Natural Resources Energy & Environmental Law

2026 May Be Too Late: GWC hosts 42nd Annual Conference on Natural Resources

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 21:36:41 +0000

2026 May Be Too Late: GWC hosts 42nd Annual Conference on Natural Resources Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/13/2022 - 15:36

The Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment hosted it’s 42^nd Annual Conference on Natural Resources on Thursday, June 16 and Friday, June 17, 2022. The event, titled “2026 May Be Too Late: Hard Conversations Really Complicated Issues” brought together a broad array of experts and diverse perspectives from across the region to candidly discuss the demand for water across the Colorado River Basin and the rapidly diminishing supply.

Chronic drought, record heat, increasing winds and aridity, as well as rampant wildfires are diminishing the Basin’s overall health and resilience. To ensure a sustainable future, these harsh realities will require inclusive collaborations and innovative actions—and with this conference, the GWC aimed to do its part. Thought leaders in the fields of natural resources law and policy attended the conference to take part in a conversation about advancing sustainable water management, expanding basin-wide conservation, and strengthening watershed resilience.

The first day of the conference focused on understanding where we currently stand, confronting what we don’t know, and making sense of projections for the future. After an introduction and welcome from Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss and Deputy Director of the GWC, Shaun LaBarre, the day’s sessions began.

James Prairie, Upper Colorado Basin Research and Modeling Group Chief with the Bureau of Reclamation, kicked off the conference reviewing what climate scientists believe will be the likely behavior in the Colorado River Basin system in the near-term. Jeff Lukas of Lukas Climate Research and Consulting then summarized what the Climate Science foresees for the region in future decades. Tanya Trujillo, the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science with U.S. Department of the Interior provided a highly anticipated presentation on the status and timeline of negotiations for the 2026 guidelines.

Thursday’s programming continued with a moderated discussion on the unanswered legal issues at play. John Fleck, writer in residence at the Utton Center at the University of New Mexico School of Law, served as moderator. The day closed with a final session during which Professor Brad Udall discussed characteristics in the Basin across a range of flow scenarios.

“In the esteemed 42-year history of the Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources, there may never have been a timelier or more salient set of issues addressed. What happens next will have far reaching implications not only for the Colorado River Compact, but for agriculture, energy development, and Tribal rights throughout the West,” noted Director LaBarre.

Read the conference program here.

On Friday, the conference invited perspectives from across the Basin to share ideas, best practices, and lesson learned, including viewpoints from “Next Generation Voices”. In a session titled “Crafting a Rural-Tribal-Urban Social Compact in a Warming World,” experts addressed a wide-ranging set of opportunities for the Basin, including anti-speculation measures and innovative agricultural conservation methods, utility level conservation and planning, and the role traditional Tribal methods could play in Basin-wide resiliency.

The conference closed with hosts John Fleck, retired GWC Western Water Policy Program Director, Doug Kenny, and Water Journalist, Luke Runyon moderating the next generation of water policy leaders through a discussion around their vision and hopes for the future of the Colorado River.

“The Getches-Wilkinson Center has been fighting the good fight at Colorado Law for decades. It is among the oldest and most established centers of its kind in the country,” reflected Dean Inniss. “We are extraordinarily proud of how the GWC continues to advance scholarship and advocacy that aims to solve what many consider the most pressing issues of our lifetime.”

View more information about the 42^nd Annual Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources here.

Access the full recording of the conference here.

“We are very fortunate at the GWC to have these experts give so freely of their time and join us each year to provide their knowledge and perspectives on the developments within the Basin,” added LaBarre. “It is through the support of our speakers and sponsors that the Conference on Natural Resources has remained a relevant, signature event of Colorado Law for generations.”

[video:https://youtu.be/7iKi0T5-bPA]

The Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment hosted it’s 42nd Annual Conference on Natural Resources on Thursday, June 16 and Friday, June 17, 2022. The event, titled “2026 May Be Too Late: Hard Conversations Really Complicated Issues” brought together a broad array of experts and diverse perspectives from across the region to candidly discuss the demand for water across the Colorado River Basin and the rapidly diminishing supply.

