'OSTRICHES' ENDANGER FRONT RANGE WATER PLANNING, SEN. ANDREWS WARNS

Colorado has an ostrich problem when it comes to water policy, State Sen. John Andrews (R-Arapahoe County) told his colleagues on one of the final evenings of the 2000 legislative session. "We'll be remembered with dishonor by people 20 years from now if we don't get our heads out of the sand and start planning for the water needs of this state's growth," he warned during a heated floor debate on April 26.

Andrews had proposed a surprise amendment to HB-1419, a routine bill on this year's work plan and budget for the state water conservation board. It would have required the board to estimate new water supplies needed for residential and industrial growth in Colorado by the year 2020, to suggest water sources to meet that demand without drying up farmland, and to report on potential losses of Colorado's rightful water to neighboring states such as Arizona, Nevada, and California.

The proposed study would have meshed with other planning and study assignments in HB-1419, including one for south metro Denver and another for the Colorado Springs area. It would have cost only $150,000, less than 2% of the water board's annual spending.

"The amendment really made sense in light of projections that Front Range water needs will grow by a million people in the next two decades, with no coordinated plan to meet all that thirst," Andrews said. "We had easily lined up the necessary 18 votes to pass it, working with urban and rural senators from both parties, without alerting the Western slope 'water buffaloes' who always oppose any statewide approach to this issue."

But those guardians of the status quo found a way to stymie the Andrews proposal at the last moment, using a technicality to keep it from coming to a vote. "After they won," he said, "I needled them with acting less like buffaloes than ostriches. The Colorado River system west of the Divide is sending downstream to Las Vegas and Los Angeles as much as 500,000 acre-feet of our state's rightful water every year. That's enough for a couple of million people.

"Yet the attitude over there is no sharing with the Front Range, 'not one drop over the hill,'" Andrews noted, adding: "This is buried-head thinking. It ignores the dollars that could be flowing into those Western slope counties as the result of win-win water deals with communities east of the Divide. And it could eventually jeopardize the prosperity of all Coloradans, because neither the wet years nor the economic boom is going to last forever."

The 2020 planning amendment was Sen. John Andrews' third venture into water issues during this year's legislative session. In January he shook up the water buffaloes by introducing SB-113, proposing to expand the Colorado Water Conservation Board with six new seats apportioned by congressional districts, giving it a population factor to balance the existing nine seats apportioned by river basins. But his contention that "you don't have good government if you don't represent people" was not persuasive to the Senate Agriculture Committee, and the bill quickly died.

Later in the session Sen. Andrews worked with Sen. John Evans (R-Douglas County) in support of SB-215, Evans's late bill directing the water board to pursue a trans-mountain diversion project of at least 150,000 acre-feet per year on an expedited timeline, along with a study of options for its own reorganization along east-west lines. "Senate President Ray Powers knows that his Colorado Springs constituents will be water-short if things don't change," Andrews said, "so he gave this bill a friendlier committee assignment than mine got, sending it to State Affairs."

"But the buffaloes trampled it anyway, with the Governor supporting them for some reason," he related. "At that point our last shot was trying to amend the water board budget bill, saying not a word about this or that side of the Divide, proposing no construction of any kind, but merely pleading for some forecasts, some forward thinking - and it was still no go. After losing all three rounds on water this year, we've had to endure some gloating from the other side, but that's okay. We'll be back. In this arid region, water is life, and the Front Range has to keep fighting for its fair share."

Water for another million thirsty Coloradans by 2020 won't be there if "ostrich" attitudes impede statewide planning, Sen. John Andrews warned legislators in the debate on HB-1419.