Water Commission - Regular Meeting

Thank you, everybody. I'm sorry there for lost track of time. Didn't realize we're already four minutes going here. Apologize. So, at this point in time, I would like to call to order the meeting of the water commission for Monday, 08/25/2025. So first thing on our agenda will be to take a call to order and then to take a roll call. So we're gonna go inside first. I believe we have one member that's online with us today. And when we get there, we'll get there. So let's start with Harold.

Are you here? Here. Jim? Jack Gilbert here. Sean Tanner

here. Tricia Bernhardt.

Fantastic. Okay. So we have most of our members here. And online, we have Evan Ella. I'm present. Okay. Didn't hear you. Sorry, Evan. Anybody else online? I think Jim will show up in about, ten minutes, so we'll see here. So he's got a ways to drive yet. But anyhow, with that, we'd like to go ahead and start our meeting. First thing would be approval of the minutes from the last meeting. So if anybody has any corrections or edits or changes, please bring them forward now. Otherwise, I would like to entertain a motion to approve.

Motion to approve. We have a motion to approve from Don. Second. Sean, second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Abstentions? I think we're good

to go.

Passes. Okay. We have two items under our, referral for items of possible consideration. And at this point in time, is there anybody that would like to pull either one or to discuss them?

I just have a quick question. I don't have a comment on either of them. They're very minor. But my question is who makes the decisions on which referrals we're getting to see? Are we seeing all of the ones that are water related or how are they handpicked?

This is Lauren Polvor with staff. Based on direction from the board of county commissioners, we've provided or have been providing water commission, any projects that require an 18 a review. So per regulations kind of required to review water supply and adequacy, those come to Water Commission.

Any other questions? Harold? Let us know which one you want to talk about and we'll pull that one to talk about it.

I'm going to talk about The U. S. 2020 Five-nine Town of Sedalia.

Okay. At this point, what we will do is just be discussing just that second at this point in time, the second item, which is the town of Sedalia. Harold, your questions or concerns?

My question, I believe this is Gabriel's, if I remember the numbers right, which is a wonderful restaurant. However, it's on a septic in the alluvium that flows into cherry into into a Chefield. And whether it's this project or any others, I think whenever there's a rezoning, the if if it I don't believe it's in the system now, but that septic needs to be inspected, make sure it's functioning, and if not, brought up to speed. We we've got to protect the alluvium flowing into Chatfield. That's where our drinking water comes from.

So any septic use above that, there's no alternative until that sewer line is in. But until that happens, we have to be rigorous in making sure those septic systems work in the top of the game. So I would recommend that.

I think and the more that would go with the direction to the health department, who are the ones to ensure there's two inspections take place I know on septics. One is your health department can be called out to view if there's an issue or some point of contamination. The second one is usually when someone sells a property, there's always an inspection as to whether or not the sewer's there. But the real question is, what you're putting is for them to keep in the back of their mind is, are we gonna get cross contamination if we don't have some means to control that or to ensure that it's not doing that? So and we don't have I don't think there's sewer down there at all available to Sedalia, is there?

No. Castle Rock is gonna build one. It's gonna run up to PCWA, but isn't there yet.

Okay.

But until that time and and maybe maybe the system works. I don't know. But I do know the incredible amount of contamination that's going to Chatfield Reservoir. Right. That I know. And so we have to be rigorous everything that can leach into that.

Yep. I think the point what you're saying is just make it a point upon approval or not approval that they inspect that and ensure that it's safe.

Okay. Absolutely.

Anybody else? Okay. Seeing none, we will leave it that. We basically have, the only comment is from Harold on item number B and the rest of it is no comment. And with that, we'll move forward. I just want to remind board commission members that you can individually reply to any of those on your own. So please feel free to do so. Okay. Action items. The first item we have is, the Douglas County water plan.

