Municipal Water Leader September 2022 by Water Strategies

September 2022

Jim Lochhead:

Capital Development, Wildfire Mitigation, and Innovation at Denver Water

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Do you have a story idea for an upcoming issue? Contact our editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com Copyright © 2022 Water Strategies LLC. Municipal Water Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Municipal Water Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Municipal Water Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty by Water Strategies LLC or Municipal Water Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised. Contents September 2022 Volume 9, Issue 8 5 Fire Response in Colorado By Kris Polly 6 Jim Lochhead: Capital Development, Wildfire Mitigation, and Innovation at Denver Water 14 Christina Burri: Wildfire Prevention and Recovery at Denver Water 20 Eric Howell of Colorado Springs ManagingUtilities:Forests to Protect Water Supply 26 How Greeley, Colorado’s Diverse Water Supply Saved the City in the Wake of Wildfires 32 Chris Woodka of the Southeastern Colorado Water District:ConservancyProgresson the Arkansas Valley Conduit 36 Aaron Chavez of the San Juan Water Commission on Water Supply, Drought, and Fish Recovery 38 JOB LISTINGS 6 Jim Lochhead: Capital Development, Wildfire Mitigation, and Innovation at Denver Water ADVERTISEMENT 4 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | September 2022 municipalwaterleader.com

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COVER PHOTO: Jim Lochhead, CEO and Manager, Denver Water. Photo courtesy of Denver Water.

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A little further south, the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District is soon to begin construction on the Arkansas Valley Conduit, a 130 mile pipeline that will bring high-quality water to 39 communities and 50,000 people east of Pueblo, Colorado. Chris Woodka, the district’s senior policy and issues manager, fills us in on the conduit’s history andFinally,importance.wespeak with Aaron Chavez, the executive director of northwestern New Mexico’s San Juan Water Commission, about drought, power costs, and endangered species and about his current role as the president of the Colorado River Water Users Association.

A changing climate and millions of acres of overstocked forests mean that wildfire is a problem that is not going away, but as our interviews this month demonstrate, water agencies in Colorado and across the West are working systematically to better understand and address the challenges they pose. M Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He can be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com

Fire Response in Colorado By Kris Polly In the last half-decade, more than 40 million acres of land in the United States, mostly in the West, have been burned by wildfire. These wildfires affect water quality, send ash and debris into reservoirs, and create the conditions for destructive floods and landslides. In this issue, we talk to professionals from several Colorado water agencies about how they are responding. In our cover story, Municipal Water Leader Contributing Editor Jeff Kightlinger interviews Denver Water CEO and Manager Jim Lochhead about progress on the utility’s largest-ever capital development program, which includes the construction of a new water treatment plant and the raising of Gross Dam, as well as its responses to fire, climate change, and water supply challenges. Next, we talk to Denver Water Watershed Scientist Christina Burri for an in-depth look at the years-long effects of wildfires on the agency’s water supply and the mitigation and forest health initiatives it is carrying out. We also talk to water management professionals from two other Colorado cities: Eric Howell, the forest program manager for the watershed planning section at Colorado Springs Utilities, and Sean Chambers, the director of the Water and Sewer Department of the City of Greeley. They tell us about wildfire’s effects on their expansive, largely federally owned watersheds; their agencies’ pre- and postfire mitigation activities; and the importance of guaranteeing a resilient water supply.

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Denver Water serves 1.5 million people in the city and county of Denver and the surrounding suburbs. In this interview, Municipal Water Leader Contributing Editor Jeff Kightlinger talks with the utility’s CEO and manager, Jim Lochhead, about its plans to serve its customers in the face of climate change and booming population growth. A project is underway to expand Gross Reservoir to increase the city’s storage capacity. In the future, Mr. Lochhead says, to use less water, Denver Water will need to be proactive and work with agencies that manage wastewater, storm water, and land use.

Construction work on Gross Dam for the Gross Reservoir expansion project.

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Jim Lochhead: Capital Development, Wildfire Mitigation, and Innovation at Denver Water

Jim Lochhead: We serve 1.5 million people in the city and county of Denver and the surrounding suburbs. About half our customers are in the city, and half are in the suburbs. We get all our water from the snowpack and precipitation in a 4,000-square-mile watershed area—about half from the Colorado River and half from the South Platte River. It’s a diverse system fed by several watersheds along the Continental Divide. So far, our system has withstood the current drought pretty well. We’re currently in the biggest capital development program in our history. We completely redeveloped our main campus, a 35 acre site near downtown Denver, replacing our trade shops, warehouses, fleet, meter shop, and fitness center. Our new administration building is a LEED Platinum, net-zero-energy-certified building that has rainwater capture and an in-building wastewater treatment system for toilet flushing and irrigation. We

Jeff Kightlinger: Please tell us about your background. How did your experience as a lawyer prepare you to become the CEO and manager of Denver Water? Jim Lochhead: I practiced water law in western Colorado, representing counties, municipalities, ditch companies, and developers. I became involved in water policy and was appointed by the governor to the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which in turn led to representing Colorado on interstate Colorado River issues. Governor Romer then appointed me to his cabinet as the executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. I then returned to law practice and dealt with many large river basin issues. In addition to my Colorado River work, I did work with Mexico, in the Great Lakes, on the Snake River, and on the Pecos River, so I had broad experience with river basin issues generally, and I have an appreciation for the politics involved. The board thought that kind of experience was good for Denver Water.

Jeff Kightlinger: Please introduce Denver Water.

Jeff Kightlinger: We’ve all seen wildfires increase with climate change. Have the fires posed any challenges for Denver Water?

Jim Lochhead: We had wake-up calls in 1996 and 2002 with the Buffalo Creek and Hayman Fires, which at that time were the biggest fires in Colorado’s history. They were in watersheds above a terminal reservoir in our system through which 80 percent of our water supply goes. Those fires were immediately followed by significant rain events, which sent an incredible sediment load into that reservoir. The roughly 1.5 million cubic yards of sediment that are now sitting in the reservoir and moving down toward the dam have not only caused water quality issues but will eventually threaten the integrity of the dam. We can address this, but it will take smart engineering, big thinking, and an enduring commitment.

When I came to Denver Water in 2010, we immediately began working with the federal government to start up a program called From Forests to Faucets. We match U.S. Forest Service (USFS) dollars to carry out forest treatments to prevent catastrophic fire. The idea is to reduce The site of the 1996 Buffalo Creek Fire burn area in Jefferson County, which is located in the Denver Water collection area. A machine clears trees near Breckenridge, Colorado, as part of the From Forests to Faucets program to reduce wildfire threat.

