Severe drought conditions mean that officials are concerned about both agricultural and hydrological water issues.

Typically when we talk drought, we think of water storage in our mountain reservoirs. But in the short-term, concern is highest over fire weather conditions.

As of March 1, reservoir storage was at 104 percent of capacity thanks to a snowy winter in the mountains. That could change, however, depending on how fast the winter snow pack melts in the weeks ahead.

A rapid snow melt would mean much of the water will be lost to runoff, and that could have an impact on our water supply later in the summer should conditions remain dry.

La Niña is to blame for the abnormally dry weather.

During a La Niña winter, the state is dominated by west or northwest winds. Because of this, any moisture that reaches Colorado typically does not make it over the mountains, leaving locations east of the Continental Divide warm, dry and windy.

Since January, Denver has recorded 1.10 inches of precipitation – mostly in the form of snow. The city has only seen 18.5 inches of snow to date. In an average season, Denver would be closing in on 50 inches of snow by mid-March.

With the exception of January, precipitation has been below normal across eastern Colorado since last summer.

The latest data shows that La Niña is weakening, but it may be too little too late for the bone dry region hoping for a quiet fire season.

The 90-day forecast calls for both warmer and drier than normal conditions to exist heading into the spring fire season.

But there is still hope!

A very similar scenario took place in 2002-2003 across Colorado. In fact, it was even drier, and the state had just recorded its largest wildfire ever – the Hayman fire.

But things changed rapidly after the March 2003 blizzard struck the region, filling empty reservoirs to capacity and giving cities along the Front Range a precipitation surplus.

Copyright © 2011, KDVR-TV

DeGette and Polis unsuccessfully ran the legislation last session, seeking to close the so-called “Halliburton Loophole” named for the oil and gas services company previously headed up by former Vice President Dick Cheney. It was during the Bush-Cheney administration in 2005 that Congress granted hydraulic fracturing an exemption from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

A Bush administration U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official in charge of water quality issues recently told the ProPublica website that an EPA study used to justify the Safe Drinking Water Act exemption should not have been used and that the current policy is too lenient in regulating fracking operations.

This is DeGette’s third crack at removing the exemption and requiring oil and gas companies to reveal exactly what chemicals they’re injecting under extremely high pressure, along with mostly water and sand, deep into natural gas wells to fracture tight geological formations and free up more gas.

DeGette, Polis and Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., — another sponsor of the FRAC Act — recently unveiled a congressional investigation that found oil and gas companies have been using diesel fuel in the fracking process, which many fear is contaminating groundwater supplies. A New York Times investigation of fracking found wastewater treatment facilities are being overwhelmed with sometimes radioactive fracking fluids.

“As we recognize the need for energy independence and alternative sources to power our nation, natural gas is an important economic driver and a critical bridge fuel,” DeGette said in a release.

“However, it is incumbent upon us to ensure the process for extracting natural gas from our land is done safely and responsibly. The FRAC Act takes necessary but reasonable steps to ensure our nation’s drinking water is protected, and that as fracking operations continue to expand, communities can be assured that the economic benefits of natural gas are not coming at the expense of the health of their families.”

State regulators who oversee oil and gas drilling in Colorado have said the FRAC Act is unnecessary and could create another layer of regulation that could actually spread the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission staff too thin.

Oil and gas industry officials have consistently pointed to a lack of evidence that fracking contaminates groundwater or poses a public health threat, but opponents of the practice say that’s because chemical ingredients are not being revealed so it’s difficult for regulators to know what to test for.

“There is a growing discrepancy between the natural gas industry’s claim that nothing ever goes wrong and the drumbeat of investigations and personal tragedies which demonstrate a very different reality,” Polis said in a release.

“The FRAC Act is a simple, common-sense way to answer the serious concerns that accompany the rapid growth of drilling across the country. Our bill restores a basic, national safety-net that will ensure transparency within the industry and safeguard our communities. If there is truly nothing to worry about, then this bill will lay the public’s concern to rest through science and sunlight.”

