Part IV: Balancing demands of today and tomorrow

Are we doing better than kicking the can down the road?

This is the final part of a series about four groundwater basins in Colorado. The story was commissioned by Water Education Colorado and benefited from editing by Caitlin that organization’s staff. It appears in a variant form in the summer 2025 issue of Headwaters magazine.

by Allen Best

The San Luis Valley, like the Republican River Basin, has almost no tax base other than irrigated agriculture. “Nearly everything in the valley is somehow related to agriculture. Our hospital, our schools — everything is dependent on agriculture’s existence in the valley,” says Amber Pacheco from her office in Alamosa. From her office in Wray, Deb Daniel has a parallel observation.

What then constitutes sustainability of the water that is the foundation of agriculture or, in the case of Parker, Castle Rock, and other south metro communities, their economic vitality? What decisions should be made now to foster that vitality through the 21st century?

Thoughts about conservation have shifted over time. When Colorado’s gold and silver miners arrived, they had no goal of conserving. They either mined the veins to exhaustion, or it became too costly to continue. In a sense, that has happened in the Republican River Basin. The only limits to this groundwater mining are those triggered by the interstate compact. Because the Republican River and its tributaries get most of their water from aquifers, pumping must be limited — or supplemented.

In the last 20 years, the Republican River Water Conservation District has done some of both. It has or soon will have committed $86 million to pump water from wells expressly to deliver water to the Nebraska state line. One of the directors, Tim Pautler, has called this a strategy of kicking the can down the road. Other directors have started to agree.

“It’s like the clock is ticking when it comes to sustainability,” said Rod Lenz, the board chair, at the board’s quarterly meeting in May 2025. “What more can we do with the tools we have? Do we dare ask for more tools such [as would be delivered by] statute changes? Do we really want all the groundwater districts in the basin to ask the state engineer to reconsider how much we’re allowed to pump, or do we just stay in compliance until we can’t?”

In the San Luis Valley, coming off the century-defining drought of 2002, state legislators went in exactly the opposite direction. They said that the unconfined aquifer was to be managed sustainably. Granted, that’s easier said if you have a major river flowing nearby, even if that river has been hammered hard by the warming, drying climate of the 21st century.

The south metro area falls somewhere between these two extremes. State legislators nearly a half-century ago ordered a “slow sip” of the groundwater such as to preserve it for a century. In some places, there seems to be sufficient water to slow sip for another 300 years. In other places, the aquifer might have enough water for a few decades. Some water utilities hope for a completely sustainable water supply in decades ahead. Much work has been done. The harder work lies yet ahead.

What we need are aspirations premised not on entitlement and enrichments solely for today, but instead to build economies and cultures that more comprehensively look several generations ahead. That should be the question in all these meetings, all these court cases, all of these individual actions. Based on what we know and understand today, what should we be doing for the kids, grandkids and their grandkids, too? Are we doing better than kicking the can down the road?

Also:

You can also download the entire story here in a magazine format.