And I think what we're gonna do is just bring forward at this point in time and have you guys present to us as to where we are at or what you have. Well, I can remind commission members, if you do have a question or if you're gonna respond to something, unless we I really don't wanna take up everyone's time constantly with one question after another. But it would be nice if what we do is please put your name or call you know, for the record that we can capture who's asking the questions. Okay? Thank you.

Good afternoon. Let's see here. Is microphone on? Yes. You're okay? Okay. Great. Well, great. Thank you. I'm Will Koger with the with Forest Grove and Associates, project manager for the water master plan.

And we have a pretty healthy update for you today. There's, quite a bit we've been working on, so glad to give you an update on where we are with these things. The here's a brief overview of what we'll talk about today. There's the water provider survey, the groundwater analysis, and then we're gonna touch on land use policy analysis and the framework for that. Okay.

I was pushing up. Just a reminder on our schedule, we are, we're now working on drafts of the water supply and demand analysis and the land use policy analysis. Phases one and two, looking to complete those by the end of the year. And then that will then we'll move into actually developing the water plan and also having the engagement and outreach with the public. So the water provider survey has come along really well.

We had asked for folks to return those to us by Friday the twenty second, and we've really got most nearly all of them now. We've got 21 25 completed, including 12 members of the South Metro Water Supply Authority. There are three more that are still out there, but we expect to get those within the next couple of days. So we'll have a complete list of those all those water providers. And then there were two two agencies that we weren't able to connect with at all.

They're very small. And so we're looking to probably just do without those two two providers. And then there was one for which the survey wasn't applicable because the they're part of their service area in Douglas County is not developable. So really good progress on this, and we're gonna take this information then and start working through that and and analyzing it, and that'll be coming in the next few months. So that brings us to the groundwater analysis. And Bill Fronczak with LRE Water is giving you updates on that.

Good afternoon, all. Pleasure to be here today to talk about where we are in the groundwater analysis. We've done quite a bit of work here in the last month or so, kinda getting up to date and get getting the data pulled together. We're in the process of actually starting to put text into the actual plan itself. But so we'll go through some of the data that we've been working with and what we're continuing to work on over the next couple of months. Oops. Wrong one. Wrong way. There we go. So what we've done is we've gone through the SEO data with regarding all the wells in the in the county, whether it be non whether it be domestic or nondomestic.

And we categorize those as domestic and nondomestic just for our purposes. Domestic are standard domestic wells, household use only wells, stock wells, basically your exempt well that you'd get under 3,792.602. There are some in there that are associated with an odd plan, but they're very small. The nondomestic wells are your larger wells, your commercial wells, your municipal wells. And as you can see, there's a lot less of a noncommercial, industrial, so on and so forth.

We've broken them down by Aquifer, and this took some time as this the SEO database is complete. It's good. But the problem is you see multiple entries if you have a well ownership form, for example, that list four owners. You're gonna get four entries in the Stadia database, or you're gonna have the same well if there's a replacement well. If you have a dash a or a dash dash f r, you're gonna have two wells in the same location.

So it took some time to go through and synthesize the data to figure out how many wells were in each aquifer and by category, whether it be a fee well or an exempt a nonexempt well or an exempt well. So we're we're we've synthesized this data and we've also used Petra in this analysis to really go through and figure out which wells were in what aquifer. A lot of the quarter we're

we're with the then we'll

be the the based upon SEO data and actually target that well into the right aquifer. And so we've been able to do that to get our summary here. What we're going to do with this is then we're going to take a look at this data compared with it within the unincorporated areas of the county and really take a look at how much water is actually being withdrawn by these exempt wells or these non exempt wells. What we typically do there is that you'll have a non exempt well that will have a permanent limit, say 300 gallon a minute out of the Denver. I'm just throwing a number out there.

Well, when you look at your well completion information, whether it be a pump installation report or your well construction report, you'll get an actual what that well is actually diverting. And it's typically a lot less. I mean, it's typically a 100 gallon a minute, if it's 300 gallon a well. So we'll do an estimate as we look through that and we have good data on that about what we will be able to do to take a look at what actually is being withdrawn. Typically, it's different than the well permit.

