Arkansas Valley Pipeline Could Finally Deliver Clean Water to Forgotten Towns

By Jerd Smith | The Colorado Sun

Years of buying radium-free water from vending machines is coming to an end, but the cost to build the Arkansas Valley Conduit continues to rise and deadlines to use federal funds are fast-approaching.

Rick Jones strides quickly into the offices of the May Valley Water Association. He’s running late after a morning of checking leaks in a pipeline that is one of several delivering well water to his 1,500 customers.

Jones has lived in Wiley, nearly 200 miles southeast of Denver, most of his life and has served as superintendent of the association for 38 years.

Outside the front door of his office in a small, well-kept brick building on Main Street, a dispenser delivers radium-free water for 25 cents a gallon to anyone who walks up with a container. It helps the small water company offer clean water because its own groundwater-based system struggles with radium contamination. Having the dispenser helps it meet its state obligations to deliver some clean water to the public.

Last year, the machine dispensed 24,000 gallons.

“It’s usually pretty busy,” Jones says.

But this may be changing. With construction of the long-awaited Arkansas Valley Conduit finally under way,  the May Valley Water Association is in line to get clean water from Pueblo Reservoir, more than 100 miles to the west. Then contamination notices from the state health department will stop and the cloud that lies over these small towns in the Lower Arkansas River Basin due to their historically bad water will begin to lift.

The long-awaited conduit, he says, “is what everyone is hanging their hopes on.”

A cloudy water history

The need for clean water in the Lower Arkansas Valley became apparent long before the conduit was initially approved more than 60 years ago. In the 1950s and earlier, by some accounts, as wells near the river were drilled they showed a range of toxic elements, including naturally occurring radium and selenium. Both can cause severe health problems including bone cancer, with long-term exposure to radium, and heart attacks and lung issues with selenium, if high amounts are consumed.

In 1962 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation prepared to build the Frying Pan-Arkansas Project, an ambitious plan to capture clean water from the Arkansas and Colorado rivers and store it in Pueblo Reservoir. The conduit, or AVC, was a component of the project that never got built.

Why? No one could figure out how to provide clean water to so few people living in a remote area of the state, let alone how to pay for it, according to Chris Woodka, a senior policy manager with the Southeastern Water Conservancy District. The district operates the sprawling Fryingpan-Arkansas Project for the federal government and is overseeing the conduit’s construction.

But everything changed in 2023, when decades of lobbying Congress produced some $500 million in cash toward the $1.39 billion pipeline. That equals $30,888 per person, a cost many people say is extraordinary in a region whose household income of $47,000 is roughly half of the state average of $89,000.

“It’s a very expensive project for 45,000 people,” said Keith McLaughlin, executive director of the Colorado Water and Power Development Authority, which has set aside $30 million in federal grant money to help cover the cost. “It’s an enormous project for that number of people.”

Still he said it’s important for the state, despite the state’s own budget challenges. “You have very low-income communities down there and it’s a really critical project. That makes this very high on our priority list,” McLaughlin said.

To date, 39 communities have signed onto the project. Towns at the far western end of the conduit, such as Avondale and Boone just outside Pueblo, could see water as soon as 2027, while others farther east will wait another 10 years or so as each segment of pipeline is laid and spurs to each community are built, Woodka said.

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