Mountains are the water towers of the world. The mountains in the Animas River watershed supply our communities with water for drinking, irrigation, industry, and food and energy production. This is most noticeable in the spring when warming temperatures cause snow to melt and water to course down mountain drainages to creeks and rivers to the delight of our local farming, ranching and boating communities.

We tend to take water for granted (our food and energy too) and only occasionally think of the journey it makes from the high mountains to our taps. Like last summer during the Gold King Mine spill when, for a time, the city of Durango turned off its intake from the Animas River. Fortunately, our primary drinking water supply is the Florida River that flows into the aptly named City Reservoir and is protected by the Weminuche Wilderness.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), established over 75 years ago to provide policy direction on water issues, is a protector too. With Colorado’s population expected to double by 2050, the 15-member board representing Colorado’s major water basins met in 2013 under the direction of Gov. John Hickenlooper and embarked upon developing a statewide plan for the management of the state’s water.

For a field dominated by law and politics, the development of the Colorado Water Plan was highly collaborative and forward-thinking. Those are among the reasons we support it and current efforts to improve its implementation.

Completed in November 2015, it was designed to address the challenges we face from unprecedented population growth and climate change, including persistent drought in the Southwest. That condition has resulted in catastrophic wildfires and Lake Powell and Lake Mead remaining at 45 percent and 37 percent full, respectively.

After all, with respect to climate change and human versus natural causes, human actions are the only thing we can do anything about. The actions and recommendations in the plan recognize this and focus there with goals that include:

‰ One percent per year reduction in municipal consumption using multiple strategies;

‰ Adopting management plans for 80 percent of priority streams and rivers (that includes the Animas) to quantify how much water it takes to maintain healthy functioning ecosystems;

‰ Requiring all new dam or diversion projects proposed by a municipality or water developer to be evaluated against a checklist that considers the project’s demonstrated need and/or identified water gap, commitment to collaboration with broad stakeholder involvement, fiscal and technical feasibility, ecological and financial sustainability, community support; and

‰ Supporting and sustaining agriculture, its economy, the lifestyle and attributes farms and ranches provide our state.

Next week, the CWCB will be meeting in Edwards (near Vail) where they will discuss progress made since their July meeting on implementation of the statewide plan. They also will be discussing revisions to the administration of one of three of its grant programs, the Water Supply Reserve Fund, to adopt the water plan’s evaluation criteria for all new water supply projects.

We suggest the board go a step further and require these criteria be applied to all four of its grant and loan programs. Doing so would be an important step toward bringing the existing criteria up to date with the state water plan, ensuring a more comprehensive project selection process and the sound management of all of Colorado’s water resources.