Friday, October 14, 2005

Another Evening At an Open House

Another evening. Another open house.

This time hosted by the Bureau of Land Reclamation about the Southern Delivery System (SDS); the plans for Colorado Springs to take it’s rightful water from the Arkansas River to slake its every expanding thirst.

It’s a complex issue. Including some people who suggest that Colorado Springs does not have the right to as much water as they claim. But that’s a tome in itself. We won’t address it here unless further evidence comes forward suggesting there IS a problem.

The people at Reclamation did a far better job of running an informative open house, complete with breakout groups and extensive comment-taking, than the event we went to the previous evening. Kudos to their team. I will also add that Reclamation did a good job at trying to be the honest broker during the event.

At this point there are seven alternatives being considered. I won’t bother to enumerate them here, as we determined that some titles to them are misnomers that only confuse your understanding of where and how the water will flow. And it came out that there are other alternatives they could have considered but, for some reason, didn’t make the final cut. But the people in our breakout group saw them and re-suggested them.

Furthermore, as was put forth in an editorial in yesterday’s Pueblo Chieftain, there is the idea that a flood control dam should be built on the Fountain between Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Apparently no one involved with this project, heretofore, had thought of such an idea. [Note: I mentioned such a thing to a meeting of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy group over a year ago. Most of the official members of that group politely ignored anything mentioned by the public during the public comment period of their meeting. However, when I mentioned that, one guy started scribbling notes. Maybe he got to someone…]

I think the ideal location for such a dam would be at the ‘choke point’ in the Fountain Creek valley in the vicinity of mile marker 112 on I-25. More on the benefits of such a dam at a later date. Back to the meeting.

As I said, there are seven plans being considered at the moment. Several of these seem to be favored by one group or another.

Colorado Springs favors the one where they take water out of the Arkansas and return it there in the vicinity of Florence. This is likely to be a result of Pueblo’s favored plan

In light of all the sewage spills in the Fountain of late, Pueblo has been favoring placing the water intake for the system east of the confluence of the Fountain with the Arkansas; forcing Colorado Springs to either cleanup their act or Drink S—- And Die. But there are other plans that Pueblo would favor before the one Colorado Springs would like best.

The impacts on the communities and the environment vary dramatically based on each of the plans.

There is an alternative called No-Action. However, in light of the growth pressure on Colorado, this is hardly likely to happen. But, just to help people understand what is meant by Reclamation when they say “No Action”....it means that the proponents can do whatever they want; Reclamation will take “no action” in the affair, as far as I could tell. See what I mean by misnomers? I’m sure it makes sense to Reclamation, but it confuses the rest of us mightily.

There were a number of questions about how Reclamation is going to require Colorado Springs to cleanup its sewage dumping ways. However, I got the distinct impression that Reclamation wasn’t going to touch that issue with a 10-foot pole. Why? Well, because it seems to me that getting one city to clean up it’s problems with sewage treatment as they impact on another city within the same state is NOT a ‘federal’ matter. It’s a state matter. No state lines were crossed. So, instead of putting pressure on the feds to be all things to all people, we should be beating the State Department of Public Health up over this. Not to forget other departments that oversee water ways. And not to forget our elected officials as well.

All in all it was an informative presentation. We’ll be addressing some of the details a bit later, once we have more information on the various alternatives.