So we are going to be summarizing up basically how much water is coming out of the Upper Dawson, Lower Dawson, the Dawson itself, whatever it might be, for each and every, for for all the water that's outside the, the areas of a municipal water district. Because, typically, in our municipal water district, that's all deemed consent, and they and they typically have that for themselves. Yes.

In your in your table right there sorry. Question. In your table right there, you have Dawson, Upper Dawson, and Lower Dawson. Typically, you put upper and lower together to create the Dawson. That column there of Dawson is just unspecified. You don't know whether it's upper or lower. Is that is that correct?

No. Based upon the geology, there is a portion of the county that is specifically separated by the Upper Dawson and the Lower Dawson. Then there's other parts of the county where it's just there is no separation whatsoever. So it is just considered the Dawson. So it is it is separate just depending upon the geology that's out there. So and as you can see is what we would expect. The bulk of the wells are in the Dawson Aquifer, combined. I mean, you got close to 6,000 wells out there that are in the shallowest aquifer, which is what we would expect. That's where people would drill. I mean, it's still probably 300 to 400 feet below the surface, if not deeper down to 500.

There's quite a few wells in the Denver, but then as you get in the Arapahoe and Fox Hills, which are very deep, you just don't see a lot of wells. I mean, that's and you'll see with some data that we've been able to pull from our petro analysis of why that might be. But the one good thing is, and I'll show you later, that the Aparapo Aquifer does look like a pretty good workhorse as an aquifer underneath the county. It's just very deep and it costs money to get there. That's basically what it is.

I have a quick question.

Yes, sir.

When you get to the final report, I am just curious. The different well locations on the mapping, there's one mapping that'll show all wells. I get that.

Correct.

But are we gonna be able to delineate which wells and which of these based on that map? In other words, I know which I I can now see the by color code or by a separate map. These are Arapahoe. These are Fox Hill Wells, that kind of stuff.

Right? Absolutely. Yeah. We're gonna have either an individual map for each and every aquifer that shows where the wells are, or we're gonna color code it. We haven't really decided yet. If you put them all in on one map, it gets pretty confusing, because you could definitely which is which is great. You can tell the subdivisions that actually are on individual on that wells because you'll see an entire section and you'll see nothing but yellow, which is all the wells that are in there. But we'll probably do it just by aquifer and just have a separate map for each and every one of them so we can see where wells are by aquifer.

I think I think just me speaking at that time and we can take a look at what happens, I think that would be the better way actually. Yep.

Just so you can see

what wells are. Yeah. Okay. And this was Jack. Sorry. Thank you.

Yeah. No problem. And then, you know, if you sum this up, the total number of wells and, what's not in here is alluvial wells. We didn't include those. There's not a ton of alluvial wells in the county. All alluvial wells have to be augmented, for the most part. So there's 9,500 wells roughly that are in this that are in the in the in the Denver Aquifer here. In the Denver Basin, excuse me. So and there's probably a 100 or so of the, Alluvial wells that are out there, just random wells. So we just want to focus on the Denver or on the Denver Basin for right now.

What we've also done in the groundwater analysis is what we call the SB five, total water quantification. And what we've done there is we've taken a two mile by two mile square and basically put a grid across each and every aquifer that's out there based upon GIS, figured out what exactly what that is, put us a point in the center of that two by two grid and basically got a a saturated thickness and did a computation of the amount of water underlying that specific parcel. Then added up all those little two by two grids for each and every aquifer to see how much water is in the in the actual county itself based upon state engineer data. And then we obviously subtract out all the, pre two thirteen wells. We'll subtract out the actual water provider wells because that won't be water available for an incorporated county with with the water providers.

