The desert city of Tucson, Arizona, has an average annual rainfall of just 12 inches. But when the rain comes, it often comes in the form of torrential downpours, causing damaging floods across the city. This is a perhaps ironic challenge for Tucson and the broader Pima County area in which it is situated, given that it’s part of a much larger region working to ensure that there is—and will continue to be—enough water to go around in a time of unrelenting drought.

Both of these distinct water-management challenges—too dry and too wet—can be addressed by thoughtful land use and infrastructure decisions. Of course, when making such decisions, it helps to have precise mapping data on hand. That’s why Pima County officials are working with the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and other key partners to pilot the use of some of the most cutting-edge mapping and data analysis tools on the market.

For the Babbitt Center—founded in 2017 with the mission of providing land-use research, education, and innovation to communities throughout the Colorado River Basin—the partnership represents one early step in exploring how such technology can be used to help integrate water and land use management across the region.

The technology itself originated across the country, at the Conservation Innovation Center (CIC) of Maryland’s Chesapeake Conservancy, a key player in cleaning up the notoriously pollution-addled Chesapeake Bay. To oversimplify a bit: CIC has designed image analysis algorithms that provide distinctly more granular image data of the earth’s surface. The technology has enabled a shift from a resolution that made it possible to observe and classify land in 30-meter-square chunks to a resolution that makes that possible at one square meter.

The details are of course a little more complicated, explains Jeffrey Allenby, the Conservancy’s director of conservation technology. Allenby says the new technology addresses an historic challenge: the compromise between resolution and cost of image collection. Until relatively recently, you could get 30-meter data collected via satellite every couple of weeks or even days. Or you could get more granular data collected via airplane—but at such a high cost that it was only worth doing every few years at most, which meant it was less timely.

What’s changing, says Allenby, is both the camera technology and the nature of the satellites used to deploy it. Instead of launching a super-expensive satellite built to last for decades, newer companies the CIC works with—Allenby mentions Planet Labs and DigitalGlobe—are using different approaches. “Smaller, replaceable” satellites, meant to last just a couple of years before they burn off in the atmosphere, can be equipped with the latest camera technology. Deployed in a kind of network, they offer coverage of most of the planet, producing new image data almost constantly.

Technology companies developed this business model to respond to commercial and investor demand for the most recent information available; tracking the number of cars in big-box store parking lots can, in theory, be a valuable economic indicator. Land use planners don’t need images quite that close to real time. But Allenby says the CIC began asking the tech companies, “What are you doing with the imagery that’s two weeks old?” It’s less expensive to acquire, but far better than what was previously available. The resulting images are interpreted by computers that classify them by type: irrigated land, bedrock, grassland, and so on. Doing that at a 30-square-meter level required a lot of compromise and imprecision; the one-meter-level is a different story.

The goal is to “model how water moves across a landscape,” as Allenby puts it, by combining the data with other resources, most notably LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) elevation data. Those are the “flour and eggs” of land use data projects, supplemented with other ingredients like reduction efficiencies or load rates from different land cover, depending on the project, Allenby says: “We’re building new recipes.” For Chesapeake Bay, those recipes are meant to help manage water quality. If you can determine where water is concentrating and, say, taking on nitrogen, you can deduce the most cost-effective spot to plant trees or place a riparian buffer to reduce that nitrogen load. (See “Precision Conservation,” October 2016 Land Lines.)

In the Colorado River Basin, the most urgent current water-management challenges are about quantity. Since water policy is largely hashed out at the local level despite the underlying land use issues having implications across multiple states, the Babbitt Center serves as a resource across a broad region. There’s currently a “heightened awareness” of water management among municipal and county policy makers, says Paula Randolph, the Babbitt Center’s associate director. “People are wanting to think about these issues and realizing they don’t have enough information.”

That brings us back to Pima County. Although it lies outside the basin, it boasts two features that make it a good place to evaluate how the uses of precision mapping data might be applied in the West: Basin-like geography and proactive municipal leaders. When the manager of technology for the Pima Association of Governments saw Allenby speak about the benefits of his work in the East, he contacted the CIC to discuss possibilities for the West. A year into the resulting project, several partners are on board, the group is mapping a 3,800-square-mile area, and the open-source data lives on the Pima Regional Flood Control District website, where others throughout the county are able to access and use it.

Broadly, this process has taken some effort, Randolph notes. Satellite data gathered in the West has different contours than the East Coast imagery that Chesapeake’s sophisticated software was used to, and that has required some adjustment—“teaching” the software the difference between a Southwestern rock roof and a front yard that both look (to the machine) like dirt. “We need human partners to fix that,” she says. “We strive for management-quality decision-making data.”

Even as such refinements continue, there are already some early results in Pima County. Clearer and more precise data about land cover is helping to identify areas that need flood mitigation. It has also been useful to identify “hot spots” where dangerous heat-island effects can occur, offering guidance for mitigation actions like adding shade trees. These maps provide a visual showcase about water flow and land use more efficiently than a field worker could.

Both Allenby and Randolph stress that this partnership is still in the early phases of exploring the potential uses and impacts of high-resolution map data. Randolph points out that while the Babbitt Center is working on this and another pilot project in the Denver area, the hope is that the results will contribute to a global conversation around water-management experimentation.

And Allenby suggests that the “recipes” being devised by technologists, policy makers, and planners will ideally lead to a shift in more accurately evaluating the efficiency and impact of various land use projects. This, he hopes, will lead to the most important outcome of all: “Making better decisions.” 

The Lincoln Institute has provided occasional financial support to the CIC for map- and data-related projects.

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) is a columnist for the Sunday Business section of The New York Times.

Image: High-resolution land cover data offers a closer look at Tucson, Arizona. Credit: Chesapeake Conservancy.

Agriculture was the main driver of development along the Colorado River. According to a recent report from the U.S. Geological Survey, 85 percent of water withdrawals went toward irrigation between 1985 and 2010 (Maupin 2018). The fields around Yuma, Arizona, and the Imperial and Palo Verde valleys of California consume more than 4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water annually, nearly a third of the river’s annual flows. But with population growth, water use has shifted to urban needs.

In Colorado, for example, 95 percent of water imported from the Colorado River headwaters through the Colorado-Big Thompson (CBT) project was once used for agriculture; now, that number is closer to 50 percent. As another example of the complexity of systems in the Colorado River Basin, CBT water is divided into units which can be bought and sold. The amount of water in a unit varies year to year depending on the total amount of water available; when CBT is at full capacity, a unit is one acre-foot. Agricultural users owned 85 percent of the units when trading began in the late 1950s, but currently own less than one-third of available units. Municipalities own the balance, but often lease the water to farms until it’s needed. The current price for a CBT unit is close to $30,000.

Such water-sharing agreements are becoming more common in a system stretched too thin. Rotational fallowing, also known as lease-fallowing or alternative-transfer mechanisms, has played a role in shifting water from farms to cities. Farmers in the Palo Verde Valley struck a deal with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million customers, to fallow between 7 and 35 percent of their land on a rotating basis. Metropolitan’s customers, in turn, get the water, which can be stored in Lake Mead. Similar deals, still underlined with tension but increasingly accepted, exist between Southern California municipalities and farmers in the Imperial Valley and between cities and farmers along Colorado’s Front Range urban corridor.

