In 1958, when Dick Bratton began working as a lawyer, the Gunnison River Basin and many other parts of the West  were on the cusp of a giant transformation in water. He bridged the past and future nicely.

 

by George Sibley

The cantankerous Colorado River water community recently lost a valued member, L. Richard Bratton, a water attorney in the Upper Gunnison River Basin from 1958 until his death January 28. Dick Bratton made his home in Gunnison but his creative thinking gave him influence far beyond in events on the cusp of a sea change in the way Americans viewed the American West.

Bratton was born in 1932, a son of the “working West” that delivered food, fuel and other raw resources for the burgeoning urban-industrial America. His father and grandfather were miners, and he lived the first seven years of his life in the mine camp of Garfield on Monarch Pass, at the huge Colorado Fuel and Iron limestone mine. His mother taught in the Garfield one-room school.

The family eventually moved to Salida, where his father went to work for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.  After graduation from Salida High School, Dick became the first of his three-generation Colorado family to go to college, at what was then Western State College in Gunnison.

After graduating from Western in 1954, Dick went to the University of Colorado Law School, seeing a future in the practice of water law. In 1958, soon after completing law school, he was invited by Ed Dutcher, a somewhat legendary West Slope water attorney, to join his firm. He accepted.

The West was then in amid an upheaval, and water infrastructure was at the heart of it. Congress in 1956 had approved the massive Colorado River Storage Project. It had many components, most significantly Glen Canyon Dam in Utah and the smaller, but still giant Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming.

In Colorado, the legislation called for a trio of dams and reservoirs on the Gunnison River. It was called the Curecanti Project. The largest would have backed water up to nearly Gunnison during spring but would have yielded mud flats during summer and fall, creating a dust bowl that would have plagued Gunnison. It would have also inundated two small towns, more than 20 miles of world-class fishery, 23 small river resorts, and 4,000 acres of working ranchland.

Sometimes the greatest good for the greatest number rolled over the lesser numbers without noticing. Today’s rural-urban divide shows a long memory of such occurrences. Dutcher and his “Committee of 39” local citizens, bolstered by then-Colorado Gov. Dan Thornton, a Gunnison Valley rancher, succeeded in reducing the size of the reservoir by more than half. It saved Gunnison but still inundated the small towns and the fishery.

The Bureau of Reclamation, being sensitive to the cost the project was imposing on the more agrarian communities that the agency was actually created in 1902 to serve, proposed several small, high reservoirs and some irrigation works in the upper Gunnison Basin. It proposed to pay for the work in part with revenues from sales of hydroelectricity from Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge and the Curecanti Unit – as Blue Mesa, Morrow Point and Curecanti were then called. They’re now called the Aspinall unit, in honor of Wayne Aspinall, the long-time congressman from Palisade who was the primary architect of the 1956 law.

The genius of Aspinall’s CRSP Act – or as some saw it, the scam – was the bundling of the big power and storage dams with a lot of small valley-scale irrigation and municipal water projects that would never be able to meet a cost-benefit analysis alone. Instead, the “cash-register” power facilities would pay for most of the whole bundle. (Spoiler: it didn’t exactly work out that way – another story.)

One of Bratton’s first jobs in Gunnison was helping prepare the paperwork and talking the people of the valley into taxing themselves a mil to create an Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District. This district allowed by state law would help the Bureau obtain project funding in Washington. The local district was also a vehicle for harassing the federal agency into getting project planning and execution done. Voters approved it in 1959.

In 1961 Dutcher was appointed to a judgeship, and Bratton took over the law firm. That same year, the Bureau began the preliminary work for the Curecanti Project from a new office in Gunnison. It was an unpleasant and depressing process: clearing the land of trees, relocating the highway, and buying out all the human occupants.

As work began, a “big pivot” in the way the entire nation perceived the American West was becoming evident. The Bureau of Reclamation’s mission was to “reclaim” arid lands to create more iconic “family farms.” Its goal was to aid development of raw resources to feed the people and industries of an increasingly urbanized and industrialized economy.

