Buying water from Colorado farmers and ranchers and other water users, to provide it to California and Arizona farmers and ranchers, and to casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada, is not a simple matter. But a fair number of Colorado water experts, and financial experts, and agricultural experts, have been working with the Colorado Water Conservation Board to design a workable process.
Where, exactly, the money would come from, to make these purchases from Colorado water users, we don’t yet know.
Disclosure: I currently serve on the San Juan Water Conservancy District board, but this essay does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the SJWCD board as a whole or of any other SJWCD board members.
Some 2,600 years go, a Persian philosopher named Zarathustra described the four elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire as “sacred”… which is to say, “essential for the survival of all living beings and therefore should be venerated and kept free from any contamination”. Or so they say.
A hundred years or so later, in the 5th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Empedocles theorized that everything in nature was composed of these same four elemental ‘roots’ — earth, water, air and fire. Although earlier Greek philosophers had taught and written about the four elements, Empedocles was apparently the first Greek teacher to propose that matter might ultimately be composed of all four elements… in different combinations of one another.
We have our own thoroughly modern ideas about the structure and composition of the universe — ideas that will no doubt appear wide of the mark in another 2,000 years — but we can still make the argument, if we are so inclined, that four particular ‘basic resources’ are absolutely essential to life on Planet Earth.
Fire (mainly coming from Sun), Earth (including fertile soil), Air, and Water.
Which of these resources is truly the “most valuable”? Hard to say. If any these resources were to become permanently corrupted or contaminated, humankind and every other life form on the planet would face an uncertain future.
Yesterday, I quoted from a 2013 essay by legal expert Derek Turner, about the new era that we may have entered, and his thoughts about which resource might be ‘most valuable’:
This case [Pagosa II] represents the latest evolution of Colorado’s anti-speculation doctrine, signaling a new era of water supply planning — an era that will involve greater water supply planning collaboration and a heightened focus on conserving our most valuable resource.
Of the four essential — dare we say, sacred — resources necessary to life on earth, two have been converted, in modern times, into items of private property that can be traded, rented, bought and sold.
Earth. And to a lesser degree, Water.
In our modern world, Earth — the land necessary for, among other needs, food production — has generally been converted into ‘real estate’. One of our four sacred resources — here in America, at least — is now mostly privately owned, with 60% of of our “earth element” in private hands, and 40% owned by various public entities. The largest portions of publicly-owned earth are in Alaska (95% public), Nevada (88% public), Utah (75% public) and Idaho (70% public). Here in Colorado, about 57% of the earth element is in private hands.
Is Water next to be converted?
In America, private companies profiting from the delivery of water date back to 1755, and such companies grew increasingly popular during the 1800s. By the end of the 20th century, however, most large municipal water companies in America had become government-run, not-for-profit operations. But in many places, including Colorado, the lion’s share of water diversions have benefited the agricultural industry — and was providing that benefit long before agriculture became an ‘industry’.
Yesterday in Part Six, we discussed briefly the idea that water use is allocated, in the American West, based on the date the water was legally requested in water court. When there’s a water shortage, the holder of a “senior” water right can legally use their full allotment, before a “junior” water right holder gets a single drop. In the big picture of the Colorado River Basin — in which Pagosa’s San Juan River is a tributary — the seemingly most valuable “senior” rights were adjudicated prior to 1922, when the signing of the seven-state Colorado River Compact guaranteed a certain amount of downstream Colorado River water to California, Arizona, and Nevada.
We also touched on the idea that Colorado water law, and court decisions, currently allow the holder of a senior water right to “lease” all or part of the water to which they are entitled, to a business, government, environmental organization, or other entity that has no obvious right to “senior” water rights. In other words, the courts allow a water user to “buy” or “lease” senior water rights — pre-1922 water rights — and use them for purposes that the original (pre-1922) court decree did not necessarily allow.
This idea — that the public’s water resource must be provided free of charge to a farmer or rancher, but that same farmer or rancher can then turn around and “sell” or “lease” water to someone else — is key to the “demand management” process mentioned in the Hickenlooper administration’s 2015 Colorado Water Plan. (You can download the Colorado Water Plan here. Large file.) As mentioned previously, the “demand management” concept has been put forward as a possible method for getting more Colorado River water to flow downstream into Lake Powell Reservoir, where it sits, waiting to be released into an even larger reservoir, Lake Mead.
But the fact that water is clearly defined in the Colorado Constitution as a public resource — and the fact that the Colorado Sunshine Law requires all meetings of state boards and commissions to be held publicly, has not prevented the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) from allowing its “demand management” planning process to be conducted secretly. Or so it would appear.
From an article by Brent Gardner-Smith on the AspenJournalism.org website, May 24, 2019:
The directors of the Colorado Water Conservation Board have consented to let staffers hold closed-door meetings of nine work groups that would explore a water demand-management program and to let staffers require the participants to sign confidentiality agreements.
“Work group members will be expected to sign a confidentiality agreement to abstain from discussing outside of the work group forums any information that is deemed confidential or privileged per the terms of the agreement,” read a slide shown at the state agency’s most recent meeting, which took place here May 15.
Some of the results of of that (secretive?) ‘demand management’ planning process were then discussed publicly, during a seven-hour CWCB meeting held via ZOOM on September 2, 2020. You can view that lengthy discussion on YouTube, here.