Officials say water conservation program harmed Grand Valley irrigators
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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — An irrigation company in western Colorado says it is disappointed in an Upper Basin water conservation program, its impacts to the company’s operations and the local agricultural community.
Grand Valley Irrigation Company President Sean Norris, in a September letter to state officials, said that GVIC shareholders will no longer be allowed to participate in the System Conservation Pilot Program without advance approval from the board. This year, seven GVIC irrigators participated in the federally funded program, which Norris said violates GVIC policies and bylaws as well as injures other shareholders on the system.
“The board has even broader concerns with the SCPP,” the letter reads. “As the program grows, the agricultural economy in the Grand Valley will suffer adverse economic impacts.”
In 2023, the Upper Colorado River Commission rebooted the System Conservation Pilot Program, which was first tested from 2015 to 2018. Infused with $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for Colorado River programs, SCPP pays water users in the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — to leave their fields dry for the season or enact other conservation measures and let their water flow downstream. Over two years, the program has saved about 101,000 acre-feet of water at a cost of about $45 million.
The reason for Norris’ disappointment is because GVIC’s participation in the conservation program resulted in impacts to one of the biggest, oldest and most important water rights on the Western Slope: the Cameo call. This group of agricultural water rights is able to take up to 1,950 cubic feet per second from the Colorado River to irrigate the peach orchards, vineyards and hayfields of the Grand Valley.
When this senior water right isn’t receiving the full amount it is entitled to, it places a “call.” This means that upstream junior water users — some of them Front Range water providers that take water across the Continental Divide from the basin’s mountainous headwaters — must shut off so that Cameo can receive its full amount of water.
The Cameo call comes on most years late in the irrigation season: July through October. And its impacts can be felt far upstream. The Cameo call has the ability to command the flow of water throughout the headwaters of the Colorado River basin. For example, residents of Aspen and Pitkin County like to see Cameo come on because it means that more water is flowing down Lincoln Creek and the Roaring Fork River as the Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Co., which provides water to mainly to Pueblo and Colorado Springs, is forced to shut off its diversion at Grizzly Reservoir.
This year, however, officials at the Colorado Division of Water Resources reduced the amount of the Cameo call because of GVIC irrigators’ participation in the conservation program. State engineers said that since the irrigation company was not using its full amount to irrigate, it couldn’t call for the full amount and reduced the call by about 25 cfs. About 1,500 acres under GVIC were enrolled in SCPP in 2024, and engineers calculated that the call should be reduced by 1 cfs for every 64 acres.
The Cameo call this year was on from Sept. 3 to Oct. 23. According to state officials, without the 25 cfs reduction, Cameo would have come on two days earlier: Sept. 1.
Norris said that GVIC’s system of nearly 100 miles of canals that serve about 40,000 acres between Palisade and Mack needs all of its water to function properly and that reducing the call harms all of the company’s water users. The full diversion is needed to maintain water levels in the canals and provide the “push water” to reach the farthest downstream ditches.
“The decrease in GVIC’s call adversely affects all shareholders in the system and especially those shareholders who continue to farm and irrigate while SCPP participants collect government paychecks for doing nothing,” the letter reads.
Norris said GVIC management believed that the Cameo call would not be affected by GVIC shareholders’ participation in SCPP and that state officials had assured them that this would be the case.
“At the beginning of the program, we were told that our calls would not be affected by this participation,” he said. “Then, in the middle of the summer, we had this meeting, and we were informed that that was indeed not the case and that our call would be affected.”
But even if the GVIC staff and board members believed the call would not be affected, individual participants in SCPP were informed that the call would be cut back when they signed up for the program. State and UCRC officials had to approve verification plans for each of GVIC’s seven projects. The plans contained the following language: “The Colorado Division of Water Resources will reduce the amount of the Cameo call … based upon an average delivery of 1 cfs to 64 acres and the number of acres not being irrigated at the time of the call.”
River District warned of impacts
With its location near the state line, some of the biggest and most senior water rights on the Colorado River and huge expanses of irrigated farmland, the Grand Valley is an ideal location for an interstate water conservation program. But SCPP has also faced criticism about its high cost, the limited water savings, the difficulty in measuring and tracking conserved water, and the potential damage it could cause to local agricultural economies.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District, whose mission is to protect and develop water for the Western Slope, warned in a January comment letter to state officials that a call reduction could happen. River District officials pointed out that the water that GVIC doesn’t use, instead of flowing downstream, could be picked up by Front Range transmountain diverters.
The River District’s position has long been that these types of conservation programs need careful consideration and guidelines to avoid harming local communities and other water users. River District General Manager Andy Mueller spoke to Colorado Basin Roundtable members at the September meeting and explained that Front Range water providers such as Denver Water, Northern Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Aurora Water could take that 25 cfs. That is the opposite of SCPP’s intent, which is to respond to drought and falling reservoir levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
“The federal government, in its effort to put water in the system, has just unwittingly provided an exportation of water out of the river at its headwaters,” Mueller told the roundtable. “We shouldn’t be setting up a system like that. Just that plain and simple.”
State officials said no TMDs benefited from the reduction in the Cameo call this year because the upstream call at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon had already turned off the TMDs on the mainstem of the Colorado River. A maintenance project on Grizzly Reservoir this year meant that Twin Lakes did not take the 25 cfs either. Jason Ullman, the top engineer with the Department of Water Resources, said a few upstream junior water users probably picked that water up.
The valley’s other large irrigation company, Grand Valley Water Users Association, did not have any shareholders participate in SCPP in either 2023 or 2024 because the board did not approve participation. But if irrigators from both GVWUA and GVIC had participated in SCPP in 2024, it could have resulted in an even bigger reduction of the Cameo call.
“If there was a much larger amount of acreage that would participate in a program, then that resulting call reduction would be larger,” Ullmann said.
Water managers don’t know yet whether SCPP will happen again in 2025 or beyond — federal authorization is pending in Congress. But Norris said that irrigators who want to participate in any future conservation programs like SCPP will have to get approval from the board to make sure the project is in compliance with GVIC’s bylaws. Because the bylaws include a prohibition on changes to water use that could prevent the company from being able to divert its full amount, it’s unlikely the board would approve future SCPP projects that would reduce the Cameo call.
Norris said he sees the 2024 SCPP as an experiment to gather data.
“A lot of the data is numbers and money-driven and acres watered,” he said. “But a lot of the data is the social impacts, the operational impacts that are harder to quantify. Having companies say they’re not going to participate because it unfairly impacts some of their users is a data point they hadn’t necessarily considered, but now they’ve got that in their experiment.”
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Aspen Journalism is an independent nonprofit news organization. See www.aspenjournalism.org for more.