The 1989 baseball movie “Field of Dreams” is best known for originating the familiar catchphrase, “If you build it, they will come.”
But along the booming but semi-arid
northern Front Range, if reservoirs aren’t built to store mountain
snowmelt and water becomes too expensive, will they still come?
“We are in the thick of that debate,”
said Reagan Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute at Colorado
State University in Fort Collins. “In a sense, water becomes a proxy
war for growth management.”
Municipalities, developers and
agriculture interests are trying to figure out how to provide enough
water to supply a population expected to double in the next few decades.
If more water-storage reservoirs are built, the new residents and
businesses will come, said Eric Wilkinson, general manager of the
Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, known locally as Northern
Water, “but if we don’t build it, they’re still going to come anyway. “Controlling growth by limiting water? Possibly if you’re living on the moon.
New housing affected
Not that the rising cost of water hasn’t
stalled the inevitable, said developer Landon Hoover, president of
Timnath-based Hartford Homes.
“It’s delayed some developments. We are
limited in the number that we can do because of the magnitude of the
water cost. It just stretches resources,” Hoover said. “Generally
speaking, water is now more than the raw land cost. Five or 10 years
ago, water was around $6,000 a house. Now it’s anywhere from $22,500 to
$30,000.”
The area served by Northern Water has a
population of 880,000 people, Werner said, but the state demographer
expects that to grow to as many as 1.5 million by 2050.
“Seven of the 10 fastest-growing cities in Colorado are in Northern’s boundaries,” he said. “We can’t ignore it.”
The growth is coming, Hoover agreed. “To not prepare for that is unwise.”
NISP to the rescue?
Northern Water wants to prepare for that
growth by building the Northern Integrated Supply Project. If approved,
NISP would include construction of a pair of reservoirs that, combined,
could store more than 215,000 acre-feet of water, 40,000 of which would
be allocated to municipal water supplies annually.
About a dozen cities and towns and four
water districts have signed up to buy water from the NISP project if it
wins final approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Supporters,
including the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry, the
Northern Colorado Legislative Alliance and many other business- and
agriculture-backed groups, see the project as crucial to keeping up with
the growing demands of development, industry and agriculture along the
Front Range.
Opponents have said the project would
drain water from the Poudre as it flows through Fort Collins, limiting
opportunities for recreation, including tubing, whitewater kayaking and
fishing.
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