Cotten outlines Alamosa’s choices



By RUTH HEIDE

ALAMOSA — A time of reckoning is near for one of the San Luis Valley’s large well users - the City of Alamosa.

Craig Cotten, Acting Division Engineer for Colorado Division of Water Resources Division 3, told the Alamosa city council on Wednesday that cities would not be immune from imminent well regulations.

He said the state engineer hopes to promulgate the rules sometime this year.

Alamosa obtains its municipal water supply from deep or confined aquifer wells. When the state implements well regulations governing large capacity well users in the Rio Grande Basin (San Luis Valley), cities like Alamosa will have to comply, Cotten explained. He said the city’s choices are to file its own augmentation plan or join a water management sub-district.

He said Tim Walters is working on a sub-district specifically for confined aquifer wells like the city’s. The city would have to petition into the sub-district, Cotten explained.

Cotten said the city pumps on average about 2,000 acre feet of water a year from its wells. Using a very rough calculation he estimated that 20-25 percent of that was consumptive use with the rest returned to the unconfined or more shallow aquifer. He said that analyzing Alamosa’s confined aquifer wells would be difficult because the return flows from the city’s system are going back to the unconfined aquifer while the depletions are being made in the confined aquifer.

Cotten added that Alamosa is in better shape than some other well users because the city owns surface water rights (on its ranch property) that could be used to augment or offset its well usage.

He recommended that the city begin working on a plan to comply with the state rules that will be implemented in the near future. “Start to look at the possibility of developing an augmentation plan,” he said, “in case you can’t get into a sub-district or do not want to get into a sub-district.” Cotten told the city council that the benefits of a sub-district include spreading the compliance responsibility over a larger group.

Cotten said the state engineer is drafting the well regulations up now and will be running them by a large committee representative of water user interests in the basin. City Public Works Director Don Koskelin has been nominated as the city’s representative to that committee.

Cotten said so far about 100 people have been nominated, and that group will be pared down to 40-50.