Water Wars No More

Political division crumbles in light of Referendum A

By Shawn O’Bryant

The Continental Divide, which runs through Colorado’s Rocky Mountain backbone, has historically been a symbol of division and conflict within Colorado’s voting population.

Last Tuesday’s poles however, in which voters defeated Referendum A with a 64-percent vote against the measure, could represent the first consensus on water issues between western Colorado and the Front Range in over 100 years.

“I think that the age-old water wars were really not the issue regarding Referendum A,” said Joseph Levi, a resident of Colorado Springs, after casting his vote at downtown’s Palmer High School.

If passed, Referendum A would have allowed the Colorado Water Conservation Board, appointed and spearheaded by Governor Bill Owens, to borrow up to $2 billion worth of bonds to fund yet unnamed Colorado water projects.

Each year, 3.2 million acre feet of Colorado River water, which is entitled to the state, slips downstream to other thirsty states such as Nevada and California. The borrowed money would likely go to a variety projects that would focus on retaining that water.

Although repayment costs of the loan could run as high as $4 billion, for many Coloradans, the referendum represented an end to future droughts such as the one which gripped Colorado last year.

“If Referendum A does not pass, we will have a shortage in a short amount of time,” said Coy Osburn, a Colorado Springs Paramedic who worries about the frequency of drought. “We must secure the water for ourselves or it will be a hot situation around here.”

Although many Front Range residents agree with Osburn, and would generally support large-scale water projects, many decided that the wording of Referendum A was just too vague.

“Essentially the idea is to give the governor a blank check to do what he would like with that money instead of the voters having more say,” said Lenox Powell, a 24-year-old resident of Colorado Springs.

“If it did pass it would give the governor a lot of open leeway to make a lot of political decisions in the name of the state as opposed to what the voters necessarily want on how water is allocated.”

Greg Buettner, another Colorado Springs resident, also seemed concerned.

“It does bother me that the projects are unnamed,” said Buettner, who worried that the places in the highest need would probably never have seen any revenue from the referendum.

“You have to get a feasibility study,” he added. “If you don’t have the feasibility study then you can’t get the project considered and the feasibility study may cost too much, especially for the outer areas of the state that really need the projects.”

For Patrick Magee, a West Slope resident and an ecology professor at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, the referendum was negative for an entirely different reason.

“It is a way of dealing with the symptoms instead of getting to the heart of the problems,” he said. Like many West Slope residents who have dealt with Front Range metropolitan centers such as Denver and Colorado Springs continually lobbying for western Colorado water, he is sick of the politics.

“In general, the West Slope is unsupportive of Referendum A due to fear of trans-mountain diversions,” he said.

Magee, like many other water environmentalists, believe that the future focus of Colorado should be on conservation rather than taking more water from already depleted watersheds. “We should be figuring out ways to leave water in the rivers rather than better ways to take it,” said Magee.

Governor Owens has said that the money will not be used for Front Range diversions in a number of speeches, including last year's Water Conference held in Gunnison. “The era of trans-mountain diversions without the approval of both sides of the mountain is over,” he said, according to the Rocky Mountain News website.

However, his promise does not mean enough to many West Slope Coloradans. Due to the power the governor would have wielded with Referendum A funds, some worried that a change in governor could also equal a change in financing and water policy. “Owens could be in office for years but after that, the next governor can do whatever he wants,” said Magee.

Whether the reasons are economic, mistrust of Governor Owens, or conservation, Referendum A now stands as a symbol of agreement on key state-wide water issues. Although their motives differ, Coloradans on either side of the continental divide are mutually concerned and skeptical about plunging the state into debt for unnamed projects and unguaranteed results.

"It is just not worth it for either side of the state," said Joseph Levi.

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