Farmers working in Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District would have to recover 1.2 million acre-feet of water – or 175,000 acre-feet a year for the next seven years – to avoid the state of Colorado from shutting down irrigation wells in one of the state’s most lucrative agricultural corridors.
Fortunately for them, those figures and timeline would become moot should a Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management for the subdistrict gain approval through state water court. And if not, well, State Engineer Jason Ullmann said Tuesday, “then I think we will be having discussions at that time with the district on what the path forward is.”
Ullmann, named state engineer in March of 2024, was making his first appearance before the Rio Grande Water Conservation District board, and everyone at the meeting was anticipating his visit and the exchange that took place toward the end of the meeting between Board President Greg Higel and Ullmann.
Higel noted the obvious, that the San Luis Valley and its ag sector hardly ever benefit anymore from snowpack in the all-important San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges to fill its creeks and rivers. The fact is, there is little snowpack in the high country these days, or at least the years are inconsistent on when snow arrives, and so recovering the aquifer through reduced groundwater pumping as the state mandates has become an exercise with little gain.
“My question would be ‘Would you chop ’em off,’ chop us off right away if we lose the case,” Higel said.
Before Ullmann could answer, Rio Grande Water Conservation District attorney David Robbins jumped in to say it was a question that maybe shouldn’t be addressed head-on given the upcoming state water court trial on Subdistrict 1’s Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management. That trial won’t happen until 2026, but it’s what every irrigator in the subdistrict has been talking about given the plan’s unique feature of requiring one-for-one pumping and limiting groundwater pumping to the amount of surface water that naturally flows in.
“It really shouldn’t be trivialized how kind-of-extreme this plan is,” said Michael Jones of Jones Farms Organics in Hooper. “I mean, I’ve been calling this the nuclear option and had this plan been proposed in 2002, there would’ve been riots and media.
“This is a very intense plan and we are taking these recoveries really seriously and this one-to-one metric. But the fact that we are going to one-to-one, this is a hard right turn from the previous plans. So I guess I really want to stress just how important it is that we get this plan through and kind of as it is, and it really should mean that we are taking this seriously and hopefully we are able to start showing some more progress toward some of these metrics.”
If the Fourth Plan of Water Management gains state water court approval next year and goes into effect, then the state’s deadline of establishing a sustainable aquifer by 2031 goes away. Progress toward recovery of the aquifer would then be measured through progress in the plan and its one-for-one feature, without specific deadlines to meet.
“I want to get a feel for how your thought process would be,” Higel pressed on. If the state water court rejects the Subdistrict 1 Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management, what will be the state engineer’s position knowing the farmers in Subdistrict 1 would be hard-pressed to get anywhere close to what the 2031 deadline requires from an aquifer recovery standpoint?
“It’s hard for me to predict the future,” Ullmann said. But, he went on, there would have to be accountability, and if the aquifer isn’t recovering and the subdistrict’s amended plan is rejected by the court, Valley irrigators can expect the state engineer to hold them accountable, meaning well curtailment.
Everyone is hoping it doesn’t come to that.