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Rep. Suckla: The Dolores NCA and GORP aren’t collaborative acts—they’re a legislative ambush
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Approved, Commentary, Local, Top Stories

Rep. Suckla: The Dolores NCA and GORP aren’t collaborative acts—they’re a legislative ambush

By Larry Don Suckla | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice I’ve spent most of my life in the saddle. I was born and raised in Southwest Colorado. I’ve worked the land, ranched cattle, and served my neighbors as both a County Commissioner and now your elected representative in the Colorado State House. My family owns one of the largest ranches in the region, tens of thousands of acres built by my grandfather and worked by my father before me. Today, I still help run that ranch with my own children. It sits squarely inside the proposed boundaries of the Dolores River National Conservation Area. And nobody from the federal government or Senator Hickenlooper or Senator Bennet’s office ever asked us a single thing about it. Not one phone call. Not one visit. Not even a letter. The...
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Montrose Commissioner Pond: GORP Is a Land Grab. Period.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Approved, Commentary, Local, Top Stories

Montrose Commissioner Pond: GORP Is a Land Grab. Period.

By Sean Pond | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice The Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act GORP is being advertised as a community driven conservation success story. It’s not. It’s a federal land grab wrapped in pretty paper, designed to sell the illusion of balance while slowly destroying everything that makes Western Colorado worth living in. This bill doesn’t protect the land. It strangles it. They’ll tell you grazing is still allowed. Sure. But what good is a grazing permit if you can’t access your cows? If you can’t get there to fix fences, build a pond, haul salt, or rescue a sick calf? If you can’t use a pickup or a UTV or bring in the tools you need to survive?  When you strip away access, you strip away use.  It’s like giving you the right to own ...
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Western Slope pushes $99M deal for historic Shoshone water rights—Front Range says not so fast
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Western Slope pushes $99M deal for historic Shoshone water rights—Front Range says not so fast

By Shannon Mullane | Colorado Sun Western Slope communities, led by the Colorado River District, want to buy the historic Shoshone Power Plant water rights to support their economies. Front Range water providers worry their water supplies could be harmed. Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs and Northern Water voiced opposition Wednesday to the Western Slope’s proposal to spend $99 million to buy historic water rights on the Colorado River from Xcel Energy. The Colorado River Water Conservation District has been working for years to buy the water rights tied to Shoshone Power Plant, a small, easy-to-miss hydropower plant off Interstate 70 east of Glenwood Springs. The highly coveted water rights are some of the largest and oldest on the Colorado River in Colorado. The Front Range p...
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Walcher: The “sky is falling” water narrative doesn’t hold water
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Approved, GregWalcher.com, National, State

Walcher: The “sky is falling” water narrative doesn’t hold water

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Every year for the past 25, at least, negotiating teams for the seven states on the Colorado River have worked to overcome a new crisis, invariably driven by two entities: the State of California and the federal Bureau of Reclamation (BOR). For a quarter-century, those teams have responded to federal pressure based on the dubious theory that an ongoing drought, and a resulting decline in the river’s flow, somehow changed the law and gave BOR authority to ignore the Interstate Compact. Not once has the federal agency ever acknowledged the government’s own role in reducing the river’s flow, by neglecting to manage thirsty invasive species like tamarisk, and especially by allowing national forests to become so overgrown that much of...
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Can Gross Dam expansion be completed before activists and courts dry it up?
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Approved, Local, The Colorado Sun

Can Gross Dam expansion be completed before activists and courts dry it up?