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municipalwaterleader.com went through significant regulatory hoops to achieve that, since nobody else has attempted to do this kind of thing in Colorado.We’rein the process of building a new water treatment plant. We originally based our thinking on the old municipal water planning model, which says that you should build everything twice as big as you need it to be. We reassessed that approach and decided that instead of building a 150-million-gallon-per-day (MGD) plant, we really only needed 75 MGD and could manage the reduced capacity through changes in our distribution system. That cost less and gave us greater flexibility. The plant is modular, allowing us to add additional capacity when needed, which is in line with our new capital investment philosophy of being incremental, modular, adaptable, and flexible. We challenged the engineers to build the plant so that it could be operated off the electric grid. They told us we were crazy, but we said to go ahead and try it anyway. It spurred them to first look for efficiencies in the construction itself and for ways to generate energy through the treatment process. It turns out we will be connected to the grid only so that we can sell power back to the grid as a net energy generator. At Gross Reservoir, we are raising the height of the existing dam to enlarge the reservoir after a 20 year permitting process. When completed, it will be the tallest dam in Colorado. The project is designed to correct an imbalance in our system and give us greater resiliency, especially in the face of climate change. The reservoir receives water from western Colorado through a tunnel under the Continental Divide. As part of the permitting process, we worked with some 40 different counties, municipalities, and water districts in western Colorado to develop an agreement to partner on projects and operations that would benefit the aquatic environment on the western slope. It’s a far-reaching peace agreement that secured the support of both western Colorado and key environmental groups for the project.

Jeff Kightlinger: It’s interesting to hear about your modular approach. Most urban areas have seen incredible drops in demand as increases in efficiency have accelerated throughout the urban sector. What’s Denver’s story when it comes to demand and conservation?

Jim Lochhead: We’ve reduced our water use by about 36 percent since 2000. That’s in line with a lot of other municipalities. We are using about as much water as we did in the 1970s, despite the fact that we have about 500,000 more people and 500,000 more jobs in our service area. I anticipate us becoming even more aggressive on conservation throughout our system, particularly given the situation on the Colorado River.

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Jim Lochhead: It wasn’t. Our board was supportive from the beginning of the program. We have reupped our funding agreement with the USFS, so the board has remained very supportive of this program. The board members understand the value of natural infrastructure to our ability to serve our customers.

overgrowth, remove trees killed by pine beetles, and allow fire to occur in a more natural and less destructive way. In our key watersheds, we have a model that we use to identify priority areas for treatment. Since 2010, Denver Water has committed $33 million, which was matched by partners to reach a total investment of $66 million, to reduce the risk of high severity fires in priority watersheds. We had one fire event near Silverthorne, Colorado, a resort community that is near the Summit County ski areas and Dillon Reservoir. The fire occurred right next to two subdivisions where we had undertaken some forest treatment. Firefighters were able to put it out without any damage to the homes and structures in those subdivisions. The USFS went back and did a fire model and concluded that the $1 million investment that we made in forest treatment helped prevent over $1 billion of structural damage. We also have an extensive watershed health program. We’re working in partnership with local governments, private landowners, the state, and the federal government on overall watershed health, addressing not only forest health, but also abandoned mine issues, septic tank issues, and other challenges that affect water quality and quantity in our watersheds. Given the return on investment, these kinds of front-end investments in natural infrastructure are justifiable and are supported by our customers.

Dillon Reservoir, the largest of Denver Water‘s reservoirs, located on the western slope of the Continental Divide in Summit County, Colorado.

Jeff Kightlinger: Climate change is changing so much of what utilities do in terms of water supply, but it is also affecting fires and other challenges. What do you see as some of the future challenges for Denver Water, besides the obvious ones on the Colorado River?

Jeff Kightlinger: It’s always tricky using rate payer money on these kinds of watershed programs, especially on property that is not in your service area or not owned by the utility, but it’s such a good investment. Was it a challenge getting your leadership on board with that approach?

Jim Lochhead: We just completed a refresh of our strategic plan. We went through an exercise of trying to look into the future of our position in Colorado and the West. Part of that involves our internal culture. For example, we have an initiative around diversity, equity, and inclusion and are developing an innovative and open culture within the organization. To your point about technology and innovation, there’s a great interest in innovation within our system. We’re working on a comprehensive asset management plan that is going to involve enhanced technology and innovation. We are partnering with Colorado State University on the development of the Hydro Building at the National Western Complex in Denver, a premier rodeo and event venue that is in the process of being completely redeveloped. The Hydro Building will be devoted to water resource policy and research. We are going to build our new water quality lab in that building. We hope to be able to work with private and public sector entities on One Water strategies using various water quality types and understanding treatment techniques and new technologies.

Jeff Kightlinger: You mentioned recycled water. What kind of reuse does Denver Water have now, and how do you plan to expand that in the future? Jim Lochhead: We have a recycled treatment plant that we use for irrigation, and we reuse a lot of our water supply by exchange. We capture and store reusable water in reservoirs below our system. Then we release that water to senior water rights holders downstream, which in turn allows us to store water under our junior water rights upstream. Reuse and recycling is a challenge for us on a couple of fronts. One is that the only water we can reuse is water imported from the Colorado River basin. It creates a kind of dilemma in that if we double down on reuse and recycling in our system, we’re increasing our dependence on Colorado River water, and if there’s a big upset on the system that makes supply unavailable, we’ve just made a huge investment in something that is no longer available. The other challenge is that we don’t have an ocean to put a brine stream into. We haven’t figured out how to develop a reuse project at scale whose brine stream we can deal with. There might be ways for us in the future to return water to some of our upstream reservoirs simply by pumping it back up.

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Jim Lochhead: To your point about the Colorado River, if you look at the climate models on a broad scale, the picture in terms of future water supply is obviously not great. Snowpack doesn’t necessarily translate to river flow, given dry soil conditions, evaporation, and greater demands from the system. On the Colorado Front Range, if you look on a micro level, the climate models are mixed in terms of whether we are going to see more or less precipitation. However, we know that precipitation is going to come in different forms. We’re going to have more rain; less snow; earlier runoff; more rain-on-snow events; and more severe weather events, including both drought and flooding. One of our justifications for enlarging Gross Reservoir is that we need to be able to capture and store rain from those significant events. I don’t anticipate being able to build any significant new projects in the future, including new transmountain diversions. There’s just not the political will because of the environmental impacts. We’re going to have to be more incremental and adaptable and to rely more on efficiency rather than pursuing the traditional municipal utility model of just developing more water supplies. Like a lot of utilities, we use a scenario-planning approach. We look 50 years in the future under our integrated resource plan. We’re not just looking at population and water supply; we’re looking at everything that affects water demands in our system, including the economy, growth patterns, and social trends related to the extent to which our service area goes green and whether people are living inside or outside the city. All kinds of factors affect how we develop, grow, and meet the demands of our customers. We’re looking at how we can operate under every one of those scenarios.

Jim Lochhead: One of the challenges that we have in the West is uncontrolled sprawl. Colorado now has nearly 6 million people. If we grow our next 5 million people the way we did the first 5 million, that’s not going to be sustainable from a water perspective. Denver Water is somewhat fortunate in that our service area is fixed, but we’re going to have to work with our neighbors and the distributors in our service area to increase water efficiency. We are going to have to continue to invest heavily in our watersheds and in the sustainability of our operations. We have aggressive net zero energy goals, and we are going to have to start thinking of net zero water—a way to minimize our water use footprint. That is going to require switching from operating in the role of a traditional water utility to being a lot more proactive and working across agencies—including wastewater, storm water, and land-use agencies—to make sure that we are using water in the most efficient, climate-resilient way.

Jeff Kightlinger: What is your vision for Denver Water’s future?

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M Jim Lochhead is the CEO and manager of Denver Water. For more on Denver Water, visit www.denverwater.org

Jeff Kightlinger: I know that you are a strong believer in using innovation and technology to enhance the utility business. What are some of Denver Water’s current innovations, and what do you hope to see in the future?

