Photo by Ruth Heide Right, Perry Alspaugh, left, shares a statement with the Rio Grande Water Conservation District board on Tuesday. RGWCD Board President Ray Wright is at right.

Accusations

exchanged



By RUTH HEIDE

ALAMOSA — Water contentions boiled over during a Tuesday meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.

In response to several letters to the editor from Perry Alspaugh, the water district board asked Alspaugh and other members of the senior surface water group Save Our Senior Water Rights (SOS) to meet with the board during its quarterly meeting in Alamosa.

Rio Grande Water Conservation District (RGWCD) Board President Ray Wright said Alspaugh has written several letters that were critical of the district, particularly in its water management sub-district efforts.

“I was hopeful there might be some opportunity to air this in public, rather than in the press,” Wright said. “Perry your writing has disturbed me in some of the characterizations you have made of myself and our staff and the other board members.”

Alspaugh said he was glad he got the water board’s attention.

“I feel the only way we can speak our minds is through the power of the pen,” he said. “Until I die, I am not going to stop.”

Alspaugh said he always felt that senior water users had gotten the short end of the stick. “This is the reason I picked my pen up,” he said.

He added, “I don’t know if my pen is very powerful, but I am going to say some things that will hurt some people’s feelings and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

When he worked for the water division office as a water commissioner “I watched the state engineer’s office break the law. I watched out of priority diversions take place.”

Alspaugh said he had no questions for the water board because he did not trust the board’s answers.

For example, Alspaugh said SOS members believed the computer model the district was using to calculate depletions to senior water users was minimizing those depletions, and surface water users would once again get the short end of the stick.

When Wright began to contest one of Alspaugh’s points, Alspaugh responded that Wright’s response was why he had been afraid to come to the water meeting.

“You guys are professionals,” he added.

RGWCD Board Member Greg Higel asked, “Professionals at what?”

Wright said, “We are a bunch of farmers.”

Higel said he is a cattle rancher who works on a farm, not a professional.

“Don’t call us professionals.”

“Then I will call you a bum then. Is that all right?” Alspaugh responded.

“You can speak your piece but you just be careful what you are speaking,” Higel answered.

Higel said he is a surface water user also and does not even have a well.

Wright said Alspaugh’s criticisms had been hard to take because he had felt like he had done his best to lead the district to do what was right for the Valley.

“You implied a lot of things about me personally,” Wright told Alspaugh.

Alspaugh said he was not mad at any of the board members but was trying to make a point in his letters to the editor.

RGWCD Board Member Lewis Entz, who drafted legislation providing for the sub-districts while he was in the state legislature, said, “I don’t understand what your problem is because we are protecting the seniors and cutting back on irrigation.”

Ed Nielsen, a Saguache-area rancher who accompanied Alspaugh, said his 1869 surface water right has been curtailed consistently while well-irrigated farms have continued to pump.

He added he did not want to wait 10 years for the sub-district to make some kind of reparations to senior surface users.

“We want immediate relief somehow,” he said.

Wright said he believed the sub-district would provide that relief more quickly than shutting off wells.

He said, “In some ways, in a lot of ways, this district is the only outfit that’s done any work and God bless us a lot of the work we have done has let you question what we have done ... You can accuse us of being conspiratorial and having one interest or another at heart, but the state wasn’t doing the work, the water users weren’t doing the work. Nobody else was getting this data that allows us to understand the Valley, and I will stand up for this board.

“As far as I am concerned this board is involved in no way in any conspiracy to screw anybody.”

RGWCD Attorney David Robbins said the thing that bothered the board was the suggestion that they had somehow acted with malicious intent.

“They have spent a tremendous amount of time ... trying to figure out how to identify the scope of the problem and what the solutions were and still hold the community together,” Robbins said.

Travis Smith, who serves on the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said he admired Alspaugh’s steadfastness but believed when Alspaugh began suggesting impropriety on the part of the board he took the discussions to a different level of questioning people’s character. “That’s a dangerous place to go,” he said.

RGWCD Engineer Allan Davey said Alspaugh has also implied that Davey had acted improperly or inappropriately in his engineering for the district, and Alspaugh had made misstatements.

Educator Judy Lopez added that Alspaugh was disseminating confusing information to the public.

Wright said if farmers go out of business because they cannot adequately irrigate their crops, then the folks in Douglas County who want to buy up Valley water might find many willing sellers.

Nielsen said, “ I don’t have any desire to sell my water, but I would rather sell it than have somebody pump it out from under me and get nothing from it.”

Willie Hoffner, who also accompanied Alspaugh, said he could not wait for the sub-districts to fix the inequities caused by well pumping.

He added that his property is for sale.

“I am going somewhere where the law is followed.”