By Jerd Smith | Colorado Sun As Save the Colorado and Denver Water prepare to face off in a federal courtroom Tuesday, water officials across the state are watching the Gross Dam expansion case closely for its environmental impact and its affect on water projects across the West. Kirk Klancke, a long-time Grand County environmentalist and president of the Colorado River Headwaters Chapter of Trout Unlimited, said a decision that shuts down the $531 million water project, could also shut down 12 years of work on the Fraser River and its tributaries. Here’s why: Denver Water owns much of the Fraser with water rights dating back more than 100 years. And it is that water that has historically been piped through the Moffat Tunnel near Rollinsville to fill the existing Gross Reservoir. ...
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Perspectives on water after 30 years of talking about it in the Arkansas River Basin
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Approved, Colorado Public Radio, State

Perspectives on water after 30 years of talking about it in the Arkansas River Basin

By Shanna Lewis | CPR Water in the Arkansas River Basin is in high demand. Farmers, rafters, and fishermen use it. So do cities and towns far from the river, where hundreds of thousands of people live and work. Like elsewhere in the West, the region’s water resources are stretched by drought and growth, along with downstream obligations to Kansas. The 30th annual Arkansas River Basin Water Forum in Pueblo recently brought together water managers and users from all over Colorado to talk about the often contentious nature of water in the basin and around the state and to look for possible solutions to longstanding, reoccurring and often vexing questions about the precious resource. Water experts and advocates from the San Luis Valley, the Arkansas River Basin and Northern Colorado e...
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Zeldin: Trump administration to rewrite WOTUS rule
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Approved, National, State, The Fence Post

Zeldin: Trump administration to rewrite WOTUS rule

By Jerry Hagstrom | The Fence Post Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced today that EPA will work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to revise the definition of the Waters of the United States. At a news conference surrounded by Republican members of Congress, Zeldin said that the Trump administration wants to write a revised definition that “follows the law, reduces red tape, cuts overall permitting costs, and lowers the cost of doing business in communities across the country while protecting the nation’s navigable waters from pollution.” Zeldin said that the Trump administration wants to write a practical rule that will follow the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency and not be a “ping pong” in court decisio...
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Kansas forced Colorado to stop irrigating 25,000 acres of farmland. Was it too soon to put them in the same room?
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Kansas forced Colorado to stop irrigating 25,000 acres of farmland. Was it too soon to put them in the same room?

By Tracy Ross | The Colorado Sun Agricultural producers, scientists and policymakers from Colorado and Kansas gathered near the Ogallala Aquifer in Burlington on Wednesday to air their concerns and share ideas for how to survive continued drought. But it was hard to escape the Republican River Basin-shaped elephant in the room.  The group convened at the behest of U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat who chairs the Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources subcommittee, and Roger Marshall, of Kansas, the ranking Republican member of the subcommittee.  The location was poignant because it’s in a region where farmers over recent years have had to shut down their wells and either switch to dryland farming or grazing or stop all agricultural activity...
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Walcher: The EPA’s end run around the Supreme Court
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Approved, Commentary, Greg Walcher

Walcher: The EPA’s end run around the Supreme Court

By GREG WALCHER | GregWalcher.com An “end run” was once a common football term, describing an offensive play in which the ball carrier runs around the end of the defensive line. But today it is more often used rhetorically to describe a strategic dodge, any maneuver to bypass, circumvent, or sidestep. It’s more common in politics than in football. Many Westerners celebrated earlier this year when the Supreme Court finally declared once and for all that “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) does not include every creek, pond, ditch, puddle, and parking lot drain in the country. EPA spent nearly a decade trying to use WOTUS as the regulatory tool for a vast expansion of federal jurisdiction, to include virtually all activity that touches any water, ignoring the plain language...
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Understanding the complexity of Colorado’s rainwater collection laws
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Approved, State, The Colorado Sun

Understanding the complexity of Colorado’s rainwater collection laws

By Justin George | The Colorado Sun Colorado allows rainwater collection on private property but limits who can collect it, how much they can collect and how it can be used, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. You cannot collect water if you live in an apartment or condominium building with more than four units. You can own up to two rain barrels to catch water, but cannot store more than 110 gallons at a time. Lids are required to prevent mosquitoes from breeding. Collected water can only be used for “outside” purposes such as lawn and garden maintenance, car washing, livestock watering and hot tub filling. It cannot be used indoors or as drinking water. READ THE FULL STORY AT THE COLORADO SUN
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