For their part, cities tend to tout conservation and development efforts they’ve made with water in mind. Many are encouraging density, reducing the water needed for landscaping; some have implemented turf-removal programs; and toilets, showers and other fixtures have become more efficient. Metropolitan Water District of Southern California chalked up a 36 percent per capita reduction in water use from 1985 to 2015, a time of several droughts, according to Planning magazine (Best 2018).

In Nevada, the population served by the Southern Nevada Water Authority has increased 41 percent since 2002, but the per capita consumption of Colorado River water fell 36 percent. The agency’s Colby Pellegrino, speaking at a September 2018 conference called “Risky Business on the Colorado River,” said conservation is the first, second, and third strategy for achieving reduced water consumption. “If you live in the Las Vegas Valley, where there is less than 4 inches of rainfall a year, and you have a median covered in turf, and the only person walking on that turf is the person pushing a lawn mower—that is a luxury our community cannot afford, if we want to continue to have the economy we have today,” she said.

Economy, culture, and values have been at the core of the basinwide debate about how to respond to the drought. No one sector or region can absorb the full burden of necessary reductions, and it’s clear that everyone must begin to think differently. Speaking at the “Risky Business” conference, Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, put it this way: Instead of the intentional use of water, Colorado is now talking about the intentional non-use of water. As is everyone who lives and works in the Colorado River Basin.

This content is excerpted from the article “Hydraulic Empire” published December 14, 2018.

Allen Best writes about water, energy, and other topics from a base in metropolitan Denver, where 78 percent of his water comes from the Colorado River Basin.

Photograph: On a farm in Yuma, Arizona. Credit: Amy Martin, courtesy of American Rivers.

References

Arizona Daily Star. 1998. “Don’t Ignore Colorado Delta.” May 6, 1998.

Best, Allen. 2018. “Water Pressure: Smart Management Is Key to Making Sure Inland Cities Aren’t Left High and Dry in the Face of a Warming Climate.” Planning August/September: 40–45. https://www.planning.org/login/?next=/planning/2018/aug/waterpressure/.

Maupin, Molly A., Tamara Ivahnenko, and Breton Bruce. 2018. “Estimates of Water Use and Trends in the Colorado River Basin, Southwestern United States, 1985–2010.” Reston, Virginia: U.S. Geological Survey. https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20185049.

For six centuries, a people called the Hohokam inhabited central Arizona. Among their many accomplishments, they created a hydraulic empire of sorts, a spiderlike web of canals intended to deliver water from the Gila and Salt rivers—tributaries of the mighty Colorado—to their agricultural fields. Eventually, the Hohokam abandoned their fields and canals. To this day, the reason is uncertain, but historian Donald Worster once surmised that the productive but ill-fated tribe “suffered the political and environmental consequences of bigness” (Worster 1985).

Bigness. It’s the perfect word to describe not only the Colorado River Basin, but so much of the geography, history, culture, politics, and challenges associated with it.

In its sheer complexity, the Colorado stands out among the rivers of America, and probably the world. In this river basin of 244,000 square miles, one-twelfth the land mass of the continental United States, exist great diversities, places of oven-hot heat and icy vastness. All but 2,000 of those square miles lie in the United States. Just 10 percent of that land mass, mostly in an elevation band of 9,000 to 11,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, produces 90 percent of the water in the system.

Hydraulic infrastructure abounds at almost every turn on the river’s 1,450-mile journey. The first diversions occur at its very headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, before the river can rightfully be called a creek. Fourteen dams have been erected on the Colorado River, and hundreds more on its tributaries. Hoover Dam, perhaps the best known, hulks a half-hour drive from Las Vegas. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) built it in the 1930s to hold back the river’s spring floods, creating a reservoir now known as Lake Mead. A second massive reservoir, Lake Powell, lies upstream 300 miles. It’s the result of Glen Canyon Dam, built in the 1960s with the goal of providing a means for the four Upper Basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—to store the water they had agreed to deliver to the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, and to Mexico.

At their fullest, the two reservoirs—which are the biggest in the country—can hold four years of flows of the Colorado River. A recent paper suggested that the two reservoirs could be considered one giant reservoir, bisected by a “glorious ditch” (CRRG 2018). That ditch is the Grand Canyon, which celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of its designation as a national park this year.

The dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and aqueducts of the Colorado deliver water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states—more than 1 in 10 Americans—and two Mexican states. The river’s water also nourishes more than 5.5 million acres of agricultural fields within and outside the river basin. Residents of Denver, Los Angeles, and other cities outside the basin rely on the river; crops in fields reaching almost to Nebraska benefit from transbasin exports and diversions.

The river provides a cultural and economic resource for 28 tribes within the basin. A $1.4 trillion economy hums along in and around the basin. This includes the snowmaking cannons at Vail and Aspen, the nightly water spectacle at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and the aeronautics industry of Southern California. Up and down the river, more than 225 federal recreation sites draw visitors eager to try their luck at fishing, rafting, hiking, or just taking in the sights. This river and the lands around it loom large in the public imagination.

It’s a big, complicated, and now vulnerable hydraulic web. Entering the twenty-first century, the river was already a sponge fully squeezed, its water rarely making it to the Gulf of California.

Rapid population growth, rising temperatures, and declining river flows are putting pressure on the system, forcing river managers and users to devise creative, forward-looking plans that consider both water and land. The Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy strongly encourages this approach. “We are trying to think more holistically by considering the management and planning of land and water resources together,” says Babbitt Center Program Manager Faith Sternlieb. “These are the foundations upon which water policy in the Colorado River Basin has been considered and crafted, and these are the roots we must nurture for a sustainable water future.” 

Taming the Colorado

The need to nurture roots has driven the development of the Colorado River Basin since the first people began farming there. The Hohokam, Mojave, and other tribes built canal systems of varying complexity to irrigate their fields. In the late 1800s, federal interest in tapping the river to boost agricultural production surged. By 1902, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) had created what is now the Bureau of Reclamation. During the twentieth century, the Bureau became the prime builder, and funder, of agricultural water projects throughout the basin.

Work on the Laguna Diversion Dam, the first dam on the Colorado River, began in 1904, yielding water a few years later for fields near Yuma, Arizona. Yuma sits in the Mojave Desert, where Arizona, California, and Mexico come together. There, long, nearly frost-free growing seasons coupled with fertile soils and Colorado River water enable extraordinary productivity. Today, farmers in the Yuma area of Arizona and Imperial Valley of California proclaim that during winter they grow 80 to 90 percent of the greens and other vegetables in the United States and Canada. This area, declares Arizona’s Yuma County Agriculture Water Coalition, is to U.S. agriculture what Silicon Valley is to electronics and what Detroit was to automobiles (YCAWC 2015).

All told, irrigation accounted for 85 percent of total water withdrawals in the basin between 1985–2010 (Maupin 2018). Today, agriculture still accounts for 75 to 80 percent of total water withdrawals. This supports row crops such as corn and the perennial crop of alfalfa, which is grown from Wyoming to Mexico. Much of the crops go to livestock: The Pacific Institute, in a 2013 report, estimated that 60 percent of agricultural production in the basin feeds beef cattle, dairy cattle, and horses (Cohen 2013). Agriculture has always been, and will remain, a key piece of the Colorado River puzzle.

But almost as quickly as the Bureau of Reclamation began diverting water for agriculture, other needs arose, from producing electricity to slaking the thirst of booming Los Angeles. By the early 1920s, the seven states of the arid West realized they had to find a way to share a river that would become—as the river’s preeminent historian, the late Norris Hundley, would later write—“the most disputed body of water in the country and probably in the world” (Hundley 1996). Years later, Hundley famously referred to the area as a “basin of contention” (Hundley 2009).

