Denver’s southern suburbs have a
rich, new-car smell. Emboldened by information-technology
employers, Douglas County during the ‘90s was the
nation’s fastest-growing county. It also ranked among the
nation’s elite in per capita income, education and other
measures of affluence.
In short, this region of sleek and
slinky subdivisions looks and feels an awful lot like the sprawling
suburbs of Los Angeles in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In fact,
many of its new residents during the ‘90s came from
California.
But for all their luxuriant golf courses that
roll up toward the Colorado Rockies, Denver’s southern
suburbs in Douglas County and unincorporated Arapahoe County are in
a pinch. Their hurried growth is based on an exhaustible water
supply. Wells for this oasis civilization are running dry.
Some say this underground body of water, called the Denver Aquifer,
will hold out for 1,000 years, others say only 30 or 40. What is
known is that existing wells produce steadily diminishing volumes
of water every year, sometimes only a third as much. Wells must be
dug deeper and deeper. Replumbing this subterranean water supply
could be enormously expensive.
But in the West, who pays
their own way in water? For most of the 20th century the federal
government played the role of an uncommonly generous banker to
Westerners in need of water.
The largest project, what
the late historian David Lavender called a “massive violation of
geography,” was the Colorado-Big Thompson diversion. That project,
launched during the dusty, hard-bitten 1930s, takes water from the
snow-clogged headwaters of the Colorado River through the
Continental Divide onto the rich but dry lands of the high plains,
creating irrigated farms even to the Colorado-Nebraska border. Now,
those farms are being steadily converted into subdivisions around
Boulder, Greeley and other small cities. Colorado Big-Thompson
water that once grew grains and vegetables now grows lawns and
flushes toilets.
After another drought, in the 1950s, a
similar project occurred elsewhere in Colorado. Launched by
President Kennedy in 1962, the Fryingpan-Arkansas moves water from
streams near Aspen to Colorado Springs and Pueblo, on the Denver
side of the Rockies. In both cases, water destined to flow west via
the Colorado River is now used along the Front Range.
Today, after yet another drought, there’s a cry for more
storage. The latest scheme is called Referendum A, which would
authorize state-backed bonding of some $2 billion for water
projects to be determined by the governor. Not surprisingly, Gov.
Bill Owens is also the chief lobbyist for Referendum A.
The suburbs Referendum A is designed for have several options, none
easy. They can seek to convert water now used for agriculture for
their subdivisions. Call this trading beef steaks for survey
stakes. Altogether, 93 percent of Colorado’s water is devoted
to agriculture, and 80 percent of that is used to grow alfalfa,
corn and other crops used to feed livestock. In other words, about
two-thirds of Colorado’s water goes to steaks and hamburgers.
It would seem that the water could easily be diverted from farms to
cities.
But Colorado’s self-image is grounded in
pastoral pleasantness. Buying farms for their water is only a step
above selling your sister into the sex trade.
A second
option for Denver’s southern suburbs is to bore tunnels and
lay pipelines for the hundreds of miles necessary to access what
little water is not already claimed on the western side of the
Continental Divide. This also would prevent water from getting to
Las Vegas and California. Like the cry of “The Utes must go” of 125
years ago, the common refrain of any successful politician in
Colorado is: “No water for California.”
Still, even the
bogeyman of California hasn’t united Coloradans. With few
exceptions, Colorado’s Western Slope residents see Referendum
A as an uncouth guest, the kind who moves in but fails to chip in
for groceries. Even most Republicans from these more rural areas
have broken ranks to oppose Referendum A.
Support is
stronger in eastern Colorado, but the large cities of Denver,
Aurora and Colorado Springs see nothing in this for them. Democrats
actively oppose it, and many Republicans have remained quiet. Yet
this scheme could get approved. Proponents have a large campaign
chest, and not least, they have highly visible enemies to blame for
the trouble — drought and California.
But the real enemy
remains the build-now, pay-later mentality of these suburbs.
Government authorities for two decades routinely approved
subdivision after subdivision, predicated only on exhaustible,
underground supplies. It would be, they correctly surmised,
somebody else’s problem.
Well, they were right. It
is now our problem. What’s doubtful is the solution on the
Colorado ballot Nov. 4.
Allen Best is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives and writes in the Denver
area.
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