The House bill was introduced along with the Senate version, which is sponsored by Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

According to today’s joint release by DeGette, Hinchey and Polis, the FRAC Act would specifically:

• Require disclosure of the chemical constituents used in the fracturing process, but not the proprietary chemical formula.
• The proprietary chemical formulas are protected under our bill – much like the way Coca-Cola must reveal the ingredients of Coke, but not their secret formula; oil and gas companies would have to reveal the chemicals but not the specific formula.
• Disclosure would be to the state, or to EPA, but only if EPA has primary enforcement responsibility in the state. The disclosures would then be made available to the public online.
• This bill does include an emergency provision that requires these proprietary chemical formulas to be disclosed to a treating physician, the State, or EPA in emergency situations where the information is needed to provide medical treatment.
• Repeal a provision added to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempting the industry from complying with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), one of our landmark environmental and public health protection statutes.
• Most states have primacy over these types of wells, and the intent of this Act is to allow states to ensure that our drinking water is safe. EPA would set the standard, but a state would be able to incorporate hydraulic fracturing into the existing permitting process for each well, and so this would not require any new permitting process.

That proposal, first floated in July, was sure to draw big crowds and heated debate both evenings beginning at 5 p.m. in the Jackson Ballroom of the Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center, but in the wake of partial meltdowns at two Japanese nuclear reactors and problems at two other facilities in the wake of Friday’s devastating earthquake, the proposal will likely bring even closer scrutiny. The Japan disaster has sent shockwaves through the world’s resurgent nuclear industry that could impact Colorado’s uranium-mining revival.

The Pueblo County Planning Commission already signed off on the plan, voting 5-3 to recommend zoning changes that would allow for the 40-square-mile energy park proposed by local attorney Don Banner and supported by Puebloans for Energizing Our Community LLC.

“The world needs energy,” Banner told the Pueblo Chieftain in July. “The United States is behind the eight ball when it comes to nuclear energy.”

Actually, the United States leads the world with 104 nuclear reactors, nearly twice as many as second-place France (58). But as a percentage of electrical power, the U.S. only gets about 20 percent from nuclear compared to nearly 80 percent for France.

Colorado has no active nuclear power plants, and many conservationists say nuclear is too pricey (Banner’s plant could cost more than $5.5 billion) and consumes too much water in a mostly arid state like Colorado. Now they’re likely to hammer even harder on safety concerns that have made the U.S. nuclear industry relatively dormant since the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in the Ukraine in 1986.

The Heritage Foundation points out that the technology at the nuclear plants in trouble in Japan is older and far less efficient and safe than today’s designs, but according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there are 23 General Electric Mark 1 reactors like the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 that are currently operating in the United States.

Rep. Edward Markey, D–Mass., on Saturday warned that a disaster such as the one unfolding in Japan could happen here in the United States and called for a moratorium on locating any new reactors in seismically active areas as well as tighter NRC regulation of containment technology for facilities in such areas. Pueblo and Colorado in general are not known as particularly earthquake-prone areas.

“As a result of this disaster, the world is now facing the looming threat of a possible nuclear meltdown at one of the damaged Japanese nuclear reactors,” Markey said Saturday. “I hope and pray that Japanese experts can successfully bring these reactors under control and avert a Chernobyl-style disaster that could release large amounts of radioactive materials into the environment.”

Many Pueblo residents are already leery of power infrastructure projects like Xcel’s Commanche 3 coal-fired power plant, feeling to some degree that they get all of the impacts of such development and few of the benefits.

The scramble is intensifying as aging farmers offer their valuable water rights to thirsty cities, drying up ag land so quickly that state overseers are worried about the life span of Colorado’s agricultural economy.

“The status quo has been going to agriculture (interests) and buying and drying. That’s not good,” said John Stulp, a cattle rancher and former state agriculture commissioner who is Gov. John Hickenlooper’s special policy adviser on water. “We need to do it in a smarter way.”

Since 1987, Colorado farmers and ranchers have sold at least 191,000 acre-feet of water to suburbs, according to a review of water transactional data. (That’s enough water to fill Chatfield Reservoir nine times— and enough to sustain 382,000 families of four for a year.)

The shift has been especially abrupt north of Denver, where farmers sold water to suburbs at a rate of 2 to 5 percent of available water each year, according to the Northern Water Conservancy District.

