South Platte River Task Force

To:       Governor Bill Ritter

Re:       2007 South Platte River Task Force

From:   Arnold Good, Task Force member, Water Users Defense Committee

Date:    September 13, 2007

Thank you Mr. Governor for commissioning the South Platte River Task Force and for being concerned for irrigated agriculture in the South Platte Basin.  In spite of your encouragement and vision for this panel, and your charge to be objective and unselfish, the consensus vote was to maintain the status quo.  The presumption of injury has again prevented serious consideration of any and all substantive relief measures. Unless and until we as a state change the way we quantify well pumping injury to reflect real, verifiable river performance and behavior, relief will likely be nothing more than an illusion.

The policy of the state of Colorado to integrate groundwater with surface water has failed.  Groundwater has been successfully integrated in appropriation, but has been subjugated to surface water in use and administration.  Groundwater rights have become nothing more than junior surface rights, never able to pump in their own priority and confined to surface source replacements.  Strict and rigid administration of the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation was shown to be inconsistent with a policy of ‘maximum beneficial use’ and thus the efforts of the 1967-1968 Legislature to integrate the appropriation, use, and administration; to prevent wholesale well curtailments.  The outcome of the integration policy has been the very scenario it was designed to prevent!

Mr. Governor, this is a debate about science; what is real and what is presumed to be real. The task force panel should not have been made up of biased and subjective water users and politicians, but of unbiased and objective engineers and scientists who are able to adequately and accurately quantify well pumping injury.  There are volumes of credible evidence available from credible sources that quantitatively shows that well pumping replacement requirements are but a fraction of what current models presume them to be.  Preliminary results from the SPDSS Groundwater Model also indicate a much smaller impact of well pumping on the stream.  While our system transitions from presumptive modeling to realistic, physical based modeling; can our state policy continue to render wells expendable until we adopt a better system? Is our state commitment to ‘minimizing detrimental use’ to the stream or to ‘maximizing beneficial use’ of the overall resource?

Many view this crisis as miniscule, only affecting a few hundred (thousand?) wells.  In the judgment of many others, a commitment to the status quo will eventually render all wells in the basin vulnerable to serious curtailment and a return to 1900 river conditions.  Augmentation is only a means to an end, not the end in and of itself.  This is a big crisis that demands big ideas, big solutions, big changes, big leadership, and a big vision.  The big ideas put forth that could provide near and long term relief were summarily dismissed under the guise of presumptive injury and impacting the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation.  I apologize for sending you up a big goose egg Mr. Governor, for I fear that our legacy will be the 2007 South Platte River Task Farce that was trapped in a ‘drainage vacuum’ unable and unwilling to think ‘outside the box’!

Respectfully,       Arnie Good