Colorado Water EIS

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has finally released an environmental impact statement that many feel is a key milestone toward approval of a long awaited water storage project in northern Colorado. Brian Werner, spokesman for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District says it's good news.

WERNER: It's been six years working on a supplemental so we're pleased as well as the participants that it's finally out. It's on the street. It's there for public comment. It's another step in the process of trying to get two reservoirs built. We've been working on the formal permitting now since 2004, so take your pic, 11 or 12 years and then we've probably got another 2 years for the decision, it's 2017 and then a couple years for design and then we can start construction.

Of course it will take a number of years to build and Werner says that will be into the 2020's and even then this won't solve the problem.

WERNER: No. (laughs) I mean it's going to help. We're losing a lot of water this year. They're referring to it as the miracle May and there's just not a lot water going downstream. We want to store just a little nit of that in these two reservoirs so we can carry over for the dry times.

Of course with any project like this there are opponents.

WERNER: There are some people that feel that the river is going to be harmed beyond repair. We can't do that if we wanted to and we don't want to. We're going to mitigate the impacts with the mitigation enhancement package we strongly believe we're going to be able to show the river's going to be better off with the project than without the project overall.

And that's Colorado Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.