State water courts in the South Platte River Basin, which includes Denver and Weld counties, approved farm-to-urban change-of-use petitions in 41 different cases between 2002 and 2007, state records show.

In the process, about 400,000 acres in Colorado dried up between 2000 and 2005, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. And Colorado natural resources planners anticipate losing another 500,000 to 700,000 acres of irrigated cropland by 2050.

Officials worried

Trading farmland for suburban lawns worries officials.

“Water and agriculture are critical for the rural economy to flourish,” Hickenlooper said. “Unlike many other states, and even some nations, we have the potential in Colorado to provide a sustainable food supply that is local and not imported. That’s an asset we need to recognize and support.”

Yet nothing is stopping the ownership shift. Long-envisioned cooperative transfers, with farmers leasing water to suburbs while retaining control, have not materialized.

Instead, suburban water managers — and their agents — are venturing as far as mountain valleys 100 miles away to acquire new water supplies, sometimes backed by state government agencies.

“It’s a good time to acquire water rights,” said veteran water broker Jerry Kessel.

Two Rivers, a company traded on the New York Stock Exchange and run by Colorado Springs real estate and water broker Gary Barber, recently purchased two old reservoirs and significant senior water rights from Arkansas River Basin farmers.

Barber said he aims to save farming by trapping water flowing off the Spanish Peaks and using it for its court-decreed purpose of irrigating crops.

Southern Colorado farming communities that died could now come back to life, Barber said, because booming nations such as China soon will be looking for new sources of grain.

“Look at the price of corn now,” he said. “It’s going up faster than the price of gold.”

Water for suburbs

State natural resources officials backed Two Rivers by granting a $9.9 million low-interest loan to support reservoir rehabilitation.

But farming groups immediately identified Two Rivers’ buy-up as a stealth move to shift more water to suburbs.

“You get kind of nervous when you have people who are on the New York Stock Exchange saying they’re going to put agriculture back into production,” said Jay Winner, manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District, devoted to retaining farming water rights across a five-county area.

“I’m skeptical,” Winner said, “because from the amount of money they’re sticking into this project, it looks like it’s a big agriculture-municipal transfer.”

When pressed, Two Rivers’ Barber acknowledged that the $27 million deal was indeed done with an eye toward eventually selling water to suburbs.

The stealthy and not-so-stealthy shifting of control over Colorado water has continued despite economic doldrums and may be gaining momentum. Farmers often are willing participants, cashing in as relative scarcity makes water more valuable.

Among recent deals:

• Pueblo bought the Bessemer agricultural canal.

• Aurora, Thornton, Brighton and Adams County invested in the Fulton Ditch northeast of Denver.

• Cherry Creek and Arapahoe County water authorities, though still facing court scrutiny, have staked claims to water once allocated for farming.

Also, in the Colorado Springs area, the Donala Water and Sanitation District, which bought a 711-acre ranch near Leadville for its water rights, now is pursuing a change-of-use ruling in state court so that farming water could be harnessed for Front Range housing and lawns.

Similarly, satellite cities Fountain and Widefield spent $3.5 million to acquire developer Mund Shaikly’s 480-acre H2O Ranch at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The plan is to sustain an anticipated military housing boom by using mountain creek water that once irrigated hayfields.

Fountain will let the creek water flow into the Arkansas River, then trap it in Pueblo Reservoir, said Fountain water engineer Curtis Mitchell. “Certainly we’re not in the land business.”

North of Colorado Springs, Woodmoor’s new 1,900-foot-deep municipal wells appear uncertain enough that suburban leaders are mobilizing to buy water rights from farmers in the Arkansas River Valley and plan to construct a delivery pipeline.

Along the Arkansas River, state records indicate suburbs petitioned courts at least 116 times over the past decade to convert agricultural water for municipal use.

State court administrators say they didn’t track outcomes in those cases. However, the impact in the Arkansas basin has been clear: One in six of the 450,000 acres that was irrigated in 1970 no longer produces crops.

Colorado has reached a turning point, some water authorities say, because there’s no longer enough water available to sustain both farming and an expanding suburban population.

“It’s a big mistake”

State planners project a shortfall of up to 1 million acre-feet of water by 2050 if Colorado’s population of 5 million doubles as expected.

