Water Commission - Regular Meeting

K. At this point in time, I think we're gonna go ahead and get started. We have enough members here, and I'm sure some will be online or calling in. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah. And James. So we'll see. But, so at this point in time, I'd like to call the order at 03:01, the Monday, 07/28/2025. Excuse me. That is, yeah, meeting of the water commission. So the first thing is to take roll call. So if we could please go around the room and then we'll see who's online if there's anyone. But let's start online first. Anyone online? No.

Okay, great. Thank you. So let's start with Tricia.

I'm here.

Okay. Sean Tanner, present.

Clark Hamilton, present. Roger Hudson, City Councilman, here.

Jack Hilbert, present. Don Langley, present.

Jim Morris, present.

Okay, great. We had to get all your voice fluctuations on. So when we do AI, we can do it without you next time. First thing is we'd like approval of the meeting minutes from June 23. Anybody have any corrections or changes you would like to make? Seeing none, we have a motion to approve from Roger. Second?

Second.

We have a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, nay. Any abstentions? Seeing none, let's move on. It is approved. All right. First thing we're going to move to is next thing we're to move to, excuse me, is item number three, which is referral of items for possible consideration. There are four items on the agenda today. So we can either just take him in one swoop or why don't we just hand them out at one time. If somebody has a question, we'll just figure it out there. Otherwise, I think you know the drill on these at this point in time. So let's start with item A. Don?

Yes. I need to make a comment on the Bloom preliminary plan.

Is your mic on?

I think so. Yes. I'm just not closing. Okay. There we go. Yes, there's a will serve letter associated with this plan from Parker Water. And there is an error in the will serve letter. The will serve letter shows a presumptive demand of 0.7 acre feet per SFE. What we currently use is 1.1 acre feet per SFE. So there was this error in that letter. And I've already talked to the folks at Parker Water and a corrected letter, will serve letter has been sent to the developer. So it's really more a math problem because it's a really low density development, but it should be right. So that's been fixed.

Anything else? So yes, working over at Clark on the same item A.

Yes, I just want to add that this is, I think, a good example of a development, a mid sized development occurring in the county where the developer is working with existing water providers to make sure that the water is available. There's no go at themselves with deep wells or anything like that. It's it's looks like a good plan in both the Parker Water and the Pinery Water And Sand District have been working together. And I guess the current status is that Parker will be the water provider. But they're going to be provided water through an existing water provider and rolled into their long term plans.

That's what we wanna see happen in the county. And I'm just gonna say that's exactly what I wanna say on item d as well, the Highlands Land

Okay.

Highlands Ranch plan development. Again, a change in a mid sized kind of developed area where the developer is working with the existing water provider in that area to to make sure that they roll into their long term plans. None of this go it yourself, dig a new well, and hope for the best in the future. So both of those I think are good ways for the county to move forward.

Any other comments? Let's go to item B, Crestview. Seeing none, we'll go to item C. Seeing none, we'll to item D with Clark's information already noted. Nothing else. Okay. I think we are good to go. Do you have enough information, man, to share with the commissioners? Great. Thank you.

So, the next part we have is a discussion on any action items. I don't think we have any at this point in time. So we'll move on at this point to our Highlands Ranch water provider presentation. I would like to say that, no, Mr. McCloud does not look like Sam. Sam couldn't make it today. He had an item that took place. And so he sent one of his great directors, I believe here to help us out with that. So Mr. McCloud will make the presentation today.

By the way, have seen this. I visited Sam in his office and, I was really impressed with what they're doing. They're doing a great job, I think.

You. I want to make sure you can all hear me. It's a bigger room than I realized.

Can you pull that mic up or Okay. There we go. Let's see if that helps you a little bit.

Just pointed at my face there.

Yeah. We'll see what happens. Okay.

Yeah. Thank you.

So I just wanted to mention, name is Rick McLeod. I'm the water resources manager at Highlands Ranch Water and Sanitation District. Of course, we were many, many years Centennial Water and Sanitation District. And we've changed names to be a little more straightforward because we always got confused with the city of Centennial. You know?

And we named it Centennial because the movie Centennial was filmed on Highlands Ranch at the Highlands Ranch Mansion. So we tried to grab that identity, but then, it all got mixed up through the years. And, I'm a native of Denver and, went to the University of Colorado, both bachelor's and master's degree in civil engineering, and, was in the army during the Vietnam War and different stuff like that. But now, I've been at, on the Highlands Ranch project since 1981. That's a total of forty four years.

So I was there the year that the first home was sold on Highlands Ranch, and I'm now gonna be presenting where we've built out. We've got a 100,000 or a 110,000 people there. So my job the entire time has been trying to develop a a reliable water supply, and I think that's kind of the focus of your master plan as well. So I'm very thrilled and happy to be here to to tell you about my experience at Highlands Ranch and what it's been like to develop a water supply for a 100,000 people. We feel like we're a little further down the road than some of the other people who are similarly going on that same road.

And of course, the biggest issue for us is that they are allowing us to use this nontributory groundwater. So that's really been the focus of my career is to, take advantage of the opportunity to have some additional time to develop the water supply, but also at the same time to make sure that moving forward to develop that water supply so that down the road as the groundwater, you know, eventually, it's gonna run out and to make sure we'll have a reliable water supply. So with all of that, it's an introduction. I'm gonna start into the PowerPoint here. K?

And anybody can interrupt me at any time with any questions. That'll be just fine. Okay. That one's not working, but maybe this will. There we go. So I just wanted to start with a quote that's been influential to me. This is from David Getsches. He was the executive director of the Department of Natural Resources. This is back in 1985. This relates to the actually, the senate, the second groundwater bill.

The first one was in 1973. And but in the second in 1985, it was the senate bill two thirteen, and this is when the executive director is making a public statement. I think it was in a speech that he gave. It says, senate bill two thirteen is effectively a legislative announcement that nontributory groundwater is available for total depletion, meaning it can be used up in a hundred years was the formula that they have. And then he said, we are moving inexorably toward a crisis in groundwater.