So we'll just track that out. So we'll get a number of how much water based upon s b five is actually in the unincorporated areas of county by aquifer. And I'll show you kind of some of the maps that we we've kind of put in together as we get further down the line. Then what we do is what we're gonna compare is the what I call the legal analysis, which is the s p five to our pet analysis. And what the pet analysis is, again, as we talked about initially, is basically we looked at 500 and some wells across the county as well as just outside the county to really get a look at how we can the geophysical logs from those wells, so where we can take a look at what those, what each aquifer has tops and bottoms and what those saturated sands are.

We then take a look at that data, and we we parcel it out for everything that's below 12 o meters on the various, various geophysical logs really are not avail not not good water. It really won't come out physically. So we do that analysis, and we compute exactly how much water is there based upon that's our saturated thickness versus the SP five. And so the numbers may be different, and we'll do the exact same analysis. We'll do it across the county, then separate out all the the existing water providers.

We're trying to stay away from the water providers to say how a petrol analysis may impact their water because they do have decrees. And we don't wanna tell them like, oh, you have a SB five decree that says you have 3,000 acre feet underlying for for example, Castle Rock or or whoever. And our analysis, you got 2,000. We're gonna stay away from that because we're gonna look at the unincorporated areas of the county. I'll let each and every water provider of the data will be there and how they wanna interpret it, how they want to utilize it would be great. But I don't wanna tell them that their degree is less. I mean, that's that that's that's a that's a hard road to hoe up and down that road. Don't wanna do that one. So and again Chicken? No. Go ahead.

It's all I gotta say. Coward. No. Just kidding. Yeah.

Again, we know

that the legal right is the decrease. But what we're trying to do here is get the county the information that in the unincorporated areas, when you're looking at new subdivisions, you're looking at new development, how much water really is in these various aquifers? What can be utilized? Are the existing zones in 18A adequate to protect water users that are out there as well as have enough water in these basins and in these aquifers for sustainable development over time. So that's what we're going try to get to

through those tools.

This is Jack. And then one of the what is the you said 12 ohm?

12 ohm meter basically in in the geophysical log. It's an elect electro resistivity log. Excuse me. Electro I can't even say that. An ER log, basically. Electro and so, basically, electricity goes in and you get, you know, based upon where's water's there or if there's not water there, how many ohms are coming back on a on a and I'm simplifying it, but how many comes back on a tool and then you can see how much water is in there. And so we cut it off at a certain amount based upon our experience about what's physically there. Anything below 12 really is I mean, there's water there, but it's just not going to come out of the ground.

The

next thing we've done is as we've developed this data and we've calculated the number of wells, we've done our SB five analysis, we also have done the petro analysis. We've started to put this into what we call the Douglas County interactive web map. And what that is going to be is just the tool that people are going to be able to go out to and take a look at how this data summarized and evaluated. And I'm going to show you a couple of these, you know, I'm not going go through the model right now or the or the web map. You can take up some computing time and we still have to figure it out, and I don't want to be sitting here trying to figure out if it's gonna load or not.

But I do have some good slides from that, GIS web map that can show you what what what we're trying to show so people can take a look at it. Let's just let's kinda get into it. So, initially, there's just some basic data that's gonna be there. Here's your water providers and your wells for your water providers that are out there, and that comes from the county and the state engineer's office. Yeah. You're gonna have a legend on the side that's gonna basically tell you what you click on and not click on, turn on and off. Harold has a question. Sorry, Harold. I apologize.

Thank you, Harold Smith. My question, when you're saying, municipal providers, does that mean just within the municipal town who may be serving outside an unincorporated Douglas County? Or is it really any if it's a municipal provider no matter where they are, then that's excluded from the analysis?

Well, what it would be is based upon their service area. They have an initial service area, then if they actually have an extraterritorial service area, that will be included in the service area for the municipality. That will

not be part of this analysis.