“It’s a big mistake to be doing massive transfers. We’ve got to produce food,” said Pat O’Toole, president of the Colorado-based Family Farm Alliance. “Denver’s going to double, and so is India and China and everybody else. What are we going to do to feed people if we keep taking agricultural land out of production?”

One solution Stulp and Hickenlooper are pushing is so-called “alternative transfers.” The idea is that farmers who still own water band together and lease some of that water to suburbs each year. A few fields would have to remain unplanted each year.

The sticking point has been that suburban water suppliers contend they must own water outright to guarantee supplies sufficient to sustain population growth.

“If the farmers own it, and you have to rely on getting the water from farmers, what security do you have?” said Rod Kuharich, director of the South Metro Water Supply Authority, which represents 15 Denver-area suburbs that currently draw 60 percent of their water from groundwater wells.

“You would need to own the water and lease it back to the farmers,” Kuharich said. “Then, you know water is there when you need it.”

So the upshot is that suburbs and water brokers are scrambling, offering willing farmers up to $15,000 per acre-foot of water.

Sometimes brokers must be persuasive. But sometimes farmers and ranchers in their 70s, seeing no children poised to take over their operations, are the ones proposing to sell out.

Regardless of who initiates the deals, “we’re drying up agriculture,” said T. Wright Dickinson, a northwestern Colorado rancher and former Moffatt County commissioner.

Dickinson pointed to the example of Arizona, which had 500,000 acres of irrigated cropland after World War II but today — after using water to enable suburban development — has one tenth that acreage to grow food.

“I don’t believe that it was a good or sustainable choice, because it’s important to be able to feed and clothe people in this world,” Dickinson said. “The people of Colorado get this.”

Bruce Finley: 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com

It’s all there in the 2010 Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI) report issued in late January by the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

And it’s not pretty.

The SWSI report notes that, if water use in Colorado follows current trends, large supplies will inevitably be shifted away from agricultural uses, especially along the Front Range, resulting in significant loss of farmlands, economic damage to the state’s agricultural regions and potential environmental harm.
The report concludes that between 500,000 and 700,000 irrigated acres in Colorado could be dried up by 2050.

But that’s not all. The report also says that even if the long-delayed Glade Reservoir northwest of Fort Collins is built and planned expansions of Halligan and Seaman Reservoirs in Poudre Canyon are completed, Northern Colorado will still be short more than 100,000 acre-feet of water to meet the expected demand in 2050.

Hecox, acting deputy director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and water supply planning chief, said the SWSI report should be an eye-opener for state residents, farmers, ranchers, governments and water planners.

“It points to the importance of these projects moving forward, to the extent that if they’re successful we’re moving that gap forward into time and if they’re not successful, then the gap will be larger and we’ll encounter it sooner,” he said.

The SWSI report contains 16 recommendations focused on “an implementation phase to determine and pursue projects and methods to help meet the state’s consumptive and nonconsumptive water supply needs.”

Many of the recommendations specifically call for actively encouraging and implementing water storage projects that would help hold onto more of the estimated 16 million acre-feet generated by Colorado’s rivers each year.

But Colorado can only hold onto a portion of that water because the state is obligated, under various legal compacts and decrees, to let about two-thirds of that flow out of the state to Colorado’s water-hungry neighbors.

Northern Colorado – defined as Larimer and Weld counties – falls into the state’s South Platte Basin for water planning purposes. Hecox said South Platte Basin river supplies are always unpredictable.

“The South Platte can be very dry in some years and very high in other years,” he said. “There’s water there to be developed, but you have to have storage.”
Still, Hecox said the CWCB isn’t completely fixed on just being an advocate for new storage projects.

“I think our board has recognized that there’s no one silver bullet – that the answer lies with a mix of strategies, including conservation, ag and urban water transfers, and new storage and infrastructure projects,” he said. “One thing that the water community has talked about is we’re ending an era of developing a resource and entering an era of managing a resource better.”

A summit convened by Gov. John Hickenlooper on March 3 charged water experts from all the major river basins to develop a statewide water strategy to balance the needs of urban and agricultural users within the next five years.

