ALAMOSA — The announcement of a water export proposal last week has had rippling effects within the San Luis Valley, especially among those involved in water groups like the Rio Grande Roundtable, a Valley-wide group representing diverse water interests.

Roundtable Chairman Nathan Coombs on Tuesday gave an overview of the latest water export proposal by Renewable Water Resources, the successor to Gary Boyce’s water export proposal of several years ago, and involving the same area of the San Luis Valley and the same water the late Boyce had proposed to send to buyers outside of the Valley on the Front Range.

“We have known about this or heard rumblings about it for 1 1/2 to 2 years,” Coombs said. However, nothing concrete had come forward, and nothing official has been filed regarding the proposal. For example, no right of way application has been filed for the highway corridor where the pipeline would be constructed out of the Valley.

Coombs said the developers plan to export 22,000 acre feet from the confined aquifer. Spokesmen told Rio Grande Water Conservation District board members last week the pipeline would not be constructed to hold any more than the 22,000 acre feet they planned to export.

Coombs said folks from here have reached out to entities on the Front Range in Douglas and Arapahoe Counties, but no one they talked to has heard about water being for sale from the San Luis Valley. In addition, the lawyer for the water conservancy district which Coombs directs also represented an entity that just sold $30 million worth of water to Aurora, and the people involved in that transaction were not aware of the proposed water export from here.

However, Coombs said he was not surprised that the word had not gotten around too much yet, because he imagined the developers wanted to get their supplies put together and water purchased first.

Developers said they had had about 100 meetings, and Coombs said those were probably with Valley residents who own water rights. Rio Grande Roundtable member and Colorado Potato Administrative Committee Director Jim Ehrlich said the developers had had at least one public meeting as well, at the road and bridge facility in Saguache County.

“We are watching it,” Coombs said. “We are strategizing about it.”

Water attorneys and water leaders are meeting about this “trying to make sure we are on top of what’s going on and seeing what strategy should be moving forward,” he said.

Coombs repeated to the Rio Grande Roundtable what spokesmen from Renewal Water Resources had shared with the Rio Grande Water Conservation District on Thursday. To make up for the 22,000-acre-foot export, the group plans to buy up and retire 30,000-35,000 acre feet from a combination of well and surface water throughout the San Luis Valley. They plan to build a well field on the former Cottonwood Creek Circles land owned by the late Gary Boyce. Land and associated water rights owned by Whiting Petroleum are under contract, but Coombs said it is not yet known if the same developers have bought those rights as well.

“They want to retire water and take it to a new place,” Coombs explained.

A model run will be conducted to determine what the impact would be for that kind of withdrawal, Coombs added.

He said developers are allocating $60 million for water acquisition and have to buy water at $2,000 an acre foot and sell it for $35,000 to make their numbers work. The pipeline cost itself will be $550-600 million.

Developers are also proposing to set up a $50 million community fund with no set perimeters for how that will be used yet. A community board would manage the disbursement of those funds.

Coombs said he believed the developers had some cards they weren’t showing yet, but he said he could understand that.

“I think we are up against a different scenario than we have in the past,” Coombs said.

Rio Grande Roundtable member Ron Brink said he believed the $60 million figure and the $2,000 figure were way off.

He added, “I call this chapter one of the death of the San Luis Valley.” He said once the water starts being exported out of the Valley “there will be no way of stopping it.”

Long-time water leader Travis Smith said this proposal brings back memories of AWDI (American Water Development Inc.) He said he was skeptical about the benefits the new group proposed, such as the community fund.

However, he said, some good things came out of the AWDI threat. For one thing, the Valley began to look at irrigation efficiencies and how it managed its water resources.

In addition, AWDI prompted the Valley to come together to fight a common enemy, he said.

“We as a Valley have another opportunity now to take a look at what we can do together,” Smith said. “A unified threat will help us put our petty differences aside, company to company, water user to water user.”

Roundtable member Charlie Spielman said he believed this would the first of many plans to take water out of the Valley. He said the confined aquifer by the sand dunes is so attractive and municipal and industrial users could afford to pay so much more for water than agricultural users, “we are bound to have many such schemes.”