It won't be part of this analysis because they will be providing water. Typically, we've seen is that if, say, Castle Rock wants to bring in x y z development, they're gonna make sure x y z development dedicates all the water to the town. Yeah. But They're not gonna basically say, well, hey. We'll provide you water and just keep the water underneath your land. They're gonna have to dedicate that. So that's gonna be part of I'm just using Castle Rock as an example. So you're

going to take, for example, use your Castle Rock example. It could be any municipality. You're going to take their numbers when you actually look at the consumption of water out of the aquifer. Correct. We'll include their numbers in that.

Yes. Yes. But we're not It will be included. Exactly. But we're going to also look at the total amount of water in the unincorporated areas as well. So we so you when we go in, because based upon land ownership, even though we do know why Castle Rock is pumping water, the Denver Basin has very steep cones of depression. We're going to look at water levels, all that fun stuff. But we really want to look at what is the quantification of water in the unincorporated areas of the county and not get it into what the quantification of water is.

But you've got to know what their quantification is. You're taking their numbers as they provide it.

Yeah. And that but I we're gonna leave that as based upon what their decrees are as well as what SB five says. We're not gonna get into the SB five to tell them because SB five really is telling us what physically is available there. And I don't wanna tell Castle Rock

But you got Rock tell you what they think is They

can tell us whatever they want. Yeah. We can we'll incorporate what they want through the water provider survey. Exactly.

You won't have a study if you don't have that.

Yeah. Well, we have to yeah. We that's why we have the water providers that are providing us their information on what they're doing.

You'll include what water they believe they have

Correct.

At face value. You're not going to recompute that. That makes sense. And then you'll include that in the overall consumption and availability.

Yes.

Okay. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Just want Sorry.

I apologize if I misunderstood the question. Yes. Thank you. We are using the water This

is Sean Tanner. I agree 100%

with Harold. I think we, yeah, we absolutely want that data because in if history is a guide, and I remember when you're a commissioner, commissioner Hilbert, the providers will come to the county again for funds. And I think making sure that we know where funds can best be deployed to have the maximum impact for the citizens.

Yes. And we're getting that data from that, from those water provider questionnaires that we've sent out. How much water they have? What their plans are? What they have for asset pools? Whatever it might be. Yeah. Absolutely.

Just just to maybe, Don Langley, point of clarification. You're saying municipalities, but you're talking about all the special districts, all the water providers that are in the county, Yes.

Exactly.

Because there's only one municipality,

I think. So, no, let me let me back up a little bit here. So I gotta make sure we're clear on this one here because there's an expectation that I wanna make sure I've got in my head. So there's a lot of water providers that cover municipalities. Now I'm gonna take Parker. Parker covers the municipality park, but they also cover unincorporated. But so are we saying that we're going to just take Parker Water's district as a whole, and that'll be carved out as not telling them what they have? Or are we going to just I don't know how you just carve out the municipal portion

of that. Well, exactly. I might misterminating. It's not just the municipal portion. It's the water providers.

It's the water providers.

So my my I'm kinda lumping it into municipal, but, yes, it's the water provider and service area.

Perfect. Thank you.

Jim Morris. Yes, sir. So my question is regarding the not counting the alluvials. So Barry Park, where I'm from down your map, we have a number of alluvial wells out on the West Side. Now how do you account for surface water being available if you're not gonna count the alluvials?

Yes. And I and what I would didn't include this in what we were talking about, alluvials will be addressed in the water supply report. Okay. We're not we just were focusing on Denver Basin. There's just not a ton of alluvial water in the district or in the county, excuse me. So we are handling that, but it's always typically pursued to some sort of augmentation plan or some other type of issue that we do have data on. I just didn't put it in the total well count. But yes, alluvial water will be a part of this analysis. This is just a simple map that's part of that part of the web map that shows all the wells that were used that have geophysical logs on that we went to across the county and outside the county. And as you can see, it goes up to the hogback.

