The Colorado Sun and San Juan Citizens Alliance teamed up to talk about Colorado water, particularly about water and sustainability in Durango, ahead of an Animas River cleanup on Saturday.

Three panelists – Durango sustainability manager Marty Pool, Center for Earth Theology founder and environmental scientist Heidi Steltzer, and Peter Butler, a founding member of the Animas River Stakeholders Group and water quality consultant – were featured at Saturday’s discussion at the Durango Public Library.

About 20 people attended the event. They heard the panelists discuss Florida and Animas river trends, how Southwest Colorado’s climate is changing over time and fast facts about where Durango’s water comes from.

Pool said Durango’s water comes predominantly from the Florida River and is supplemented by the Animas River. The city uses about 1.5 billion gallons of water per year for all utility use types, he said.

Colorado Sun reporter Shannon Mullane asked Pool about projects that show water supply from the Florida and Animas rivers is trending down and that trend’s significance.

Pool said the city relies on state climatologists, scientists and Mountain Studies Institute for water prediction data, and water has fluctuated from year to year just as snowpack does.

He said both the Florida and Animas rivers are trending downward in total water volume; in dry years, groundwater recedes, which affects the total amount of surface water available. But Durango’s water consumption has remained flat despite a growing population, he said.

“Per capita, water use is going down. Total water use is staying pretty flat, with some seasonal fluctuations due to irrigation,” he said.

While the city uses all the water from the Florida River it has legal rights to every year, it’s not even approaching the maximum usage of water from the Animas River, he said.

“Water rights are still significantly less than the amount of water that is in those two watersheds, and so when you look at those cushions, we're not in crisis mode yet,” he said. “ … There are a lot of communities that hit that wall in terms of available water. We're not there yet, and we're not going to get there within the next few years.”

He said it’s hard to get the community behind future water preservation because if one goes strictly by the numbers, the numbers aren’t exclaiming any immediate crisis.

Mullane asked Pool how the city is preparing for its water future. Pool said the fact the city has two separate watersheds to pull from is a boon to resiliency and redundancy in and of itself.

“If there was a wildfire in one valley, we could switch over to the other and vice versa. That's a real benefit,” he said. “Now, we don't have any storage water rights on either of these rivers, so we are at the mercy of the floods. We can't ask Lemon Reservoir to release more water for us to take. We just have to take what's floating out of Florida.”

He said if the city builds a water pipeline to Lake Nighthorse, which it has water storage rights at, it would give the city a third level of protection – at the cost of tens of millions of dollars for construction.

Durango is lucky in that not all communities have that many second or third water options, he said.

When it comes to predicting the state of water in Durango in 2050, Pool said there are so many variables and scenarios to consider that it’s hard to predict what future circumstances could look like.

The city could grow at an increased rate of 3% annually over the next 25 years, or it could grow more slowly at an increased rate of 1%. There could be a recession, or a war, he said.

Sara Burch, Animas riverkeeper with the San Juan Citizens Alliance, said when she sees statistics that over 100,000 people are floating down an 8-mile stretch of the Animas River through town, she worries about the impacts of human recreation.

“This idea of sustainable recreation always changes,” she said. “It depends on what lens you're looking through. But for me, what I would like to see is a way that we can minimize impacts to our riparian corridors and to our water quality while still allowing people to use the river for recreation.”

cburney@durangoherald.com