So what do J. Paul Brown and the snowpack have in common?
Let’s begin with the premise that water is the most important issue facing the West and certainly Colorado. We are in a remarkable year where the great California drought has been broken virtually overnight, and in Colorado, the snowpack is higher than average for the date, and in many places, including the San Juan basin, is substantially greater than the average peak.
This is a huge amount of water, but the problem lies with the other side of the mountains, the Eastern Slope. It was easier to capture Western Slope water than it was to try some other method like impoundment. They have taken millions of acre feet away from Western Colorado and the over-committed Colorado River. They continue to seek water from this side of the mountains.
So what has that to do with J. Paul Brown?
I think that J. Paul knows more about water than anyone else in the Legislature. He wrote and succeeded in getting legislation passed to study the building of dams and the impoundment of water to meet the needs of the metropolitan areas on the Eastern Slope.
I know, dams have bad names, but these dams are not like Hoover or Glenn Canyon or dams on the Columbia River. They are generally long and low and impound water in low areas of farm or pasture land and do not destroy scenic rivers, bury archaeological sites or interfere with fish spawning; and they will hold water for those metropolitan areas.
So what is going to happen to the huge amounts of water currently waiting to run off in the Platte River drainage? It’s going to simply run down the rivers and be wasted to the Mississippi. It will not be put to use in the cities or on the farms. Without impoundment, it will simply be lost.
So what did the voters in the 59th District do? They replaced J. Paul with Barbara McLachlan, who doesn’t know the first thing about the most important issue facing us. Good job, liberals.
George Thompson
Durango