It comes quietly, and it comes slowly. When the groundwater crisis hits, we are all going to be gone, of course. It will be our legacy to our children and grandchildren. Okay? So that's that was happening right as I was first beginning my work. And so always the foundation has been, okay. How do we not have a crisis in groundwater? And I would submit for all of the water utilities in Douglas County, you have that same issue. How do we not have a crisis in groundwater somewhere down the road? And that that's what your master plan will be looking at as well.

What is the status of this whole situation of not having a crisis in groundwater because we have developed surface water to replace it so that we're part of the hydrologic cycle. Okay? So with that understanding, I'm gonna be telling you how has Highlands Ranch tried to address this issue and tried to develop its surface water so that we're not in a crisis situation for the future. So here's who we are physically and some of the three different districts that form it. And so you can see right there, it's the Highlands Ranch district, which is the majority of that land.

And then we also have a smaller amount of, service that we provide in the orange there. That's the Northern Douglas County Water and Sanitation District. And then the Mirabel District, that's way to the left there. It's South Of Chatfield. Okay? And and for the all of these districts, we now have a 110,000 population. We're 95 98% built out, about 35,000 homes. And I've rounded off some of these numbers just to go for go like that. And I wanted to mention that this was a developer controlled district. It was either Mission Viejo company or it was Shay in later years that was the moving force behind developing the Highlands Ranch project.

And they have now we've sold the last homes or close to the last homes. And so now that developer control district has now become our local residents. That's like three years ago that that happened. So our mission statement for Highlands Ranch Water is provide safe, sustainable, and reliable water and wastewater utility service to our customers with superior quality and value. And, as you look at those words sustainable and reliable, I like to use a different term.

It's a term never failing system. So as a homebuyers buy a home, they don't really understand water or know that much about it. There's varying levels that they know, but they all are assuming someone is responsibly providing the water supply for them so that it will never fail. So it's not a question of just during their time, if their kids buy the have the house or whatever or whomever they sell the house to, it'll always retain its value, and it'll be a never failing system. And and from listening to your last water commission meeting, I believe there's 31 water utilities.

At least that's what came out of that conversation that I had. So I believe that all of them, you know, all water utilities have a very similar mission statement. Okay. How do we do this? How how's Highlands Ranch Water done this?

Okay. What we've done is develop two systems simultaneously, a surface water system and a groundwater system. And with those systems, we've tried to pursue having diversification that is multiple possibilities about how we get water or how we use water facilities to move the water around and similarly with the groundwater. So diversification, flexibility, and redundancy is the key. We're doing that for both the water sources themselves, but also for the various facilities that give us the reliability that we need, and that's surface water storage and delivery facilities.

I mainly am focused on getting the water to our water treatment plant. There's other people who take it from there into the system. They treat it and they deliver it and they and all of that sort of thing. I just wanna make sure we can get water to the water treatment plant in a timely way. And and the other goal that we have is to both own and control the water sources and facilities.

That's easily said, but that's hard to accomplish. And and the system like Denver Water, they control and own everything that they have. But you'll see that Highlands Ranch has needed to develop some facilities that others own and control, and so we're still in the process of of achieving that ownership and control. So here's the bottom line of our system. What happened was that first, we went to Denver Water, and they would not serve us.

And then we started we we knew we could start drilling groundwater wells, but we had a neighbor, the city of Englewood, who had excess water and excess capacity in some of their facilities, and they needed money. And so in 1980, the very beginning of our project, we struck a major contract with Englewood where we are the captive buyer of their excess water, and they're the captive seller of their water and facilities to us. That allowed us to start having surface water clear back at the very beginning of our project. That was a huge windfall for us, and that's a really distinguishing feature that we have from the the challenge that many other entities in Douglas County have. The fact that we could find some entity very willing to help us out in this development of our surface water side of our project.

And so you could see here, the purple is surface water, the green is groundwater, and there's even some years that we had a 100%, surface water and even put some water into the we inject water into the ground and in our ASR system. So we've had a variety of things over the years, but also we went in a pretty, sharp sloped line going up to about 2002 when we had a major drought here. And in that drought, where we had to use the most of the groundwater, we, were influenced by a program that we found from California, which was called a water budget system. And that was part of our water conservation activities. We adopted that water budget system where we give all of our customers a water budget, and then we have a tiered rate structure.

And what that does is give everybody's thinking about and equating the use of water with the spending of money so that they suddenly conserve a lot more. They turn it off when it rains. They do other things like that. And that's what's allowed our curve there because we were growing throughout this whole time, but it pretty much started flattening out off into the future because of this water budget system that we implemented at that time. Rick. Yes. Do you know You know, I want I wanted to mention that I've known Evan Ella for many years. I don't know most of you, but I know this guy well. Yeah.

We have to talk into these so everyone

can hear. Yeah.

This is, Evan, Hila. Back on that graph, when you started that budgeting system, what was your population about then? How much growth has there been through that flattened part of the curve?

It's roughly the same over the whole time. Although, it was stronger right through the middle, but we we used to be considered the fastest growing, you know, entity in this country or something like that. There were articles in National Geographic even about how fast we were moving ahead and all the rest of it there.

But do you know what your population was in 2002 or '3? Oh. Oh, I see that. I'm sorry. I didn't see that.

Sorry. It should say population over there. Got

it. Alright. Thanks.

K.

Sean Tanner, do you still have the lease agreement in effect with Inglewood?

The lease agreement with Inglewood? Yes.

Okay.

I'll talk more about that. We actually have two of them with Inglewood.

Okay. Perfect.

Yeah.

Actually, I think the x or I mean, the y axis, that's acre feet. Is it not?

The x axis is time, and the y axis is is population.

That's population?

No. I think it's about a 100,000. Feet. That's acre feet.

