There’s a concept called “demand management” in the news in Colorado, and here’s a simple definition: Landowners get paid to temporarily stop irrigating, and that water gets sent downstream to hang out in Lake Powell.
It’s an idea long talked about because of increasing drought and the very real danger of both Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropping into “dead pool,” where no hydropower could be generated for millions of homes and farms.
Yet separating water from the land sounds like heresy to some, and to others, irrigation canals create splashes of green in what is otherwise a desert landscape.
Here’s how Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District sees it:
“Just talking about demand management has already attracted deep-pocketed investors, whose motives are money and not for maintaining a healthy river.” Those investors are buying up land with water rights in anticipation of the future escalation of water prices.
But James Eklund, former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, thinks setting up demand management in Colorado is crucial.
“We need to act now,” he said. “Last winter and spring, where 107% snowpack turned into 52% runoff, was proof we’ve entered a deadly phase where millions of acre-feet of water need to be stored in Lake Powell.”
These days, Eklund is a lawyer for the New York investment company Water Asset Management, whose land purchases in Mesa County have sounded alarms about outsiders speculating on water.
State Sen. Kerry Donovan, D-Vail, has co-sponsored what could be called an anti-WAM bill, aimed at beefing up the state’s water anti-speculation laws.
“If we don’t do demand management correctly, we are going to create a commodity-based situation where water goes to the highest bidder,” Donovan warned.
Gary Wockner with the nonprofit Save the Colorado supports following the West’s existing water laws, which took root in scarcity and drought.
“If Lake Powell requires more water to keep functioning, why not curtail junior users across the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, rather than employing expensive water purchases?” he said.
Critics of Wockner’s plan say by then it’ll be too late; after multiple dry years, upper basin reservoirs will be empty.
Jim Lockhead, president of Denver Water, argued that without demand management, increasing drought could bring about a crisis.
“Water rates would spike in cities, just as farm income and output would plunge region-wide,” he said.
To test demand management, four municipal water districts, including Denver Water, funded a pilot program in 2015-19. It stored 175,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead by paying irrigators in Arizona, California and Nevada to fallow fields and forgo cultivation.
But to gain participation in the pilot program, water prices were set at levels that boosted farm incomes above what agriculture alone would produce. That increase in income also increased the value of their land.
“That will squeeze out future mom-and-pop operators,” Mueller warned. Ninety-five percent of Western Slope irrigators are owner-operators, and we don’t want that declining.”
Although the Colorado Water Conservation Board hasn’t ironed out how to “shepherd” the water downstream or who will round up willing sellers, investors from outside Western Colorado are already buying up land with senior water rights.
In Delta County, the Conscience Bay Co., operating out of Boulder, bought the 3,000-acre Harts Basin Ranch, with senior water rights on the Grand Mesa.
Yet the new owners are hardly quick-buck artists. They have expanded the cattle herds, improved irrigation and hired locals.
But as drought worsens, these owners – whether they are from New York City or Texas – could well be sitting on a fortune.
Dave Marston is the publisher of the nonprofit Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org.
