The growing city of Thornton won unanimous approval Wednesday night from Larimer County for 10 miles of a pipeline to deliver Poudre River water to Adams County, after years of battling neighbor and environmental opposition for the northernmost part of the $485 million project.
After seeking a number of conditions and concessions, all three Larimer County commissioners agreed with county staff backing Thornton’s required 1041 permit for the first pipeline section through the exurban parts of the county. Colorado’s 1041 process is named after a 1970s-era law giving counties power over another town or agency’s rights to build civil projects far from their home base.
It was Thornton’s second try at 1041 approval from Larimer, decades after the city that has grown to 147,000 started buying up farm water in Larimer and Weld Counties as insurance for continued development. Thornton now says it needs a way to deliver the water from Ted’s Place on the Poudre northwest of Fort Collins, across Larimer County farms and gravel roads, on to a southern turn in Weld County.
Thornton has already begun construction on some miles of the line in places like Weld County that have already consented. To win approval from Larimer County this time around, Thornton shortened the segment through the county from 27 miles, moved key points farther away from homes, and made assurances on emergency road access and other concerns.
Thornton now sits as Colorado’s sixth-largest city, up from 50,000 people in 1985. High visibility developments along Interstate 25, like Denver Premium Outlets and a shopping district anchored by Topgolf, bolstered the city’s north side, and planners want to fill in promising spaces around RTD’s N Line commuter rail stations. The city could mushroom to 240,000 people in 40 years, but only with access to the distant water.
The Larimer commissioners spent another long night of hearings Wednesday querying Thornton representatives on the pipeline construction plan, and how Larimer County farmland will be treated after it’s dried up to send water shares into the pipe.
Land planning staff and Thornton officials agreed to add numerous conditions into the permit, and the list included deep cuts like trying to limit tailpipe emissions when construction begins in earnest in 2025 to help avoid worsening the Front Range ozone problem. After multiple days of public comments and commissioner questions, and thousands of pages of regulatory filings, the details were down to what kind of lighting would be used outside a pumphouse to avoid bothering neighbors.
Many public comments demanded that Thornton give up the pipeline in Larimer County and instead send its water down the Poudre River channel before diverting it to a pipeline start in Weld County. That would avoid construction impacts and boost wildlife and recreational use in the strained river, proponents said.
Thornton has responded that putting its clean mountain runoff through city and industrial areas would pick up intense contamination, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of a new treatment plant before Thornton residents could use it. When Thornton appealed its previous 1041 rejection, the city lost, but courts said one thing Larimer County could not do was require use of the Poudre channel.
“I wish that was the option — to say, send it down the river. We can’t do that,” Commissioner Kristin Stephens said. “The pipeline that was proposed by Thornton was the best of what feels like a bad solution.”
Commissioner Jody Shadduck-McNally said Thornton came through with robust mitigation steps for the project under pressure from county staff and the commissioners.
“I kept pushing that I wanted every tool in the toolbox. Every tool that we could have for protections for our community, and to mitigate any kind of impacts to our communities and our residents and to our water,” she said.
Commission Chair John Kefalas said the choice was “one of the most important and difficult” of his time as a commissioner.
Some longtime pipeline opponents were convinced the commissioners had previously made up their minds to approve their staff recommendation and the Thornton proposal.
“We’ll skip the torture of tonight’s hearing on our ‘good neighbor’ Thornton’s plans to win the water tap lottery and appease hungry developers,” neighborhood opponents and former county commissioner Karen Wagner said to local media in a pre-hearing statement. “A seven-year commitment (to oppose) is beyond the ability of the most ardent resident, who just wants to be heard by their elected officials.”