Grand County and Northern Water have struck a deal that will send more water running down Western Slope streams to benefit farmers, boaters and the environment.
Grand County in northern Colorado is home to nearly 16,000 people, part of Rocky Mountain National Park and the headwaters of the Colorado River. Each year, four major diversion tunnels take up to 350,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water out of the county and push it east to the Front Range. Now, the county and the water provider are agreeing to release water in the opposite direction, to the west.
“We’re the epicenter of transmountain diversions in Colorado. No other county is diverted more than Grand County,” Ed Moyer, Grand County manager, said. “Every drop of water that we can negotiate and partner on to flow west to better our streams and rivers is a good thing.”
Under the agreement, Northern Water would have the option to access more water in dry years. Grand County would have the ability to release up to 7,000 acre-feet of water from Willow Creek Reservoir and Lake Granby — both part of the federal Colorado-Big Thompson, or C-BT, Project managed by Northern Water — into the Colorado River.
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
The agreement still needs federal review, but Moyer said the first release under the new agreement could happen as soon as this year.
“We are all trying to do the best with water,” said Kyle Whitaker, water rights manager for Northern Water. “When there’s opportunities to work together to do good, I think we’re foolish if we don’t pursue them and try to make them work for everyone.”
Irrigation to bankruptcy to urban development
The water supply in question changed hands several times over 20 years after being mixed up in one of the largest bankruptcies in Grand County history.
The water rights allowed 45 cubic feet per second of water, or about 10,000 acre-feet, to be siphoned from the Bunte Highline Ditch, which connects to Willow Creek below Willow Creek Reservoir. From there, the rights were used to irrigate the hay fields on Horn Ranch near the intersection of U.S. 40 and 34.
In the early 2000s, Shorefox Development LLC bought a 1,500–acre section of the ranch along with the attached water rights. The ranching family who owned Horn Ranch kept a portion of the most senior water right for 5 cubic feet per second of water.
The developers had already partially constructed a golf course, golf cart paths, roads and more when they entered into bankruptcy during the Great Recession.
Over the next decade, residents in the nearby town of Granby watched the abandoned, partially developed land grow weeds as the property moved from a Florida real estate investment trust to the town of Granby and Sun Communities, the nation’s largest builder of manufactured home communities. It is now Sun Outdoors Rocky Mountains, a luxury RV camping resort; Smith Creek Crossing, an entry-level housing community; and town-owned open space.
The water, however, was no longer needed for agriculture, which left it available for use by the next in line under Colorado water law, Northern Water.
Each spring, the water would flow into Willow Creek Reservoir, where it would become part of Northern’s water supply. From there, it would go through tunnels, canals and reservoirs to more than 1 million residents and 600,000 acres of farmland in northeastern Colorado.
In dry years, Grand County would experience what Moyer described as a “perfect storm”: Low snowpack, combined with reservoir operations and transmountain diversions, shrank stream flows and raised water temperatures, harming fish, farmers and boating-based businesses.
“It could be the first week of June, and we would already see skyrocketed temperatures for the aquatic environment, and then at the same time, the ag producers can barely get their water to irrigate all the hay fields along the Colorado River,” Moyer said.
Once the water hits 68 degrees, released fish have a hard time recovering from being hooked because of low oxygen levels in the warm water, said Jordan Elhert, a part-time guide with Winter Park Flyfisher. That’s when the company would cut its trips short.
“In late summer, that temperature is a problem,” Elhert said. “There were a lot of trips where it would hit that 68 water temperature by 12 or 1, so we were having to leave super early, like 5 a.m., for a lot of those trips.”
More water would always be better, he said.
A new streamflow framework
The streamflow agreement, approved April 23, will become critical to mitigate low-flow conditions and provide a more-certain water supply in times of drought, the officials said.
“We’ve been receiving the benefit for the last 20 years, give or take, of this additional water, and now by effectively splitting that benefit with Grand County, makes it a win-win,” Whitaker said.
Under the agreement, the first 1,500 acre-feet of water will go to Grand County. The next 1,500 acre-feet goes to Northern Water. If more than 3,000 acre-feet of water is available, the two parties will split it equally. The agreement will not impact the water still used by ranchers off the Bunte Highline Canal.
Whitaker estimates that the total amount of water each year could range from 500 acre-feet to 7,000 acre-feet, depending on snowpack and water conditions.
For Northern Water, the deal could be a big help in drought years.
“In 2002, our system’s total inflows were in the 80,000-acre-feet range. So an additional few thousand acre-feet — that’s significant,” Whitaker said.
Northern Water expects to purchase the former ranch’s water rights in May. That purchase, plus the water-sharing agreement, will also keep the rights from being snapped up by any buyers who want to use the water elsewhere in Colorado.
“The investors that ended up with these rights through bankruptcy and foreclosure, they had marketed it to folks on the East Slope and West Slope,” Whitaker said. “This assures that the benefits remain in the C-BT system and in Grand County.”
For the county, this water-sharing agreement is the latest of several deals with Northern Water that keeps water flowing in the Colorado River, which has experienced two decades of prolonged drought and provides water to 40 million people.
It will help agriculture, recreation and environmental flows on the Western Slope, Moyer said. Agriculture, recreation and tourism services — like hotels, food and entertainment — helped contribute $152.5 million, or 27%, of the county’s gross regional product in 2017.
“Everybody’s looking for water as high in the basin as possible,” Whitaker said. “To have thousands of acre-feet of controllable water available for their use, it’s going to be a good thing.”