Yeah. Okay. That's what I'm thinking. So

because our build out is 20,000.

So my original question was, how what was your population in around 2000?

Yeah. And I I don't know that off the top of my head.

Okay.

But maybe 10,000 or something like that. Oh, that low? Maybe.

Wow. Alright.

Thank you. No. No. No. I take it back. We're at a 100,000, so maybe 50,000 then. Maybe that was half the time back or something like that.

That's what I

would Right. Right.

Regard regardless of what those the actual numbers were, you've had

a very successful conservation program. It would appear. Yeah. Mainly what I want to point out is we've been able to use surface and groundwater throughout this entire time. And it was because Inglewood not only was leasing us water, but they leased us some of the storage space in McClellan Reservoir.

So we, right from the beginning, we're able to store water to to spread out the times when we needed to retime it to to to meet our needs and the rest of it. Also, diversion capacity in City Ditch, for instance, and some other things like that. So that agreement with Englewood really was the key to our being able to use both surface and groundwater through many, many years here. And that also let us spread out the time to need to develop the whole system. We could build a water treatment plant at three MGD, and then later go in and expand it up to, you know, eventually got to 40.

And we could drill so many wells, and then gradually over time, drill more wells and the rest of it. Because it's a great, great challenge to to do both the surface water system and the groundwater system, and all of the expenses of it, the different pipelines, the pump stations, all the rest of it simultaneously. And also, we were a subsidiary of Philip Morris, so we were able to use their good financing to be able to do this through this period. So there's a number of fortunate things. The other thing you're gonna find out is that we're close to the South Plymouth River. So the distances to have pipelines or whatever was shorter for us. You know, Parker is is a long way from the South Plymouth River. And I say that because Ron Redd is in the audience here. So yeah. So

the surface

water that

You need you need the microphone.

Tricia Bernhardt. So the surface water that you're buying from Englewood comes from where? Where are they getting their source?

So they it's from a whole collection of their water rights, which eventually makes its way to Chatfield Reservoir, or they're able to divert it up to McClellan Reservoir. Those are the two key reservoirs that we use. Some of that is on the West Slope. It's in the Ranch Creek system, but a whole lot of it is on the South Platte system. Okay? Rick, see, here we go.

You said ask a lot

of questions. I like that.

Given the quote on your first slide

Right.

Which you said was

trying to kinda jolt you guys and

Well well,

what you said that

was sort of a driving force. Why isn't your long term usage goal 100% surface water?

It is. You'll see that on another

87.

Well, that's our historic use. We've been able over time, long term usage is 8087%. So if you look at all of these graphs, you look at the length of the purple versus the green and everything, and you average all that out, we've been able to use 8087% surface water over that span of years.

The goal is a 100.

The goal is a 100, and you'll see in an average hydrologic year. Okay? But definitely, that is why we're, you know, we're trying to get to where we're hardly needing the groundwater at all. We're trying to minimize our dependence on the groundwater. K? You gotta get a microphone.

Maybe we can put this off. Are you gonna talk about this budget program later or do I have to ask that now?

I'm not gonna talk much about it later. Just that every home is given a budget, how much water we think they should use, and then they have a tiered rate structure. So if they use basically what we think they should use, they have the lowest price. But as soon as they start watering more or, you know, any way that they use more water, it it hits them significantly as they go up different tiers. And Denver, of course, has that now, and many other entities have now adopted this budget approach.

But but how do you determine the budget for an individual house?

Well, there's a Historically? On their historical formula, and we look at the size of the lot, and we look at the number of people that are in it, and a bunch of things like that. We we do what we think it is. And then if they have, like, many more children or something, they can come in and get a little waiver on that part of it or something like that. It gets into great details like that.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Here we go. I've got actually a lot of slides, I better get going.

Okay. Hey, guys. Can we, kind of curtail the questions at this point? I don't know where we're we're only partial way through this presentation and we've already through fifteen to twenty minutes. So Okay. If we can just go ahead and and you

can Some of them are just pretty pictures, and those are gonna go rapidly. So Right. Yeah.

Great. Thank you.

Okay. What's our strategy to develop water supply? So, again, I said we went to Denver first. They said no. We're outside of the line that they've drawn. Okay? We knew that we had access to the deep groundwater. We knew that that was within our control. So our solution is a conjunctive use system, which I think that's what all of us are doing. That's a combination of surface and groundwater.

Okay? And then the other thing is if you're gonna use surface water, you better get surface water storage so you can retime that water and bring it in when you need it off of the stream. And here's where it says our goal is a 100% surface water in average hydrologic years. Okay? Because to get a 100% in dry years where you really have to have firm yield water, you either need a lot more storage, like Denver will have three times their needs up in the mountains, or you need to go after this really expensive senior priority water, and that just, like, breaks the bank.

It it there's almost none out there. It's very hard to get, and and you can't really get that. So that's why we've had to modify ours to where we still will use groundwater in dry years. That's how we'll get our reliability. But in the average years, we're trying to not be using groundwater as much as possible. K. Here we go. Okay. This we all know. This is from people up in Northern Colorado.

The the point here, average cost increase of surface water, $3,500 per year. We bought some water back in the early two thousands for $4,000 an acre foot. Right now, you can't find almost anything for not for 40,000 or 50,000 an acre foot. It's it's gone crazy, the cost of water, surface water. So here's our demand and how we calculate that.

I said we were at 98% build out. Did when we get to total bill out, it's a 112,000. We use you know, that's turned into three quarter inch water taps. We're using a demand of point four acre feet per year. That's based on historic usage. That's what we've been using. That number is gradually coming down with the greater education of people. Since we have surface water reservoirs, we wanna include in our estimate here the need to replace the evaporation occurring with those reservoirs because we can't control that. So our demand is roughly 20,000 acre feet per year. That's what we need, 20,000.

