Aurora keeps an eye on water gauge as it grows

LEADVILLE - Just 50 years ago, Aurora was a dusty bedroom community on the eastern outskirts of the much larger city of Denver.

Aurora relied on its much larger neighbor to the west for many things, including water.

Since 1960, the city has grown fivefold to a population of 300,000, and in the process it has carved a wide arc 100 miles to the south and west to bring water from the state’s three largest river basins into a rich soup fed by freeways, an international airport and military installations.

Upscale communities, planned neighborhoods, cookiecutter strip malls and apartment complexes are folded together in an eastward sweep that seems unstoppable.

City planners expect the city to reach a population of 450,000 by 2030. The city’s water department is focused on making sure the well doesn’t run dry.

“We’re making decisions similar to those in the 1950s, when the city would buy water from Denver,” Dana Ehlen, acting director of Aurora Water, told a busload of passengers looking at the water system last week. “Sometimes, the water would be shut off in the middle of the day..”

The water tour is a way for the city to explain its operations to interested citizens, such as other large water providers on the Front Range. Aurora’s tour also includes a healthy contingent of those who have leases, agreements or other water deals with the city.

Even though Aurora is enjoying an abundance of water this year — reservoirs are 95 percent full — the city is anything but complacent about its supply. Much of the trip was devoted to current water projects. But an equal amount of time was spent on mapping the future, such as a plan to recycle the city’s transmountain flows, called the Prairie Waters Project, or a cooperative agreement with the Western Slope to develop a groundwater basin under the former Camp Hale.

“We don’t believe, and our climatologists don’t believe, the drought is over,” Ehlen said.

The immediate future of Aurora Water is tied to the development of the $750 million Prairie Waters Project, an ambitious water reuse strategy that is attracting national attention.

Aurora is developing the water it owns by reusing its share of wastewater return in the South Platte River. Under Colorado water law, water introduced from other basins may be reused until it is gone. Agricultural water rights Aurora bought in the South Platte basin also may be reused, since only the historic consumptive use is transferred. Aurora initially could realize 10,000 acrefeet from the project by 2010.

“This project will be one of the most drought-hardened projects in the state,” Ehlen said.

This summer, Aurora broke ground on the site of the $200 million treatment plant at Aurora Reservoir. Water will be brought from a groundwater recharge field near Brighton, 30 miles to the north. After natural filtration through river banks and alluvial deposits, the water will be pumped uphill to the Aurora Reservoir site and further purified. There it will be treated again using a variety of measures and blended with other Aurora supplies.

“The engineering is unprecedented,” said Rob Brauer of CH2MHill Engineering, consultants for the project. “To bring a $750 million project online in six years is unheard of.”

While parts of the project are used in other water systems, this is the first time so many elements have been included in one project, he said.