Pipeline plan hits obstacles

Eleven years and $59.6 million after the city settled on a plan to build a pipeline from Pueblo Reservoir, the project remains just that, a plan.

Not one leg of the 43-mile line has been laid, a reservoir hasn’t been built and the water treatment plant is still a vision.

Many Colorado water projects have been planned, but few have been built since a wave of environmental laws went on the books in the early 1970s.

Add to that the increasing competition among cities, and it seems hard to assume Colorado Springs’ Southern Delivery System will leave the drawing board.

Substantial roadblocks have stymied the city’s effort to bring 78 million gallons a day of water it owns from Pueblo Dam.

Among them:

- A far-reaching environmental study that began in 2003.

- Legal battles triggered by opposition from Pueblo County commissioners.

- Negotiations to acquire land for the pipeline from Pueblo Dam to northeast Colorado Springs and a reservoir.

Growth is driving the project. The new system will be needed to serve the 23,000-acre Banning Lewis Ranch on the city’s northeast side, Colorado Springs Utilities officials say, and other expansion, including growth to the north and to the south at Fort Carson, which expects to get 7,500 more soldiers by 2010. It also would provide backup supply for a system largely dependent on aging transmountain systems.

SDS, as the project is called, would be built in two phases. Utilities officials say the first is needed by 2012; estimated cost: $623 million in 2007 dollars for pipe, pump stations, a treatment plant and distribution lines capable of moving 50 million gallons a day.

The second phase, estimated at up to $500 million, includes a storage reservoir, return flow reservoir and expanded treatment capacity to accommodate another 180 million gallons a day.

Officials insist they’ll deliver water when it’s needed, but they’re reluctant to pin down a date when SDS will be on line and have no other options for delivering a large amount of water in the meantime.

Water projects didn’t used to be so difficult.

The Colorado-Big Thompson, the state’s largest transmountain diversion system with four power plants, 12 reservoirs, 35 miles of tunnels, 95 miles of canals and 700 miles of transmission lines, began construction in 1938 after a three-year survey period. It was finished in 1957.

Construction of the Fryingpan-Arkansas project, from which the SDS water will come, began in 1964. It was authorized by Congress on Aug. 6, 1962, and 10 days later President John F. Kennedy visited Pueblo to commemorate the bill.

The project began delivering water for agricultural and municipal use in 1975.

Since then, two key actions have hampered water projects.

First, the National Environmental Policy Act, adopted in 1970, requires federal agencies to investigate environmental effects of projects that involve the federal government and recommend ways to reduce or offset those effects.

Projects can languish for years as experts analyze mountains of data. Such delays and subsequent changes can drive costs sky high.

“It’s very hard to do a major project now because the best sites are already developed,” said David Getches, dean of the University of Colorado Law School, former executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and one-time consultant to the Interior secretary.

“Secondly, the construction of a big project has all sorts of land use and environmental implications,” he added. “Nobody wants the pipeline going through their yard. They don’t want a dam near them. We have environmental issues that make it hard for the development to occur without interfering with species, water quality and wildlife.”

SDS won’t have to navigate through some of those issues. The project takes no water from the West Slope, envisions no dam on a river and no endangered species have surfaced.

But it does propose to draw water from the Bureau of Reclamation-owned Pueblo Dam. The dam is part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas project to which El Paso County residents have contributed by far the most of any county — $65 million in property taxes in the past 47 years.

The bureau’s environmental review has been exhaustive. “We’ve had thousands of components involved in hundreds of configurations,” bureau spokeswoman Kara Lamb said.

After holding public meetings as far away as Buena Vista and La Junta, the bureau narrowed the pool to seven alternatives that bring water from the Arkansas River to Colorado Springs — six via a pipeline adjacent to Interstate 25 and one with a pipeline along Colorado Highway 115.

The bureau might add an eighth option — 100 percent recycling and reclamation.

The bureau is expected to issue a draft environmental impact statement late this year; a public comment period will follow.

“We’ll see if any comments have new scientific information that might change something we already looked at and see if that justifies restudy,” Lamb said.

She refused to guess how much time that could add but said environmental studies can span from three to 10 years.

After a decision is issued, the city can proceed.

“The municipality doesn’t have to follow the (decision),” Lamb said. “They’re free to change their mind and do something else but would not be free to use reclamation facilities or contracts to do what they want to do.”

