Potential failure to meet Colorado River compact requirements is a big issue that must be addressed but cannot be solved by demand management alone…
— from a September 27, 2020 Revised Final Report, “Upper Basin Demand Management Economic Study in Western Colorado” by BBC Research & Consulting, ERO Resources Corporation, and Headwaters Corporation.
I’m contemplating the word, “speculation.”
It has several possible meanings. From WordReference.com:
- the contemplation or consideration of some subject: to engage in speculation on humanity’s ultimate destiny.
- a single instance or process of consideration.
- a conclusion or opinion reached by such contemplation: These speculations are impossible to verify.
- conjectural consideration of a matter; conjecture or surmise: a report based on speculation rather than facts.
- engagement in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains, esp. trading in commodities, stocks, etc., in the hope of profit from changes in the market price.
- a speculative commercial venture or undertaking.
This editorial series has been making use of nearly all these definitions, in various contexts. We’ve mentioned, for example, the speculation (3. opinion reached by contemplation…) of State Senator Kerry Donovan, that capitalist organizations such as New York-based Water Assets Management might be speculating (5. engaging in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains…) with Colorado water rights. Senator Donovan is obviously not the only person concerned about investors like WAM, because the Colorado General Assembly passed SB 48 last session, creating a special “anti-speculation” commission to look at ways to strengthen Colorado law, to prevent investors from personally profiting from possible water shortages in the American West.
Many people — including many scientists — have been speculating lately (definition 4) about possible future water shortages, based on several years of “lower than average” flows in the Colorado River Basin. I define these scientific reports as “conjecture based on speculation, rather than fact” because:
- We cannot possibly have “facts” about what has not yet happened, and…
- We might be in the midst of human-caused climate change due to the release of various greenhouse gases, and perhaps also due to the decimation of forests all around the globe, but the world has always gone through phases of cooling and warming, and — looking at scientific records related to past climate changes — it’s equally possible our current climate events are not due to human causes.
- Even if humans are causing the climate to change in ways we’ve never before experienced, we are only guessing about whether the changes will cause more, or less, precipitation in the American West. Climate is an impossibly complex subject, and as smart as we may think ourselves, we have never before experienced the current situation. So we are speculating.
Perhaps this editorial series has also engaged in some speculation about humanity’s ultimate destiny (definition 1). If so, that was not my intention. I’ve merely been speculating about specific Colorado issues such as “demand management”… the “Colorado Water Plan”… and “the San Juan River Headwaters” as a possible water source for new reservoirs in Archuleta County.
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.
As noted in Part Two of this editorial series, one of the possible reservoirs promoted for the past couple of decades by the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) board, has been envisioned for the Dry Gulch Valley northeast of downtown Pagosa. When the Colorado Supreme Court rejected the water rights application for Dry Gulch in 2009, Justice Gregory Hobbs wrote in the opinion:
A governmental entity has the burden of demonstrating three elements in regard to its intent to make a non-speculative conditional appropriation of unappropriated water: (1) what is a reasonable water supply planning period; (2) what are the substantiated population projections based on a normal rate of growth for that period; and (3) what amount of available unappropriated water is reasonably necessary to serve the reasonably anticipated needs of the governmental agency for the planning period above its current water supply…
The evidence currently of record does not demonstrate that the Districts have carried their burden of proving a non-speculative intent to put the water amounts contained in the remand decree to beneficial use…
In this case, the word “non-speculative” steps outside the six definitions mentioned above, because it means (in my opinion): asking for a new water right much larger than the evidence can justify, and with insufficient evidence that you will ever be able to make use of the water right.
At their September 21 meeting, during an enlightening discussion with consultants Erin Wilson and Brenna Mefford, the San Juan Water Conservancy District board heard some speculation (definition 4) from the consultants about how much “water demand” exists in Archuleta County. The SJWCD board has made a commitment, recently, to better define that demand, and has hired Wilson Water Group (WWG) to help out with that analysis.
During our conversation, Ms. Wilson suggested that SJWCD might have difficulty “selling” the concept of a Dry Gulch Reservoir (or any other future reservoir) as part of a “water banking” or “demand management” or “compact-compliance” tool, because the water rights held by SJWCD are “junior” to the 1922 Colorado River Compact — and also junior to nearly all the agricultural water rights in the region. In order to justify reservoir development in Archuleta County, she speculated, SJWCD might need to find partners who can demonstrate a pressing need to meet “recreational” or “environmental” water demands.
These types of water rights — “recreational” and “environmental” — are relatively new to Colorado. 100 years ago, no one imagined that Colorado would someday have 5 million people watering their lawns and flushing their toilets, or that we’d have hedge funds from New York buying up agricultural water rights. Or that California, Nevada and Arizona would be sucking water out of Lake Mead, further down the Colorado River, faster than it could be refilled.
In 2004, the Dry Gulch Reservoir (for example) obtained a ruling from water court judge Greg Lyman giving the proposed reservoir refill rights up to 64,000 acre feet. All of that 64,000 acre feet of water was supposedly justified by a report from Durango-based water engineer Steve Harris — because Archuleta County’s population was going to grow at an incredible rate, Mr. Harris proposed, and the residential (not agricultural) growth was not only going to make use of all that water, but the growth was also going to pay enough taxes to finance the reservoir.
Here is a comparison of the population growth envisioned by engineer Steve Harris in 2003, compared to the ‘official’ projections recently adopted by SJWCD. The magenta line is the growth speculated by Mr. Harris; the other lines show a range of population growth developed by RPI Consulting in 2019:
Read Part Eleven, on Monday…
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.