But the increasingly urbanized, industrialized – and after the Second War, increasingly mobilized – American people were enjoying a rising standard of living that included more time for recreation – paid vacations!  “Their” western public lands were increasingly perceived not as a resource hinterland, land to be developed, but as a vacation destination, to be kept as pure and pristine as possible (with millions trampling over it). The CRSP Act was the first resource development act that included recreational use around its reservoirs as part of the basic plan.

On Bratton’s home front, the Crested Butte Ski Resort also opened in 1961, the beginning of a transition in the Upper Gunnison’s self-perception as part of the mining, farming and ranching “working west,” to a New West serving visitors to the great western playground. Some accepted that transition more easily than others, hoping it might reduce the export of its young people.

Bratton himself still had one foot in the Old West. He worked on water rights with the mining and ranching economies, hoping that money would start to flow for the Upper Gunnison Project irrigation structures. But he was also involved in local real estate and could tell which way that wind was blowing.

Between the beginning of the Curecanti (Aspinall) Unit in 1961 and its final completion in the early 1970s, it became increasing obvious to Bratton that the Upper Gunnison River Project would probably never receive federal funding. But Bratton was close enough with the Bureau of Reclamation people – as he was with virtually everyone – to know that they felt a little guilty about having taken quite a lot from the Upper Gunnison people with nothing in return. (Blue Mesa Reservoir has become a solid element in the local economy – when it is more or less full).

So Bratton started sounding out the feds on an idea. In the 1930s, the Bureau had built the Taylor Dam at the head of the Taylor River’s 20-mile scenic run through spectacular canyons to its junction with the East River in Almont and the beginning of the Gunnison River. This was an Old West project, to store late season water for farmers and ranchers in the Uncompahgre River Valley some 80 river-miles west around Montrose and Delta.

This turned the natural Taylor River into an irrigation canal, reversing its flow pattern and killing its world-class fishery.

Bratton and the Bureau began to talk about moving the 110,000 acre-feet of Uncompahgre Valley water in Taylor Reservoir down to storage in the 945,000 acre-foot Blue Mesa Reservoir. That would be at least a day closer to where the water would be used, which the Uncompahgre farmers liked. And it would mean that the Uncompahgre water could be moved from Taylor Reservoir on a schedule more like a natural river’s flow, with higher spring flows and lower late-season flows, so long as the water was in Blue Mesa when the Uncompahgre farmers wanted it.

This was all codified in a 1975 agreement between the local and regional water districts and the Bureau. The Bureau has the final word on how the water will be moved, but the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy appoints a “local users’ group” of irrigators, the whitewater recreation companies, anglers, and the riparian property owners. Every April the group creates a Taylor River operating plan that meets enough of all their needs. The Bureau can change it but usually does little.

The result is a river that, even to the trained eye, looks too natural to be something run by humans.

So if Bratton and the Upper Gunnison Conservancy could not get an Old West irrigation system out of the Bureau, they could at least use its works to ‘reclaim” a multiple-use river for both the Old and the New West.

Bratton had another idea. Water kept running into the reservoir from the Continental Divide and Taylor Park even as the reservoir was drawn down. So he filed on a “second fill” of the reservoir, up to 110,000 acre-feet of water in a big snow year, but about half of that on average. This was the water judiciously released for instream needs of wildlife, fish, and other environmental concerns. The filing paralleled Colorado’s ground-breaking 1973 instream flow law, which allows for instream water rights (in priority) to “protect the environment to a reasonable degree.”

It was not an easy decision for the district water court, but in 1990 the court granted the decree – and the fact that Dick Bratton was pushing it probably weighed in the decision.

Bratton also played a significant role in water education in Colorado, beginning with work at his home Western State College, now Western Colorado University, where he put together the (now) Western Colorado University Foundation in 1975. The next year, he began a Western Water Workshop with a Western professor that brought together regional water leaders. It lasted for 40-plus years until there were just too many copycat forums across the state with “built-in” participants.

In sum, Dick Bratton was what might be called a “creative connector.” He brought people together to take a different look at difficult challenges, and people who might have eschewed the opportunity otherwise, participated because it was Dick, and it would at least be interesting. As is shown by the story of the Taylor River, “A River Once More.”

George Sibley is a Colorado writer and Colorado River aficionado who writes a blog about state and regional water issues, sibleysrivers.com