Pueblo gains voice in Fountain Creek talks

Jane Rhodes has lived beside Fountain Creek all her life and, at 70, still farms 1,100 acres next to it in Pueblo County.

As a child, she scampered through the shallow and crystal-clear stream to play with neighbors on the other side.

During the 1965 flood, she watched turbulent waters build two-story walls of debris from uprooted cottonwoods, willows, sand and dirt.

Today, the creek is a dirty, unpredictable river whose velocities and volumes reflect the growth of Colorado Springs, she said.

“More and more, water comes from the north,” she said. “The more growth north, the more cement, asphalt and what have you. Now, it is not a creek. Now, it’s a big river.”

Today, Rhodes is at the table with elected officials from Pueblo, Colorado Springs and Fountain trying to find ways to restrain and reshape the creek.

Called the Fountain Creek Vision Task Force, the group of 28 entities, including Sen. Ken Salazar’s office, hopes to make the creek a ribbon of trails, wetlands and flood-control projects.

“This time,” Rhodes said, “we finally are being recognized. Finally we are all sitting at the table to find out what to do. Let’s do something.”

Flooding in the Fountain Creek watershed, which extends from Woodland Park and Palmer Lake to Pueblo, isn’t new. Nor is pollution. As early as 1820, an explorer noted in his journal the creek was so befouled with buffalo dung that campers couldn’t use the water to brew coffee.

Early settlers chronicled how cloudbursts swelled the creek to a “swift flowing river.”

The creek had devastating floods in 1935 and 1965 and several times since.

What’s different today is that more people live near Fountain Creek and rely on it for irrigation and domestic water supplies and to dispose of treated wastewater.

The creek carries more water than would naturally drain into it, because Colorado Springs gets about 85 percent of its water from transmountain sources and discharges treated effluent into the creek.

Those flows will increase if Colorado Springs builds the Southern Delivery System. The pipeline from Pueblo Reservoir, which would bring 78 million gallons a day to a city on the verge of developing an additional 20,000 acres, would double the amount of return flows in the creek from imported water.

Today, the creek’s average flow is 165 cubic feet per second, of which 37 percent is wastewater discharge.

But in 1999, after a heavy snow and pouring rains, water hurtled down the creek at 20,000 cfs, damaging sewer lines and overwhelming the Las Vegas Street sewage plant. About 70 million gallons of sewage spilled into the creek.

Erosion carved away acres of soil, prompting about 50 El Paso County property owners to seek property tax reductions because of the loss of land.

Rhodes did, too. Her family’s 1,500 acres have been shaved by 400 acres through the years, largely in 1999.

The creek’s 1,000-foot drop in elevation from Colorado Springs to Pueblo County speeds the water.

“By the time it gets down here, it’s rolling,” she said, pointing to the remains of a concrete and steel bridge swept away in 1999.

Flooding has changed the creek’s course several times. A half-mile swath of Rhodes’ grazing land today is an unusable scum-covered swamp and brush-filled lowland.

In the late 1990s, Rhodes got involved with the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments Fountain Creek Watershed Technical Advisory Committee, formed to provide technical input for studies.

It’s not the only effort aimed at the creek. Some others:

- In 1988, the U.S. Geological Survey developed a way to estimate transit losses for return flows of transmountain water discharged into the creek from Colorado Springs to the Arkansas River east of Pueblo. The USGS also set up a water-quality monitoring program on Fountain Creek.

- The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is studying the creek’s E. coli bacteria levels. E. coli results from fecal pollution and can cause intestinal disease and death. Pueblo has routinely warned residents to avoid the creek’s water because of elevated E. coli levels. The warnings often followed Springs sewage spills, which led state regulators in 2005 to impose record fines on the city.

The $450,000 study, for which Colorado Springs will pay a third, is testing DNA of E. coli samples to determine the source — animal or human, which will point to the bacteria’s origin, the first step in remedial action.

“There may be some people or an area contributing who may not know they’re contributing,” Springs Councilman Jerry Heimlicher said at a recent meeting. “They may be able to make some steps to stop it from getting there.”

Springs Utilities regulatory services supervisor Keith Riley noted E. coli levels are highest during storms, which flush backyards and rural wildlife areas as well as parking lots and streets. “There are contributors from outside Colorado Springs,” he said. “It doesn’t just come just from Colorado Springs.”

- The biggest study is a $3 million project by the Army Corps of Engineers that looks at erosion, sedimentation and flooding. Started in 2000 and due next year, it will recommend construction projects. It’s a list eagerly awaited by the task force, which wants to create a new vehicle to oversee the work. No one knows where funding will come from.

But some members and their constituents are tired of studies.

“In Pueblo, there’s an urgency,” Pueblo City Councilwoman Vera Ortegon said at a recent task force meeting. “We need to focus on the actual management, and we need to focus on that now. We’ve studied quality and quantity to death.”