So here's our system, and the key here is that there already were several reservoirs very close to our system, Chatfield Reservoir and McClellan Reservoir. And we have access to use McClellan Reservoir right away. And then in our development, we developed a third reservoir from a gravel pit site that's called South Platte Reservoir, and you'll see more about that. But, anyway, where we're fortunate is that we're close to the river that makes a big difference in what a lot of this costs or what opportunities you have. So here's more detail of our surface water.

You know, how have we been able to use 87% surface water? Well, we have done a combination of making agreements with entities who would sell us some of their water, like Englewood, or with Denver was an agreement because we would get out of the 2 Forks reservoir contracts that we had. It's known as Patty Water. So we have water from Denver for that. Or we're part of the Wise project.

That's surface water, but it's we we use reclaimed water from effluent. All of us bunch of us in in Douglas County are using Wise water, and then there's a couple of other contracts that we have. But anyway, multiple, multiple sources to give us this diversification so that if we can't get water from one source, we try we hopefully will get it from another one. And in in general, about half of our water comes from our own water rights, some that we filed ourselves or others that we've purchased it from others where we're using their historic priorities. And that's what happens if you buy agricultural water.

You're able to have a change case where you can keep that high that early priority of those entities. Okay? And in the water that we've acquired, half of it is about single use water. That's generally water that's from the South Platte Basin surface water, or it's reusable water. And, course, our deep groundwater is reusable water, but the consumptive use from agricultural change cases is consumptive use water. And then there's some other water as well that we've leased that's, reusable water. Okay. So here's more on our water rights. We've purchased it from others who have filed original applications. We have nine senior surface water rights.

That's what I was saying. It's so hard to acquire and difficult. And part of it was from the people who originally had the Highlands Ranch. They had water rights on Plum Creek. That's the Phipps family. And part of it is from some other water rights that we've acquired up in South Park. Most of that is gone. That's gone to Denver, Aurora, and Thornton. And and Evan knows about it because he worked for Thornton at the time. So and other others like that.

That water's mainly gone, the water that's up above us. And then you could see what our yields are there. And on the yields, I try to point out what what would be the yield of the surface water in an average hydrologic year or in a dry year. Because we're really driven by what you gotta have a reliable water supply in a dry year to the extent that you can. Okay?

And here's where I point out that half of it's single use, half of it's reusable. And you and I'll talk about facilities that we've developed giving us the capability to recapture the reusable water so that we can use it multiple times. That's a big component of trying to have a a reliable surface water system. So the other half of our water supply is from these water supply contracts, two of them with Englewood. Okay?

That's really important water to us. It's about 6,000 acre feet a year. It's also the use of various facilities. It's a long term contracts that go for like a hundred years. So again, this was Inglewood wanting the financial resources they could be getting from, having a captive buyer of their water rights in their water facilities. The Denver Water, Wise Water, we have an agreement with Castle Pines North. I think one of you is Castle Pines North here, maybe, or I'm not sure. But anyway and then Center Of Colorado, that's a small district up in South Park. Okay? From all of these contracts, you could see we get more dry year water.

That's because of the seniority of the Inglewood water rights. They have, you know, really outstandingly senior water rights from them, and then also the average year. And then some of these contracts are permanent. That's that permanent control that I was talking about. But some of them are long term. So that's an uncertainty. Can we renew them? Can we extend them? Do we whatever. We do have, first right of return on any sale of those water rights.

So we try to have them as reliable and and locked down as we can. But for instance, Englewood's charter doesn't allow them to sell their water rights without a vote of the people. So that's why we have that particular contract. Okay. So that's our water supplies and and how we've been able to do this.

The the other component here is raw water storage. And here I've spelled out the volumes of these different storage, reservoirs that we've been able to work for over time. We built we, meaning Highlands Ranch Water, built the South Pye Reservoir. We leased from Englewood thirty eight eighty five acre feet in McClellan, and then we were in a twenty six year process to obtain storage in Chatfield Reservoir. And we've been successful with that.

That always had great uncertainty as to whether that would get successfully accomplished. Then we have a small delayed return flow facility reservoir up in South Park. Altogether, not even one year supply, but but still a significant amount of supply there. Go ahead.

So, Rick, is this, acre feet of space or of that Space. Wet water?

Space.

Okay.

Now the water rights are separate. This is the space. We have the water rights also to fill the space. So these are the pictures I was talking about. Here's McClellan Reservoir. I'm sure you're all familiar with that or probably you are. So, this is Inglewood owns it. They have a part of it. Its total volume is 60 6,000 acre feet, So we have about 70% of that volume. The the other reservoir that's on the West Side of the South Pole River Valley, we built in 2008.

It's called the South Pole Reservoir. This was a former gravel pit reservoir. It's a lined reservoir now. This can be fed by gravity with the last chance ditch. This was a major project I was saying took twenty six years. Extremely challenging environmental impact statements, contracts that needed to be created, you know, a major accomplishment, a whole collection of people doing it. Now I think there's 14 different people who have a piece of the storage here. You know, there's always a water quality issue in Chatfield. It's slowly deteriorating. And then this last small delayed return flow reservoir up in South Park.

So how do you get the water into the reservoirs? Always a huge issue. Here's where we we Island's Ranch Water also was very fortunate in that there are some old agricultural ditches that were replaced by Chatfield, and they come out in a pipeline underneath Chatfield. And then two of them are on the West Side of the Platte Valley, and one's on the East Side. And those ditches are called City Ditch, Last Chance Ditch, and Nevada Ditch.

And they had water rights going back to about 1861 or '62, really senior water rights. Well, it's Denver, Inglewood, and Aurora who acquired those senior water rights and moved that water through change cases to other diversion facilities. And so those ditches existed and still have a few users, but they had a whole lot of excess capacity not being used. And that was an opportunity for us. We could buy a little bit of of the, of somebody's water right in these ditches, and from that, become part of the ditch company and influence the bylaws allowing us to use the excess capacity in those ditches when it's available.

