County News

By Roger Baker
County Manager

2/16/2006 - A great deal of Tuesday’s meeting of the Gilpin County Commissioners was taken up with our water attorney Rick Fendel’s discussion of the arcane field of water law and some of the issues pending for the County.

  While the old Courthouse gets its water from Central City, when the Justice Center was built, the County drilled two wells to supply its water. To get the kind of water rights we needed for such a large use, we had to prepare what’s called an Augmentation Plan.

  An Augmentation Plan has to be approved by the state water court, in Greeley; it’s based upon the principle that water you take out of a stream has to be replaced without harm—lessening either the quality or quantity of the stream flow—for downstream users.

  There are basically three watersheds in Gilpin County—South Boulder Creek at the north end, Ralston Creek in mid-county, and Clear Creek at the south end. What makes our use particularly tricky is that our wells are very close to the divide between the Ralston and Clear Creek watersheds, with most of the water coming from the Ralston Creek side. But our main discharge from the Justice Center goes into Clear Creek, as we’re connected to the sewer line that runs down to the Black Hawk-Central City Sanitation District treatment plant.

  We had applied when we built the Justice Center for the water court to approve our Augmentation Plan, but we were still waiting—operating under temporary approvals granted by the state water engineer—when we complicated things still further by building the Exhibit Building and Community Center. So now we have to file to amend a plan which hasn’t even been approved yet.

  A lot of these water issues essentially deal with paper transactions; we own several shares of Tucker Lake water, which is down off of Highway 93. Obviously, we don’t pump that water back uphill, but we can “use” it as part of our Augmentation Plan.

  But there is one real practical and noticeable use related to our water rights, and that has to do with our water storage in Dory Lake. We have an arrangement with their homeowners’ association to store some of “our” water—the water that we get credit for as another part of our Augmentation Plan. It’s a win-win situation, as the lake stays fuller, and refills more quickly, than it would under the “junior” water rights the association owns.

  We’re hoping that we can get a final decree—an unconditional approval of our Augmentation Plan—sometime this year. It’s been a long, and expensive, process. But it’s necessary for conducting the people’s business here in the mountains, and I’m sure we’ll have still more changes as we grow in the future.