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After a wildfire in a watershed, water utilities are faced with an expensive recovery process as well as issues like erosion and the entry of sedimentation into reservoirs that can continue for decades after the last ember is extinguished. In this interview, Municipal Water Leader speaks with Christina Burri, who leads Denver Water’s watershed planning efforts. Through programs such as the From Forests to Faucets partnership, Denver Water and its partners have invested $66 million since 2010 in forest health and wildfire risk reduction projects to protect its 2.5 million-acre water supply watershed.

Christina Burri: Denver Water’s collection area covers 4,000 square miles on both sides of the Continental Divide. On average, we capture around 290,000 acre-feet of water from rain and melting snow every year. About 80 percent of Colorado’s precipitation falls on the west side of the Continental Divide, so Front Range communities bring water over from the west slope. Denver Water has two water collection systems. The North System covers parts of Boulder, Clear Creek, Gilpin, Grand, and Jefferson Counties. Eighty percent of Denver Water’s supply comes from the South System, which captures water from the South Platte and Blue River basins. Water from the South Platte River is stored in a series of reservoirs, and water from the Blue River is stored in Dillon Reservoir and then delivered to the Front Range through the Roberts Tunnel under the Continental Divide.

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Christina Burri: Denver Water serves about 1.5 million people in the Denver metro area. We have 12 major reservoirs in our 2.5 million-acre watershed. Denver Water only owns 2 percent of the watershed land. About 54 percent is national forest, and about 34 percent is privately owned. Healthy forests equal healthy watersheds for Denver Water, which is why we are so committed to improving forest health conditions.

Christina Burri: I am a watershed scientist at Denver Water. Before joining Denver Water, I worked for the Bureau of Reclamation, and before that, I worked for the State of Ohio on funding for source water protection projects. It was the biggest watershed health funding source in Ohio— $15 million per year, generated from the state revolving fund. I have been with Denver Water for about 6 years, and I am tasked with building the utility’s new watershed planning program. Most of my time is spent on our forest health commitments for wildfire risk reduction in the watershed.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Municipal Water Leader: Are the watersheds all located on the western side of the Continental Divide?

Municipal Water Leader: How frequent are wildfires in Denver Water’s watershed?

Christina Burri: Wildfire Prevention and Recovery at Denver Water

The White River National Forest and private lands in the Dillon Reservoir source water watershed, seen before (2009) and after (2013) hazardous fuels reduction.

Municipal Water Leader: Please briefly introduce Denver Water.

Christina Burri: In our recovery work for the 2020 Williams Fork Fire, we are partnering with the USFS, which owns most of the land that was affected. The Youth Corps is doing a lot of the actual implementation of the best management practices. Initial recovery efforts were focused on trying to save the road that we use to deliver supplies to our onsite caretakers from washing out. After rain events on these burn scars, culverts alongside roads become overloaded, and there is a risk that roads will wash out. We also want to protect the diversion structures underneath the roads. The Youth Corps put in small rolling dips and other structures along the road to help water drain off the road. Hazardous trees also need to be removed. There are many burned trees that could fall and block the road, so we remove them and use the logs as erosion barriers.

Christina Burri: We have frequent fire starts in the watershed, particularly on the Front Range. The first major fire in the watershed in recent decades was the 1996 Buffalo Creek Fire. It burned about 12,000 acres, which was considered a lot at the time. It was just upstream of the Strontia Springs Reservoir, which 80 percent of our water supply moves through. In 2002, the Hayman Fire burned around 138,000 acres. It occurred in our South System around Cheeseman Reservoir. We’re still recovering from both fires today, even 20 years later; it still looks like a moonscape out there. The Hayman Fire was severe, and recovery just hasn’t occurred as we anticipated. The 2020 wildfire season was also bad for Colorado. That year, we had the 14,000 acre Williams Fork Fire in our North System. We are still working with partners in Grand County and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to recover. These fires show that postfire recovery is a long-term process. We started tracking fire starts last year. It’s important to understand where these fires are beginning and where the high-risk areas in the watershed are.

Christina Burri: It could, but we’ve been able to manage that at the treatment plant. So far, we haven’t had any water quality effects that we haven’t been able to treat, but it does add an extra cost to the treatment process.

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Municipal Water Leader: You mentioned that even 20 years after the Hayman Fire, there are still issues to address. What are those issues?

Municipal Water Leader: What are some of the longer-term investments you are making in forest health? Recovery efforts after the 2002 Hayman Fire, which are still ongoing today, have cost $28 million to date.

Christina Burri: Wildfires affect water utilities like Denver Water in two main ways. The first is certainly water quality. The water that comes into the treatment plant is affected in the near term following a wildfire. Longer term, there is the potential for elevated nutrients and metals. The second effect is runoff and sedimentation in the reservoirs, which is costly to remove. After the Buffalo Creek Fire in 1996 and the Hayman Fire in 2002, Denver Water spent about $28 million on recovery. Of that, $18.5 million was spent dredging Strontia Springs Reservoir to remove sediment and debris. Today, 20 years later, sediment is still entering the reservoir. Wildfires also affect infrastructure, such as our diversion structures, and even our facilities and land. Denver Water owns about 60,000 acres, and we have facilities and caretaker homes on site.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you talk more about some of the main mitigation activities you have carried out, particularly for recent fires?

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Municipal Water Leader: Does the runoff of nutrients, metals, and other substances pose a potential risk to human health?

Municipal Water Leader: Would you explain the main threats that those fires pose to water quality?

Christina Burri: When you have a high-intensity fire that burns exceptionally hot, it changes the structure of the soil and makes it more erosive. That generates more sediment and erosion, which affects the watershed and the reservoirs and other water utility facilities. It also sterilizes the seed bank, which impedes recovery and revegetation. Those two things work in combination: The soil structure erodes, and there are no plants to hold it in place. To address these continuing issues, we’re looking at proactive watershed investments such as riparian plantings. We’re also looking at doing stream restoration work to stabilize some of the sediment on the banks upstream of Strontia Springs Reservoir. Our engineers have calculated that if we can reduce the amount of sediment coming into Strontia Springs by just 5 percent, we’ll see a return on our investment. Making upstream investments in the watershed is cost effective.

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Municipal Water Leader: Do you do any work in partnership with local or private landowners?

Municipal Water Leader: In the future, what results would you like to see from these various forest health initiatives?

Christina Burri: That’s where our biggest commitment is—wildfire risk reduction in critical watersheds. Since 2010, Denver Water has committed over $33 million to a partnership with the USFS, the Colorado State Forest Service, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service called From Forests to Faucets. This partnership was motivated by the need to understand the cost of recovery after these fires. We realized how cost effective it is to be proactive in reducing wildfire risk. The partners matched our investment dollar for dollar, and a total of $66 million has been invested in forest health and wildfire risk reduction projects in Denver Water’s critical water supply watersheds. A lot of the risk reduction work is focused on thinning or removing hazardous fuels in the forest, an intervention that also helps protect trees from insects and disease. The work restores forest conditions to promote trees of different ages, classes, and species and to create openings that allow for the suppression of fire. The end result mimics how these forests typically looked in the past. It’s been a successful partnership. We’ve seen, for example, that a fuel break we made in Summit County saved approximately $1 billion worth of infrastructure and homes. Investments in the forests are a smart business decision for water utilities like Denver Water.