What Colorado Springs wants to do is lay pipe from the dam across Pueblo County, but a standoff has developed because of the other action that wasn’t a factor 33 years ago.

In 1974, the Legislature adopted House Bill 1041, empowering counties to establish regulations for “areas and activities of state interest,” including municipal water and wastewater facilities.

Eagle County imposed stringent 1041 rules that forced Utilities to abandon its effort to add a collection project to its Homestake system.

Now, Pueblo County commissioners are poised to do the same to SDS.

Pueblo County’s 1041 rules were adopted soon after the bill was enacted and remained unchanged until 2005, when they were revised to make it more difficult for a pipeline project to be permitted, Utilities spokesman Steve Berry said.

Commissioner Loretta Kennedy disagreed the rules are oppressive.

“That’s totally untrue,” she said, noting several large projects, including power plants, are meeting the rules as they build right now.

“We are not against anything,” she added. “I do not believe the (SDS) 1041 application would cause a problem at all for that permitting process.”

Berry said Springs officials think the 1041 rules, which are “far too restrictive,” could hamstring the project.

Aggravating the situation are Colorado Springs’ chronic sewage spills into Fountain Creek, which joins the Arkansas River near downtown Pueblo. Pueblo commissioners and other residents are concerned any plan to infuse more water into the Springs system guarantees more water flushed into the creek, further polluting and eroding it.

Colorado Springs has a court case pending that seeks an exemption from Pueblo’s 1041 regulations and argues the matter should be decided by an El Paso County District judge because most of the pipeline will lie in El Paso County, not Pueblo County.

The state Supreme Court disagreed, sending the matter to Pueblo District Court, which will decide if the 1041 rules apply to the city’s project.

Further complicating matters is a bill recently introduced by Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., that calls for a socioeconomic environmental impact study of water transfers from the Arkansas Basin before Pueblo Reservoir can be expanded.

The bill may go nowhere, but Utilities thinks it undermines efforts to strike deals with lower basin water users where the city wants to marshal support for SDS.

That support has largely been sealed in intergovernmental agreements in which various agencies agree to back one another’s agendas. For example, one pact involving the city, Pueblo, Pueblo Board of Water Works and Aurora provides ample flows from the dam through Pueblo to keep Pueblo’s Riverwalk park viable. In exchange, Pueblo officials say they’ll support the pipeline.

Only one agreement, with the Lower Arkansas River Conservancy District, carries a price tag: $150,000 to coordinate study of Fountain Creek.

But other measures to appease opponents have cost millions. Among those is a $10 million water diversion project on the Springs’ south side designed to sidetrack sewage spilled into Fountain Creek.

Even more costly is the City Council’s action to impose stormwater fees, which will generate about $15 million annually from property owners to build channels and drains. Although the primary purpose is to prevent local flooding, council members have acknowledged the move plays to Pueblo’s concerns about Fountain Creek.

“This is not an easy challenge,” said Bruce McCormick, Utilities chief of water services. “We are working very hard with constituents around the region for support for our preferred option. We want to be a good neighbor.”

If and when approvals are obtained for SDS, the city would face the task of patching together right of way for the pipeline and acquiring land for a storage reservoir. For storage, the city has two options — Upper Williams Creek southeast of town, which is owned by the state and a half-dozen citizens, and Jimmy Camp Creek in the northeast part of the city.

The preferred site is Jimmy Camp Creek. The city paid $6.4 million for 400 Jimmy Camp acres from 2003 to 2005 in deals so controversial they triggered a rewrite of the city’s realestate acquisition procedures.

The remaining 1,400 acres are owned by Banning Lewis Ranch Management Co.

The company, which has escorted council members on tours to explain the land’s value, reportedly wants $150,000 an acre, or $210 million, the land’s purported value 20 years from now.

Utilities officials plan to hire a land firm within the next month to handle land acquisitions. That will consume part of the $9.7 million the city plans to spend this year on SDS.

Should those steps take longer than five years, the city will be looking for ways to bridge the gap.

Utilities water manager Gary Bostrom said some water could be pumped from wells and squeezed from a small existing pipeline from Pueblo Dam. But those efforts would be “scraping the bottom of the barrel on our system to get a little more water,” he said.

McCormick says everything will work out.

“I think there’s a misconception in the community that we may only have one option to do that,” he said. “In fact, we have many options to do that.”