That's the edge of the Denver Basin. When you get to the western part of the county into the into the mountainous areas, that's all fractured granite. It's Based upon the review that we've seen, most of those wells out there are exempt. They're actually not. I mean, you go right across the county line, you get into some of the non exempts where you have the Mountain Mutuals of the world that are doing global log plans, these type of things.

We haven't seen that in the Most of it's exempt. So it's probably a lot to do with pre-seventy two lots or larger parcels where the state can issue household use only well permits or actually domestic permits under six zero two. So that's what we've seen, at least not in the mountains part of the country. But on the eastern edge where we see the Denver Basin, that's also where the geophysical logs are that we've taken a look at. So here's kind of a snapshot of what we've seen in the model for the geophysical logs.

Taking all those wells, We look at some of the better ones to see it go from north, south, east, west. And in the in the GIS map, you're gonna be able to click on that line, say e e or b b, whatever it might be. And what you're gonna get is you're gonna get this. So there's the BB cross section. When you click on it, that's gonna pop up in the GIS website, and you're gonna be able to see your different aquifers that are out there.

You're gonna see the ground surface. You're gonna see the Upper Lower Dawson. You're gonna see the Denver, the Arapahoe, the Fox Hills, and there's the Laramie formation, but that's really nothing there. But as you can see, and that's what's really interesting is the Arapahoe Aquifer seems to be a very good aquifer based upon our analysis, based upon the amount of saturated sands that are in there. Denver and the Dawson are the workhorses right now, but you can kind of see what it is, and that's just the North South one.

But that's what's going to be able to happen. You're be able to see this actually what's going to happen. And then here's East West cross section going from the hog back out to the county line. And, you know, as you would expect, there's, you know, you know, not much Dawson, you know, as you get towards the the West Side because everything's pinching out. And then you get out to the to the East Side, you got a lot more Dawson, Denver, and and Arapahoe. But, again, on the East West cross section, you're seeing the Arapahoe is a pretty good looks like a pretty good aquifer. So that's encouraging. Deep, but it's a you know, there's some water there. And then one month we take that data, what we come up is come up with a heat map. This is doesn't show the actual contours yet with numbers, but this is what the contours will show.

You'll be able this happens to be the Denver Aquifer, and you'll see where it's a purple. It means there's a lot of saturated sands there. Whereas the red, it's not as much saturated sands. And that's just based upon the geology and the review of the geophysical logs. So we take all that data and we put together a heat map. That's this is just basically the net sands or saturated sands. We're also gonna have tops and bottoms of each aquifer. And then basically what we call the saturated thickness, which is the actual thickness of the aquifer. This is just this is what the net sands are. So this is what will be coming out of that report.

So we'll be able to kind of see where things are at and overlay where Castle Rock is, where Highlands Ranch is, where it might be to kind of see where these areas that you see differ from aquifers and where that those net sands are. So it'll be a powerful tool once we get all that data processed. This is the SB5 analysis that I was mentioning to you. We did the same thing. This, again, the Denver Aquifer just apples to apples, two mile by two mile grid across the Denver Aquifer based upon the lateral extent, and we'll sum up all that based upon the saturated thickness that the state provides for each one of those little squares, calculate the overlying or calculate the volume and we'll get the volume for each aquifer.

And we want to compare the two numbers. That's one of the thoughts is to compare the two numbers is we know what the legal availability will be, what the state says, what you're going to have, what physically is going to come out of the ground. And that's kind of what we want to understand because in our experience, there's less physical water coming out of the Denver Basin than actually is given by decree. Now we've had arguments with various folks as we'll put in multiple wells and get our amount of water out from underlying our land. That's great, but you got economic considerations. I mean, those wells are not cheap. Two, then you got well to well interference. There's a whole bunch of more complicated factors than saying I can put in five wells to get my analysis out. Our analysis is based upon one well on that property just to kind of see what will happen. Sure, can put more wells.