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New Getches-Wilkinson Center Report Assesses Risks of Colorado River Cutbacks

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 22:40:40 +0000

New Getches-Wilkinson Center Report Assesses Risks of Colorado River Cutbacks Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/11/2019 - 15:40

Anne Castle

As declines in the Colorado River’s flow pose a risk of forced water curtailments in the coming decades in Colorado and the rest of the Upper Colorado River Basin, communities should consider what kind of insurance is needed, argues a new report coauthored by Anne Castle ('81), senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School.

A repeat of drought conditions seen in the first decade of the 20th century could nearly empty the Upper Basin’s primary storage reservoirs.

"While the risk of that happening remains low in the short term, the threat increases substantially over time," said Castle, the study’s lead author, who served as assistant secretary for water and science in the U.S. Department of the Interior from 2009 to 2014. "Regardless of the time frame, the consequences could be dire—a loss of economic activity, jobs, income, and community benefits in cities and rural communities that depend on the water."

"The chances that my house will burn down are low, but the result would be disastrous. So I buy insurance," she said. "The question is: What kind of insurance against the risk of Colorado River water curtailment should water users buy?"

Castle will discuss the study at the Upper Colorado River Basin Water Forum Nov. 13-14 at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction.

The report, written with University of New Mexico Water Resources Program Director John Fleck, connects the latest hydrology and climate science with an analysis of the legal framework governing the Colorado River’s allocation.

Drawing on water supply analyses by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and independent experts, the study finds that the risks are significant:

A recent Bureau of Reclamation analysis found that a repeat of the conditions of the drought of the early 2000s could, in fewer than five years, drain Lake Powell to levels at which it would be unable to generate electricity.
Water supply simulations commissioned by a group of western Colorado water agencies found a greater than one in three chance that flows could drop so far in the next decade that the ability of the Upper Colorado River Basin states—Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico—j to meet their legal obligations to deliver Colorado River water to downstream users in Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico would be in grave jeopardy.

Those hydrologic realities collide with legal institutions designed nearly a century ago that allocated far more water than the river has, without clear rules for handling sustained low flows.

The result, the report found, is significant risk of shortfall combined with uncertainty about whose water supplies would be cut, and by how much. The authors suggest a need to prepare now so that communities are not blindsided, offering the following as options:

Negotiating legal agreements among the Colorado River Basin states to clarify rules for sharing shortages
Setting up voluntary, temporary, and compensated water conservation programs now to bank conserved water as a hedge against risk
Waiting – not taking proactive action, but rather letting the chips fall where they may, an option the authors warn is high-stakes poker

The authors caution against litigation against the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada as a path to settling the issues. Such litigation could drag on for many years, creating uncertainty and hindering the types of collaborative agreements that have kept the river sustainable so far, they argue.

Read the study on SSRN.

Learn more about the Getches-Wilkinson Center.

As declines in the Colorado River's flow pose a risk of forced water curtailments in the coming decades in Colorado and the rest of the Upper Colorado River Basin, communities should consider what kind of insurance is needed, argues a new report coauthored by Anne Castle ('81), senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School.

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Protecting Water Rights for Colorado Farmers

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:38:26 +0000

Protecting Water Rights for Colorado Farmers Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/03/2019 - 13:38

Gregor MacGregor (’19)

Acequia Project Completes Multi-Year Case Assisting Southern Colorado Farmers

220 miles south of Denver—a stone’s throw from the New Mexico border—lies the small town of San Luis, Colorado, population 629. Established in 1851, San Luis is Colorado’s oldest town and is populated by the predominantly Hispanic families who settled there almost two centuries ago. The town remains close to its past, with many of its traditions still intact. Among those traditions are its acequias, or irrigation trenches, which reflect a centuries-old method of irrigation and community-based water sharing. Operated according to the principles of equity, communal governance, and mutual support, the acequias ensure that each family in the community has enough water for domestic use, gardening, and subsistence farming and ranching purposes.

Introduced by the Spanish and Mexican families who settled in the American Southwest before it became part of the United States, acequias operated informally for generations, with many remaining unincorporated and without bylaws. However, their future became unclear after the U.S. acquired these communities in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, and after Colorado became a state in 1876.

Colorado’s strict water law of prior appropriation—"first in time, first in right"—is fundamentally at odds with the equitable principles of acequia governance, which operate under the "one family, one vote" principle. With the mandatory adjudication of rights in water courts following Colorado’s principles, acequia communities faced a difficult question: how do they preserve an important tradition while living in modern times?