Today, dozens of laws, treaties, and other agreements and rulings collectively called the Law of the River govern the use of Colorado River Basin water. They include federal environmental laws, a treaty over salinity, amendments to treaties, a U.S. Supreme Court case, and interstate compacts. None is more fundamental than the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which still guides the annual share of water each state gets. Representatives of the seven basin states hammered out its provisions in grueling meetings held near Santa Fe. They were driven by both ambition and fear.

Ambitious California needed federal muscle to tame the Colorado River if it was to realize its agricultural potential. Los Angeles had aspirations, too. In the century’s first two decades, it had grown more than 500 percent and wanted the electricity that a large dam on the river could deliver. A few years later, it also decided it wanted the water itself. To pay for this giant dam, California needed federal help. Congress would approve that aid only if California had secured support from the other southwestern states.

Fear drove the other basin states. If the first-in-time, first-in-right legal system of prior appropriation used by Western states was to be applied to the Colorado River, California and perhaps Arizona would reap the benefits. The headwaters states, including Colorado, were developing too slowly to benefit from their own long and snowy winters. Delph Carpenter, a Colorado farm boy turned water lawyer, forged the consensus. Both basins, upper and lower, got 7.5 million acre-feet, for a total of 15 million acre-feet. Mexico needed water, too, which the compact assumed would come from surplus waters. A later treaty between the two nations specified 1.5 million acre-feet for Mexico.

The 1922 Colorado River Compact also nodded, but no more, at what later writers called a sword of Damocles hanging over these allocations: water for the basin’s Indian reservations. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1908 case called Winters v. United States, had declared that when Congress reserved land for a reservation, it implicitly reserved water sufficient to fulfill the purpose of that reservation, including agriculture. That ruling did not determine the amounts that were needed. Tribal water rights within the basin now constitute 2.4 million acre-feet, in many cases senior in priority to all other users within the allocations of the individual states. That’s a fifth of the river’s total flows. Importantly, specific water allocations for some of the largest tribes still have not been resolved.

The framers of the 1922 compact made a big, fatally flawed assumption: That enough water existed to meet everyone’s needs. Average annual flows from 1906 to 1921 had averaged 18 million acre-feet. But even by 1925, just three years after the Compact came into being and three years short of its Congressional approval, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist named Eugene Clyde La Rue had delivered a report indicating the river probably would deliver too little water to meet these hopes and expectations. Other studies about the same time delivered the same conclusions.

They were right. Over a longer period, from 1906 to 2018, the river has averaged 14.8 million acre-feet per year. Averages have dropped during the twenty-first century, in the midst of a 19-year drought, to 12.3 million acre-feet. In the last water year, ending in September 2018, the river carried only 4.6 million acre-feet. That’s just 200,000 more acre-feet than California’s annual entitlement.

The Shift from Farms to Cities

Agriculture was the main driver of development along the Colorado River. According to a recent report from the U.S. Geological Survey, 85 percent of water withdrawals went toward irrigation between 1985 and 2010 (Maupin 2018). The fields around Yuma, Arizona, and the Imperial and Palo Verde valleys of California consume more than 4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water annually, nearly a third of the river’s annual flows. But with population growth, water use has shifted to urban needs.

In Colorado, for example, 95 percent of water imported from the Colorado River headwaters through the Colorado-Big Thompson (CBT) project was once used for agriculture; now, that number is closer to 50 percent. As another example of the complexity of systems in the Colorado River Basin, CBT water is divided into units which can be bought and sold. The amount of water in a unit varies year to year depending on the total amount of water available; when CBT is at full capacity, a unit is one acre-foot. Agricultural users owned 85 percent of the units when trading began in the late 1950s, but currently own less than one-third of available units. Municipalities own the balance, but often lease the water to farms until it’s needed. The current price for a CBT unit is close to $30,000.

Such water-sharing agreements are becoming more common in a system stretched too thin. Rotational fallowing, also known as lease-fallowing or alternative-transfer mechanisms, has played a role in shifting water from farms to cities. Farmers in the Palo Verde Valley struck a deal with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million customers, to fallow between 7 and 35 percent of their land on a rotating basis. Metropolitan’s customers, in turn, get the water, which can be stored in Lake Mead. Similar deals, still underlined with tension but increasingly accepted, exist between Southern California municipalities and farmers in the Imperial Valley and between cities and farmers along Colorado’s Front Range urban corridor.

For their part, cities tend to tout conservation and development efforts they’ve made with water in mind. Many are encouraging density, reducing the water needed for landscaping; some have implemented turf-removal programs; and toilets, showers and other fixtures have become more efficient. Metropolitan Water District of Southern California chalked up a 36 percent per capita reduction in water use from 1985 to 2015, a time of several droughts, according to Planning magazine (Best 2018).

In Nevada, the population served by the Southern Nevada Water Authority has increased 41 percent since 2002, but the per capita consumption of Colorado River water fell 36 percent. The agency’s Colby Pellegrino, speaking at a September 2018 conference called “Risky Business on the Colorado River,” said conservation is the first, second, and third strategy for achieving reduced water consumption. “If you live in the Las Vegas Valley, where there is less than 4 inches of rainfall a year, and you have a median covered in turf, and the only person walking on that turf is the person pushing a lawn mower—that is a luxury our community cannot afford, if we want to continue to have the economy we have today,” she said.

Economy, culture, and values have been at the core of the basinwide debate about how to respond to the drought. No one sector or region can absorb the full burden of necessary reductions, and it’s clear that everyone must begin to think differently. Speaking at the “Risky Business” conference, Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, put it this way: Instead of the intentional use of water, Colorado is now talking about the intentional non-use of water. As is everyone who lives and works in the Colorado River Basin.

A River Shared

In late 1928, Congress approved the Boulder Canyon Project Act. This legislation accomplished three significant things: It authorized construction of a dam in Boulder Canyon, near Las Vegas, which was later named Hoover Dam. The law also authorized construction of the All American Canal, crucial for developing the productive farmland of California’s Imperial Valley, an area that’s now the single largest user of Colorado River water. And the Boulder Canyon Project Act divided waters among the Lower Basin states: 4.4 million acre-feet each year to California, 2.8 million acre-feet to Arizona, and 300,000 acre-feet for Nevada. Las Vegas then had a population of fewer than 3,000 people.

As the twentieth century rolled on, headwaters states also got dams, tunnels, and other hydraulic infrastructure. In 1937, Congress agreed to bankroll the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, what historian David Lavender called a “massive violation of geography” intended to divert Colorado River waters to farms in northeastern Colorado, outside of the hydrological basin. In 1956, Congress approved the Colorado River Storage Project Act, authorizing a handful of dams, including Glen Canyon.

Only Arizona remained left out. It had vigorously opposed the 1922 compact, then remained defiant. Its Congressional representatives opposed Hoover Dam and, in 1934, then-Governor Benjamin Moeur even dispatched the state’s National Guard in a showy opposition to construction of another dam being built downstream to deliver water to Los Angeles. “Put simply, Arizonans feared there would be little water remaining for them after the Upper Basin, California, and Mexico got what they wanted,” Hundley explains (Hundley 1996). Finally, in 1944—the same year the U.S. and Mexico reached an agreement about the amount of water due to the latter—Arizona legislators succumbed to political realities. Cooperation, not confrontation, would be needed for the state to get federal help to develop its share of the river. At last, the compact had the signatures of all seven states.