So that's how we move water out of Chatfield, moving it in these ditches and moving it over to South Pike Reservoir or moving it over to McClellan or to our water treatment plant. And that's why I'm saying this was lucky. Somebody else had built these facilities and they weren't being used. So we, without great expense or difficulty or political difficulty, could acquire the use of these ditches, and that's what we've been doing. Okay?

And then just below where the ditches are, we similarly put in our own alluvial well field. That's a well field in the sand and gravel that's adjacent to the river. And we did that adjacent to Littleton in their South Platte Park. And we had to study and make sure we weren't harming the cottonwood trees and other things like that. This took a long time, but eventually worked out arrangements with Littleton where we're now using these alluvial well field, and it's a key way that we recapture any waters or effluent that we're not otherwise able to capture into these other ditches.

And here's a map showing that, but I know it's kind of small here, and you can't see it very well. Way on the left, the last chance ditch gets water from Chatfield by gravity into the South Pond Reservoir. Next to it is the Nevada Ditch. We don't end up using that very much, but it's a backup redundant part of how we can move things around. And then on the right side is where City Ditch is.

That's what Inglewood's been using for years to get water to its water treatment plant, and uses it to fill up McClellan Reservoir. And then all of these are connected going down to the Blake Water Treatment Plant. That's our treatment plant. So I just wanted to point out how you you not only need to have use of the facilities, but you need water rights. We have an exchange plan that lets us take our effluent and exchange it up into Chatfield so that we can put it into these ditches.

We also have, lawn irrigation return flow component of our water ride, allowing us to take the water that's used on Highlands Ranch and recapture it. So we have various ways of recapturing this reusable water, and that's why I was able to say we we recaptured 95% of it. Okay? And, you know, what has it taken to do this? We've had forty four years to do it, but we've been working on multiple projects all all this whole time, all happening simultaneously, developing the well field, water treatment plant, all the pipelines, pump stations.

And then here's some more. Southland Reservoir that took 45,000,000, ten years to develop. Chatfield, I mentioned twenty six years. We spent 16,000,000 on that. Water rights acquisitions in South Park, we had to go and get two ten forty one permits. If you know about them, that's how the local counties can often stop you in a water project. You have to go in front of their three member board of supervisors and convince them that it's a it's in the county's best interest to let this water leave the county. Always very challenging. And then other pipelines and pump stations moving this water around. So millions spent.

So that's the end of the surface water part. Now I'm gonna talk a little bit about groundwater. Here we are located. We have no Dawson underneath us, but we have Denver, Arapahoe, and Laramie Fox Hills. So we have three different well fields, each in those different aquifers. I know all of you have aquifers in your systems, and so you're familiar with this. Our issue there is that we're near the edge of the aquifer. We're in an area that's been used heavily. That's where the Phipps family allowed Willow's Water District to start using the wells. They were using it before our project even came along.

So we're in an area that's been using groundwater maybe longer than any other entity out there. I'm gonna just keep going. So our philosophy, always minimize the use of the base Denver Basin groundwater. So what does that mean practically? That means that it needs to be a drought or or extremely dry year and maybe a multiyear drought before we need to use some groundwater in combination with our surface water to provide the water to our our residents.

And then the other condition is if we're ever needing to work on our water treatment plant, which we've needed to do in recent years here, we need to use a 100% of groundwater through the winter only to do that work on the groundwater treatment plant. That won't happen that often, but when it does happen, it's a pretty significant issue to have that water supply. And then the third time you need to use some groundwater is just to get the wells ready. You know, we're you're gonna see we use 35 of them, and you wanna be able to turn the switches, and they'll be there. You've gotta take you have to use some groundwater for that.

So here's our decrees, large numbers. One of the first thing we did was go and get these decrees. They add up to 18,000 acre feet. We need 20,000. So this has always been where we've been able to tell people we have a reliable water supply because we have the surface water in addition to this 18,000 de groundwater in the decrees.

But this our entire time where we could be using, you know, 1% of it to last a hundred years, we've been using a tenth of that amount. We've not been pumping them to to the full amount. That that would make you think, oh, it should last within a thousand years, not a hundred years. But we've only we've been using them like this. And we've drilled 52 of the wells, and then some of the wells became sand pumpers in the rest of it.

And so we've redrilled a whole bunch of our wells. So we've spent millions drilling these wells. But right now of the 52, only 35 of them are operational. We've had 16 wells, which we spent the money to drill. It was either like half 1,000,000 or 1,000,000 or something like that, and they are now non usable because the groundwater levels in our wells has gone down enough to change them into a state where they're no longer economically economical to be used.

So we're on the edge, and we're where a lot of other people are using water, and we have been maybe the first going down this road of what happens when you use your groundwater a long time to see that there is a time when you're running out of the groundwater, where your best efforts, you can't get the water out of the ground like you may need to or want to. I think other entities that are further centrally located in these basins are behind us, and they probably have higher water levels, and they have a longer period of time till they have a problem. But we're like a canary in the coal mine. We've been we've experienced now what's going on, and there is a finite life to this groundwater resource. Okay?

We cannot get out of the ground what our decrees would allow us to legally get. And in the entire time of our usage, we've never used the full amount of what we could get. So if we pumped every well to its maximum year round, we'd get 9,000 acre feet, not 18. We need 20,000, of course. See?

So the groundwater is there and it helps us, but we can't depend on groundwater alone. We must have the surface water that we have. And the pumping rates in our wells, when we first pump them, you determine the pumping rate and what it will last. And then as you use it, that rate goes down every year. But right now, from all of our wells, we can only pump them at half of the rate of what they originally would pump when we first put them in.

