Upper Basin states of the Colorado River have proposed reviving a program with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) to compensate water users for reducing usage to mitigate long-term drought impact.
Water managers in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, acting through the Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC) and in partnership with the BOR, announced their intent to launch a System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP) for 2023.
The 2023 plan was disclosed during UCRC’s meeting held in mid-December in conjunction with the Colorado River Water Users Association conference.
“The SCPP is a significant step to begin to partially mitigate the water supply crisis in the Upper Colorado River Basin brought on by a drier climate and depleted storage,” UCRC said in their press release. “The SCPP will provide short-term reductions to reduce some impacts in the Upper Colorado River Basin.”
Municipal, industrial and agriculture users, along with Tribes, are encouraged to submit a proposal describing conservation projects that can be implemented this year by Feb. 1.
“The goal is to have water conservation projects underway in April 2023 to reduce consumptive uses in the Upper Basin Colorado River system,” UCRC said in their press release.
According to UCRC, there is no target for the volume of conservation, but consideration for projects to fund will be based on the cost of the proposed project in terms of price per acre-foot for conservation reductions. Projects will be paid a fixed price of $150 per acre-foot of water conserved (an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons).
Projects can be paid more per acre-foot if proposals justify the proposed price. BOR will provide up to $125 million to UCRC for the pilot program available for projects between 2023-26, but the current focus is on participation in the 2023 water year.
According to E&E News, UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom said the agency does not have a prediction on the number of participants in the program.
“I quite frankly don’t have any sense of how many folks are willing and able to participate as they consider their own reductions that are brought by hydrology,” Cullom said. “For me, success is that we have broad participation in terms of broadly distributed across the four states, broadly distributed among the water use sectors: municipal, industrial [and] agricultural users.”
The SCPP program is part of a “5 Point Plan” developed by UCRC in July 2022 in response to BOR Commissioner Camille Touton’s testimony to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, asking all the Basin states to conserve 2-4 million acre-feet of water to preserve levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
The announcement is a reauthorization and revival of the SCPP that took place in 2015-18. According to a final report issued by UCRC in 2017, “Based on the contracted historical conserved consumptive use estimates, the funding agencies, including (non-governmental organizations), provided $4,555,747 to conserve 22,116 acre-feet of water during 2015, 2016, and 2017.”
More information on the SCPP, including how to submit proposals, can be found at www.ucrcommission.com/.— Charles Wallace, WLJ editor