Hecox said groups that work to derail water storage projects for environmental protection or other reasons are only part of the story as to why it takes so long to move a project toward completion.

“Where a lot of the problems come is in the permitting phase,” he said. “They’re having a hard time getting their way through the system. Because of the complexity of the process, it gives lots of opportunities to jump in and slow it down.”

Hecox said not pursuing storage as part of the water supply solution for the state’s inevitable population growth simply means a continuing and speeded-up loss of once-productive ag lands along the Front Range.

“We often get wrapped up in discussions of highly controversial projects, but we have a status-quo solution to meet our needs,” he said. “The default solution is the transfer of ag to urban use. The South Platte Basin could lose up to 35 percent of its irrigated lands, and a lot of that would be in the Larimer-Weld county area.

Steve Porter covers agribusiness and natural resources for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-232-3147 or at sporter@ncbr.com.

Other waterfowl were visible through the spitting snow, including diving ducks such as buffleheads, goldeneyes and redheads, as well as dabblers such as wigeons, mallards and green-winged teal.

Without warning, a majority of the ducks erupted and whirled off in all directions. The source of the panic soon appeared: a golden eagle cruising overhead, probably looking for an injured or weak bird to snatch for lunch. Larger birds — the tundra swan (which was not present when I revisited Walden Ponds on Wednesday), some Canada geese and a few gulls — remained, although acting agitated and alert.

Eagle encounters are often awesome, and not just for the powerful hunter’s potential prey. One of my most memorable bird sightings was of a ferruginous hawk standing in a prairie dog village, atop a recently dispatched resident. An eagle barreled in, sending the hawk flying and taking possession of its hard-earned meal.

With their impressive talons, hooked beaks, large size — about 10 pounds with 30-inch length and 79-inch wingspan — and scowling expression formed by a supraorbital ridge, golden eagles look the part of a bully and have developed a reputation for ferocity in many cultures. Folklore has them grabbing pets, livestock and even small children, and they have been recorded attacking and possibly killing fully grown deer, although their usual victim is usually no larger than a jackrabbit.

Numerous legends have sprung up wherever golden eagles occur, across the entire Northern Hemisphere. The tales are too numerous to recount here, but they range from the eagle that gathered the thunderbolts of Zeus and carried his messages, to the eagle perched atop a cactus (perhaps clutching a snake) that told the wandering Aztecs where to build their capital city.

A memorable movie from my youth was “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” based on “Tales of the Arabian Nights.” The sailors find the egg of a roc — essentially a giant eagle from Persian mythology that was able to carry off an elephant — break it open and roast the chick. When the parent bird — which had two heads in the film version — discovers what happened, it massacres the crew. In other versions of the story, the roc smashes Sinbad’s ship to smithereens, appropriately by dropping rocks onto it from high above. The filmmakers probably intended for the audience to sympathize with the sailors, but I was rooting for the bird. Rocs rock!

On the other hand, heroic eagles Gwaihir, Landroval and Meneldor rescue Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Return of the King.”

In the American West, eagles sometimes are not looked on so favorably, and were systematically shot, trapped and poisoned for many years. They are now protected but face threats from habitat loss and collisions with manmade structures such as power lines.

Thankfully, golden eagles seem to be handling adversity well, and they are still relatively common and widespread. There are 15 to 20 active nest sites in Boulder County, and golden eagle pairs, which usually mate for life, have begun their soaring, swooping bonding flights.

Egg-laying should begin shortly at sites that might have been used off-and-on for decades, if not centuries. The nests typically are built on crags and cliffs, and the eagles add new branches, debris — even bones and antlers — as well as fresh greenery, sometimes resulting in a structure of several cubic yards that weighs hundreds of pounds. Two reliable spots to see locally nesting eagles are the palisades northeast of Buckingham Park in Lefthand Canyon, and the cliffs above Meadow Park in Lyons.

Kindly observe these sites, and others nestled on ledges along the Front Range, from a distance, and adhere to seasonal climbing closures to ensure eagles continue to inhabit Boulder County. It would be a great loss if these regal raptors existed only in mythology and legend from the past.

