Denver Water CEO Says 'Coordinated Plan' Is Needed For Colorado Waters
By Peak Johnson
A “coordinated plan” is needed in Colorado for the state to better manage its water systems, according to the CEO and manager of Denver Water, Jim Lochhead.
Lochhead, who took over Denver Water in 2010, believes that Colorado needs to have a thorough conversation about how to manage its water, according to aspenjournalism.org.
Specifically, Lochhead would like farmers to be able to share water with Denver and other cities, claiming that otherwise, they may lose their water rights.
While speaking at the annual Western Water Symposium, Lochhead gave credit to the 2015 Colorado Water Plan as a “useful compendium of the issues.” He added, however, that the plan focused on “easy solutions without fully addressing the harder challenges.”
“I don’t think the solution is $20 billion of new water projects for Colorado, but that’s an easy thing to go look for,” Lochhead said, according to aspenjournalism.org. “We’re not there yet with the state water plan to develop any kind of coordinated principle vision for the future, much less how to get there,” he said.
In a unique way, Denver Water is looking into the potential for putting water into aquifers beneath the city, creating underground storage. Storage that could, Aspen Journalism reported, hold water from the Western Slope.
Denver Water is also looking to store up to “an additional 15,000 acre-feet of Western Slope water” in an expanded Gross Reservoir, southwest of Boulder.
The $360 million project aims to raise the elevation of the Colorado dam by 131 feet, which would increase the capacity of the reservoir by 77,000 acre-feet and bring it up to 119,000 acre-feet.
Lochhead added that “Colorado needs more flexible water management options that allow for greater sharing of the resource.”
About 85 percent of water in Colorado is used by agriculture, ranchers, and farmers according to aspenjournalism.org. It’s usually this group that hold the most senior water rights.
Water rights are private, said Lochhead, “but you can’t really do anything with that property right except what you are currently doing with it unless you go to water court. And by going to water court you put that entire water right at risk.”