Christina Burri: I think a lot of people understand the benefits, but I would like to see more of these success stories showcased. We recently did a study through the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute that showed a return on investment of upward of $240 million for Denver Water from this partnership. Another consideration is the maintenance of these treatments. It is important that the investment is maintained. We want to keep working with our partners, not necessarily on new treatments but on maintaining our investments and ensuring that they’re effective into the future. With climate change, the risk of large and costly wildfires is only going to grow, so these types of investments are critical for municipal water utilities in Colorado and around the country. M Christina Burri is a watershed scientist at Denver Water. She can be contacted at christina.burri@denverwater.org

After the Williams Fork Fire, Denver Water carried out mitigation measures, such as creating rolling dips for road drainage, seen here. The thinning of ponderosa pine in Pike National Forest and adjacent private lands reduced the severity of the 64A Fire in 2018 and the North Fork Complex Fire in 2020, bringing canopy fire down to the ground and aiding suppression.

Christina Burri: The Colorado State Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service work with private landowners in the watershed. Aided by state and federal funding, Denver Water provides money to private landowners to help them implement forest health projects through our partners.

Municipal Water Leader: What effects are you seeing from your efforts?

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Christina Burri: We’re seeing a lot of success stories. The State Forest Service did hazardous fuels reduction on Denver Water lands before the Hayman Fire occurred. That work saved our facilities. In the 2018 Buffalo Mountain Fire, the fuel break that I mentioned saved $1 billion worth of homes and infrastructure. When fire starts occurred in the South Platte watershed in 2018 and 2020, wildfire responders and local fire protection districts had quick and safe access to the sites thanks to forest treatments done through the From Forests to Faucets initiative. As a result, they were able to suppress fires that could have grown out of control.

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Rampart Reservoir after the Waldo Canyon Fire in 2012. In recent years, wildfires have burned millions of acres in the Mountain West. When those wildfires burn critical water supply watersheds, they can degrade water quality and cause erosion and flooding for months and years. In this interview, Eric Howell, the forest program manager for the watershed planning section at Colorado Springs Utilities, tells Municipal Water Leader about how the agency works with state and federal partners on fire prevention, suppression planning, and postfire mitigation.

Municipal Water Leader: What does your current role entail?

Municipal Water Leader: Please introduce Colorado Springs Utilities. Eric Howell: Colorado Springs Utilities is a four-service public utility. We provide water, wastewater, electric, and gas services to a community of about 495,000 customer-owners, most within Colorado Springs and a few outside the city limits. We also serve five military bases: Fort Carson, the United States Air Force Academy, Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, and Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Base.

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Eric Howell: I oversee a $2.6 million budget for forest health and hazardous fuel treatment initiatives to protect Colorado Springs Utilities’ water resources and collection system infrastructure. We work with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), the Colorado State Forest Service, the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, the Nature Conservancy, the Colorado Springs Fire Department, and Colorado Springs City Forestry to conduct treatments in priority watershed areas and protect critical infrastructure. We also support various National Environmental Policy Act efforts in these watersheds to increase landscape-scale forestry treatments and are involved in state and federal efforts to craft wildfire and forest management legislation. Poor forest health and persistent drought in Colorado and the western United States have sparked broad interest in resolving these issues in order to better protect water supplies and infrastructure.

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Municipal Water Leader: Please explain your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Municipal Water Leader: What is the source of the water you deliver, and who owns the land in the watershed?

Eric Howell of Colorado Springs Utilities: Managing Forests to Protect Water Supply

Eric Howell: I went to Colorado State University and earned a forest management degree in 1991. I have been employed with Colorado Springs Utilities’ water services division since 1993, when I started in water distribution. I’ve also worked as a field technician for our water quality laboratory, as an environmental scientist, and as a water quality technical team supervisor. For the past 14 years, I’ve served as the forest program manager in our watershed planning section.

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We also get water from the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project system, which begins above Aspen and delivers water via the Fryingpan River to our native Arkansas River basin, where it is primarily delivered to Colorado Springs via the Fountain Valley Authority Pipeline or our Southern Delivery System.

Eric Howell: We collect water from over 3 million acres across 11 counties in Colorado. Most of that water originates as snowmelt from along the Continental Divide and is conveyed to us through a complex system of pipelines, tunnels, and storage reservoirs. The source water is delivered to terminal reservoirs in our local system on the Front Range of Colorado. About 90 percent of the land in our watershed is managed by the USFS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The rest is privately owned or part of our municipally owned watershed lands on Pikes Peak.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you explain the issue of wildfires in your watershed? Have you had serious wildfires in the past 10–20 years?

Eric Howell: Colorado Springs is not located near a major body of water, so most of our water is collected through various systems per our decreed water rights and conveyed to our city from more than 100 miles away. To do this, we maintain a considerable amount of infrastructure. One of those collection systems, the Homestake Project, is a partnership with the City of Aurora. Water from along the Continental Divide is collected in the Homestake Reservoir and then sent through a high-mountain tunnel to Turquoise and Twin Lakes Reservoirs, both of which are operated by the Bureau of Reclamation. From there, the water is pumped either to Colorado Springs or to Spinney Mountain Reservoir, where Aurora stores its share. Our Blue River/Continental-Hoosier collection system starts in Summit County, near Breckenridge, where it collects water from the Continental Divide into reservoirs at more than 12,000 feet of elevation. That water is conveyed through the Hoosier Tunnel to Montgomery Reservoir and then piped to our local terminal storage reservoirs. That system is completely gravity fed.

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Municipal Water Leader: Would you give us an overall view of the infrastructure that you own and operate to store and deliver water?

Eric Howell: Historically, we’ve been fortunate. We have not had to deal with a lot of large wildfires, as federal, state, and local suppression resources have quickly contained many fires before they got out of control. The largest and most destructive fire we’ve had to contend with was the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire. The Waldo Canyon Fire spread to the Mountain Shadows neighborhood in Colorado Springs, where 347 homes were lost at a cost of $352 million. The destructive, 18,000 acre wildfire damaged one of our terminal storage pipelines, which runs between Rampart Reservoir and our primary water treatment plant. The damage occurred under a postfire flooding event, which caused us worse losses than the fire itself.

Finally, we collect water locally from the Pikes Peak watershed just west of our city. Our local system contains terminal storage for all our other systems and is where we store water prior to treatment and delivery to our customers.

Municipal Water Leader: Do you consider the Waldo Canyon Fire an unusual occurrence, or is it a sign that conditions relating to wildfires are worsening?

Eric Howell: Colorado has been under drought conditions for more than two decades. At the time of the Waldo Canyon Fire, we were already 13 years into it. High winds, Storm damage after the Waldo Canyon Fire.

Municipal Water Leader: Are there any challenges involved in working on USFS land? Eric Howell: We are restricted in the types of forest management work we can do on federal land. For example, no forest treatments are allowed in designated wilderness areas, which cover much of our priority watersheds. Forest management work can be done in designated Colorado Roadless Rule areas, but there are restrictions on that work, and it must first be approved through a process established by the USFS and the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. There are still ways to get work done, but funding programs come and go. The USFS’s Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program provided many funding opportunities, but the program ended after 10 years. Looking ahead, we see substantial money coming through the USFS in response to the devastating wildfires in Colorado and the western United States in recent years.

