How the Colorado Water Trust Uses Market-Based Agreements to Benefit Rivers and Irrigators
T
he Colorado Water Trust makes agreements with water rights holders to buy or lease water to keep in the state’s rivers and streams. It negotiates deals with water rights holders—usually farmers and ranchers, who own 85 percent of the water in Colorado—to obtain rights for instream flow. The approach benefits farmers, fish, and everyone who depends on healthy rivers. Andy Schultheiss, the executive director of the Colorado Water Trust, tells us more. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Andy Schultheiss: I come from the political side of the environmental movement and have more than 20 years of experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. I have worked across the American West for organizations including the League of Conservation Voters and the National Parks Conservation Association, usually on projects involving local communities and natural resources. I was chief of staff and district director for our current governor, Jared Polis, when he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. I left to become a local government consultant. When the executive director job at the Colorado Water Trust was posted in 2017, I applied, and over the past 4 years, I’ve slowly learned about water in the West. Water rights are a complicated and highly political issue in the West, and I think that people are gradually realizing how much they don’t know about the water issues in their state. I am interested in trying to find solutions that will allow agriculture to thrive while also preserving some water for rivers and for growing cities. Irrigation Leader: Please introduce the Colorado Water Trust.
34 | IRRIGATION LEADER | July/August 2022
junior rights, so they aren’t satisfied in years when there’s a water shortage. The second way to acquire rights is by buying or leasing older rights from willing current users. For the first 30 years after instream flow rights became established in law, those acquisitions were extremely rare, and the state agency had no time to go out and try to find water rights owners willing to cut deals with them. That’s why the Water Trust was founded. Irrigation Leader: Does that mean you acquire these rights and then deliver them to the Colorado Water Conservation Board? Andy Schultheiss: While that was the original intention, we don’t always deliver the rights to the board. Sometimes, we just cut deals with water users to allow more water to stay in rivers. However, we usually go through the board, because it is the only entity that is legally allowed to hold the water for environmental use. irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE COLORADO WATER TRUST.
Andy Schultheiss: The Colorado Water Trust is a small private nonprofit founded to restore flow to Colorado’s rivers by buying or leasing rights from current water users. We were founded in 2001 and finalized our first deal in 2008. Today, we have roughly 25 permanent projects, with more coming on all the time. Convincing people that it’s possible to share the water while still holding themselves harmless financially and maintaining their full rights to the water in the future takes a great deal of time and trust. We work closely with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which is uniquely empowered to hold water rights for environmental benefit. The board acquires those rights in one of two ways. The first way is by creating new rights, which is called appropriating rights. Those new rights tend to be
The Colorado Water Trust has worked to increase flow in the Yampa River through reservoir releases.