Okay? And you and we measure the water levels in all of our wells. And right now, the most important aquifer we have is the Arapaho. And in the Arapaho Aquifer, we are halfway down in in in the aquifer, the water level's halfway down in those aquifers in our wells. Okay? So these are all wake up calls for everybody in Douglas County about the the dependence on groundwater, and what's the future gonna look like. So we've been pumping them for forty seven years. That's a long time. We've extracted a lot. We've injected a lot.

Way back in 1994, we started injecting groundwater. We've been doing all that we can to try to make this resource last as long as it possibly can, and you could see we've spent millions of dollars in this. So this is just an example. I've got three of these pictures. I'm only gonna show one of how we spread out the wells. We in our decrees, they're spread out as much as possible to minimize well to well interference, and we also drill every well down to the bottom of the aquifer right from the beginning. We do that to have it last as long as possible. Okay? I've I've heard other talk about people that just drill down to where they hit water, and then later they they'll go lower. Not us.

We drilled them all right to the bottom. So we did a study just recently trying to understand what's happening with us in the Arapahoe Aquifer. And what we did was look at the other wells around us within the three mile radius. Those are the wells in blue here. The size of the circle is the quantity of water that they're withdrawing. Where are the wells in the yellow that are that are red there? Okay? And it turns out when you look at the whole picture, we're pulling out of the aquifer in a year, one fifth of what everybody in that area is pulling out of the aquifer. Okay? So what that means is that it's heavily used by others, and we have no control of what they're doing.

They're impacting what what's happening with our wells, but we don't have a control over that. So that's another, you know, significant thing. I don't know if other areas have this density of wells or whatever. In this picture is Casa Pines North and Casa Pines Metro's wells in addition to ours. Okay? And you could see there's no wells on the left side. That's the west side. That's because we're on the edge of the aquifer. So we're having this impact upon us only from wells only on one side of us. So this again is a wake up call for people about what's going on with groundwater.

So here's our issues. We're located on the edge. We can't change that. The water levels and the pumping rates are continually dropping. 16 wells have become economically unusable. So the groundwater longevity, how long will it last for us? You're studying that in your study, but we're studying it also in what's going on with us because we wanna know the answer to this. What's our future look like? Okay? And then we have many neighbors also pulling water out of us.

And and people have said, just drill additional wells. Just poke more wells in. Well, wells have a a well to well interference, and they reach out a great distance from the well, literally miles from the well. So we've spread them out as much as we can. We can put some more in, but all that does is have more effect on the other wells around them. It doesn't buy you many, many years of continual well use. It it can improve the situation a little bit, but it's only temporarily. Tricia keeps, nodding her head yes to me, so I'm somehow doing okay here. Okay. Here's about our ASR.

This is a graph on the rise of when we were proving to ourselves that it works. You need to make sure that you're not plugging the aquifer. When you spend a million dollars and then all of a sudden you put water into it, you know, like, is this gonna ruin this well where we can't take the water out? It could foul it biologically. It could foul it physically. It could it could be chemical reactions, whatever. So we took a number of years in all the different aquifers and proved to ourself that aquifer storage and recovery is feasible and does work for us, at least where we're located. Okay? So it's it's good like that. And it, of course, offsets the depletion of the water from the wells.

But the problem is is that you rarely have years when you have so much excess surface water that you have water to put down into those wells. For us, we wanna have our our raw water storage full, and we wanna have our community only using surface water, and then we'll do ASR. And those things take time. We had we filled up Chatfield in 2023, but now we've had several years of just dryness, and we're just slowly pulling down our Chatfield storage. And so we need another really wet period to fill it back up to get to the point where we're injecting some water.

So this is not the panacea for everybody who's dependent on groundwater and the rest of it. But yes, it helps, but it's also a higher cost to have that additional flow rate of where the water goes down like that. Okay. Who we have interconnections with these entities. I won't take the time to mention them except that, there's dominion in the audience here so that we we probably have an interconnect with you.

Some of these are emergency interconnects. Some of them are for some delivery of water or or wheeling water through our system. Water conservation. I'm assuming everybody is gonna do all you can in conservation. Castle Rock does a magnificent job.

Aurora does a magnificent job. We basically try to follow them and do a similarly good job as best we can. And and I mentioned here the use of the water budgets, but where we're not able to accomplish this yet is this nonfunctional turf. And just recently, anybody's really watched this, there have been laws saying new development is not allowed to put in nonfunctional turf. But on on Highlands Ranch, we have all of our roadways have beautiful bluegrass all along their edges.

It's because our real estate developers felt they had to see that bluegrass to get them in the right mood to buy that house or something like that. I don't know what it was. But now it is very challenging to take that nonfunctional turf that's already there and have people take the expense to take it out and put something else in there. And so that's what we're trying to do now. This would give us this will lower our demand, so that we don't need as much water if we can accomplish it.

But we're not very far along. We have programs and pay people for the taking out the sod and everything like that, but it's mainly people's mindset. You have to change their opinion about this and what they will do. So it's very challenging. This this is a graph that shows the the the the water usage had been going down at the same time that the residential taps were going up. K? So people are learning. They're using better sprinkler controls and, you know, they've made changes in their houses and all kinds of things. They will use less water. They want to be conserving, but it's still a real challenge.

I'm almost done. Here's some thoughts from me about your Douglas County water master plan. Okay? Number one, it's a given that everybody will conserve and reuse as much as they possibly can, and it's not easy to do that. Number two, whatever you tell about the groundwater, be sure you're telling that it's finite, that there's some point where it will run out.

It doesn't really matter when that point is because it's coming at you. But there's nobody here who's dependent on groundwater who can just plan to use that groundwater for the next multiple hundreds of years. I don't see that happening with anybody. And so you've gotta be working on getting surface water and making, you know, the challenge of that take place. The third bullet.

The key issue in my mind is where and when the surface water will come from to remove the dependence on the Denver Basin groundwater. I personally am hoping that's what your master plan will talk about. Here's what everybody's doing to get surface water and how that's gonna work, and maybe some ideas of how you can work together or whatever. Because it's always extremely challenging to do the financial part of it, or the political part of it, or whatever it may be. This this thing is really tough, and yet everybody has been working to to sell homes, dependent on groundwater with the assumption, oh, eventually over time, we'll we'll replace that with surface water.

