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THE MATURING METROPOLIS

Chips Barry, Manager, Denver Water
30 th Colorado Water Workshop, July 28, 2005

I. INTRODUCTION

George Sibley and I had a short exchange over the topic and title for this presentation. I told him to choose any suitable title and I would either make it fit, or make fun of it. I guess I'm going to do a bit of both.

When you have only one eye, typos appear more frequently. Actually, they are often not typos, but just visual misperceptions. When I first saw the proposed title here, I thought it was "The Manuring Metropolis". I thought that was a bit over the top, even for someone from the West Slope. I was preparing to talk about e-coli, and water quality problems in general, when I realized that I failed to see the "t" in maturing, and my eye put an "n" in its place.

Now that I know the topic is "The Maturing Metropolis", we can proceed to discuss at the outset the perceived difference between "maturation" and "aging". In my vernacular, maturation means a slow process of acquiring wisdom and understanding; aging reflects decreasing functionality and a rigid approach. Obviously, as one grows older, we would prefer to mature, as oppose to age.

I'd like to think that Denver Water is a maturing institution, and that the Denver Metropolitan area is, as George suggests, a maturing metropolis. My purpose today is an attempt to demonstrate that maturation by looking back - and looking forward - at water development efforts for the Denver Metropolitan area.

•  HISTORIC SETTING

The internet has made the dissemination of humor nearly instantaneous, and certainly ubiquitous. Thus, I assume most of you have seen an amusing little chart that describes conditions, "then" and "now". A couple of examples:

• Then "hoping for a BMW"; now, "hoping for a B M".
• Then "looking for a new hip joint "; now, "looking for a new hip joint"

In an effort to catch your attention, I'm going to try to do the same thing with water development, as an introduction to the contrast between conditions in 1976 when this conference first began, and 2005:

• Then, "water development"; now, "the water development process".

I'm sure this list could go on in a more amusing and clever fashion than I have presented. The point is that the environment for water development is now very different than conditions 25 or 30 years ago.

In the late 1970s, when the real planning for Two Forks began, "water conservation" still meant for most of Denver Water the construction of water storage reservoirs. We had not yet metered all our customers, although meters were required for new construction beginning in 1957. We sold water on a flat rate basis, and tap fees for new hookups had only been in place for about five years. Although the Poundstone Amendment limiting Denver 's annexation authority was passed in 1974, Denver Water believed its system was still the keystone for Front Range water supplies. Denver Water had absolute water rights, and numerous conditional water rights yet to be developed. There was plenty of water on the West Slope to be appropriated and developed. From 1910 through the mid 1970s at least, the water development paradigm was more or less as follows:

• File on as many water rights at you could in a variety of locations;
  
• Design storage projects to store the water for which you had rights; don't tell anyone else what you are doing, and certainly don't cooperate.
  
• As demand grows, bring additional storage projects on line to meet that demand. Keep your hydrology data and your water rights data as secret as you possibly can.
  
• Develop your system in isolation from others and defend it against any attack; and attack other systems whose projects, storage, water rights, return flows, etc. might adversely affect your yield.

All this helped to set the scene for the drama of Two Forks. Denver Water proceeded down the Two Forks development path without fully understanding that the rules, perceptions and paradigm had changed.

Although in retrospect it seems clear that Denver Water did not fully understand how things had changed by the mid 1980s, it is also clear that the proposal to build Two Forks did not follow the historic Denver Water model. All previous ten Denver Water Board reservoirs had been built without great fanfare, little study of alternatives, no participation of others, and few compromises. Denver was accustomed to a "design it, finance it, and build it approach".

From the outset, the Two Forks project was different. In one sense, it was not designed as a water storage project, but as a catalyst for metropolitan government in the Denver area. The underlying assumption was that Denver would share its valuable senior water rights, and its extensive water treatment and distribution system with other metropolitan entities in return for their cooperation and participation in solving various metropolitan problems. For this reason, and because demand would develop over two decades, Denver envisioned Two Forks as a project with a 25-year "shelf life".

The project was unusual in other ways also. Denver accepted a compromise for environmental evaluation which was an unprecedented "system-wide" environmental impact analysis. The system-wide analysis was several times more extensive than a standard site specific EIS with which most project proponents are familiar. The system-wide EIS looked at all the alternatives for water supply development for the entire metropolitan Denver area, whether or not the area was to be served by the Denver Water Department or even by the participants in the Two Forks project. Denver Water also compromised its historic exclusivity, and granted partial ownership and control over the project to 42 suburban partners. Finally, contrary to historic Denver practice, the Water Board joined in landmark treaties with West Slope water users and agreed to provide certain benefits to the West Slope in return for support, (or at least neutrality) on the issuance of the Two Forks permit.

