Judge pleased with progress



By RUTH HEIDE

ALAMOSA — Court hearings regarding the San Luis Valley’s first water management sub-district plan concluded the first of what will likely be a three-week trial before District/Water Judge O. John Kuenhold.

“It seems to me we are doing pretty good,” Kuenhold told the attorneys on Friday. “It was a very productive week.”

“Not as good as we hoped,” responded David Robbins, attorney for the sub-district’s sponsoring entity the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.

The district and the state water division, represented by the attorney general’s office, are defending their approval of the sub-district board’s management plan while attorneys representing senior water users are contesting the plan as it is currently written.

By reducing well pumping in the closed basin area of the Valley north of the Rio Grande, the sub-district intends to provide protection and mitigation of injurious depletions to senior water rights; balance the aquifer; and ensure compliance with the Rio Grande Compact, an interstate agreement with downstream states.

The water district is presenting its witnesses first. Robbins said at the conclusion of testimony on Friday that the proponents still have four witnesses to call before the opponents begin their slate of witnesses.

Kuenhold told the attorneys on Friday that he would like to hear closing arguments in the case on the Friday of the third week, October 16, if at all possible He added he would try to render a decision in about 30 days following the trial but would not promise he could meet that ambitious of a deadline. He said he has asked visiting judges to help fill in for him so he could concentrate on the water decision.

He also enlisted the attorneys’ support in seeking well-written arguments and proposed legal orders so he could “cut and paste” from their arguments where he might agree with them.

Currently on the stand is Dr. Willem Schreüder, an expert on the Rio Grande Decision Support System computer model that will be one of the key tools in the hands of the new sub-district. For example, it will help the sub-district determine how much water it needs to make up to senior water users.

The model is in its fifth phase update and will continue to be upgraded as new information becomes available to feed into it, experts testified. For example, more groundwater measurement data is now becoming available as a result of recent state rules requiring that wells of a certain size be metered. Schreüder testified that he would incorporate the information into the model once it is available to him.

Attorneys for those contesting the sub-district water management plan have questioned the reliability of the model and the information used to develop it.

“We did our best to represent the physical system as accurately as we possibly can,” Schreüder said.

When senior water rights attorney Tim Buchanan asked Schreüder if the model still had limitations, Schreüder responded, “I believe that’s true of every model.”

Schreüder testified that the model could reliably be used to calculate depletions to surface streams from well pumping in the sub-district area. He explained that the model was not intended to be used on a small-scale basis, for example to determine the pumping effects of 10 acres, but as a regional tool that could effectively determine the effect of drying up a large area of irrigated acreage, as the sub-district plans to do.

Previously on the stand was the water district’s engineer Allen Davey who remained on the stand two days. Other witnesses this week have been the water district’s general manager Steve Vandiver and sub-district board member Carla Worley.