Some communities obtained decrees for their preexisting water rights, only to lose half of the water to promoters and speculators. Others never made the 40-mile trip to Alamosa to adjudicate their rights in court and continued to irrigate as their ancestors had for generations. Although Colorado’s territorial legislature had recognized the Spanish "right of thirst" (a pillar of acequia communities), the state’s new constitution made no mention of acequias, excluding them from Colorado’s legal framework. Acequias had to take on the guise of mutual ditch companies under law, even though they continued their traditional practices.

Professor Sarah Krakoff

This all changed in 2009 when Colorado passed the Acequia Recognition Law, which permitted community ditches established prior to Colorado statehood to incorporate as acequia ditch corporations. This was welcome news and granted acequias the legal power to preserve their traditional institutions, but Peter Nichols ('01), who worked on the legislation, recognized that acequia members in the San Luis Valley needed more than just the statute to keep their acequias alive and thriving. He called on Colorado Law Professor Sarah Krakoff for help.

"He asked, do you have a couple students who could write a handbook on Colorado water law for some communities down in the San Luis Valley?" Krakoff said.

What Krakoff and Nichols had envisioned would take a summer—drafting the handbook, which is now in its third edition—ended up taking more than two years to complete. "We quickly realized that just drafting the handbook was not going to give the farmers and irrigators the assistance they needed," Krakoff said.

In August 2012, Krakoff, Nichols, Sarah Parmar of Colorado Open Lands, and Ryan Golten, a former New Mexico Legal Services attorney, decided the best way to implement the Acequia Recognition Statute was to provide no-cost legal assistance to acequias. They would help them draft bylaws and affirm their water rights in water court.

The group presented the idea to the board of the Sangre de Cristo Acequia Association, a San Luis-based nonprofit representing more than 73 acequias, which supported the project. That fall they began to recruit students and paired them with pro bono attorneys. Since then, the teams having been helping acequia organizations incorporate, conducting governance reviews for existing acequia corporations, and helping individual irrigators understand and secure their water rights.

A Longtime Case Comes to a Close

Colorado Law students with Charlie Jacquez, a client of the Acequia Project.

The project recently completed one of its most ambitious and technical cases, spanning four years and nine law students. Charlie Jacquez, a descendent of one of the original settlers of San Luis and an acequia commissioner, reached out in 2015 for assistance drafting bylaws for his acequia, the Montez Ditch, but it was unclear who exactly had rights to the ditch. The team quickly recognized that this was not going to be an easy case. There were 22 properties on the Montez Ditch with potential water rights, each of which required a chain-of-title on their complex history, several groundwater springs, and legal questions about an upstream goldmine.

Water law attorneys Kelcey Nichols and Ryan Jarvis and paralegal Rebecca Moller joined the case as the students combed through records of the Costilla County Clerk and Recorder’s Office. Since the county had only digitized its most recent records, students needed to physically travel to its office. The team made eight-hour roundtrips to examine deeds reaching back to before Colorado’s statehood, often written in Spanish.

As students moved back in time through the indices, handwriting became harder to decipher, they discovered pages and whole books of records were missing, and they feared that the trail would be lost in a community where Anglo-American law and custom had been laid over Hispanic culture. Two years later, the students had assembled enough documents to write an opinion on each of the properties’ rights to water on the ditch. The final report totaled 400 pages, representing the group’s collective 875 hours of pro bono work.

"We could never have afforded this work on our own. We’ve gained a lot of administrative tools and can move forward with our work on the acequia. Before [working with the Acequia Project], the big fear was that we were going to lose our water, that someone with a lot of money was going to come in and grab our rights. We know now we can defend against that."
Charlie Jacquez, client

In April 2019, the Acequia Project came together to celebrate completing the Montez Ditch case and share what they had learned from the case with the law school community. Though the Montez Ditch case is complete, the Acequia Project’s work in southern Colorado remains ongoing. Students and their supervising attorneys continue to help acequias write their bylaws, bring unadjudicated water rights into court, and tackle important questions in the community through socially engaged scholarship.

Professor Sarah Krakoff, far left, and Peter Nichols ('01), far right, with Colorado Law students at the Sangre de Cristo Acequia Association's annual Congreso de Acequia in January 2019.

This story originally appeared in the fall 2019 issue of Amicus.

Colorado Law's Acequia Project completes a multi-year case assisting southern Colorado farmers.

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