be trying to solve.
Archuleta County residents, businesses, farms and ranches draw most of their water from the San Juan River and its tributaries. The San Juan is a major tributary of the Colorado River, and the San Juan features a pretty impressive reservoir that commences in the southwest corner of the Archuleta County and heads south and west into New Mexico. Thanks to the Navajo Dam near Farmington, the Navajo Reservoir is the second largest body of water in New Mexico, next to Elephant Butte Reservoir, and features three developed recreation areas in New Mexico, and one in Archuleta County. It has a capacity of about 1.7 million acre-feet of stored water.
Like all of the dams along the Colorado River, Navajo Reservoir and the irrigated farms it serves have helped decimate the native fish, birds, vegetation and wildlife species that once thrived, in and along the river, between its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River Delta in Mexico. The destruction was done, originally, in the name of agriculture and hydroelectricity, although a thorough study of water history suggests that much of the work of corralling the Colorado River took place primarily because the engineers and bureaucrats employed by the US Bureau of Reclamation wanted to keep busy.
Back in Parts One and Two, we briefly discussed Delph Carpenter, the Coloradan largely responsible for the 1922 Colorado River Compact. As a man with a farming and ranching background, Carpenter viewed the Colorado River — and all the rivers of the state — as sources for irrigation water, to facilitate agricultural development in places where Mother Nature would not normally allow it. Agriculture is still the primary human use of the Colorado River and the San Juan River in 2019, although numerous other uses have made their appearance over the years. Golf courses. Flushing indoor toilets. Manufacturing. Beer brewing. Rafting. Fly fishing. Automated car washes. And more recently, fracking.
But these auxiliary uses still can’t hold a candle to agriculture, in terms of water consumption.
While working on the SJWCD strategic plan, I did some research into how we use water in Archuleta County, and I came upon a US Geological Survey (USGS) website detailing water consumption in Archuleta County. The most recent data comes from 2015.
USGS calculates that non-agricultural water consumption — residential, commercial, industrial — at about 2.44 million gallons per day, or about 2,700 acre feet per year. Their website refers to this water as ‘Public Supply.’
“Irrigation” in Archuleta County uses about 47,000 acre feet per year.
According to my pocket calculator, farmers and ranchers account for slightly more than 94 percent of the water use in Archuleta County.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.