An update on the Shoshone Power Plant's water rights. More road dollars going to transit.
An update on Colorado River water rights involving the Shoshone Power Plant's water rights.
I wrote earlier about a likely deal to preserve the water rights that Xcel has for the Shoshone Power Plant outside Glenwood Springs. If you want to go and revisit, check the first link below, but the short version is that a group wanted to buy Xcel's water rights, then lease them back to Xcel for the power plant until the plant closed.
This would ensure that those rights stay in the hands of a group that would have kept the water for use here in Colorado instead of them getting snapped up by speculators.
Well, the update is that apparently some groups are not too jazzed about all this and are looking to fight it.
Quoting the Sun article linked second below, "Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District says it’s not necessary to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on the deal, nor is it necessary for the River District to play such a central role. Whether it opposes the deal will depend on a highly anticipated analysis of past water use that will guide how the rights can be used in the future, spokespeople said."
More in the article which I'll leave you to read up on if you'd like.
Would you be surprised if I said it looks like a bigger fight is brewing than just a disagreement playing out in words in the newspapers?
Ah water rights in Colorado.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/28/northern-water-colorado-river-district-historic-water-deal/
You can probably figure that you'll see more of this: road dollars going to transit.
The CPR article below details how Gunnison County Commissioners are going to, here quoting the article, "... use the federal grant to help fund safety improvements — many of which are aimed at pedestrians and transit users."
That grant, by the way, is $15.2 million in federal dollars from the 2024 Safe Streets and Roads for All program.
Now, if Gunnison wants to spend their grant money this way and it's allowed by the Feds, that's their choice. In reading the article I think reasonable arguments could be made in this case where you have a population heading from one community to another to work and both are small enough that mostly central drop off and pick up make sense. I think I might blanch at the levels of spending on transit vs, that on roads, but it's their choice.
The thing that's more noteworthy here, the thing that you need to pay attention to whether you live there or not, is that you can probably expect to see more and more of this. You can especially expect it here in Colorado.
More and more, public transportation dollars in the hands of liberals and progressives will be going to transit, climate change oriented things like apartments with no parking and bike lanes, etc.
If this is a concern, start paying attention to what's going on at the local level. This is, as is the case here, the level where a lot of those decisions are getting made.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/09/06/gunnison-county-highway-135-safety-improvements/
Fort Collins received some of this Safe Streets and Roads for All grant money too and are planning on spending it on projects which will remove automobile parking to replace them with segregated bike lanes, which unless designed properly cause more car-bike crashes due to visibility issues.
https://www.fcgov.com/fcmoves/current-projects