From an article by Jason Blevins, posted Wednesday on the Colorado Sun website:
For more than 20 years, negotiations among the seven states that rely on the Colorado River have avoided lawsuits, even as drought and population growth threaten the river’s flows.
That may change as a promise to rush the environmental review of a diversion project between the Colorado River’s upper and lower basins has six states suggesting lawsuits challenging the project could topple years of agreements. Colorado this week joined Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada and Wyoming in protesting a fast-tracked environmental review of the 140-mile Lake Powell Pipeline in Utah. Using special “national emergency” executive powers the president has during the pandemic, the Trump Administration in June ordered the Interior Department to scale back environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects.
“Antiquated regulations and bureaucratic practices have hindered American infrastructure investments” and slowed growth in construction and trade jobs, President Donald Trump said in the June 4 executive order.
Lake Powell has been having a hard time of it, lately. In spite of being only half full, it’s reportedly losing perhaps 600,000 acre feet of water each year to evaporation and seepage. The amount of water lost by storing water in the nation’s second largest reservoir is not accurately known, however… even though the reservoir is 55 years old. Scientists and engineers and government agencies consistently seem to be more interested in the next big project, instead than in tracking exactly how the old projects are faring. And that’s not only a problem with water storage — it applies to pretty much all types of infrastructure.
The Trump administration’s June executive order reflects that bias, by ordering federal officials to “pursue emergency workarounds of bedrock environmental laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, to hasten completion of infrastructure projects to speed economic recovery”, according to a January, 2020 article by Associated Press reporter Matthew Brown. More than 60 projects are mentioned in documents obtained by a freedom of information lawsuit… a 5,000 well oil field in Wyoming… a liquefied natural gas terminal in Oregon… a natural gas pipeline in Virginia…
… and of course, the controversial Utah water pipeline, which would divert 86,000 acre feet of water of allocated water from Lake Powell to fast-growing communities in southwest Utah.
The issue with the Utah pipeline isn’t exactly about the water, per se. The water “belongs” to Utah, under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The seven Compact states have been working on this planned pipeline for years now, but the new executive order seems to be undermining the cooperative spirit that have kept the states out of the courts in recent years. (There have been plenty of courtroom battles since 1922, however.)
In a letter sent Tuesday to Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, the six other Compact states warned of probable “multi-year litigation over a rushed approval of the 20-year-old Lake Powell Pipeline plan…”
“As a result of the collaborative approach embodied in these successes and other efforts, we have not only limited the risk that the Colorado River system will crash, we have done so without introducing the unpredictability and untimeliness of having courts weigh in on Colorado River management,” the letter reads.
Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) thinks our nation’s existing infrastructure is in pretty piss-poor shape. In 2017, the ASCE did an inventory of America’s infrastructure and gave it an overall grade of “D+”. As I recall from my school days, a “D+” is barely better than an “F”.
In particular, the nation’s drinking water systems got a “D”. Not even a “D+”.
Here in Colorado, things are not quite so bad. ASCE gave our state’s drinking water infrastructure a “C-” grade.
Three themes dominate the drinking water infrastructure sector in Colorado: a growing population, aging treatment facilities and conveyance pipes, and water consumption trends. The average age of the state’s major drinking water treatment facilities and conveyance pipes is approaching 50 years, meaning they are nearing or at the end of their service life… In addition to operation and maintenance, the continued increase in population and community development brings increased demand for additional water supply projects and improvements to treatment plants and distribution systems…
“Nearing or at the end of their service life.” That’s an interesting comment, considering that many of the water pipelines in Archuleta County date back to the 1970s… almost fifty years ago. Back in 2010, when Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation convened a “Water Supply Community Work Group” to help identify local water issues, the group uncovered some information that may not have been common knowledge: PAWSD was treating about 1,804 acre-feet of water each year, but only 1,154 acre-feet actually arrived at people’s faucets. About 40% of our water district’s treated water was leaking out of our 40-year-old water pipelines, never to be seen again.
This photo is not from Pagosa Springs. But it could be.
Instead of letting the customers know about the leakage problem, however, PAWSD and the San Juan Water Conservancy District were telling us that we had a serious reservoir shortage, and that we needed to buy the Running Iron Ranch as the site for a new multi-million-dollar water reservoir, for a cost of a mere $10 million for the property. (To say nothing about the cost of the reservoir itself.) The property was purchased without any chance for the voters to participate in the decision, while the leaks continued.
Fortunately, a new crop of volunteer directors have since been elected to the PAWSD board, and PAWSD now has an ongoing program to fix the leaks — and no plans, at the moment, to build a new reservoir.
To put that PAWSD leak repair project in perspective, if we can reduce our treated water losses from 40% down to, say, an industry average of about 7%, that would mean that we already have more than enough water resources for a population of perhaps 20,000 people. (Based on current precipitation trends.) That’s the approximate population the community’s “Growing Water Smart” task force recently projected for the year 2050.
American governments and engineers love building new things… bigger, more expensive things… “new and improved” things. Taking care of what we built 20 years ago, or 50 years ago? Not so fascinating. This attitude has been on full display over the past 4 years, here locally — with our Archuleta Board of County Commissioners creating millions of dollars of new taxpayer debt to replace “old” County facilities (…none of which are as old as the house I live in.)
The letter from the six Colorado Basin states, sent in reaction the Trump administration’s new executive order, notes that wrangling in court “is not the recipe for creating the kind of meaningful and positive change needed to sustain the Colorado River in the coming decades.”
There is something to be said for consensus decision making, where everyone gives up a little, and everyone gets a little of what they want. Shoving things down peoples’ throats is the opposite of ‘consensus’ — but it’s too often a government’s mode of operation.