A prickly path

The push is on to carve a 100-foot-wide swath through prairies, farms and neighborhoods between Pueblo Reservoir and Colorado Springs, to make way for a 66-inch water pipeline. The line, part of the $1.1 billion Southern Delivery System, is expected to deliver 78 million gallons a day by 2016, increasing the city's water supply by a third and driving up water bills by an average of 12 percent a year from 2011 to 2016. City Council recently approved spending $916,000 to purchase 14 tracts, including four homes in Pueblo West, the first properties acquired in the pipeline's path. And it's only the start. Colorado Springs Utilities plans to pay $25 million for roughly 300 properties totaling 2,900 acres in Pueblo and El Paso counties within the next two years. Not everyone is so willing. Gary Walker loathes the idea of losing 93 of his 70,000 acres between Penrose and Interstate 25 for the pipeline. The 63-year-old rancher is still sore from dealing with Utilities in the 1970s, when he was forced through condemnation to provide land for the Fountain Valley Authority water line. Not only is the easement itself barren now, he says, but blowing dirt and sand "literally killed hundreds of acres" of his farm and ranch land. Moreover, he's perturbed the new line won't use the Fountain Valley line's easement, but instead will cut another gouge up to a mile away...read more