Arizona finally got its big slice of Colorado River pie in the 1960s. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1963—one in a series of Arizona vs. California cases over many decades—confirmed Arizona had the right to 2.8 million acre-feet, as Congress had specified in 1928, along with all the water in its own tributaries. This is what Arizona had wanted all along. In 1968, Congress approved funding for the massive Central Arizona Project, ultimately resulting in the construction of 307 miles of concrete canal to deliver water from Lake Havasu to Phoenix and Tucson and farmers between. California supported the authorization, with a hitch: In times of shortage, it would still have rights to its 4.4 million acre-feet first. This led Arizona to later create a water banking authority to store Colorado River in underground aquifers, providing at least partial security against future shortages.

Upper Basin states had reached accord about how to apportion their 7.5 million acre-feet without notable friction: Colorado 51.75 percent, Utah 23 percent, Wyoming 14 percent, and New Mexico 11.25 percent. They used percentages, as Hundley explained, because of “uncertainty over how much water would remain after the upper basin had fulfilled its obligation to the lower-basin states” and Mexico. Fluctuations in the river’s flow, they reasoned, might mean that some years they had an amount smaller than 7.5 million acre-feet to divide between themselves. It was, in retrospect, an eminently wise decision.

Conservation Concerns

The same year the basin states framed the original Colorado River Compact, the great naturalist Aldo Leopold canoed through the Colorado River Delta in Mexico. In an essay later published in A Sand County Almanac, he described the delta as “a milk and honey wilderness.” The river itself was “nowhere and everywhere,” he wrote, and was camouflaged by a “hundred green lagoons” in its leisurely journey to the ocean. Six decades later, visiting the delta after a half-century of feverish engineering, construction, and management had emerged to put the river’s waters to good use, the journalist Philip Fradkin had a different take. He called his book A River No More.

As the 20th century closed, the environmental impacts of essentially regarding a river as plumbing drew new attention, especially in the now dewatered delta. The lagoons that had so enchanted Leopold were gone, because the stopped-up river no longer reached its southern outlet. Drainage from vast agricultural enterprises had made the river so saline that, among other things, Mexico protested that the water it was receiving was unfit to use. The many dams and diversions that came after Leopold’s visit had also put 102 river-dependent rare birds, fish, and mammals on the brink of extinction, reported the Arizona Daily Star. The newspaper lauded the work of stakeholders in a new transborder conservation effort: “The fundamental principle of ecology calls for land managers to look to the good of the whole system, not just its parts.”

Environmental groups might have used the Endangered Species Act to force the argument about solutions, but the delta was not within the United States. So they looked to find collaborative solutions. In the closing days of the tenure of Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the Interior in the Clinton administration and namesake of the Babbitt Center, the two countries adopted Minute 306. It created the framework for a dialogue that produced, under Babbitt’s successors in the Bush administration, an agreement called Minute 319 and a one-time pulse flow of more than 100,000 acre-feet in the river in 2014.

Children gleefully splashed in the rare waters of the river in Mexico during that pulse flow, but adults on both sides of the border were equally happy. Among those grinning was Jennifer Pitt, then of the Environmental Defense Fund. Litigation had been a possible route, she said, but an inclusive and transparent process with stakeholders was more productive.

“The institutional legal and physical framework we have on the Colorado River is the basis for great competition and the potential for litigation between parties,” says Pitt, who is now with Audubon. “But it is exactly that same framework that has given those parties the opportunity to collaborate as an alternative to having solutions handed to them by a court.”

Collaboration Is Critical

Reservoirs were full as the next century arrived, thanks to robust snowfall in the Rockies during the 1990s. Still, there was tension. California for decades had exceeded its apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet, consuming a high of 5.4 million acre-feet in 1974. Upper Basin states never have fully developed their 7.5 million acre-feet, averaging 3.7 to 4 million since the 1980s, plus 500,000 acre-feet from reservoir evaporation.

Then came drought, deep and extended. The river carried just 69 percent in 2000. The winter of 2001 to 2002 was even more stingy, the river delivering just 5.9 million acre-feet, or 39 percent of average, at Lake Powell. From 2000 to 2004 was the lowest 5-year cumulative flow in the observed record. Since then, more years have been dry than wet. The reservoir levels are at near-record lows.

The 1922 compact had not contemplated this kind of long-term drought. A structural deficit came into sharp relief. Tom McCann, assistant general manager of the Central Arizona Project, coined the phrase. Very simply, the Lower Basin states were using more water than was delivered from Lake Powell each year. This was so even when the Bureau of Reclamation authorized the release of extra “equalization” flows from Powell.

“Equalization releases are like hitting the jackpot on the slot machine,” McCann says. “Back then, we were hitting the jackpot every three or four or five years, and we thought we had nothing to worry about.” Even with the jackpots, Lake Mead continued to decline, the reservoir’s widening bathtub ring charting the losses.

Climate change overlays the structural deficit. Scientists argue that warming temperatures swing a big bat in the Colorado River Basin. They term the early-twenty-first-century declines a “hot drought” as distinguished from a “dry drought.”

The prospect of this new, human-induced “hot” drought on top of a conventional drought worries many. Tree-ring studies show that the region has suffered longer, deeper droughts in the past, before measurements began. “A number of folks claim that the current 19-year period of 2000 to 2018 is the driest 19-year period on the Colorado River,” says Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District. “Nonsense. It’s not even close. If these past droughts were to happen with today’s temperatures, things could be much worse.”

The first two decades of the new millennium have seen a series of efforts to confront this new reality. In 2007, the Department of the Interior issued interim shortage guidelines, the first formal response to the drought. The Bureau of Reclamation released a Basin Supply and Demand Study in 2012, an exhaustive effort to provide a platform for future decisions. The many reports stacked tall enough to fill a box that could ship a football. They discussed population growth, rising temperatures, and the impact of increasing rain on snowpack. Demand, the study concluded, would exceed supply by 3.2 million acre-feet by 2060 (USBR 2012).

“You can argue about the numbers, you can argue about the forecast, but it was something that got everybody’s attention,” says Colorado’s Anne Castle, who was then assistant secretary of Interior for water and science. “It served as a catalyst to focus the discussion about Colorado River management more directly in dealing with future scarcity.”

Castle sees the basin now struggling to find collaborative solutions. “In a complex water system, there are so many moving parts, it’s not about one answer,” she says. “You have to manage a complex system, and you can only do that through negotiated agreements.”

Those negotiations are happening now, in the form of drought contingency planning. Even as scarcity has become more prominent, collaboration has also grown. But the measuring stick for success may well be the white mineralized walls of Lake Mead, a big reservoir in a big basin facing big challenges. Now the seven states, the tribes, and the governments of the U.S. and Mexico, with input from environmental and other nongovernmental organizations, must figure out how to keep those water levels from sagging even more. They must concoct a plan that ensures a sustainable future, while heeding the twists and turns of the past.

Allen Best writes about water, energy, and other topics from a base in metropolitan Denver, where 78 percent of his water comes from the Colorado River Basin.

Photograph: Lake Powell at Glen Canyon Dam. Credit: Pete McBride.

References

Arizona Daily Star. 1998. “Don’t Ignore Colorado Delta.” May 6, 1998.

Best, Allen. 2018. “Water Pressure: Smart Management Is Key to Making Sure Inland Cities Aren’t Left High and Dry in the Face of a Warming Climate.” Planning August/September: 40–45. https://www.planning.org/login/?next=/planning/2018/aug/waterpressure/.