There could be new technology that comes in horizontal well drilling that can maybe get more water out of these aquifers. A lot of different factors come into play to get your actual appropriation. But based upon a single well analysis with actual construction from today, we're seeing that there's less physical water available than actual legal water. It's not to say that water is not there, it's just not coming up out of the aquifer is what we want. Then after we've done that, that's kind of our quantification analysis, and we're still running through all the numbers. We're now looking at how can we compare the quantification. Again, heat map is the saturated thickness. It is the net sands. It's not the water levels because we know that that's different. There might be water levels that are different.

It might have 300 feet of saturated sands or net sands, but the water level might be down to say a 100 feet. You know, we don't know. I'm just throwing something out there. So we're looking through all the water label data that we have out there in the county. We've done the USGS as well as DWR.

USGS, as we know, has done a lot of the household use wells, the home wells, the individual well known wells they've gone out and taken samples of. So we've gone through and looked at that data and tried to figure out how we can see whether it's pumping versus not pumping, and I'll show this on another slide. We've also looked at DWR. DWR is typically the bigger wells, the wells that are municipal, that have that are pumping and multiply completed these type of things. So we've looked through theirs and there advantages and disadvantages to both both datasets.

But we've looked through through a lot of that, versus, you know, period of record. And I'll let me go back. We've we've color coded these wells as well based upon the different color codes or whether wells are multiply completed, in other words, completed between two aquifers, whether they're partially completed in one aquifer or fully completed into one aquifer. So we've looked at how because that's going affect your water level on how things are going to happen. So here's an example of a USGS log that everybody's probably seen before.

We've analyzed what's pumping, what's non pumping, really trying to get a good dataset on what kind of is going on in that water level. We're then comparing that data to what we see, like, in some of the DWR analysis. And what this is powerful is showing is that the aquifer is the purple. That's where your tops and bottoms of the aquifer. Your water level is well above it. So that means we're pumping piezometric water. We're not having into the aquifer yet. So you are gonna see a decline. You are gonna see major sawtooth as you see that pressure water bounce up and down and upon not just you pumping the well, but your neighbors and other folks doing it. Once you get down in the aquifer, you will see a lot less of an impact, a lot less of a decline.

And we're going have examples of that and show you that because there are a few wells out there that are pumping water out of the actual aquifer itself that's called it's given the unconfined. And you're seeing a lot less decline versus your piezometric water, the confined water. Let's see. Is that it? That might be it. That's where we're at right now. And so we're processing all that data and getting it, obviously, into nice little figure, tables, data, all that fun stuff. Yes.

Tricia Barnhart. Just for clarification again, when you talk about the saturated thick thickness and you said that it's basically provided by the state, is there any other way that you are analyzing the saturated thickness? Because I'm a little wary of those numbers sometimes when I look at them. Can you explain that?

So there's two things. The saturated thickness is the difference between the top of the aquifer and the bottom of the aquifer, then there's the net sands. And so the state has gone through an estimate of what the net sands are. And that's what SB5 is based upon. Petra is different than that.

That's looking at the geophysical logs. The state does the same thing with the geophysical logs, but they literally take the geophysical logs and put them up on the wall and try to figure out what the what the I call it saturated thickness, but what the net sands are. And so we're gonna be we're going to be comparing that saturated thickness of the state comes up with based upon the SP five rules versus what we see from the geophysical logs, and that's we're going to compare the two numbers about what those are. And there is there they are different. The state has actually really enjoyed that we've been doing some of this petro analysis on various projects, not only in this county, but in other counties to really understand what is what is out there.

And we've seen discrepancies And what the state says is what the saturated thickness is versus what we actually see and what's physically there, both positive and negative, more water and and also less water.

Jim Morris, gonna get back to the surface water issue. So are you looking, you know, like, the southern half of the county, if there's enough surface water anywhere to, let's say, do a Reuter Hess two type project, build a dam and hold back surface water. Is there any kind of flows even close to what was utilized for Rider Hess?

