Please add your voice to update Colorado’s Water Plan

The Colorado Water Conservation Board released the 2023 draft update to the Colorado Water Plan this summer. The plan is an important framework to ensure we have a vibrant future in Colorado. The original plan was finalized in 2015 and identified water based recreation as an important value. American Whitewater is working to ensure that the update builds on that plan by identifying the valuable socio-economic role recreation plays in our state and identifying actions to ensure it’s protected and enhanced. There is currently a public comment period open until September 30th. Below we describe some of the comments we will be providing and we encourage you to add your voice. Please follow this link to make your own comment. 

There are 6.7 million residents who participate in recreational activities on and near Colorado's water resources. Accessible open spaces, and especially those with water, have been shown to provide wide ranging public health benefits such as lower rates of obesity, stronger social connections and improved mental health. During the summer of 2020, the COVID pandemic sent millions into the outdoors seeking safe and accessible recreation. Colorado based product manufacturers like Alpacka Raft in Mancos or Down River Equipment in Wheat Ridge, still have huge backlogs for their hand-built goods. 

Outdoor recreation is not only a robust sector, but a growing one. Particularly, water-related outdoor recreation is becoming an important economic diversification strategy for rural and historically underserved communities. For example, Craig, Colorado recently received a $3.3 million Economic Development Administration Assistance to Coal Communities Grant for construction of the Yampa River Corridor Project, that will upgrade the city’s outdoor recreation infrastructure including new river access and improving the existing municipal diversion dam to enhance boating passage and create recreational amenities. Overall, the goal of the project is to stabilize and diversify the economy in Craig and Moffat County after the closure of the coal mines and power plant. Other communities, like Salida or Durango, have experienced the transformational change such investments in outdoor recreation can provide.

Throughout the Update, there are references that increasing demands and declining supply may lead to conflicts between meeting municipal, industrial, and agricultural water needs while maintaining or enhancing environmental and recreational resources. While the Update does include a commitment to work towards reducing these conflicts between water uses, this framing in general sets a tone that addressing recreational and environmental water needs must be at the expense of other water uses. We challenge these narratives and would encourage the Update to reflect the numerous examples, such as the Voluntary Flow Management Program on the Arkansas or cooperative reservoir releases on the Upper Colorado River, where there’s mutual benefit for recreation and other water users in working together. We encourage CWCB to identify actions in the final plan Update to encourage this sort of cooperative management and to support the development of tools that allow for flexibility in that management. 

Additionally, we encourage CWCB to identify actions that fully quantify the gap in water supply for non-consumptive needs. American Whitewater has developed multiple approaches to quantify flow needs for recreation and to evaluate the risk to those flow needs under future climate change scenarios. The plan does a good job of indicating that climate change will likely cause lower streamflows that impact the environment and recreation. With the belief that we cannot plan for what we don't know, we'd like to see actions directing partners and CWCB to put values on those potential impacts. This data will be helpful in understanding how new projects may affect these non-consumptive needs. American Whitewater has complete various needs assessments as a part of Stream Management and Integrated Watershed Management Planning around the state, including a climate change analysis in the Rio Grande Basin that is replicable. We would appreciate the opportunity to expand this data collection and assessment.

The Colorado Water Plan set the tone for the important uses of our water resources, directs funding, and is an adaptive management tool. The engagement of residents in the planning process is essential to developing a robust plan. Please follow this link to make your own comment.