And that's just tough. Remember, these homeowners assume that somebody's being responsible. It's up to you in this room and others to be the responsible ones that are telling about this. K. Next bullet. Surface water project's extremely challenging. I have one slide that don't talk about that. And then the last one is just that our experiences is that you can determine what, for instance, is the recoverable groundwater or other things like that. But it's really how much you can pump out over time. What is the pumping rate and where are the water levels?

The the aquifers, in other words, mother nature overrides and decides what you're gonna get. And and you can calculate numbers, and the state calculated some numbers, but they're almost always too high. And they've been using storage coefficients and the rest, they were just estimates. And you can't really believe those numbers until you really experience what really does come out of your groundwater system. That's why I was emphasizing how we're only like able to pump half of the rates that we did before and the rest of it.

That's because mother nature told us what we can get using the best technology that we have. Whoops. Oh, this is missing one slide, but anyway, I'm I'm not sure what's going on here. But, anyway, I had a slide on what are the surface water possibilities. Is it South Basin?

We got a new lawsuit with Nebraska. We got some chances in the South Platte Basin, but it's all lower in the basin. That water is dirtier, and you've got the elevation to come back, and you're gonna have to dry up farms to do that. Okay? None of that's politically correct or or inexpensive. Very challenging. What about 2 Forks Reservoir? I I hope you all know what was 2 Forks Reservoir. Maybe you don't. I don't know.

But anyway, that's a project, you know, the confluence of the main stem on the North Fork that it's Denver Water who controls 2 Forks. The trouble with 2 Forks, two things. One, it's in a moratorium where Denver is not gonna look at it for ten years. And the second one is Denver was gonna fill it with Colorado River water. Okay?

Which moves us to the Colorado River Basin. You've got all the problems with California, Nevada, and Arizona, and all the rest of it where they thought there was 17,000,000 acre feet per year of water there, and it turns out there's only 12,000,000 or sometimes as little as 8,000,000. I'm sure you've all read read the paper about all of the problems there. We're a long ways from being able to use more water out of the Colorado River. Okay?

I don't really see a project solving the Douglas County needs coming from the Colorado River, but maybe that will happen. I don't know. There's a lot of politics involved in that. And then you've got the other basins. You know, I mean, you've got the Gunnison, you've got the Yampa, you've got the Flaming Gorge, you've got, you know, what about water from the Missouri, you know, or what what about San Luis Valley water or or other water? All of those very challenging, very controversial. They need it locally. It's all very tough. There is no simple, easy solution to where you can get the surface water. And you just have to look at Castle Rock and Parker.

They're getting the water almost before it goes out to Nebraska. It's because of Frank Yeager's project there, but also Ron's leadership since then. But that's a huge distance with great uncertainty and very unknown costs there. But hopefully, all of that will work, but we've got 31 water utilities that need some surface water. You know, that's gonna maybe work out for two of them.

So this is a huge challenge, and hopefully, your master plan will talk about it and address it and look for maybe how the county can help with that or whatever it could be. Okay? This is I'm about to retire, but this is a great challenge for anybody in water from this future on. And maybe Evan here will solve it. You know, that's that's what we need. So Questions?

Any questions? Please make sure you give your name before you speak.

Sean Tanner. No questions. Just comment. A plus is fantastic. And I think we we feel the heat that you just gave us. Right. I think we, in the county, feel the heat, and we all have to work together. Thank you.

You bet. My pleasure. And and you can all be have a copy of the PowerPoint, I'm sure, through your, you know, everything there. Come on, Evan.

Anybody else? Yeah. Jim?

Jim Morris and Molly Comet is, coming from Southern Douglas County. There is some bright spots yet. And so we have several wells down in Arapahoe as well. And it starts at just under 1,300 feet there and goes to about 1,500 feet. So 300 feet of material down where we are, great water supply.

Most of our pumps are down 500 to 700 feet. So the pressure from the aquifer down where we are is pushing water up in the pipe half the distance. So we're not anywhere near the aquifer yet now. We also have service water rates too that we're using. We're doing our best to convert. The groundwater and our wells, we're targeting about 900 feet apart. We've just drilled two new wells, one redrill and one new one in the last two years. There is some bright spots. It's not all due to Oklahoma and they wrap a hole, and and and we we feel like it's a pretty good I

should have said, you know, to get to twenty fifty, we will have the groundwater to get to 20 It's not like it's gonna run out of water overnight. It's gradual and all the rest of it. But with everybody who's using this nontributory groundwater, it's it's like a a gift giving you time to try to replace it with the surface water. You you have this this obligation to do that so that this problem or whatever it may be doesn't fall to the next children, grandchildren thing. So but I hear you, you know, and I think a lot of people, they're not maybe as dire as what I just presented here for Highlands Ranch.

But, you know, we're working hard to make sure we we got a stability in what we're doing, and it just is minimizing this dependence on the groundwater. Go ahead. Your mic's not on. No.

No. There we go. Do you have an idea of how much of your demand you would conserve if you if you can convert all the nonfunctional turf?

They're they're telling me that's about 800 acre feet more.

On 20,000. So that's

Right.

Pretty small percentage.

Right.

And do you have any plans to do a purple pipe to keep it green or to or you wanna convert it to non irrigated?

Well, we wanna convert it to Colorado scape.

Yeah.

So native species, but very attractive. No plans for purple pipe. But but we do reuse our effluent in a number of places, golf courses, Windcrest, for instance, other places like that parks that we have. And and I'm a big proponent of that kind of reuse as well. It doesn't have to go back to the stream when we pick it up and we drink it again. To me, that that non potable reuse is is is very positive.