The point of all this is that while some may view the Two Forks project as the last and dying vestige of a "pour concrete" dam building mentality, Denver actually tried to do it differently. We didn't succeed, but we learned a lot in the process.

•  WHAT WE LEARNED

One of the things we learned in the Two Forks planning, EIS, and veto process, is that conflict surrounds most water development schemes in Colorado . We learned about the following conflicts.

• Denver - with water rights - versus suburban entities, without the same kind or quality of rights. It could be argued that Denver acquired water rights in anticipation of annexation of additional territory. When the annexation was stopped by the Poundstone Amendment, the water rights stayed with Denver Water.
  
• East Slope versus West Slope. This is of course the traditional Colorado water rivalry. Eighty percent of the water is on the West Slope, but 80 percent of the people are on the East Slope. This has meant diversions of water from the West Slope to the East, leaving those on the West Slope feeling ignored, deprived, or victimized. There may be a moral basis for complaint from those in the Basin of Origin , but under Colorado Water Law, there is no legal basis for complaint.
  
• The environmental community versus the development community. This conflict illustrates a large divergence of values. The environmental community believes in conservation, limitations and controls on growth and "saving" rivers. The development community of course believes that economic health requires continued growth. Individual developers want a level playing field, in order that no other development or town has an advantage due to water supplies.
  
• Fisherman versus "urban mowers". This is a conflict between trout on one hand, and bluegrass on the other; between the elite fly fisherman using the stream and Joe six-pack who is drinking it. Is the highest and best use of water to leave it in the stream for a fish, or divert it from the streams so grass, trees and flowers and people can flourish in an urban setting?
  
• Colorado versus Nebraska . A great deal of noise was made about the alleged affect of the Two Forks dam on flows in the Platte River in central Nebraska . It was alleged that Two Forks would damage the habitat for endangered whooping cranes or for sand hill cranes that feed along the Platte in the spring. Denver had great difficulty in believing that Two Forks would have any affect 300 miles away in an area that is down stream from both Lake McConaughy , and the confluence of the North and South Platte Rivers. Today, many in Nebraska acknowledge that Two Forks would have had little impact on Nebraska .
  
• EPA versus the Corps of Engineers. The conflict between these two agencies became apparent when the Corps agreed to apply the public purpose standard after mitigating measures had been agreed to. EPA disagreed and alleged that the public purpose of the project should be measured prior to application of mitigating measures. I remain incredulous that this important disagreement did not surface until the Two Forks project came up for review.

Thus, we learned something about conflict, and I will talk later about our current proposals to minimize or mitigate conflict. But we learned some other things as well. Among them:

• The idea of a water project as a metropolitan government catalyst was never appreciated by EPA or anyone outside the metropolitan area. This failure was certainly a major reason for the EPA veto.
  
• On perhaps a related point, the jurisdictional boundaries between water entities in the Denver metropolitan area are invisible when viewed from Washington , D.C. Denver 's argument for reserving water supply to serve DIA, Lowry and the Central Platte Valley made no headway with those in Washington who viewed the entire area as homogeneous and without jurisdictional lines.
  
• When EPA says "there are less environmental damaging practicable alternatives" they do not necessarily mean that any of those alternatives are actually permitable.
  
• Big water storage dams are dead, at least until California , Texas , or Washington , D.C. needs one. California did get a big new water storage project, Riverside Reservoir, built with some difficulty and great expense, but it is off channel and no one, even in Washington , has ever questioned the need for additional water supply in Southern California .
  
• There can be no water crisis until there is no water. This is consistent with the standard operating principles of American politics and crisis management.
  
• The environmental community is technically and politically sophisticated. They raise good tough questions that developers and pro-growth advocates often cannot adequately answer.
  
• Public values have changed in the last 25 years. The environmental fringe of 1968 is the environmental main stream of 2005. The public now appreciates and values water in the stream and no longer feels required to adhere to the age old western tradition about the necessity to divert water from the stream to have a "beneficial use".
  
• Water conservation is a precondition to issuance of a permit for any project involving water.