Eric Howell: Our first dive into this work occurred in 1986, when my predecessor started a partnership with the Colorado State Forest Service. Today, our work is focused on three areas: prefire mitigation, fire suppression planning, and postfire mitigation. Prefire mitigation involves using mastication or harvesting equipment to reduce the number of trees per acre in a forest based on specific prescriptions. Through funding and partnerships, we treat 3,500–4,000 acres annually. Fire suppression planning involves working with our partners to help them understand our watershed and infrastructure risks. With that knowledge, fire suppression resources can be better focused to protect these valuable resources. During a wildfire event, we coordinate closely with area agencies to determine what we can afford to let burn in specific areas and what we can’t. Colorado Springs Utilities operates its own wildland fire team with specific knowledge and expertise to support incidents involving any of our assets. Anyone can request the services of our wildland fire team, especially when it involves our municipally owned watersheds. Postfire mitigation involves assessing all the pipelines and creek crossings for damage and ensuring that they have adequate capacity to operate as designed and keep floodwater in stream channels. Since the Waldo Canyon Fire, we’ve implemented a program that helps fund the replacement of undersized or damaged culverts, helping to minimize damage to our water collection systems during postfire flooding.

Eric Howell: Some of the treatments we’ve done in our local watershed have helped prevent fires from spreading. Because of the treatments, we were able to quickly contain the fires and put them out. But the emphasis of our work is on forest health. We have a lot of insect problems, tree diseases, and tree mortality. We mitigate wildfire risk, but we’re also trying to improve forest health and resilience.

Municipal Water Leader: What is your vision for the future?

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Eric Howell: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is bringing more money to forest management in Colorado and the West. Additionally, the USFS and BLM will be receiving $70 billion, which is tied to the 10 year wildfire crisis money, in the next few years. It is going to take a lot of capacity-building to scale up our work with the USFS, BLM, and other federal agencies. We’re going to need to be strategic about where we work, since drought conditions are likely to persist. M Eric Howell is the forest program manager for the watershed planning section at Colorado Springs Utilities. He can be contacted at ehowell@csu.org

Municipal Water Leader: Why is it important to manage wildfires for watershed health? Eric Howell: The effects of postfire flooding, erosion, and sedimentation are worse than fires themselves. In 2012, shortly after the Waldo Canyon Fire, we had a storm event that caused about $12 million worth of damage in one afternoon. The storm took out several culverts, and floodwater washed out a service road where two of our major pipelines were located. Substantial restoration work over multiple years was required to repair the road and stabilize 3,000 acres of watershed hill slopes. We learned that implementing forest treatments is much cheaper than conducting repairs and restoration to address postfire damage.

high temperatures, and low fuel-moisture conditions resulted in a damaging, high-severity fire. It’s important to note that the area of forest that burned in the Waldo Canyon Fire had not been managed to reduce the fuel load. Much of the state’s forested areas are overstocked with lots of ladder fuels because fire has been suppressed for well over 100 years. However, through our forest management program and partnerships, we can make landscape-scale changes to increase the resiliency of Colorado Springs Utilities’ priority watersheds against wildfire while improving forest health in general.

Municipal Water Leader: When did Colorado Springs Utilities start doing this wildfire mitigation work? What does the work involve, and what effects have you seen from it?

Municipal Water Leader: How have your mitigation activities protected the city and the utilities from the effects of wildfire and avoided expenses that you might otherwise have had?

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Sean Chambers: Our watersheds are primarily federal land, and many of our high-mountain reservoirs are operated under special-use permits or by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). The USFS is the predominant landholder, but we also have some Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and private lands in the watersheds. About 10 percent of the property in the watershed is privately owned.

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Municipal Water Leader: Who are the primary owners of the land in your watershed?

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Sean Chambers: I am the director of the Water and Sewer Department of the City of Greeley, Colorado. I’ve been in this role since 2018. Before this, I managed other water utilities and did private consultation for water utilities on long-range regional water planning. I am from Colorado and have lived most of my life here.

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Municipal Water Leader: Please give us a brief introduction to Greeley’s Water and Sewer Department. Sean Chambers: The City of Greeley serves a population of approximately 115,000 people within the city and is a regional treatment provider for 20,000 people outside our city. That means that we treat water from neighboring communities at our facility and deliver it back to them through master meters. Our system collects source water from four river basins in the Rocky Mountains. That diverse water supply builds resiliency in the system. We operate six high-mountain reservoirs, a variety of lower-river gravel-pit storage facilities, two conventional water treatment facilities, and several transmission pipelines for treated water. The city has a strong portfolio of surface water resources and also recently acquired a large aquifer storage and recovery project, which will enable us to store water underground over the long term, limiting evaporative loss and building our resiliency to drought. Our water board members are appointed by our city council, and they are vested with more responsibility than those in some communities. They are service-oriented volunteers appointed to terms of service, but they don’t have term limits, which is important because water projects often take many years or decades to bring to fruition and institutional knowledge is critical. This has allowed Greeley to do a lot of long-range planning and strategic long-range investments. We have a healthy water supply and storage portfolio, and our two treatment plants make our system among the most resilient in the West.

How Greeley, Colorado’s Diverse Water Supply Saved the City in the Wake of Wildfires

Burned areas of the Comanche Peak Wilderness after the Cameron Peak Fire in 2021. Point mitigation structures put in place after the Cameron Peak Fire.

In 2020, Colorado’s two largest wildfires burned more than 400,000 acres in the watersheds serving the city of Greeley and most of northern Colorado. The fires made the river water too dirty to treat, and for 45 days, the city turned to its reservoirs and a water swap with agricultural users for its water supply. Events like these demonstrate the importance of prefire preparation; postfire mitigation; and above all, resiliency. In this interview, Sean Chambers, the director of Greeley’s Water and Sewer Department, tells us about the city’s efforts in this regard.

Sean Chambers: We have not gotten deeply involved in preventive forest treatments yet, but our experience over the last 10 years makes it clear that landscape-scale prewildfire mitigation is critical, and that’s the next frontier for our utility in partnership with the USFS and local watershed groups. Our historic data show that temperatures are increasing both in the community of Greeley and in our watershed. The forest has seen 100 years of fire suppression, and the climate is now drier more frequently than it has been historically. All those factors increase the risk of large fires. Prefire forest mitigation has been proven to work, especially if it can be done on a landscape scale. There’s a lot of good work happening in Colorado on that front, both in developing the financial resources to make it possible and in developing the expertise and political will to get the mitigation work done.

Aerial mulching activities in 2013 after the Hyde Park Fire.

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Municipal Water Leader: Before 2020, did wildfires occur frequently in your watershed?

Municipal Water Leader: What were some of the effects of those fires on your infrastructure and water quality?

