Backup pipeline proposal leaves Pueblo up a creek

Developments in the coming year could radically change the look of the beleaguered Southern Delivery System, a $1 billion water project designed to supply water to Colorado Springs during the next three decades.

Recent interviews suggest even a different version of the controversial project would have its own implications and perils. And, ironically, it wouldn’t satisfy even the most bitter opponent of the pipeline project from Pueblo Reservoir, Pueblo Chieftain publisher Bob Rawlings.

In fact, an altered project might be a classic case of being careful of what you wish for, warned two political leaders from Pueblo and Colorado Springs.

In October, lawyers for Colorado Springs Utilities will be in District Court in Pueblo to challenge land-use regulations imposed by Pueblo County they say are designed to derail the pipeline system.

The utility has spent about $60 million planning a project that would pump water it owns in Pueblo Reservoir 40-plus miles through Pueblo and El Paso counties to Colorado Springs.

Utilities officials expect a judge’s decision in the civil suit by the end of the year. After that, possibly in December 2008, the Bureau of Reclamation is scheduled to release its decision on which of seven pipeline alternatives it will permit.

Utilities officials publicly remain optimistic they can overturn Pueblo County’s land-use regulations, called 1041, and win the bureau’s support for a pipeline from Pueblo Reservoir.

If they lose in court, however, either in Pueblo or on appeal, or the bureau nixes their preferred plan, officials said recently that one pipeline alternative would work best.

That alternative, first suggested by Springs developer Mark Morley but altered by the bureau, would bypass Pueblo County altogether. Instead, the utility would take the water directly out of the Arkansas River in Fremont County and move it northward through a pipeline built along Colorado Highway 115.

The utility would need the permission of Colorado water courts to take the water out of the river instead of the reservoir, and engineers would have to solve some technical problems such as sedimentation peculiar to diverting water from a river.

Still, senior Utilities employees Gary Bostrom and Bruce McCormick said the alternative could deliver the same amount of water to Colorado Springs as a pipeline through Pueblo County, about 74,000 acre-feet a year. The pipeline, though, would cost Utilities customers about 10 percent more.

There could also be a cost to our neighbors to the south, said Colorado Springs Councilwoman Margaret Radford. If the utility has to run its project through Fremont County, Colorado Springs might be less inclined to work on issues important to Pueblo County, she said. Those include managing water flows on the Arkansas River, enlarging Pueblo Reservoir and lobbying lawmakers on issues of interest to Pueblo.

“If we can’t go through Pueblo County, clearly the accommodations, compromises and concessions yet to be made, none of that is going to happen and they’re going to lose some control over this project,” she said.

Radford said Pueblo County could lose pipeline construction jobs and wind up with less water in Pueblo Reservoir. The Springs would have to exchange its reservoir water upstream for the right to divert from the Arkansas River. Utility officials say the reduction shouldn’t be enough to affect recreation at the reservoir.

Pueblo City Councilman Randy Thurston said moving the pipeline project out of Pueblo County would be “devastating.” He said a rupture between the two cities would jeopardize regional cooperation on other water issues, including solving problems on Fountain Creek and assuring a flow of water to Arkansas Valley agriculture.

If Colorado Springs Utilities is forced into a Highway 115 pipeline route, Thurston said, “I would do everything to fight it.”

Even the most influential foe of the Southern Delivery System, the Chieftain’s Rawlings, thinks the Highway 115 pipeline would be the “worst of all worlds.”

That’s because the alternative being studied by the bureau would allow Colorado Springs to release the 74,000 acre-feet of treated effluent down Fountain Creek, which Rawlings believes is already overloaded with Colorado Springs’ treated wastewater.

Rawlings said he has no problems with Colorado Springs taking water out of the Pueblo Reservoir and sending it back down Fountain Creek. But before that happens, he said, he wants Colorado Springs to solve flooding, sedimentation and water-quality issues he believes are largely the result of unchecked growth in the Pikes Peak region.

“It’s only fair that Colorado Springs return the quality and quantity of water they take out,” he said. He believes the only sure way to to do that is to construct a dam on Fountain Creek to slow return flows and capture sewage spills.

Colorado Springs council members and Utilities officials have flatly rejected that suggestion, saying it wouldn’t work and would be horribly expensive. They have said Rawlings, despite what he may say, would never support a viable pipeline project no matter what Colorado Springs did.

“Rawlings has never had a rational reason for any of this,” Radford said. “My sense is he wants us to drink our own effluent, and it is based on his hatred of this city for his own reasons.”

There’s another potential obstacle: Fremont County. Commissioner Larry Lasha said it would be a mistake to believe the county is giddy over the prospect of hosting Colorado Springs’ pipeline project.

He said county commissioners have been briefed by Colorado Springs Utilities on the possible diversion from the Arkansas River. But he said it’s too early to say how likely that option is.

“Everything is conceptual right now,” he said. “We’re the ‘just in case’ right now. Are there pluses that go with it? Absolutely. Are there minuses that go with it? Absolutely.”

Lasha said county residents would have to look long and hard at the project and assure themselves it wouldn’t affect the quantity and quality of water that now flows down the Arkansas.

“There’s only so many straws that can be put in the river,” he said.

Building any water project in Colorado requires endless patience and boundless optimism. Radford and Utilities officials are confident the utility eventually will have a pipeline from Pueblo Reservoir, if only out of fair play:

Colorado Springs has long owned the water it stores in Pueblo Reservoir, and taxpayers here have paid 70 percent of the cost of building and maintaining the Fryingpan-Arkansas federal water project, of which the reservoir is a part.

“No one wants to talk about ultimatums and what-ifs,” Radford said. “The sense of regional cooperation that has come out of this — the agreements with the city of Pueblo, our work on stormwater and the Fountain — is absolutely the most important thing to happen in southern Colorado in a decade.”