Cohen, Michael, Juliet Christian-Smith, and John Berggren. 2013. Water to Supply the Land: Irrigated Agriculture in the Colorado River Basin. Oakland, CA: Pacific Institute. (May). http://pacinst.org/publication/water-to-supply-the-land-irrigated-agriculture-in-the-colorado-river-basin/.

CRRG (Colorado River Research Group). 2018. “It’s Hard to Fill a Bathtub When the Drain is Wide Open: The Case of Lake Powell.” Boulder, CO: Colorado River Research Group. (August). https://www.coloradoriverresearchgroup.org/uploads/4/2/3/6/42362959/crrg_the_case_of_lake_powell.pdf.

Fradkin, Philip. 1996. A River No More: The Colorado River and the West. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Hundley, Norris Jr. 1996. “The West Against Itself: The Colorado River—An Institutional History.” In New Courses for the Colorado River: Major Issues for the Next Century, ed. Gary D. Weatherford and F. Lee Brown. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. http://web.sahra.arizona.edu/education2/hwr213/docs/Unit1Wk4/Hundley_CRWUA.pdf.

———. 2009. Water in the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Maupin, Molly A., Tamara Ivahnenko, and Breton Bruce. 2018. “Estimates of Water Use and Trends in the Colorado River Basin, Southwestern United States, 1985–2010.” Reston, Virginia: U.S. Geological Survey. https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20185049.

USBR (U.S Bureau of Reclamation). 2012. “Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand Study.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Interior. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy/finalreport/Study%20Report/CRBS_Study_Report_FINAL.pdf.

Worster, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

YCAWC (Yuma County Agriculture Water Coalition). 2015. “A Case Study in Efficiency: Agriculture and Water Use in the Yuma, Arizona Area.” Yuma, AZ: Yuma County Agriculture Water Coalition. (February). https://www.agwateryuma.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ACaseStudyInEfficiency.pdf.

 
A flurry of integrated land and water activity occurred after passage of the Colorado Water Plan in 2015, but the work actually had begun years before. Beginning in 2010, leaders from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the state Department of Local Affairs, the Lincoln Institute, the Sonoran Institute, Pace University Land Use Law Center, and the Keystone Policy Center came together for the Colorado Water and Growth Dialogue. They developed a stakeholder group that also includes city and county planners, water specialists, and public officials, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, Western Resource Advocates, water utilities, universities, environmental organizations, and others. A core group of stakeholders has evolved as the Colorado Land and Water Planning Alliance to continue the Dialogue’s research and training in land and water planning. The Lincoln Institute, through their Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, is providing both financial and technical assistance for Alliance efforts.

In 2016, the Keystone Policy Center, with support from the Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute, hosted a scenario-planning program for Front Range stakeholders focused on integrating land and water planning. The goal was to develop strategies to reduce water demand and close Colorado’s water gap. The key question: How can changes in urban form and landscaping practices assist in meeting future urban water demand along the Front Range?

Ray Quay of Arizona State University’s Decision Center for a Desert City, who is a former assistant planning director and assistant water services director in Phoenix, presented his Denver-area study of water use across densities, building types, and landscaping practices as part of the program. The study found that the maximum reduction in water use achievable by increasing density was in the range of 20 percent, with a 10 percent reduction achievable by modest density increases; and it found that local governments could achieve the same levels of reduction through outdoor water restrictions, landscape codes, and irrigation practices, with much greater certainty.

The upshot for integrated land and water planning, says Quay: “Water supplies are limited, and . . . with growth you’re going to need more water. You can’t support growth on the conservation of water.” Communities need to focus on what type of growth and economy they want, he says, and how to allocate water supplies for the growth they expect. And fundamentally, he concludes, “they need to do that before they need water.”

The work of all the partners involved in these conversations has “moved the needle” and helped create a consensus on the need for integrated land and water planning statewide, says Matt Mulica, policy facilitator for the Keystone Policy Center. He says the Dialogue’s exploratory scenario planning and a Keystone report on the process have helped communities with strategies such as planning for higher density, developing new metrics on water and land use, and offering incentives for compact development and low-water landscapes. The Pace Land Use Law Center’s Land Use Leadership Alliance, the Colorado chapter of the American Planning Association, and the Boulder-based environmental nonprofit Western Resource Advocates also have offered training on issues such as comprehensive plans that designate priority areas for growth and conservation, water-efficient land-use development patterns, cluster and infill development, and urban growth boundaries.

This content is excerpted from the article “Grow with the Flow,” published November 27, 2018.

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.

 
When Bradley Hill arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona, to become its first water manager in 2007, the high-desert city had spent decades working to ensure a sustainable water supply for its growing population. But Hill immediately noticed a missing link: “The planning group and water group didn’t talk to each other,” says Hill, now water services director. “The planners were planning subdivisions without talking to the water supply guys.”

In his prior post as water manager in Peoria, a major suburb of Phoenix, Hill had introduced a pioneering approach to integrated water conservation and land planning. Seeking to connect the dots between growth and water in Flagstaff, Hill secured support to introduce a similarly collaborative approach—one that has helped the city plan to meet its water needs into the next century.

Across the arid and rapidly urbanizing Southwestern United States, planning for the future availability of water has taken on a new urgency in the face of multiyear drought, trends toward higher temperatures, and the uncertainty of climate-related changes. As recognition of the relationship between water demand and the built environment increases, collaboration between urban planners and water resources specialists is on the rise. The evidence is mounting that tools such as dedicated water master plans, new zoning approaches, and comprehensive plans embedded with policies that address a wide range of water-use issues can help communities plan better.
 

The Benefits of Integrated Land and Water Planning

Communities that integrate land use and water planning report multiple benefits, according to the Coordinated Planning Guide: A How-To Resource for Integrating Alternative Water Supply and Land Use Planning. These include:

• Increasing water supply sustainability at reduced costs
• Securing water supplies, such as recycled water, that are independent of weather
• Reducing competition for limited water supplies
• Resolving conflict among plans for land use, economic development, and regional or statewide water use
• Improving water management plans, data development, and data sharing
• Addressing urban flooding by integrating low-impact development design into land use planning
• Increasing predictability within the development process

But there’s still a long way to go. “With water and land-use planning, we’re where we were years ago with early transit-oriented and mixed-use development,” says Peter Pollock, former manager of Western Programs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and former planning director in Boulder, Colorado. “[We’re] trying to guess what it will be like and what our water needs will be.”

In 2017, the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy conducted a review of more than 150 comprehensive plans from communities in Arizona and Colorado to assess how—or whether—they address water in the course of land planning. Both states require all local jurisdictions to complete comprehensive plans; Arizona requires those plans to integrate water-related issues. Still, when it came down to it, the Babbitt Center team detected a certain scarcity.

“Very few comprehensive plans actually have links between water and land,” says Babbitt Center research fellow Erin Rugland, who conducted the analysis (Babbitt Center, forthcoming). “A lot of water planning is very cursory and general within comprehensive plans. Even communities with an integrated water resource plan may not link land and water in their comprehensive plan.”

Some communities, however, are modeling different approaches. Flagstaff “hit every review criteria” in her study, says Rugland, noting the city excels in its conservation programs, water-demand projections, and regional collaborations. And in Westminster, Colorado, planners are crunching numbers in new ways to glean better insights into future needs: “Westminster has excelled at incorporating water into its zoning and development processes,” says Rugland. Here’s a closer look at the innovations afoot in two small cities facing considerable pressures from growth.

