Colorado Dam Is History but Water Fight Goes On : Environment: The rush to buy land rights stirs concerns over farming, recreational and urban needs.

The trout fishermen and the bird lovers and the eco-scientists--they won the battle of Two Forks Dam.

Among them, they scotched one of the biggest water projects in the American West, maybe the last from the age of big dams, a plan 50 years in the making.

The project would have created a reservoir about half the size of Pasadena, fed by two branches of a great river, serving the bathroom taps and garden hoses of Denver and its satellite cities for decades to come. The water behind the 555-foot-tall dam was to be the formula on which the infant cities around Denver could feed and grow.

The Environmental Protection Agency heeded the environmentalists and the fishermen and boaters and its own staff advice, and last month vetoed the plan to fill picturesque Cheesman Canyon, 30 miles south of here, with 359 billion gallons of river water--the largest non-federal water project in the West.

And to the victors belongs . . . the next fight.

Demand for water did not disappear with the plans for the dam. Where will it come from now?

Part of the answer is, you buy other people’s water rights. In Colorado, as the sardonic old saying goes, water does not run upstream, except to money.

“The denial of Two Forks has been like dropping a bag of marbles on the floor,” says Denver water attorney Bennett Raley. “All the people who had expected it to go through and supply their needs have scattered all over and are now looking for their own water.”

For several years, some of Denver’s growing suburbs have been buying up rural water rights. And now that it’s pretty much every suburb for itself, more communities that had counted on Two Forks are flipping open their checkbooks and looking at rural water with something of the same covetousness with which Saddam Hussein must have eyeballed Kuwait and its oil.

Even the Nature Conservancy, a national environmental group that buys up land for wildlife and habitat, is in the market for water rights as well, to preserve streams and wetlands, but with a far smaller purse.

The organization “doesn’t say a market approach is the only way to protect land,” says its Colorado lawyer, Robert Wigington, “but we are able to protect some pieces of land other groups and agencies are not.”

Nevertheless, the rush to buy land and water rights is raising new concerns that market forces devoted to water consumption will disrupt the state’s balance among recreational, agricultural and urban needs.

Dairy farmer Mike Roskop, president of the Weld County Farm Bureau, has seen the land on either side of his bought up for its water rights. Farmers needed that money; he can’t quarrel with that. Yet there is a lot of conservative Angst over this--against interfering in private enterprise, but anxious that water not be bought and sold as blithely as used cars.

“We’re treading on thin ice,” Roskop says. “We very strongly believe in the right (to sell); how can you come up and say ‘Don’t sell to these people, all they want is the water off your land?’ ”

At the same time, he said: “Farmers are saying, ‘Hey, we need to be careful. We can’t allow ourselves to be dried up.’ ”

Weld County, near the Wyoming border, is the richest agricultural county in Colorado, and because “rich” means “wet,” some agricultural water rights in this accessible region north of Denver have already been bought out. And farmers like Roskop fret that prosperity will gurgle away with the water, as it did in parts of Crowley County, near the southeast corner of the state, touched by the desiccating hand of water purchases.

Crowley County is every farmer’s cautionary tale, where 20 years of water rights purchases have left “more thistles and tumbleweeds blowing around this county than you’ve ever seen in your life,” says 64-year-old Ruben Bauer.

Since 1949, Bauer has farmed in Sugar City. He saw neighbors sell water rights, saw the town dwindle into “a pathetic thing.” The water companies “offered to buy us out but I wanted my boys here. I wanted them to make a living here, but I’m sorry now I didn’t let them sell.”

Bauer says his farm, near the end of the water ditch, gets about a third less than he is entitled to, because of selloffs upstream. In consequence, his two sons can farm only 100 acres, a fourth of what they cultivated three years ago.

“We’ve lost a lot of our tax base,” said Rob Keenan, director of Crowley County’s department of social services. “If the urban areas want to grow, let them grow. Then they can eat their own bluegrass lawns instead of the crops we used to grow,” Keenan said angrily. The Denver suburb of Aurora has bought up a lot of water rights out toward Crowley County. Tom Griswold, Aurora’s utilities director, says the city paid farmers “a lot more than they’d ever get as a return from agriculture.” And “much of this land was going out of agricultural production prior to our purchases.”

Robert Young is a Colorado State University professor of agriculture who doesn’t have any problem with water sales. “Many people feel that buying out agriculture is buying out Colorado’s birthright,” he says, and “shouldn’t be subject to market forces. But my own feeling is that Denver’s metro demand isn’t growing so fast that it’ll make a difference.” With nearly 90% of Colorado’s water still going to agriculture, some think the concern is overstated.

But Raley, who represents the Northern Colorado Water Conservation district, up toward Weld County, said: “We do not want to become a Crowley County or an Owens Valley to feed Denver’s growth . . . it’s not just the water (at risk), it’s the whole fabric of life.”

All of this has complicated Colorado’s already convoluted water rights system.

In Craig Harrison’s office in Ft. Collins is a relief map, 20 feet by 5 feet, with Pike’s Peak in snowy white--the water rights on the Front Range, updated constantly with overlays. Harrison is one of those water brokers who buys and sells water rights.

Like a paddle wheel, “the growth business is what drives the water business,” he says. “The water’s probably got to come from agriculture, whether we like it or not. The veto of Two Forks is another sign that if you don’t build new supplies, you have to work with old supplies.”

On this point some environmentalists speak up: Whatever the advantages of a free market, safeguards are needed, a recognition that water is not a 1964 VW beetle, to be paid for and driven off the lot without a backward glance. The National Wildlife Federation, for example, is pressing in court for a public interest review to be made a part of Colorado’s water regulations, much as water levels were ordered to maintain Mono Lake in California.

The priorities of Colorado’s ironclad water regulations, sprung from frontier days, generally rank “consumptive” water uses, for cities and industry and agriculture, ahead of any others.

Such priorities, it is being argued, are outdated in an era when recreational and tourist and ecological uses are golden. Pioneers could not have conceived a day when guys with fly rods or backpacks could actually constitute big business.

Like the Two Forks alliance of trout fishermen and environmentalists, there is another joining of interests--a second date, if not a wedding--who want to see that cities do not elbow everyone aside on the way to the water trough.

Dick Bratton, who for 30 years has represented the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservation District on the Western Slope of the Rockies, is “not used to riding this environmental horse . . . but we’re talking about loss of economy. We’re fighting for our lives down here” against Aurora and Arapahoe County claims on water that Bratton says is now used in his district for profitable boating and fishing.

“We’ve taken the position that recreation is a beneficial use of water,” he said. “We think we’re entitled to it. We’re saying that is our economy.”

Bratton’s unlikely partner on this dance card is the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab. Since 1928, the lab has done world-class biological field research amid wild streams and high meadows near Crested Butte. Some studies are of 20 and 30 years’ duration; a model to study global warming has just been set up in a meadow on lab acreage.

The lab, like Bratton’s group and some individuals downstream, is ranged against urban thirsts to keep intact what they won in the 1970s, when they became virtually the only private citizens in Colorado to hold rights to in-stream water.

“We’re facing disaster,” says lab director Susan Allen. “It’s our assumption they’re going to (try to) invalidate our water rights.” Even a claim to secondary water is dangerous, says Allen; in these dry years, there is no water to spare. “Taking water from headlands here is a travesty for the whole state.”

State Rep. Tim Foster, a Republican from the Western Slope, has introduced legislation that would put recreational and environmental needs in the hierarchy of water use considerations. “You’ve got to create a process,” he says, “that recognizes the environmental impact, the socioeconomic impact.”