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A Bit of a Stink about Hot Water, Part Two |
Bill Hudson | 7/1/08
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Read Part One
My interest in some geothermal water rights questions, that bear on the future development of downtown Pagosa Springs, arose at a public meeting on June 19. That meeting was a Town Council work session — meaning that no formal decisions would be made — where Springs Resort owner Bill Whittington was negotiating aspects of a lengthy agreement with the Town, dealing with the lease of additional geothermal water from the Town’s PS-5 well. (As a perhaps incidental note, the Springs Resort website shows the owners of the resort as Whittington’s daughters, Nerissa Whittington and Keely Reyes, but Bill Whittington consistently represents the resort in appearances before Town Council.)
 The negotiations had been going on for months — perhaps years, I'm not sure — and there were a couple of sticking points that Whittington and the six members of the Council present at the meeting were trying to work through. The potential agreement included increasing the amount of water leased, as well as several agreements about easements and river setbacks relating to the resort’s proposed $250 million resort expansion.
One thing that was not being discussed, I noted, was whether the Town could legally lease the water Whittington was asking for.
As I mentioned in Part One yesterday, the Town has been leasing 200 gallon per minute (200gpm) of “waste water” from its geothermal heating operations to the Springs Resort for about ten years. This lease has been a mildly contentious issue and the subject of at least one lawsuit. Here’s a bit more of the story.
Since about 1981, the Town of Pagosa Springs, in its desire to provide a low-cost heating source to downtown businesses and residences, has been operating a geothermal heat exchanger, located on Lewis Street overlooking Centennial Park and the San Juan River. The Town draws up to about 400gpm from its nearby artesian well, known as PS-5, and runs the 140 degree mineral water through a simple system of radiator pipes, transferring the heat to a plain water system that then circulates through about 27 downtown buildings, including the local school buildings and numerous businesses.
Years ago, many downtown businesses had their own private wells and tried running pure geothermal mineral water through their radiators. Unfortunately, the mineral water is so high in mineral content that it quickly corrodes most any type of plumbing, leading to breakdowns and leaks. Folks who have lived in Pagosa for twenty years or so well remember the downtown buildings that consistently smelled of sulphur.
The Town’s heat exchanger system keeps the high-mineral-content water safely separated from the water delivered via pipes to the various downtown buildings.
According to the Town, the geothermal system is fired up around the first of October, and runs through the cold months of winter. The amount of geothermal water needed to keep the system running warm varies, of course, with the winter temperatures. At times during the coldest months — December, January and February — the system often requires nearly all of the Town’s adjudicated water rights — 450gpm. For most of the heating season, however, the system uses about 200gpm.
The Town received its water rights, to use up to its full allotment of 450gpm as needed, in 1981. That decree included not only the maximum amount of water granted, it also decreed the use to which the Town could put the water. That decree states that the Town may use the water for “municipal use associated with geothermal heating.”
In the state of Colorado, a water right consists, in essence, of three parts. One part is the date of the decree. The date places the right in a timeline, where senior water rights — the oldest water rights — must be fulfilled first in a drought situation. When there is not enough water to go around to fulfill every user’s rights, the oldest rights have priority. Asserting senior rights is referred to as “placing a call.” The Town’s right is dated 1981, one of the most recent rights granted on the Pagosa mineral water.
Another part of an adjudicated water right is the amount, typically stated in “shares,” or in “cfs” (cubic feet per second) or in “gpm” (gallons per minute.) One share equals one “cfs” which equals 450 gpm. The Town of Pagosa Springs has the right to one share, or 450gpm, from its PS-5 well, with backup allowed from its PS-3 well in case of problems with PS-5. From what I understand, a water right owner can draw more water from a well that he has rights to, so long as he doesn’t affect the water needed by, and available to, other users of the same water source.
The third important aspect of a water right decree is the use to which the water may be put. If, for example, I have a well and a decreed right to use the water for domestic purposes — and I then build a restaurant on my property and begin using the well to supply water to run my restaurant — I would now be using the water illegally, and the Colorado Division of Water Resources would be required to put a stop to my commercial water use. My allowed use does not depend upon how much water is available or whether a call has been placed, from what I have gathered.
We will hear more about the Colorado Division of Water Resources, and its local Water Division 7 commissioner, Pete Kasper, as we get deeper into the story.
So, we will note that the Town’s water rights decree clearly states the use to which its geothermal mineral water may be put:
“Municipal use associated with geothermal heating.”
In 1995, the Town was involved in yet another lawsuit around its rights to its geothermal water. The owners of the Spring Inn, Matt Mees and Bill Dawson, were filing for water rights to all of the waste water coming from every use in Pagosa Springs. To clarify this awkward situation, we need to look at the components of the marvelous mineral water from the Pagosa aquifer. The water bubbling up from the ground, into the mother spring and into the 27 or so wells drilled in the downtown area, has artesian pressure, meaning that I can get water without having to run an electric pump. The marvelous water comes to me free of pumping expenses. That’s one component.
Another component is the water’s mineral content, mainly sulphates and sodium compounds. Since long before the coming of the white man, the Indians of this region recognized the healing properties of the numerous Pagosa hot springs. Yes, in those days, it seems there were several springs flowing in the meadow beside the San Juan River. The U.S. government also recognized the therapeutic value of the water, in the 1880s, when it had plans for a convalescent hospital in Pagosa Springs. The water continues to be marketed in tourism brochures as “naturally therapeutic,” although strictly speaking, the scientific community might argue that no proper scientific data has ever validated that claim.
A third component of the Pagosa geothermal resource is exactly that: geothermal heat. Setting aside any possible therapeutic value the water may have, the fact remains that human beings like to be warm, and Pagosa Springs can get mighty cold in the middle of winter. So the Town of Pagosa Springs, in its infinite wisdom, built a geothermal heating utility on Lewis Street to heat downtown buildings, and it acquired the rights to Pagosa water for that express purpose.
Up until 1995, the water that ran through the Town’s heat exchanger was dumped into the San Juan — about 20 degrees cooler than it had been before its trip through the exchanger. In other words, the Town was dumping 120 degree mineral water into the river — still containing its full range of therapeutic minerals and still too hot for therapeutic bathing without further cooling.
Bill Dawson and Matt Mees, as owners of the Spring Inn — later to become the Springs Resort — apparently decided that was simply a waste of good mineral water, and tried to file for the rights to the still-perfectly-usable, discarded waste water. The Town and the neighboring Spa Motel defended their water resources by opposing that filing, and voila, we have another mineral water lawsuit.
The three parties finally settled the suit, and the settlement agreement involved allowing the Spring Inn to “lease” the outflow from the Town’s heat exchanger — an outflow that was still perfectly usable for recreational bathing.
Just one small problem. The Town’s heat exchanger was not operating in the summer, which is exactly when the Spring Inn got most of its visitors. To make the plan work properly, the Town needed “lease” water to the Spring Inn even when it was not running its heat exchanger. The Spring Inn wanted 200gpm of “waste water” even in the summer months.
So the attorneys were brought in, to verify the agreement. The attorneys looked at the language of the Town’s water right decree:
“Municipal use associated with heating purposes.”
How could that be construed to mean, “and of course including leasing the water to a private resort for recreational bathing purposes” ?
More tomorrow… |
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