Flagstaff, Arizona

Situated at an elevation of 7,000 feet on the Colorado Plateau in Northern Arizona, Flagstaff is essentially a high-desert urban island surrounded by thousands of acres of national forests, monuments, and other public land. This booming city is home to 73,000, a population that surged 25 percent between 2000 and 2010; that number could grow to 90,000 by 2040, according to state projections. The city’s 64 square miles offer no access to Colorado River water or any running rivers, and the extended drought in the region has limited average annual precipitation to a mere 22 inches. On top of all that, the city is the primary water provider within the region, also serving unincorporated areas of Coconino County. As a result, Flagstaff has “one of the most challenging water situations in the state,” says Brad Hill.

That’s a meaningful claim in a state that is intensely aware of its vulnerabilities regarding water.

Arizona saw trouble coming decades ago. In 1980, the state legislature passed the groundbreaking Groundwater Management Act in an effort to carefully allocate Arizona’s limited groundwater resources. The legislation created four “active management areas” (AMAs), later expanded to five, which include metro areas such as Phoenix and Tucson. As Jeff Tannler of the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) explains, “Before recording plats or selling parcels within an AMA, developers must demonstrate an assured 100-year water supply. Outside of AMAs, a developer must disclose to potential first purchasers of subdivided lots whether the water supply is adequate.”

While the latter is advisory in nature—land outside an AMA can still be subdivided and sold without an adequate water supply as long as the buyer is notified—Tannler says both programs “consider current and committed demand as well as growth projections, and both incorporate long-term water supply planning.” Subsequent legislation made it possible for cities and towns—or counties by a unanimous vote of their governing body—to adopt an ordinance making the adequacy rules mandatory within their jurisdiction. Two counties and two towns in Arizona have adopted such an ordinance.

A more recent piece of statewide legislation, the Growing Smarter Plus Act of 2000, requires every local jurisdiction to develop a comprehensive plan that describes a physical supply of available water, projects water demand based on predicted population growth, and explains how future water demand will affect the water supply. This legislation “strengthened how water is talked about in the comprehensive plans for big cities like Phoenix and its metro area,” says Rugland. However, she notes a caveat: The defunding of the Arizona Commerce Department office that reviewed comprehensive plans has meant little oversight in smaller cities and towns regarding good planning for linking land and water.

Among the water-wise practices local jurisdictions are incorporating into their comprehensive plans: Tucson limits thirsty turf grass, allows greywater reuse on landscapes, and requires high-efficiency water fixtures in new developments; Chandler requires nonresidential developments that exceed municipal water allotments to apply for an exemption to the city council or purchase their own water; and Peoria established an economic valuation per gallon of water to help assess the impact of new development.

Against this backdrop, Flagstaff has been finding its own solutions. The city drilled its first well outside the city limits in 1954, and in the late 1990s it began drilling wells inside the city. Wells are a difficult and costly groundwater source: Boring through 2,000 feet of the same sandstone, shale, and limestone layers that form the Grand Canyon costs about $3 million for each well, says Hill. But the wells help reduce the city’s reliance on surface water such as snowmelt, which is unreliable in drought conditions. Groundwater now accounts for about 60 percent of the city’s water.

In 2005, the city made a major investment in securing a sustainable water supply by purchasing Red Gap Ranch, an 8,500-acre property located 40 miles to the east. The ranch, which borders Navajo Nation land, has high groundwater yields that could meet projected water demands for Flagstaff, with minimal impact to the aquifer. The city has drilled 11 wells at Red Gap Ranch, but the idea of building a 40-mile pipeline to transport the resulting water is ambitious, costly, and controversial.

With feasibility studies on the Red Gap pipeline continuing, Flagstaff completed a study in 2012 that quantified its total water supply to provide baseline data for growth. In 2013, ADWR designated Flagstaff as having an adequate water supply for 100 years, including Red Gap Ranch. The following year, the voters approved Flagstaff Regional Plan 2030, a comprehensive plan for the city and county that contains a chapter on water resources with goals and policies related to low-water development strategies, green infrastructure, and water infrastructure financing, as well as information such as water use per capita and per sector (City of Flagstaff 2014). The vision is that by 2030, the water supply will be maintained through conservation, reuse, innovative treatment technologies, and smart development choices.

“One of the things Flagstaff has done well is we didn’t wait for a crisis to begin planning for water,” says Sara Dechter, comprehensive planning manager. “We can develop for the next 100 years—not 20 years like most comprehensive plans.”

Every administrative site plan review or zoning request includes an impact analysis to determine whether water can be delivered to the site through existing infrastructure or a new well is needed, and how the project will work within the city’s water budget. Among its forward-looking policies, the city has identified higher-density, mixed-use infill projects as a way to plan within its water budget, says Daniel Folke, acting community development director. Such projects “are more energy and water efficient than single-family subdivisions,” he says. “The reality is that way of housing people is more water efficient, due to efficiencies of scale” and other factors, he says.

Flagstaff’s best practices also include the following:

Stormwater management: Flagstaff requires stormwater “low impact development” (LID) practices for all new subdivisions, commercial and industrial developments, redevelopment of nonconforming sites, and developments larger than one-quarter acre to control increasing runoff volumes from impervious areas that had required the city’s storm drain systems to be up-sized.

Rainwater harvesting: Adoption of a rainwater harvesting ordinance in 2012 was precedent-setting in Arizona and led to revisions of its low-impact development and stormwater manuals. Flagstaff encourages harvesting measures such as rain barrels and cisterns.

Landscaping: Flagstaff modified its land development code to promote sustainable development practices and Smart Growth principles to ensure protection of resources and open space and to allow for more compact development. This revision included changes to its landscaping code to foster the creation of sustainable landscapes by using native plants, zone-planting according to water needs, and irrigating with greywater, reclaimed water, or rainwater rather than potable water.

Knowing that the city has an adequate water supply offers only a measure of confidence in the age of climate change, says Hill, and creativity is increasingly called for. In early 2018, the state of Arizona—facing a population increase from 7.1 million to 9.7 million people by 2040, according to state projections—opened a new door for some communities, updating its regulations to allow reclaimed water from wastewater treatment plants to undergo advanced treatment for use as drinking water.

“We know [the Red Gap pipeline] could cost an estimated $250 million, and that supply would provide 100 percent of demands into the future,” says Hill. Or the city could spend over $100 million to build a recycled-water advanced treatment facility to meet a portion of its future water needs, he says. “We don’t have to do any of these things tomorrow, though it takes a long time to set up the financial and legal frameworks for such infrastructure.”

For now, Hill says, the city has enough water from existing supplies for 100 years for as many as 106,000 residents. If the city grows beyond that size, it would need a new supply of water. “Because of the city’s policies, we can think today about how to have a sustainable water supply for the future,” he says. “We need to be planning ahead.”

Westminster, Colorado

Nearly 700 miles northeast of Flagstaff, midway between Denver and Boulder on the busy US 36 transportation corridor, sits Westminster, Colorado. Located at an elevation of 5,384 feet, with only 16 inches of annual rain and snowfall, the city of 114,000 is positioning itself as the next urban hub for the metro area. A 10-million-square-foot mixed-use district known as Downtown Westminster, rising on the site of a dead shopping mall, could house as many as 12,000 new residents in a few years. Four other urban growth zones in the 34-square-mile city could accommodate density for build-out, with a projected population of 157,000 by 2040, according to the Denver Regional Council of Governments. The city’s goal is to have 33,000 acre-feet of water per year available long-term. Current supplies will not meet these projected demands; the city is analyzing population targets and the potential gap amount, and it is focusing on how to predict future needs with greater accuracy.

