Public comment shuts down Alamosa City Council's plan. The Colorado Supreme Court orders a "slow sip" when it comes to water. An effort to bring rye to the San Luis Valley.
Public comment shuts down Alamosa City Council's plan.
Let me start with a quote from the article linked at bottom:
"Alamosa has halted plans to build a second homeless shelter following broad concern from residents that the project would add more people to the San Luis Valley city’s already growing unhoused population."
I'm not going to step on the decision made or the fact that residents down there had concerns. I don't know enough of the details and I don't live there.
That's not the point anyway. The point is that the people in Alamosa spoke up and got to have things down there the way they see fit, not the way I see it.
The change in direction happened because people were paying attention locally and spoke up locally. This is the moral of the story.
Pay attention to what's going on in your local area and speak up. Get plugged into the local information networks around you, be that a local newspaper, be that a local events/news Facebook page, or similar. Share information with others and let your local officials hear you.
If you can't find a local network to share news, maybe that's a signal that there is a need which you could fill. Maybe you could be the someone who starts a group. The nice thing about Facebook is that it doesn't cost anything but time to start a page.
If you want things to change, you have to do your part. You can't wait for someone else to step up.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/11/12/alamosa-city-council-cancels-new-homeless-shelter-plans/
The Colorado Supreme Court orders a "slow sip" when it comes to water.
Per the Fresh Water news article linked first below, the Colorado Supreme Court recently affirmed a 2020 precedent on water use from wells in a suit brought by Parker and Castle Rock against the state.
A lot of the decision hinges on a concept called "nontributary groundwater" a subject I've touched on before, mostly in the context of the Closed Basin project down in the San Luis Valley.
If you want a reference on the topic, check out the second link below, with screenshot 1 attached defining the concept.
In plainer language, it's probably easier to consider what it is in relation to what it's not. Nontributary groundwater is groundwater that is not connected to any source of water on the surface.
Picture a body of water down deep (though they don't always need to be super deep) and under a layer of rock or clay that is so impermeable that water soaking into the surface of the earth cannot reach it on timescales other than that of "very slowly".
It's that feature that plays into the decision. If the water doesn't connect to the surface well, then it's not going to replenish itself from above well either. Stick a well into the nontributary water and start pulling it out you have a problem that you don't with wells in plain old tributary water: you can easily exhaust it faster than you can refill it.
The Colorado Supreme Court's decision touches on this because both this more recent decision and the earlier 2020 precedent put a pretty strict limit on just how much nontributary water can be pumped specifically to prevent something like this.
Consider the lengthy quote in screenshot 2 attached (from the Water News article).
The crux of this latest court fight is that Parker and Castle Rock both say that their overall 1% should be revisited because they claim the amount that the 1% is calculated from is better known with more modern measuring methods. The state's claim was that the new technology doesn't matter. They were told how much they could get when they got the well permit and that's that.
Let me give you an analogy. Let's say that I told you I had 100 buckets of water and that you could have 1 bucket per day up to a total of 20 buckets. That is, I offer you 1% of my water a day for 20 days at which point you're cut off.
Now, at day 10 you come to find out that I really actually had 150 buckets. You (like Parker and Castle Rock) then contend that the 1% I offered should really have been 1.5 buckets a day for 20 days. Giving you a grand total of 30 gallons, not the original 20. I (like the state) say that you had your original offer and it stands. You hit 20 and you're done.
We take our dispute to the state supreme court and I win. This is what happened in this case. The Colorado Supreme Court said that Parker and Castle Rock get what they originally got back when they got their well permits, regardless of whether or not the original estimates of the reservoir size are off.
So there you go. Anyone care to take bets on whether or not these communities will limit water use or try to get more from the rural parts of the state to continue their expansion?
An effort to bring rye to the San Luis Valley.*
The San Luis Valley has been many things, but it's been an agricultural center for as long as it's been anything else. Agriculture has started to struggle down there too, for a variety of reasons.
Any reasonable fix would almost certainly need to be just as multi-faceted as the problem: issues with many causes don't lend themselves to single-factor solutions.
One of the solutions proposed is similar to the ones proposed for the dry Eastern Plains: plant something that doesn't use the same amount of water that current crops do.
Our governor's earlier and uninformed attempts at this were to try and encourage hemp cultivation. I put a link first below if you'd like some context on that. I'm less in touch with the results down there, but I know they've been a waste of time up here. Hemp's super duper I suppose, but there's simply no market. Oh, and on top of that, there's a huge investment often in drip lines and plastic mulch. Yet another case of our governor listening to people that don't do actual production Ag for a living when trying to make Ag policy.
Transition from that to the second link below, where you see an effort by someone who lives in the San Luis Valley and who farms and knows farmers there. Her (and others, it's not just a single person's effort as I understand it) idea is to grow rye in the valley as a way to continue to keep land in production and use less water.
Right off the bat, you can see two things different here compared with the hemp effort: there is a market/infrastructure for rye as a cash crop, and growers in the Valley are already growing rye (albeit as a cover crop**). The effort, then, does seem to have some prospects: in talking with one of my contacts down in the Valley it seems that the woman heading the project is energetic, committed, and familiar with farming in the region.
If growers down there do decide to start growing rye, I wish them the best. More than anything else, what I wish is that there are economic opportunities in the rural parts of the state so that people who want to stay there, can. So that our state can retain some of its agricultural heritage.
One last thing. Another of my contacts who lives in the Valley had some interesting comments on the issue of a lack of water for irrigation down there. Quoting their reply via text:
"The story about RRP [Rye Resurgence Project -- the effort to get people cultivating and selling rye] is typical of most of the thinking about water in the valley......blame it on the drought.....blame it on the farmers but don't dare say anything about the federal government stealing it right from under our noses for 50 years......just do a little math and it adds up!!! The article mentioned that some farmers are paying a million dollars a year for water. How much do you suppose the federal government pays?"
Fair points, all too often in discussions about the lack of water in the San Luis Valley, no mention is made of the fact that the Feds have been pumping water out to send downstream for decades.
I put a link to one of my updates on the Closed Basin Project third below. It will provide some context on what I mean and links to my earlier multi-part series on the Project.
*Quick side note, the picture above is from the internet. It's a 100% rye sourdough loaf. The picture is not of one of my efforts, but this is a bread I've made. Dense, not very chewy, kind of gummy (though I have read the description as "creamy" by fans), I would say it's gotta be an acquired taste. I like adding some rye in on my breads (and cookies) but at about 10% or so. Go much outside that and, without adding extra gluten, the texture suffers.
**There's more context on how it's used as a cover crop in the valley, but in short, a cover crop is something you plant to help rebuild the soil and/or hold it in place between seasons. You do not let it go to seed. I myself use hairy vetch often around my house because it holds the soil and is a legume which can fix nitrogen into the soil. Another common mix is vetch and a grain like oats or rye.
https://coloradosun.com/2021/08/09/colorado-hemp-cbd-polis-patagonia/
https://www.5280.com/san-luis-valley-rye-resurgence-project/
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/a-day-at-the-dried-up-lake-ditch?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Regarding the Parker and Castle Rock water and aquifer pumping rights issue, I can't speculate on Parker's eventual build out because they at least created a surface supply (renewable) reservoir. Castle Rock and Castle Pines, however, will continue to rely on draining the Denver aquifer complex beneath them dry because growth is good. Castle Pines recently celebrated a new car wash business at the entrance to their city. Impressive, I'd say since the new car wash is next to an existing car wash. Got to keep those Escalades and Tesla's shiny.