Well, is that that golf course that sits right in there by Marcy Gulch or

Highlands Ranch Golf Course.

Yeah. Is that irrigated direct reuse, or how is that irrigated?

Direct direct reuse.

Oh, it is. Okay. So that's essentially It's

near our wastewater water treatment plant. That's the key. Yeah.

So it's essentially purple pipe water.

That's right. Yeah. That's right. And all the entities will will be doing that, think. You'll all be figuring out how can we stretch this as much as possible. But at some point, you've got to replace some groundwater usage with some new surface water, I think.

Any other questions? I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be, well, for you guys is that you have a metro district and a water district. They're two separate entities, is my understanding. But trying to get that Nonfunctional turf, because quite frankly, Highlands Ranch has a ton of it.

Yes.

And, I don't know how many acres it is of it, but it's quite large. I know in our HOA where, where you have started a process of every year converting out a little bit and a little bit. And I will tell you the problem right now is converting out turf for us is running about a, it's almost an eighteen year payback. So based on cost of current cost of water, but that doesn't include what the current savings calculated back into it would have been.

Yes.

And that meaning that in the future, what is that? Because it's very difficult to get ahold of that. But I think that's going to have to be one of the things that we ask of our larger developments is to, we've

got

to take it serious. I mean, it's going to become a Las Vegas issue if we don't get control of it. And I know there's other sources of water around the state, but I got to tell you, every time you blink, Arizona, Nevada, California is screaming, you know, Colorado water based water and they want it. Just one question. I'm just curious is a larger picture if you happen to know. Because one of the options that people have been talking about is if California would go with desalinization, you don't need Colorado water, which one would free up a ton of water for the Upper Basin entities to be able to use that. So do you ever see that happening? I'm curious.

In the lower part of California, I believe there is some levels of desalinization. Definitely, desalinization is helping significantly with Israel and other places that are even more, you know, minimally, having water. But I don't I don't see it going to the point where they're not still taking huge amounts from the Colorado River. And for instance, for the Imperial Valley, which is a major area that they do it that provides the vegetation that people use through the winter and, you know, the salads and all of that kind of stuff. So I I think it's gradual degrees, but I don't see desalinization because it's so expensive and energy intensive and other things like that and has other adverse effects.

I don't see it being the great solution.

Can't they use a windmill? No. I'm just kidding. I know. So, okay. Great. Thank you. Anybody else have any questions? All right. Well, thank you so very much, Mr. That was, informative. Thank you. Well, mister Forsgren, I think you would be up to give us an update as to where we're at on the water plan. Do you have anything to give us today?

No update other than, the change of the schedule that we're

Sure. Sure. Okay.

I'm I'm sorry. I didn't cancel that. Is there some changes that you want to talk about or that have been made?

I wanted to talk about moving quicker on the production of the draft plan. Okay.

We'll grab a mic.

Been working, with the board of county commissioners and will to, speed up the production of a draft, water plan. They're very interested in having that done by the end of the year so that we can get going on, workshopping with the public early in, 2026. And we worked with Will to make sure that nothing's gonna be skipped. We'll just stack some things up, and, we think, you know, with the pace that we're producing all the data and the analysis that this commission can get to work and get that draft plan put together with Will in a quick quick pace. And so, talked to the board about it, and they were very interested in pursuing it.

So I just wanted to let you know that.

Any questions about that? I think the gist of it is is that I think they're looking to pull the draft up so that we can start getting, some public input and, some public presentations quicker than what we currently have, on the, on our current timeline. So I think that would be good. I mean, if they can do it without jeopardizing the overall plan, I think that's fine. But I think we have to leave that to force for him to be able to lead the way working with staff. We just need to be able to move when we need to. Yes, Tricia.

Patricia Bernhardt. So will I assume LRE is on board then since they have a push to get all the groundwater work done. They can get it done by that time.

Yes, ma'am. We'll be looking to do the draft draft the. The.

Would you mind, Will, yes, standing at the mic. We gotta get this on the recorder. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So the way this will be restructured would be that we would draft the technical analysis by the end of the year. And then with that draft analysis, go to the focus groups and the public in general early into next year and go through it that way. So we'll complete the draft technical analysis with oversight from the commission and also working with staff.

And I think what they're they're worried about is that we're gonna be pushing too hard on data collection or analysis. And I think we're in such a good spot along those lines that it shouldn't be a problem, Tricia.

Right. And LRU is on board with that.

Okay. So I think in our next meeting, you you would have an update for us as to where you currently are at. Okay. That's great. Because I think we were telling you every other meeting. So Right. That'd be great.

Okay.

Alright. Any other questions? Okay. Seeing none, let's move on and to member discussion. Does anybody have anything they would like to bring up, discuss, talk about? Tricia?

Just a quick summary, letting people know that we did do the ASR tour with Castle Rock last week. So there were four members from the water commission that went. Don went, Clark went, I went, and James went. It was very interesting. Of course, Castle Rock's very much in a pilot program for the ASR systems at this time, but we learned a lot and enjoyed the expertise of the folks that gave the tour. And Katie and Lauren were there as well.

Okay, thank you for sharing that. Anybody else? For those members who were not at the filming of the video with the commissioner, Commissioner Thiel and staff and, and us and T, we met at the Ruderhest Reservoir, and there were several of us. I'd say, about six or so that then, were able to make it. And from there, it was just a series of, quite frankly, casual impromptu questions. Everybody took a shot at answering them. They were wrong. I wasn't. But no, just kidding. Just kidding.

But everybody had a good it was very informative from that standpoint just to listen to everybody, what everybody's been doing. I think, you know, Clark was there and Roger. I know that Jim let's see. Don was there. So it was it was really a a pretty good turnout. And, so I don't know what the video is gonna look like, what it's gonna be about. But, don't be surprised if one of you is running for commission. You don't know it. But anyhow okay. Nothing else? With that then, I would like to say we can adjourn our meeting. And, thank you very much.