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Pagosa Springs Local News
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| PAWSD Gets Called on the Carpet, Part Three |
| Bill Hudson | 3/12/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Read Part One
The first issue spelled out in the 6-page letter — addressed to “Karen Wessels, Chairman and President, Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District” and signed, at the end, by our three County Commissioners, Clifford A. Lucero, Robert C. Moomaw and John A. Ranson — begins like this:
“1. According to the Appraisal Report to Evaluate Future Raw Water Demands and Water Supply Alternative Plans (Harris Water Engineering, March 2003), found on the PAWSD website, the PAWSD and SJWCD Boards decided to ‘incorporate the concept of a 'Safety Supply Margin’ into their planning..”
That’s just the first of 25 issues, concerning the PAWSD operations, that the Board of County Commissioners want the water district to explain in a “special district annual report” — to be filed, hopefully, within the next couple of months. County attorney Todd Starr suggested, at this week’s special meeting where the letter was formally issued, that PAWSD would have that special report submitted by the end of April. A few minutes later in that meeting, PAWSD manager Carrie Weiss noted that such an “annual report” had never before been requested from PAWSD, and suggested that the earliest the BoCC could expect a report would be July.
Clearly, an adversarial relationship between the County Commissioners and the PAWSD board and staff has been revealed by this March 8 letter — probably to no one's surprise.
 The Commissioners have been quite outspoken, over the past year, about their desire to help revive the Archuleta County economy, immediately if not sooner. The BoCC completely waived their development fees last year, in an effort to encourage residential and commercial building.
PAWSD, meanwhile, has continued to focus their planning — and their sizable development fees — on a reservoir that might be built 50 years from now. Or might never be built.
I’d like to take this opportunity to review the 25 issues raised by the County Commissioners’ March 8 letter, from the point of view of an outside reporter who has been reviewing the PAWSD Dry Gulch proposal for the past four years or so, and as one of a very select number of people who occasionally attend both the BoCC meetings in the County Courthouse, and the PAWSD board meetings held at the PAWSD offices on Lyn Avenue.
You can click here to download the entire 6-page letter.
Issue Number One: the Safety Supply Margin.
From what I can tell, PAWSD is the only water district in Colorado that has such a policy — requiring the district to develop enough water storage to supply each and every PAWSD user enough water for a full year of unrestrained water use — lawn watering, clothes washing, toilet flushing, golf course irrigation — even if we saw not a drop of rain, or a flake of snow, for a full calendar year.
Other water districts in Colorado — perhaps ignorantly — build their water planning policies on the assumption that clouds will continue to pass over their communities and deliver rain and snow in quantities similar to what has been delivered for the past 1,000 years.
But 1,000 years of history, or the thought that Archuleta County residents could actually be asked to skip watering their lawns during a drought, apparently leaves our current PAWSD board and planning staff feeling anxious.
Without this “Safety Supply Margin” policy, the PAWSD board and staff could not possibly justify their plans for a 35,000 acre-foot reservoir in Dry Gulch. If PAWSD had a water storage policy similar to other Colorado water districts, we would realize that we already have enough water storage — thanks to the recently enlarged Stevens Reservoir and the enclosing of the Dutton Ditch system — to last for the next 50 years, even if the community grows at a reasonable rate.
The BoCC points out this apparent fact in their letter, and asks PAWSD for more information about their policy, noting in passing that this policy has placed “an unreasonable financial burden on the community.”
“A burden that was never approved by voters or anyone independent of the PAWSD and its board,” the letter notes.
During the last serious drought in Archuleta County — in 2002 — PAWSD allowed us to water our lawns, all summer long, all through the drought. You might almost imagine they were purposely trying to develop statistics to show the district’s high water usage during a drought.
In fact, those very statistics have proved somewhat valuable to PAWSD since 2002, in supporting their “Safety Supply Margin” policy, their requests for additional water rights, their plans for an over-sized reservoir, and their loans for the Dry Gulch property purchases.
The problem with a “policy” is that it doesn’t require scientific proof or believable numbers. It needs only a vote of the board.
Issue Number Two: Dry Gulch is outside the water district boundaries, and this is a material departure from the district’s Service Plan.
Apparently, PAWSD has a document, or a collection of documents, that constitute its “Service Plan.” I’ve never seen this document, but it supposedly exists, and I assume it is supposed to direct the overall actions of the PAWSD board and staff. Someone at the County Courthouse, speaking off the record, suggested that PAWSD has failed to update its Service Plan for at least 20 years. I have no knowledge of whether that is true or not.
PAWSD actually serves only a small part of Archuleta County. Basically, its service area includes downtown Pagosa Springs and most of the Pagosa Lakes area. In four years of covering PAWSD board meetings, I’ve never heard a serious discussion about expanding the district to serve areas such as Aspen Springs, Arboles, Chromo, lower 84, north 160, Trujillo, or any of the other potential growth areas outside the current district.
Nor is the cost of expanding the district’s service area calculated or presented in any of the documents that support the Dry Gulch project. In other words, PAWSD is planning a $357 million reservoir project capable of storing water for over 100,000 people — but it has no plans to deliver that water to anywhere outside of the current core residential areas of downtown and Pagosa Lakes.
Nevertheless, PAWSD decided to locate its proposed reservoir outside the current service area — and outside the intentions of its current Service Plan, according to the BoCC letter.
Issue Number Three: Spiraling reservoir cost projections.
Read Part Four... |
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