Westminster knows what’s it like to need water. In the early 1960s, awaiting completion of a reservoir and strained by a long, hot summer after a decade of rapid growth, the city resorted to using ditchwater as a source of drinking water. This prompted the Mothers’ March on City Hall, which saw local women protest for safe drinking water for their children. Their action spurred Westminster’s efforts to improve the quantity as well as the quality of its water, says City Council Member Anita Seitz.

Since then, Westminster has become a leader in water planning among communities on the Front Range—a region on the east face of the Rocky Mountains that is home to more than 80 percent of the state’s residents and is defined by a north-south urban corridor that includes Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. The city is modeling the integration of land and water planning through its comprehensive plan’s policies, codes, and regulations, zoning and development practices, landscaping, and capital improvement plans.

Westminster’s location puts it in the heart of a region that is grappling with drought, rising temperatures, and rapid urban growth. By 2040, Colorado’s population is projected to double to 10 million people, greatly increasing the demand for water. Most of those people will live on the Front Range, and most of their water will be piped to them through the Rockies, from the other side of the Continental Divide. Although it is a headwaters state, Colorado could face an annual gap between water supply and water demand of over 500,000 acre-feet by 2050, according to analysis conducted for the Colorado Water Plan, adopted by the state in 2015. Given this gap scenario, the Colorado Water Plan calls for training local governments to encourage best management practices in land use planning and water management, efficiency, and conservation. Among its goals: By 2025, 75 percent of Coloradans would live in communities that had incorporated water-saving actions into land-use planning.

“That legislation really galvanized communities and provided leadership for making change,” says Kevin Reidy, water conservation technical specialist for the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), the state agency that is managing a series of grant-funded workshops and webinars on water and planning for municipal leaders.

Westminster updated its comprehensive land use plan in 2004 to improve alignment between resources and land development. The plan included a revised tap fee structure to reflect water usage, revised landscape requirements for low-water using materials, linkage of water use and land parcels through geographic information systems (GIS) data, and more reporting to city council on water supply and demand projections. The city’s Comprehensive Plan 2013, currently being updated, focused on strategic growth and density in five urban zones, including the new downtown (City of Westminster 2013). The 2014 Water Supply Plan used the comprehensive plan to model projected development and growth.

“Most cities project future water use per capita, per person,” by taking all water and dividing by the population, says Drew Beckwith, water specialist for the city’s public works and utilities. “It’s a very linear calculation. The problem with that is it matters what new development looks like.” Westminster is one of the first cities in Colorado to link water use to development in its comprehensive plan, he says. “The city has calculated the water impacts of all building types based on existing data. We know that office space uses 1.6 acre-feet of water per year, a golf course uses 2.5 acre-feet per year, and a multi-story, mixed-use downtown building uses 5.4 acre-feet. Once the comprehensive plan is set and adopted by the city council, it’s very straightforward. Zoning and the availability and cost of water is front and center in planning and development decisions.”

Water is also integrated into day-to-day planning activities, says Beckwith. The public works and utilities department meets weekly with community development, building, fire, engineering, transportation, economic development, and other departments to discuss development proposals and technical issues. They review policy issues monthly, and meet annually with the city council to assess water needed for new growth.

Other best practices in Westminster include:

Tap fees: Westminster charges tap fees by estimates by the type of business and the square footage to accurately account for the impact of that business on water supplies. The tap fee structure is based on water use from a plumbing fixture data sheet, so there’s an incentive to have water-conserving fixtures.

Pre-application development meetings: Developers are encouraged to attend a free pre-application meeting with staff from public utilities and water services, community planning, and other departments to discuss code issues and how their building and site design would benefit from high-efficiency plumbing fixtures and water-wise landscaping to reduce fees based on the projected water demands. Water supply impacts are taken into account with every project approval.

Landscaping regulations: Westminster has a post-occupancy inspection program to ensure that water-efficient landscaping from the development plan has been installed. Alterations are treated as a code violation, and can result in misdemeanor charges and fines.

“Integration of water and land use makes us much more conscious of the impact of development on our water resource portfolio,” says Beckwith. “Most Front Range cities have a certain amount of water, and they’re not keen to get more because it is a pain to obtain and very expensive. That’s where conservation comes in.” In 2012, Westminster analyzed the impact of its conservation efforts from 1980 to 2010, a period when its population doubled from approximately 53,000 to 106,000 people. The volume of daily water used per person declined by 17 percent, a reduction that was critical in helping Westminster avoid the need—and millions of dollars in costs—to build new facilities and purchase additional water supplies.

The city is using computer modeling to determine how much water the system can produce today and the probability of the city being able to supply that amount in a given year, says Sarah Borgers, water resources and quality manager for the city’s public works and utilities department. “We’ve run these questions through thousands of iterations prior to launching [our] comprehensive plan update process, as a framework so we can start allocating water to certain parts of the city that will need it.” The city also commissioned a paleohydrological study of 500-year-old tree rings from the Front Range to understand past cycles and future possibilities for drought.

“We’ve incorporated water supply into land planning through the last two comprehensive plans in 2004 and 2013, but we need to make sure we’re planning for growth,” says Andrew Spurgin, Westminster’s principal long-range planner. Echoing many others in the Colorado River Basin, Spurgin says climate change adds another layer of uncertainty. “One question with climate change is: ‘What level of risk do we need to plan for?’” he says. Westminster has participated in the Keystone Water and Growth Dialogue, and has been doing scenario planning with experts and collaboratively with key city departments. The city also participated in the Growing Water Smart program held by the Lincoln Institute and Sonoran Institute at the Keystone Policy Center in 2017.

It’s all part of an effort, says City Council Member Seitz, “to make sure the decisions we make today allow our community to continue to offer a high quality of life.” Seitz, who has participated in the Keystone scenario planning and in workshops led by the Land Use Leadership Alliance, says integrating land use and water planning is time consuming, but worth it. “We believe it helps resource planning, long-term planning, fiscal budgeting, and final land use,” she says. “We get better development and it builds our resilience as a city.”

Keystone Water and Growth Dialogue

A flurry of integrated land and water activity occurred after passage of the Colorado Water Plan in 2015, but the work actually had begun years before. Beginning in 2010, leaders from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the state Department of Local Affairs, the Lincoln Institute, the Sonoran Institute, Pace University Land Use Law Center, and the Keystone Policy Center came together for the Colorado Water and Growth Dialogue. They developed a stakeholder group that also includes city and county planners, water specialists, and public officials, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, Western Resource Advocates, water utilities, universities, environmental organizations, and others. A core group of stakeholders has evolved as the Colorado Land and Water Planning Alliance to continue the Dialogue’s research and training in land and water planning. The Lincoln Institute, through their Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, is providing both financial and technical assistance for Alliance efforts.

In 2016, the Keystone Policy Center, with support from the Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute, hosted a scenario-planning program for Front Range stakeholders focused on integrating land and water planning. The goal was to develop strategies to reduce water demand and close Colorado’s water gap. The key question: How can changes in urban form and landscaping practices assist in meeting future urban water demand along the Front Range?