Over the last decade, gas companies have turned increasingly to fracking, a process in which water and sand and chemicals are injected under high pressure into deep wells to break up sandstone formations and free up previously inaccessible gas. The identity of the chemical ingredients in fracking fluid have so far been shielded by energy company arguments that the recipes are proprietary, a kind of secret sauce they have the right to keep from competitors.

As government and media reports have made clear, however, the fracking-fluid chemicals pose only a part of the environmental risks posed by the process. Hydro-fracturing loosens more than gas from the earth. It also frees up high concentrations of salt and toxic minerals and radioactivity, all of which rise to the surface in the millions of gallons of fracking waste-water and can seep into ground-water sources.

Although the documentary “Gasland” didn’t win an award Sunday night, it featured toxic and flammable tap water from Weld and Garfield Counties in Colorado, where activists and property owners have been warning about the negative effects of fracking for years. And the New York Times report explained that taps that pour out gas and chemicals may well be pouring out unacceptable levels of radioactivity, too.

“The industry keeps telling everyone that nothing is wrong, but more and more investigations like the ones conducted by The New York Times and Congressional investigators show a very different reality,” Rep. Polis told the Colorado Independent in an email. “This is exactly why we need the FRAC Act, which requires basic common sense safeguards, not a patchwork of laws or lack thereof from state to state. We need to… keep science and safety at the forefront of our nation’s energy policy.  Hopefully this investigation will give further credence to the need for reform and the real troubles that can accompany gas drilling, and will further support action by the EPA and Congress regarding violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act.”

Reporters for the New York Times found that drilling companies were sending billions of gallons of waste-water to sewage treatment plants ill-equipped to remove toxic fracking materials. It also found that sewage plants in at least three states were releasing inadequately treated fracking water into rivers, lakes and streams, and that nearly 200 fracking wells were producing waste-water that contained hundreds and even a thousand times the amount of radioactive material considered acceptable according to water safety standards.

In January Polis and DeGette called on the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether oil and gas service companies violated the Safe Drinking Water Act by using more than 32 million gallons of diesel fuel in their fracking operations.

DeGette and Polis were responding to an investigation conducted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which found that drilling companies used 32.2 million gallons of diesel fuel or fluids containing diesel fuel in fracking operations in 19 state between 2005 and 2009. The companies admitted using diesel fuel in testimony to the committee. The committee found that 1.3 million gallons of diesel fuel had been used in Colorado fracking operations.

Fracking was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act under the Energy Policy Act passed by the Bush administration in 2005. The exemption did not cover cases where fracking included the use of diesel fuel.

Oil and gas companies and sympathetic politicians have fought against efforts to further regulate fracking. State regulators in Colorado at least have also come out against the need for federal oversight.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), for example, the primary state regulator of oil and gas drilling, has long maintained the FRAC Act is unnecessary because fracking is covered by state rules.

Yet the COGCC interactions with the Energy Committee that investigated diesel-fuel fracking inspire little confidence.

“In some instances, the officials we contacted expressed doubt that companies still used diesel as a hydraulic fracturing fluid or additive or were unaware of continued diesel fuel use,” the Energy committee wrote, after detailing how oil and gas companies admitted to using diesel fuel– including the million-plus gallons used in Colorado.

“An engineer from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), for example, said that diesel is ‘rarely used’ and said he knew of only one time diesel fuel was used in hydraulic fracturing in Colorado.”

The next two months will be the larger indicator of how much water will be available for agricultural and residential uses this summer, however.

According to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the snowpack in the upper reaches of the Big Thompson River basin are well above the 30-year averages heading into the wettest months of the year.

In observations made last week, each of the four indicator sites in Rocky Mountain National Park gave promise of a strong year to come — and were much better than one year ago.

The figures for the Big Thompson mirror those for the rest of the South Platte River basin, which slakes the thirst of the state’s biggest urban areas and most-productive farmland. Federal figures show the basin at 122 percent of its 30-year average.

Statewide, all of the major river basins are close to or above their historical averages. Leading the way is the North Platte basin, at 132 percent, with the Colorado River basin at 127 percent, Yampa at 125 percent and Gunnison at 120 percent.

In the southern half of the state, the Arkansas River basin is at 105 percent of average, the Animas/San Juan basin is at 99 percent and Rio Grande at 90 percent.