Sean Chambers: The start of the era of record-breaking megafires in Colorado dates back to 2002, when the state had a record drought and record fire season. The Hayman Fire burned a significant portion of Denver Water’s South Platte watershed that year. The cycle of major drought and large fires started in northern Colorado in 2012. In June 2012, the High Park Fire became one of the largest and most destructive wildfires in Colorado history, burning nearly 87,450 acres along the Cache La Poudre River in the mountains west of Fort Collins, in the heart of our watershed, just upstream of our primary municipal treatment facility. Then, in summer 2020, the Cameron Peak Fire broke out. Over the next 4½ months, it burned 208,000 acres in our upper Cache La Poudre and Big Thompson River watersheds. Part of the reason the Cameron Peak Fire was not larger is that it burned right up to the burn area of the 2012 High Park Fire. In fall 2020, concurrent with the Cameron Peak Fire, the East Troublesome Fire grew rapidly in pine forests that had been plagued by a pine beetle kill in the upper Colorado and Willow Creek basins on the other side of the Continental Divide. The East Troublesome Fire burned nearly 200,000 acres in the upper Colorado River basin, the source watershed for Grand County and the Colorado–Big Thompson project, which is operated by the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District in partnership with the Bureau of Reclamation. The East Troublesome Fire burn area affected the watershed of nearly all the communities in northeastern Colorado. In a single year, 408,000 acres in our watershed burned on top of the roughly 87,000 acres that had burned in 2012. Managing the effects of wildfire is becoming a key aspect of our water utility business.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about some of your mitigation efforts.

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Sean Chambers: Each wildfire has been different in terms of its effects on the City of Greeley’s infrastructure and water quality. What we experienced in 2012 with the Hyde Park Fire was limited and a bit of an outlier, because the severe burn was followed by an unusual flood event in 2013 across several of the northern Front Range watersheds, including the Cache La Poudre. In 2013, a 500 year event happened in most of the foothill watershed of Boulder and Larimer Counties on the northern Front Range. The floodwaters essentially scoured a lot of the debris that was on hill slopes and in the riverbed. Then, after any significant precipitation event, ash, debris, and sediment ran off the hills and into the tributaries of the main stem of the river. It turned the water turbid and black. The water was simply too turbid to treat cost effectively. Because of that, we had to shut off the intake to the water treatment plant periodically and take water from different storage sources that didn’t rely on the river. We found out for the first time how important it is to not be reliant on the river. We saw that play out again following the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire. Again, we had to turn off our diversions from the river and rely on stored water. In 2020, we built some additional resiliency into our response by trading the Cache La Poudre River water that was too dirty to treat to some agricultural partners, who delivered it through ditches to their fields. We were able to trade them for the high-quality water they had in storage, often at a one-to-one ratio. For 45 days in 2021, we couldn’t take water from the river, so we took it from storage and various reservoirs that were unaffected by debris.

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Municipal Water Leader: Where do you get the funding for your fire response and mitigation efforts? Sean Chambers: We’ve sought funding at the local, state, and federal levels. We and our partners at the Cities of Fort Collins and Loveland have secured funds through our city councils to match the mitigation funds we’ve secured from state and federal programs. We have been blessed to receive a lot of financial resources from the State of Colorado through the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB). The CWCB has a longstanding watershed-restoration grant program, and its rapid response to our grant requests has allowed us to undertake major impact mitigation work within 7 months of the fire being extinguished. Because of the extreme wildfire year we had in 2020 and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money that was made available to the state in 2021, that grant program grew robustly.

Greeley and our partners in the Cameron Peak Recovery Collaborative were able to access about $10 million of that funding and matched it against local dollars and other federal funding. The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which is the recovery sponsor for the East Troublesome Fire, was able to access approximately $10 million from that fund as well.

Sean Chambers is director of the Water and Sewer Department of the City of Greeley, Colorado. He can be contacted at sean.chambers@greeleygov.com.

Greeley was also able to access funding through the NRCS Emergency Watershed Protection Program. We had prior experience accessing Emergency Watershed Protection dollars after the Hyde Park Fire. This program requires you to match its funds, but it is effective and allows you to get mitigation measures in place very quickly after a fire. It is primarily focused on private property. We were able to use it on our own private property, on the private property of many people in the Cache La Poudre basin, and around our special-use permit areas on USFS land.

In September 2021, a continuing resolution provided about $67 million to the USFS for postfire recovery. We think we may see around $15–$17 million under a USFS participating agreement that allows us to do postfire watershed recovery on USFS land. That’s important because some of the funding we received through the NRCS program was not eligible for work on USFS land, and about 90 percent of our watershed is federal land, most of it owned by the USFS.

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Municipal Water Leader: What trends do you see in the future?

Senate Bill 21 240, signed by Governor Polis, transferred $30 million from the general fund to the Watershed Restoration Grant Program managed by the CWCB. This funding will be used for critical watershed recovery efforts to address the effects of Colorado’s 2020 wildfire season.

Sean Chambers: Many of the recent wildfires in the West have happened in places where the communities that were affected had resilient systems and multiple intakes as well as the financial resources to go chase money. We’re fortunate that we’ve been able to navigate the severe water restrictions and that the communities in our customer bases have not been greatly affected. But that is not true for many regions in the West. Many communities have a single intake of the river and may have a small amount of water and storage, and they could never go 45 days or longer without being able to divert water from the river. I think the magnitude of recent wildfires in Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico are telling us that water systems need to look at resiliency in a new way.

Municipal Water Leader: Is there anything you’d like to add?

Sean Chambers: Greeley appreciates the strong legislative advocacy we’ve received from our state and federal representatives on wildfire recovery and funding for initiatives that protect the watershed from the effects of a warmer climate. Our representatives have been responsive and have helped us find funding to take action in the forest and prepare for the next fire. We’re hopeful that the next Farm Bill will consider more permanent funding sources for USFS and NRCS programs to help communities like ours recover from wildfires. M

At this time, we’re working hard just to protect our current water supply from the existing burn areas. We’re working with a team of postfire recovery consultants and the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed to identify the most severely burned areas, which are also highly correlated to effects on water quality. We use two strategies that have been proven to work in past fires and are supported by science. The first is on-the-ground point mitigation— specific treatment such as building a barrier wall or retention wall to protect diversion structures from future sediment flows, for example. We also build check structures with natural materials and catchment basins upstream in areas of the tributaries that tend to bring debris and sediment into the river. There is more point mitigation work to be done, some of it related to USFS roads in the burn area that have repeatedly washed out and contributed a lot of sediment to tributaries and the river. We’ve also been busy with watershed-scale mulching work to address the most severely burned and remote areas, not including severe burns in designated wilderness areas. Aerial mulching involves dropping a heavy chipped-wood product from helicopters over the forest floor in areas of severe burn. The wood mulch helps the soil retain moisture, promotes vegetation, and helps prevent rapid runoff and debris flows.

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Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the district.

The district imports an average of 57,000 acre-feet of water annually from the Fryingpan River basin on the Colorado River to the Arkansas River basin. The district lines were drawn close to the service areas to which we provide water. We have an ad valorem tax that funds the operations of the FryingpanArkansas Project as well as its repayment. We move water into Turquoise Lake through a system of tunnels, conveyances, and conduits and then through the Mount Elbert Conduit to Twin Lakes, where we have a large power plant. From Twin Lakes, the water is transported down the Arkansas River all the way to Pueblo Reservoir, where we have terminal storage. The Fryingpan-Arkansas Project delivers water to Pueblo Reservoir and sells it to different areas throughout our district based on our district’s appropriations principles and policy. About 12 percent of the water goes to the area east of Pueblo for domestic use in the AVC.

