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As County leaders, we must protect our region. Our quality of life is directly connected to our commitment to build a tomorrow that preserves the best of today. This vision includes protecting our natural resources, utilizing our county’s resources in a fiscally-smart manner, and wisely planning for our future. Thank you for standing with us.
Water Policy: What’s in Store for 2024?
The New Year provides the opportunity to set a course for progress on critical goals.
That is true for Douglas County’s continuing efforts to provide long-term water security for our families,
businesses, and local communities.
As January begins, the basic facts and challenges about water in the Front Range – including in Douglas County – are not in dispute.
The region’s water resources have been under increasing duress thanks to rapid growth, years-long drought conditions and other climate-related issues.
The County is overly dependent on the dwindling, non-replenishing Denver aquifer and water experts – including the State Engineer – are urging communities to diversify their water sources, including finding new sources of renewable water.
It is also true that, unlike other counties, Douglas County lacks both a comprehensive and verifiable inventory of its water resources, and a water plan for the future.
This is the focus for action in 2024.
Despite senseless resistance by a few minority voices to uncover facts and information to investigate this concern and instead passively preserve the status quo – Commissioners Laydon and Teal pushed for a citizen Water Commission that got down to work in recent weeks.
Job number one is for the panel is to complete an audit of the county’s water supply and infrastructure, including a much-needed look at the County’s rural areas that are not served by water providers.
The hope, of course, is that all the players will cooperate around the essential goal of completing this new tool that will become the backbone of the eventual comprehensive water plan, ensuring the provision of water security to Douglas County well into the future.
Embracing the reality of the Front Range’s water challenges and developing a transparent plan for ensuring Douglas County can meet those challenges is the New Year’s water resolution that our citizens need and deserve.
Recent Headlines
Colorado River drought task force achieves consensus — but some water experts say recommendations “fell short”
The final recommendations from a statewide task force charged with finding water-saving solutions for the drying Colorado River focus largely on expanding and tweaking existing programs.
That outcome has underwhelmed some water experts, prompting calls for more decisive action to address overuse and drought on the river that’s the lifeblood of the American Southwest.
…State Sen. Dylan Roberts, one of the lawmakers who created the task force, said in an interview that he was disappointed in the final recommendations.
The task force discussed but did not recommend action on some of the biggest questions about the Colorado River, he said, such as what the state should do if it’s forced in the future to cut its water use.
…The task force’s recommendations might do some good but they only “scratch the surface of the problem,” Mark Squillace, a water law professor at the University of Colorado, wrote in an email. The inherent problem is that people who use Colorado River water are using more than the river produces in an average year, he said.
Solutions must involve permanent reduction of consumption, he said, such as paying farmers to switch to plants that consume less water or limiting water rights so that farmers have a slightly shorter growing season.
‘The crisis has arrived’: An elder statesman unpacks the battle over the West’s water
Dozens of federal, state and tribal leaders are descending on Las Vegas this week to start haggling over the most important waterway in the West — and Bruce Babbitt has found reason to hope.
The former Democratic governor of Arizona and Clinton-era Interior secretary has charted the Colorado River’s fate since the 1970s, and he’s watched the last 20 years of drought stir up political and economic fissures among the seven states that rely on it.
… “The scientists are out there saying, ’There’s a problem. We have a drought. The demand exceeds the supply. There’s going to be a day of reckoning,’” Bruce Babbitt told POLITICO’s E&E News. “Here we are: The crisis has arrived.”