Ray Quay of Arizona State University’s Decision Center for a Desert City, who is a former assistant planning director and assistant water services director in Phoenix, presented his Denver-area study of water use across densities, building types, and landscaping practices as part of the program. The study found that the maximum reduction in water use achievable by increasing density was in the range of 20 percent, with a 10 percent reduction achievable by modest density increases; and it found that local governments could achieve the same levels of reduction through outdoor water restrictions, landscape codes, and irrigation practices, with much greater certainty.

The upshot for integrated land and water planning, says Quay: “Water supplies are limited, and . . . with growth you’re going to need more water. You can’t support growth on the conservation of water.” Communities need to focus on what type of growth and economy they want, he says, and how to allocate water supplies for the growth they expect. And fundamentally, he concludes, “they need to do that before they need water.”

The work of all the partners involved in these conversations has “moved the needle” and helped create a consensus on the need for integrated land and water planning statewide, says Matt Mulica, policy facilitator for the Keystone Policy Center. He says the Dialogue’s exploratory scenario planning and a Keystone report on the process have helped communities with strategies such as planning for higher density, developing new metrics on water and land use, and offering incentives for compact development and low-water landscapes. The Pace Land Use Law Center’s Land Use Leadership Alliance, the Colorado chapter of the American Planning Association, and the Boulder-based environmental nonprofit Western Resource Advocates also have offered training on issues such as comprehensive plans that designate priority areas for growth and conservation, water-efficient land-use development patterns, cluster and infill development, and urban growth boundaries.

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.

Photograph: Planners in fast-growing cities like Westminster, Colorado, where a new “downtown” is taking shape on the site of a former shopping mall, are increasingly integrating water usage into their work. Credit: City of Westminster.

References

Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Forthcoming. “Incorporating Water into Comprehensive Plans in Colorado Communities.” Phoenix, Arizona: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

City of Flagstaff, Arizona. 2014. “Regional Plan 2030.” Amended 2018. https://www.flagstaff.az.gov/2945/The-Plan.

City of Westminster, Colorado. 2013. “Comprehensive Plan.” Amended 2015; update pending 2018. https://www.cityofwestminster.us/Portals/1/Documents/Government%20-%20Documents/Departments/Community%20Development/Planning/COMPLETE%20Comp%20Plan_2015%20Update_WEB.pdf.

Colorado Department of Natural Resources. n.d. “Drought Planning Toolbox.” Colorado Water Conservation Board (website). http://cwcb.state.co.us/technical-resources/drought-planning-toolbox/Pages/main.aspx.

Fedak, Rebecca, Drew Beckwith, Derek Hannon, Amelia Nuding, Russ Sands, Shelby Sommer, and Linda Stitzer. 2018a. Coordinated Planning Guide: A How-To Resource for Integrating Alternative Water Supply and Land Use Planning. Denver, Colorado: Water Research Foundation. http://www.waterrf.org/PublicReportLibrary/4623B.pdf.

———. 2018b. Integrating Land Use and Water Resources: Planning to Support Water Supply Diversification. Denver, Colorado: Water Research Foundation. http://www.waterrf.org/PublicReportLibrary/4623A.pdf.

Friends of the Verde River. 2017. “Local Land Use Planning Toolbox.” https://verderiver.org/local-land-use-planning-toolbox/.

Keystone Policy Center. 2018. “Colorado Water and Growth Dialogue Final Report.” (September). http://www.keystone.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/CO-Water-and-Growth-Dialogue-Final-Report_September-2018.pdf.

State of Colorado. 2015. Colorado’s Water Plan. (November). https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cowaterplan/plan.

Las Vegas residents receive $3 for every square foot of grass they replace with drought-tolerant landscaping. In Morro Bay, California, developers must retrofit existing housing stock to save twice the water demanded by new development. Chandler, Arizona, offers awards and incentives to developments that meet green building standards.

These are just a few of the programs profiled in a new manual released by Pace University’s Land Use Law Center and Western Resource Advocates (WRA), with support from the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Intended for local land use planners facing water scarcity and related environmental challenges in the Intermountain West, the 300-page guide calls for the assimilation of water efficiency and conservation techniques into community development and land use planning. Integrating Water Efficiency into Land Use Planning in the Interior West: A Guidebook for Local Planners builds on years of research and community discussions and aims to build collaboration between land use planners and water planners, who have historically operated within their own silos.

“If you can really think about water throughout all parts of development, you can actually become much more efficient with your water resources and you often don’t even need new supplies,” explained John Berggren, water policy analyst at WRA.

For the past decade, as the Intermountain West has seen significant population growth, WRA and other local organizations have been working with municipal staff and elected officials to shift the region toward “water smart” development practices. In 2015, for example, Colorado published its first water plan, which includes a goal that 75 percent of the state’s municipalities will incorporate water-saving actions into land-use planning by 2025.

The new manual, written specifically for local land use planners, is the first comprehensive document of its kind, said Erin Rugland, research fellow at the Babbitt Center. “This manual is foundational in forming our efforts and advancing the state of practice and literature of water and land use integration,” Rugland said.

“You not only get the technical information like specific zoning codes, but you can also see examples from communities around the country to learn what they did, how they did it, and how it turned out,” Berggren added.

The focus of the guide’s chapters range from how to draft a water element for a comprehensive plan, to how to structure a sustainability plan to address water, to how to create water-efficient density by permitting accessory dwelling units. Within each chapter, subsections drill down to detailed instructions—for example, how to promote cluster development, or adopt requirements for water-saving measures such as stormwater capture that equal the water demands of new development. Throughout, guidelines are supplemented by case studies, including sample language that municipalities have used in their planning documents.

The Babbitt Center’s involvement with the new manual is an important launching point for the center’s growing work and presence in the Intermountain West. Established in 2017, the Babbitt Center is currently producing informational materials for the State of Colorado on integrating water into comprehensive plans and providing guidance on integrating land use within water efficiency plans filed by Colorado water providers. “In the next year, we will expand our review of comprehensive plans throughout Colorado River Basin communities to better gauge the state of practice in the region,” said Rugland.

Photograph Credit: Flickr/U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning are launching a competition to promote innovative curricula and case studies focused on land policy. Winning projects will receive financial support and become part of the Lincoln Institute’s digital case library—a platform for sharing effective land policy as practiced in different cities, regions, and countries.

The competition includes two awards. The Curriculum Innovation Award will recognize three courses that help future planners use land value capture, the property tax, and other land-based tools to reduce urban poverty and informality, adapt to climate change, and strengthen municipal fiscal health. Three winners will each receive a prize of $7,000 for creating innovative, accessible, engaging, and effective learning experiences for students. The deadline for proposals is February 11, 2019 at 6:00 pm (EST).

The Case Study Award will offer $2,000 to 10 authors of engaging and instructive case studies for the Lincoln Institute’s digital case library. The case studies must focus on the same thematic areas as the Curriculum Innovation Awards and follow one of two templates:

• Descriptive cases present essential facts of a situation and an expert interpretation.
• Inquiry cases include facts of a situation but shift the question of interpretation to readers, enabling them to practice applying what they know to a real-world situation.

Award recipients will write a case study and receive guidance and support from the Lincoln Institute. The deadline to submit a proposal is December 21, 2018 at 6:00 pm (EST).

Both awards advance the Lincoln Institute’s initiative to build a digital library of free learning resources available to anyone. The library will include teaching methods, case studies, and other materials that can help spread innovative land policy among students, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners.

For more detailed information on the awards and how to apply, visit the competition web page.

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