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Chris Woodka of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District: Progress on the Arkansas Valley Conduit

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

The Arkansas Valley Conduit project.

The Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (SECWCD) is soon to begin construction on the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC), a 130 mile pipeline with spurs that will bring water from Pueblo Reservoir to 39 communities and 50,000 people east of Pueblo, Colorado. In this interview, Chris Woodka, the district’s senior policy and issues manager, talks about what got the project on track and what it will mean for communities in the Arkansas River basin.

Chris Woodka: The SECWCD was formed in 1958 to promote the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. The project was signed into law in 1962, and we’ve been the local partner since that time. The federal partner is the Bureau of Reclamation. The project envisioned two pipelines. One was the Fountain Valley Conduit, which was built in 1985 to serve several El Paso County water systems. The other was the Arkansas Valley Conduit (AVC), which will begin construction this year after decades of waiting.

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Chris Woodka: I am the senior policy and issues manager at the SECWCD. The district serves parts of nine counties in Colorado, from Buena Vista to Lamar. The water we provide comes from the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which collects water on the western slope of Colorado and delivers it to our areas along the Arkansas River. I covered the district for more than 30 years as a reporter for the Pueblo Chieftain. I left the paper in 2016 to join the district. Because I had a background in writing about all sorts of western and Colorado water issues, it seemed I was a natural fit for this position.

Municipal Water Leader: Why is the AVC needed? Do the communities in those eastern areas lack reliable water supplies, or is the existing water source unsatisfactory? An aerial view of Pueblo Dam and Reservoir.

Municipal Water Leader: How does Pueblo Water fit in with the other agencies involved?

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Chris Woodka: The AVC will provide water to 39 communities that serve 50,000 people from Pueblo to Lamar—about 130 miles. In 2020, we revised the construction plan; now, Reclamation will build the trunk line and the district will build the delivery lines. We have just entered an agreement with the Pueblo Board of Water Works, or Pueblo Water, that enables us to use extra capacity in its treatment plant and transmission lines to deliver water from Pueblo Reservoir to the AVC. This saved about 10 years and millions of dollars in construction costs. We see this as a game changer for the entire project. By 2024, we will have built the pipeline to Avondale and Boone in Pueblo County. Then, the availability of funding will determine how soon we get out to Lamar; the current estimate is that we will reach it by 2035 at the latest. The completion date could be sooner if we are able to use federal infrastructure funding to expedite the schedule.

Chris Woodka: This plan has its roots in the 1970s, when Pueblo Water was working with the communities in the lower Arkansas Valley to build the pipeline through Reclamation and the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. At the time, the water systems that would have been served by the AVC decided that it was too expensive.

In 2018, we began discussions with Pueblo Water about the possibility of using the capacity in its system to treat and deliver the water to the AVC at a point about 15 miles to the east, at the far end of Pueblo Water’s system, using existing water mains for transmission. That saves us the time and expense of building around Pueblo. We went through some technical meetings and decided it might be possible. We sat down with Reclamation in 2019 and began the value-planning exercises that led to the current AVC plan.

The AVC was revived in 2000, and a decade of planning resulted in a plan to filter the AVC water at Pueblo Water’s Whitlock Treatment Plant, to build a pumping station to a regulating tank south of Pueblo, and then to build a gravityfed pipeline to move the water to the east. That plan was designated the preferred alternative by Reclamation in a 2014 record of decision.

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Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us more about the AVC.

Chris Woodka: There are some water quantity issues. The flow in the Arkansas River is intermittent: It is heavy in late spring and summer and lighter for most of the rest of the year. Occasionally, there is severe flooding. This can create shortages of irrigation water, and one purpose of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project is to provide supplemental irrigation water. However, all the AVC water systems rely on groundwater, and the major challenge is water quality. Of the roughly 23 water systems in the area around Rocky Ford and La Junta, 15 are experiencing problems with radionuclides in the water supply. There are also three others with high levels of radionuclides farther to the east. Two of our larger water systems, La Junta and Las Animas, have built reverseosmosis plants that are expensive to operate and have issues with brine disposal. Many of the water systems get water from deep wells that have naturally occurring uranium, radon, and other radionuclides as well as high levels of metals like iron. And in the shallow aquifer that is tied to the Arkansas River, the water has always been brackish and practically undrinkable. The total dissolved solids are very high, and there are elevated levels of selenium. Most of the communities also have problems with the corrosiveness of the water. People in the lower Arkansas Valley realized back in the 1950s that their water quality was substandard and that they needed a better source of water. They were big supporters of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project.

Pueblo Water’s Whitlock Treatment Plant.

Chris Woodka: Under the current plan, this is the full buildout of the project. The AVC is designated to deliver a defined amount of water to specific water systems. These communities have been paying taxes into the district for the past 64 years, and some of them are in the district solely for the AVC. We’re obligated to serve them. M

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Municipal Water Leader: Is there anything you’d like to add regarding the funding for the AVC?

Municipal Water Leader: When you build this stretch of the AVC, will that be the full buildout of the project, or will there be more to do in future years?

Chris Woodka: Fryingpan-Arkansas Project water will cover most of the needs of the AVC, but other sources of water will also be needed. Project water is supplemental, so some well water still will be needed, as will the purchase or lease of additional surface water. Pueblo Reservoir was built as part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, and its primary function is to store project water, but space is usually available for what we call excess-capacity storage. The water systems all have designated storage in Pueblo Reservoir for Fryingpan-Arkansas Project water, and many of them have indicated they will sign long-term contracts for excesscapacity storage when the AVC is built.

Municipal Water Leader: Will this increase the total amount of water going through Pueblo Reservoir, and will that represent an added burden on the watershed that’s providing this water in the first place?

Chris Woodka: There will not be an additional burden on water resources. The same water that is now used for well augmentation will now go to direct municipal use through the AVC. With regard to downstream flows, the final environmental impact statement for the AVC shows a minimal effect from this conduit on water flows in the Arkansas River. Currently, the combined flow below Pueblo is about 500,000 acre-feet a year. In some years, it’s as low as 300,000, and in others, it’s as high as 1 million. The AVC will only take an average of about 7,000 acre-feet, so overall, it won’t have a large effect on Pueblo Reservoir.

Chris Woodka: We have received federal appropriations totaling nearly $50 million in the last 3 years. The president’s budget request for 2023 had an additional $10 million in it for this project, and we’re working with Reclamation and our congressional delegation to secure more funding through federal infrastructure funds to possibly accelerate the construction timetable. We also have a $100 million funding package through the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Of that, $90 million is loans and $10 million is grants. That being said, we’re working to consolidate some of the participants who are involved to reduce the cost of building the spurs and delivery lines.

Chris Woodka is the senior policy and issues manager at the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. He can be contacted at chris@secwcd.com.

Municipal Water Leader: Is the water that will be delivered through the AVC all Fryingpan-Arkansas Project water?

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Aaron Chavez: I’ve been working for the SJWC for 21 years. I started straight out of college as the commission’s GIS coordinator. I progressed up the ladder and became involved with water rights, information technology, and webpage design. When I had been here for 14 years, the executive director retired, and I was hired as his replacement. I’ve been in this position for 7 years.

The San Juan Water Commission (SJWC) delivers water from the Animas–La Plata (ALP) Project to 11 municipal water retailers in the northwestern corner of New Mexico. In this interview, Executive Director Aaron Chavez tells us about how the commission is addressing concerns related to drought, power costs, and endangered species and about his role as president of the Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA).

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the SJWC’s history and current services.

Aaron Chavez: The SJWC was formed in 1986 through a State of New Mexico joint powers agreement. The commission’s member entities are the Cities of Aztec, Bloomfield, and Farmington; the San Juan County Rural Water Users Association; and San Juan County. The mission of the SJWC is to protect the use of the future and existing water rights and water resources of its members and of all the citizens of San Juan County. Our primary focus when we were formed was to build and fill the ALP Project for our member entities. Currently, we ensure that they receive raw water from the project, which they then treat and deliver to their customers. These days, we are also involved in addressing issues like water quality, endangered fish, and invasive species. Now, we are taking the lead on conservation projects and ensuring that our water from the ALP Project gets to the diversions that it needs to get to.

Aaron Chavez: There are four of us on staff. We also have a five-member board composed of a commissioner and an alternate from each of the three cities, San Juan County, and the San Juan County Rural Water Users Association.

Aaron Chavez: We ensure that raw water is available to our 12 member entities. The end users are their customers.

Aaron Chavez: We have taxing authority. We receive half a mill from property taxes collected in the county.

Aaron Chavez of the San Juan Water Commission on Water Supply, Drought, and Fish Recovery

The confluence of the Animas and San Juan Rivers in Farmington, New Mexico.

Municipal Water Leader: Are you funded by your members?

Aaron Chavez: The ALP Project is an off-site, off-river reservoir located in Colorado with a capacity of about 123,000 acre-feet. We share it with other partners, including three tribes, the State of Colorado, conservancy districts, and other project sponsors. We have water rights to 20,800 acre-feet in the ALP Project and storage rights in Lake Nighthorse. We primarily take our ALP water from run-of-the-river instream flows. All the deliveries from the ALP Project are done through the natural river system; we do not own pipelines or diversion structures. As a project sponsor that paid its proportional share, we own a portion of the ALP Project through the Bureau of Reclamation.

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Municipal Water Leader: Who are your immediate customers, and who are the end users of the water you deliver?

Municipal Water Leader: We understand you have had some changes over the past few years having to do with adjudications of water rights. Would you talk about that?

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Municipal Water Leader: What infrastructure do you own and operate to carry those missions out?

Municipal Water Leader: How large is the SJWC?

Aaron Chavez: The SJWC recently reached a settlement in a case with the Southwestern Water Conservation District (SWCD) in Colorado. The case involved the Colorado water rights for the ALP Project, which were appropriated in part for the SJWC. Under Colorado water law, each owner of a conditional water right must apply for a finding of diligence every 6 years to keep the water right valid. The SWCD owns the water rights in Colorado that are used to divert and store water in the ALP Project outside Durango, Colorado. The SWCD filed its diligence case in August 2013, and the SJWC filed a pleading called a statement of opposition. The SJWC and its ALP Project partners objected to how the SWCD characterized the water rights for the ALP Project. The SJWC is pleased that it has been able to work with its long-standing partner, the SWCD, to reach this settlement. The SWCD will be given the opportunity to develop water rights for its constituents, and the SJWC interests in the ALP Project will be protected.

Aaron Chavez: Drought is our number 1 concern, as it is for everyone in the Southwest. Currently, our water supply is 100 percent full. However, we use Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) power to pump our water from the Animas River into the reservoir, so if Lake Powell drops below critical levels in the future and that affects WAPA power supplies, we will have to buy power on the open market and our costs will go up enormously.

Municipal Water Leader: Is there anything you would like to add?

Aaron Chavez: I was just appointed to the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission by the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham. The commission oversees water issues and agreements with neighboring states. My role is to ensure that not only is the state protected but that our region is, too. I’m grateful to have been appointed. I feel like I can make a difference.

Aaron Chavez: At this point, no, because the rates were locked in per our contract with WAPA. In the future, we can expect them to go up, but we don’t know what the price will be.

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Municipal Water Leader: What are the SJWC’s other top issues today? Aaron Chavez: Through the San Juan Basin Recovery Implementation Program, we are helping to ensure that endangered fish species are recovering. We represent the water development interests in that program, which is run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Reclamation. The goal is to help the Colorado pikeminnow and the razorback sucker to recover. To achieve that, program partners are doing work such as creating habitat downstream, altering the streamflow to provide better habitat for the fish, and installing fish screens and diversion ladders. Our ongoing water development continues in compliance with the Endangered Species Act. We don’t have any real concerns about the ALP Project. The ALP general manager does a great job and is taking care of the project’s maintenance and operations. Currently, the state is completing a 50 year water plan, and we are looking into ensuring our system’s resiliency. We might want to look at additional storage and other resources within our county. Thinking outside the box, we are pursuing topwater banking. We are also focused on improving efficiency through things such as headgate repairs and ditch lining.

Municipal Water Leader: How is the SJWC being affected by drought today?

Municipal Water Leader: What is your vision for the future?

Municipal Water Leader: You are also the president of CRWUA. What does that entail?

Municipal Water Leader: Are the power rates you have to pay already going up?

Aaron Chavez: My vision is to continue to tackle these big regional and national issues while paying attention to the everyday needs of the end users. In our discussions about the big issues affecting the upper and lower Colorado basins, we sometimes forget about the individuals who don’t have water at the tap. I want to make sure that every citizen in San Juan County and in the state of New Mexico has a reliable water supply M

Aaron Chavez: CRWUA is an organization made up of more than 1,000 members from the upper and lower Colorado River basins. Our annual December conference affords us the opportunity to come together to discuss a broad range of critical water issues, such as the Drought Contingency Plans, the 500+ Plan, Glen Canyon Dam operations for water year 2022, and the reconsultation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines. I was honored to be elected as CRWUA president, representing the State of New Mexico, for a 2 year term. I have served this organization in multiple capacities for many years. To take on a leadership role during a megadrought, with all the current issues on the river, is daunting, but I am up for the challenge.

Aaron Chavez is the executive director of the San Juan Water Commission and the president of the Colorado River Water Users Association. He can be contacted at sjwcoffice@sjwc.org.

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Oregon Water Resources Congress, Annual Elmer G. McDaniels Memorial Golf Tournament and Technical Seminar, Bend, OR

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Association of California Water Agencies, Fall Conference and Exhibition, Indian Wells, CA

Municipal Water Leader September 2022

Articles inside

Aaron Chavez of the San Juan Water Commission on Water Supply, Drought, and Fish Recovery

Chris Woodka of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District: Progress on the Arkansas Valley Conduit

How Greeley, Colorado’s Diverse Water Supply Saved the City in the Wake of Wildfires

Eric Howell of Colorado Springs Utilities: Managing Forests to Protect Water Supply

Christina Burri: Wildfire Prevention and Recovery at Denver Water

JOB LISTINGS

Fire Response in Colorado