Jones is an attorney, civil rights activist and advocate for so-called “green-collar” jobs as a path to economic growth. He served as President Barack Obama’s green jobs adviser before resigning over controversy over his past political positions.

Jones is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a senior policy adviser at Green for All. He holds a joint appointment at Princeton University as a visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

PLAN-Boulder County Co-Chair Ruth Blackmore said she was excited to have Jones speak in Boulder as the organization enters its “second 50 years” of conservation and activism.

PLAN’s annual dinner starts with a cocktail hour at 6 p.m., followed by a buffet dinner and program beginning at 7 p.m. The event will be held in the Hotel Boulderado, 2115 13th St. Tickets cost $50 and are available at www.planboulder.org.

HB 1228 (pdf), sponsored by Rep. Judy Solano, D-Brighton, was shot down in the House Agriculture, Livestock, & Natural Resources Committee, mostly because of the no votes of seven Republicans. Publicly owned Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, and the Colorado Rural Electric Association – representing most of state’s rural electric co-ops – opposed the bill.

“Xcel’s business model relies too heavily on the building of large central generation facilities that have major inherent liabilities for grid security and environmental impacts,” said consultant Becky English of Denver-based Rebecca English and Associates, who worked with Solano for the past eight months on the bill. “Distributed generation of clean renewable energy is the wave of the future; feed-in tariff is the market-balancing policy mechanism that gets us there.”

Feed-in-tariff (FIT) is being used in parts of Canada and Germany, where it allows individual property owners and businesses to generate power using small-scale solar, wind, biomass or hydro installations and sell that electricity back into the grid at a premium rate that’s absorbed by all ratepayers. FIT is meant to encourage investment in renewables and promote “grid parity” between renewables and fossil fuels.

But Xcel officials successfully argued they’re already on-track to accomplish greater parity through the state’s ambitious renewable energy standard (RES) of 30 percent by 2020 – the second highest in the nation behind only California.

“A feed-in tariff would be duplicative of the Renewable Energy Standard Adjustment (RESA), which is the current charge on customer bills devoted to paying the incremental cost of renewable resources,” said Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz. “A feed-in-tariff is a more expensive, less efficient method for accomplishing what we are already achieving under the current [RES].”

But English and other FIT backers say an RES is merely a goal while feed-in-tariff is an actual policy mechanism that’s proven in other parts of the world to help jurisdictions meet or exceed their renewable energy goals.

“FITs create a bigger market,” said Jim Burness, CEO of SolSource, a Colorado solar installation firm. “Under our recently-departed system, solar was only available to those who either had cash, or great credit. Since FIT payments come from the utility, it allows anyone with a good [renewable energy] resource to participate, thereby exploding the market.”

Burness was referring to Xcel’s highly controversial recent proposal to cut off all new applications to its Solar Rewards program and reduce current rebates from $2.35 a watt to $1.25 a watt. Solar industry advocates say the move could cost more than 2,000 Colorado jobs. The move prompted protests by clean energy advocates in Denver over the weekend.

English says FITs would be one way for Xcel to repair its battered image on the small-scale distributed energy front.

“Xcel’s corporate responsibility reputation is on the ropes due to the company’s continuing love affair with fossil fuels, its abuse of the solar industry, and its ongoing resistance to meaningful amounts of locally produced, clean distributed generation,” English said.

Utility scale wind and solar projects come with one major drawback. The best areas for generating renewable energy on such a large scale tend to be in remote rural areas far from the major cities that need the electricity. That has caused a transmission bottleneck and sparked legal battles over power-line location such as the Trinchera Ranch lawsuit in the San Luis Valley.

Finally, Xcel’s Stutz said “feed-in tariffs face legal issues in the United States that remain to be worked out. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory [NREL in Golden] says that feed-in tariffs will not work in the U.S. without changes to federal law or to existing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [FERC] precedents.”

But English counters that an NREL official who’s studied FIT policy appeared at last week’s hearing and testified that feed-in-tariff could work under existing laws and FERC rulings.

Regardless, HB 1228 appears dead for now, leaving proponents to weigh their limited legislative options.