IV. HOW HAS OUR APPROACH CHANGED?

I have tried to describe above the context and setting for Denver Water's application for a Two Forks permit in the 1980s, and the lessons learned from the subsequent veto of that project. From all of this is slowly developing a new paradigm for water development along the Front Range , at least as perceived by Denver Water. The essential features of this new paradigm are:

• Cooperate rather than litigate. As a lawyer, I know that litigation has its place, but it is also a last resort. Rather than producing yield, litigation usually consumes money. Litigation begets polarization, and that makes cooperation and negotiation impossible. Obtaining more water for Front Range development does not have to begin in an adversarial mode. For utility managers, litigation is an easy, but wrong approach. Cooperation takes a lot of work.
  
• Share your hydrology data rather than hide it. There was a time, perhaps 15 years ago, when Denver declined to share our considerable hydrology database and hydrology models with others. That made people distrustful, and led to endless argument about the quality of the data being used for whatever analysis was at hand. By sharing our data and describing how and when it was acquired, people have come to trust and rely upon Denver 's data. When we begin negotiation from a common data standpoint, arguments about the data are nonexistent. Sharing data means we can proceed to a discussion of real issues more quickly.
  
• Help other communities and water utilities with their water problems, if we can do so without diminishing our yield or flexibility. Denver Water may have a robust and extensive water collection treatment and distribution system. But if the communities near us have less complete or reliable system, it is of no economic, political or moral benefit to Denver to leave those systems at risk if we could help. Normally the condition for our help is that we retain the yield and flexibility of our system. But even with this standard, we have been able to assist Grand County , Summit County , the City of Aurora , Arvada and Thornton in very substantial ways in the last several years. Partly this is recognition that, like it or not, we are all in this together.
  
• Consider water conservation and water recycling as supplies that are often equivalent to construction of new storage or acquisition and development of new water rights. The old paradigm was that the only way to develop a water supply was to acquire water rights and store high spring flood flows. But over the last 25 years Denver has ramped up our water conservation efforts both because of the drought, and because long-term water efficiency is absolutely necessary. I am on a personal campaign to eliminate the over-watering of bluegrass, and to eliminate rules that require bluegrass in places where it need not be, like highway and street medians. The enemy is not bluegrass per se, but bluegrass in the wrong place and the over-watering of it by our customers. It is possible to foresee a 15% permanent reduction in water demand by insistence on greater water efficiency. Insistence comes in the form of rebates, higher water rates or surcharges, and public education.
  
• Obviously, most people know that Denver Water has spent more than $100 million in construction of a water recycling plant which utilizes Denver 's reusable water emanating from the outflow of the Denver Metropolitan Wastewater Reclamation Plant. Our recycling plant is by far the biggest in Colorado , and, will contribute about 20,000 acre-feet of water per year that would otherwise come from additional West Slope diversions.
  
• In the old paradigm, only large projects were deemed worthy of our attention. In the new paradigm, we need to look at all types of system refinements that are small, but when taken together can amount to hundreds or thousands of acre-feet. In this fashion, Denver has changed the operation of the City Ditch and the Highline Canal to add yield to its system; we have installed pumps to capture fish flows below the stream reach of interest; are in the process of quantifying lawn irrigation return flows for use in augmentation plans, lined lakes to reduce seepage; are trying to install a pump station at Chatfield Reservoir to fully use our water supplies in that reservoir, etc.
  
• Denver Water and other metropolitan providers have learned that gravel mining in the South Platte below Denver has a water supply benefit. Gravel pits which once inadvertently stored water, and were admonished for doing so by the State Engineer, have now become valuable water supply reservoirs, once they are lined to prevent hydraulic connection to the river. Denver has acquired or is in the process of developing 20,000 acre-feet of storage below Denver. This storage is useful for exchange purposes, and as a supply reservoir serving the water recycling plant.
  
• The point is that we have discovered that there are water storage options other than those 15 miles on either side of the Continental Divide. They are not always as good, and they don't serve exactly the same purpose, but we are no longer overlooking them.
  
• Finally, let me put the new paradigm into perspective by referencing the offers we have made to Summit and Grand Counties in the last year, and their response to our overtures. We know that Summit and Grand Counties can solve their water supply problems best with assistance from Denver Water. We have made some suggestions as to how this might occur. Grand and Summit Counties have now added Eagle and Mesa Counties to the discussion, and made a counter proposal. While not everything in the counter proposal is doable, everything is properly the subject for discussion. Such discussions could not have occurred in 1976 when this conference began. It is a measure of our success, and the increasing sophistication and maturation of all the individuals involved that such discussions can now occur.