Charles Wilson, the Corps’ plan formulator, admits it’s been a long haul.

Funding has been patched together with federal, state and local money, and 11 local sponsors, who have given amounts from $3,000 to $500,000.

“It can be difficult to reach agreement,” Wilson said, adding that overall, cooperation has been surprisingly good.

But the creek hasn’t cooperated. Every major storm shifts the waterway’s banks, rendering data gathered four or five years ago suspect, Wilson said.

“If we took cross section data four years ago, in a lot of cases that cross section won’t look like that today,” he said.

For example, the Corps analyzed changes in channel length and how it has meandered and straightened from 1955 to 2003.

Still, Wilson insisted the data is “representative” and adequate to support the Corps’ long-term project recommendations, which could include a dam, levees or wetlands.

Another hitch is that Colorado Springs has jumped the gun on its flood-control projects, which could complicate the Corps’ ability to analyze data.

Using money collected from its controversial stormwater enterprise fees, the city is stabilizing banks on Sand Creek and doing other work on Cottonwood Creek, both major factors in the watershed.

“They’re at the point they can’t wait for us anymore,” Wilson said. “They’ve gotten ahead of us. My concern is the things we come up with in the watershed study, those things don’t contradict each other. We want to make sure they work well together.”

The city’s projects are funded with stormwater fees put in place this year without a vote of the people, belying Ortegon’s sense that urgency is lacking, Heimlicher said.

“We did it because it had to be done and it had to be done now,” he said. “We’re dealing with a gigantic ship that’s been going the same way for hundreds of thousands of years, and we’re trying to change its course. That’s not going to happen overnight.”

Springs Utilities, too, is busy. It started a sewer system upgrade in 2000 and has fortified dozens of pipes that cross channels. It also spent $10 million on a project that allows the city to divert tainted creek water for retreatment.

In addition, the city has shifted its policy on drainage by abandoning concrete channels that speed water along, in favor of requiring developers to detain the water on site to slow its journey.

Those steps and the recent push for answers for Fountain Creek are unquestionably linked to the city’s plan to pipe water from Pueblo Reservoir.

Pueblo County, which has felt the brunt of Fountain Creek’s woes, is likely to have authority over how and where the pipeline is built under its land-use regulations. Some Pueblo residents, such as Pueblo Chieftain Publisher Bob Rawlings, oppose the project.

The Springs has been busy signing up partners to quell opposition. This spring, it struck a deal with water-rights owners in the lower Arkansas Valley, calling for each to pay $300,000 to draft a Fountain Creek master plan.

The city also is active on the task force.

“Not having a regional consensus of what the problems are and what the solutions are has prevented projects from going forward,” said Springs Utilities water services manager Bruce McCormick. “The Vision Task Force is the best hope for coordination.”

Such pronouncements give some hope that the effort, this time, is more than just talk.

The prospect of a repeat of the 1965 flood brings a shudder to Pueblo Councilman Lawrence Atencio.

“It missed my house by half a block,” he said. “I remember as a 17-year-old working that summer and fall to dig all the mud out from all the homes down there. All my friends from a block away were completely washed out,” he said.

Today, sediment has built an 8-foot dike in places, making a flood more likely.

“We’re going to have to manage that somehow. Now is the time to start,” he said.

“Everyone involved in Fountain Creek is going to have to pony up.”

Rhodes feels she’s given up plenty and fears what more water from Colorado Springs’ additional growth will mean.

“It will wipe us all out,” she said. “When land is gone, it’s gone forever. You cannot get it back.”

FOUNTAIN CREEK WATERSHED

The Fountain Creek watershed includes eight municipalities (Woodland Park, Green Mountain Falls, Manitou Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake, Colorado Springs, Fountain and Pueblo) and three counties (El Paso, Pueblo and Teller).

Creeks within the Fountain Creek watershed contribute about 15 percent of the drinking water for Colorado Springs and are a source of irrigation for more than 100 farms and ranches. The other 85 percent of Colorado Springs’ water is pumped from west of the Continental Divide, and after use, this water is treated and discharged into Fountain Creek.

As Colorado Springs’ population has increased, so has its water consumption and the runoff from its expanding system of storm sewers. Most of this water winds up in Fountain Creek. The mean annual flow of Fountain Creek has risen from a historical average of approximately 60 cubic feet per second to more than 230 cfs.

Flooding and erosion along the creek have accelerated the loss of aquatic and wetland habitats, contributed to the loss of hundreds of acres of productive farmland, and caused the foundations of roads and homes to crumble.

Parts of Pueblo’s downtown business district lie directly within the historic floodplain of Fountain Creek. Pueblo’s history includes devastating floods in 1921, 1935 and 1965.

PIKES PEAK AREA COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENTS