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A Dry Look at Dry Gulch, Part One |
Bill Hudson | 2/9/09
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I haven’t seen Fred Schmidt around lately.
Mr. Schmidt was perhaps best known, in recent years, as the President of the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD), in which capacity he spent several years as the lead negotiator for the SJWCD and Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) as they have attempted to purchase $20 million of land north of Town for a planned 35,000 acre-foot reservoir. Needless to say, when you are negotiating that kind of purchase, you spend a lot of time attending public meetings: PAWSD and SJWCD water district meetings, Town Council meetings, BoCC meetings, Town Tourism Committee (TTC) meetings.
In Mr. Schmidt’s case, he also spent a considerable amount of time in the courtroom, defending himself against multiple charges of fraud and mishandling of funds in connection with his personal business dealings.
 I regularly attend some of these meetings myself, as a reporter for the Post, and I don’t recall seeing Mr. Schmidt at a single meeting for perhaps four months or more. The SJWCD has replaced him as its President — choosing the imminently sensible Ernie Amos to take over Fred’s gavel — and Mr. Schmidt was recently replaced as the Lodging Association’s representative to the TTC. Now I see that his downtown office on Lewis Street is available for lease or purchase.
Fred’s unexplained disappearance may be responsible, in part, for a seeming change of direction at SJWCD.
Under Schmidt’s leadership, the SJWCD had conjured up an intimate partnership with the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation Board (PAWSD) to collaborate on planning a reservoir in a large, dry gulch aptly known as Dry Gulch. The two water districts share numerous board members and staff, as noted below, which perhaps makes such collaborations more convenient:
PAWSD
Carrie Weiss, manager
Jack Delange, consultant
Karen Wessels, President
Windsor Chacey, board member
Harold Slavinsky, board member
Bob Huff, board member
Steve Hartvigsen, board member
SJWCD
Ernie Amos, President
Jack Delange, Secretary/Treasurer
Carrie Weiss, board member
Karen Wessels, board member
Windsor Chacey, board member
Harold Slavinski, board member
Pat Ullrich, board member
Fred Schmidt, board member
Mark Garcia, board member
Fred Ebeling, board member
The San Juan Water Conservancy District's primary purpose, according to its website, is “the preservation of the various water rights owned by individuals and entities within its District boundaries and to ensure that there are adequate water supplies to support the current and future growth of the community."
PAWSD, by contrast, is tasked with providing water service to the Town and much of the surrounding unincorporated areas.
“Due to the magnitude of the [Dry Gulch] reservoir project, including the importance of the project to both the current and future economic well being of the community, both the SJWCD and the PAWSD have been and will continue to work jointly towards completion of Dry Gulch Reservoir,” the SJWCD website states.
PAWSD currently delivers about 2,000 acre-feet of water to county water users, including the Pagosa Golf Course. The proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir was planned to hold 35,000 acre-feet — enough water for maybe 160,000 people at current usage rates.
The SJWCD asked Archuleta County voters in 2004 to approve a bond to help fund the proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir, but the voters turned down the offer. Nevertheless, SJWCD and PAWSD continued to study and plan for the new reservoir — including making an application for significant new water rights out of the nearby San Juan River for the purpose of filling the future reservoir, since Dry Gulch — as one might expect from its name — has very little water of its own. Those water rights were granted in 2006, but the case was appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, which remanded the case back to Durango Water Court Judge Greg Lyman for additional study.
The Supreme Court found several problems with the Pagosa water districts’ water rights application. First, the court felt the projected planning period — 100 years into the future — was unreasonable and speculative. Second, the Supreme Court wanted the water districts to include water conservation measures in their projections, rather than simply assume that people 50 years from now will continue to use our increasingly scarce water resources as recklessly as they do today.
Third, the Supreme Court wanted better justification for the seemingly exaggerated population projections presented by the water districts’ water engineer, Steve Harris. So far, as a result of both national and regional economic downturns, Harris’ population predictions for Archuleta County have proved to be wildly overstated. Harris himself adjusted his own projections a year ago, but the PAWSD board declined to officially accept his new figures.
Last September, Judge Lyman issued a new new ruling on the water rights issue, granting a lesser amount of water for the Dry Gulch Reservoir. That ruling was also appealed to the Supreme Court, again by fishing organization Trout Unlimited. We have not yet heard the ruling on that appeal. You can read a summary of Lyman's ruling in this Post article by Glenn Walsh.
SJWCD and PAWSD continued to plow ahead with funding of the proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir, despite the Supreme Court appeal, and both districts instituted impact fees, in part to make up for the voter-rejected bond measure.
Those impact fees became highly controversial and eventually elicited a threatened lawsuit from a group of local developers. I understand that lawsuit may still be pending.
Now both PAWSD and SJWCD appear to be re-thinking the wisdom of impact fees — fees which they are, for the most part, not collecting anyway, thanks to the crash of the local construction industry.
SJWCD has formally requested the Town of Pagosa Springs to cease collecting impact fees for the Dry Gulch project.
PAWSD might be rolling a new assessment of its own impact fees — which it now claims are “not impact fees” — at a public presentation scheduled for Monday, February 23, aptly entitled “Dry Gulch: A Comprehensive Overview”. The presentation is scheduled to last two hours, from 6 to 8pm at the Vista Clubhouse, and the invitation promises: "Q&A to follow."
A fresh assessment of PAWSD fees is being conducted by Denver firm BBC Research & Consulting, whose representative, Tom Pippen, will be present at the February 23 “comprehensive overview”.
I’d like to take a closer look at the history of those impact fees — and discuss, as dryly as possible, future of Dry Gulch.
Read Part Two... |
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