We're going to look at that. I mean, is surface water versus groundwater. We're going to look at that. It's difficult in the county because there's I mean, obviously, everything is on priority. I know there's a lot of water that's coming in from other counties into into the county down south and what have you. That's gonna be a I mean, I think what we're gonna have to do is work with the water providers on that and see what they're thinking if there's gonna be some sort of major infrastructure that may be done in the southern part of the county to support like a router has to. It's just a challenge because, you know, we have the environmental issues that go on as well as what are the water rights are gonna fill that. Yeah. I think we could probably make some generalized comments, but it's gonna be pretty tough to really kinda put a rule figure on that.

Because I'll point you to Perry Park. So they have water storage in the lake that's in the country club down there. And then Perry Park is actually purchased north of that 140 acres. It's in a valley there. And that's been designated as a future reservoir site.

So I think, I think I saw somewhere, maybe it was in my Perry Park stuff where they hold back, for Perry Park and for the Country Club. The Perry Park has 125 acre feet in the lake for the Country Club, and then this future reservoir is designated as another 125 acre feet that could be stored there. So that's, I guess, what I'm getting at. That's land that the water district down there already owns and is designated as a future reservoir. And there's a stream flowing through there already, which would end up being part of the augmentation plan because the wastewater plant for the Western Side of Perry Park dumps into that stream north of the residential area.

You know? So there is some flow there Yep. That if, you know, the powers that be would come to the conclusion that that's part of the future, that there's some groundwater surface water rights that could be held back there.

Yeah. That's what we're hoping is that we get from the water provider information and the questionnaires is what are they looking at as their water supply in the future. Are they looking at trying to diversify some of their Denver basin analysis and bring in more surface water, whether it be from construction of new reservoirs, acquisition of new water rights, surface water rights that may be on the West Slope, trying to bring them over acquisition of water rights in the South Platte, bring them down South through. Those types of questions, hopefully, the water providers are coming up with. We another count is we've seen that from the water providers as they Denver, I'm not going to use that.

That's a horrible example. They got a lot of surface water. But say, you know, Aurora, I mean, they're constantly going out and trying to find other surface water and get off of Denver Basin water. And they they have a constant asset pool that they're trying to pull together make sure that they have enough water for their citizens going forward. It's tough sometimes to get that data because sometimes they say we're in litigation. We're in water court. We're not gonna tell you what we're gonna do right now because we don't wanna jeopardize anything that's in watercourt. So we're hopeful we're going to get some of that information and at least be able to give some idea of like there might be some future surface water that might be available, Ruta S2, for example. But I think that's a lot of that data is going to come from that water providers about what they're going to be doing.

Yep.

I'm gonna turn it over turn it over to the land use and Ted.

I had one question. Excuse me. Harold Smith also again. Did I hear you say in your presentation that there's less water than legal there's less real water than legal water?

That's what our experience is well, less physically recoverable water.

Thank you. That that's what

That's what I wanted to

have a ratio for that?

Not yet.

Would you have one?

I will have one. Correct. Yeah. So for an example, I'm gonna comes

in and said I've got a water right for this amount of water that's adjudicated paper, but if it's not recoverable, that's a fool's errand.

Yeah. Well, that's exactly right. But I can't touch the legal side of things, obviously. That's No. We don't

want create legal ads. We we're we're we're we're we're molecule folks here, not legal folks.

Exactly. Well, that's what in in other counties, we've come up with that where it's, you know, ballpark, 40% less water is recoverable, ballpark.

Well, that will get back into your land use planning then too.

Exactly. Depending

on where that falls.

Yep. And that's where we wanna give the county those tools to say, hey. Listen. You know? Physical availability, you have developer a coming in. I got a decree for a thousand acre feet, for example. Well, reality, you might not only be able to get 600 out of there.

I understand.

So that's what we yeah. We wanna get that exact

Some counties are going to three hundred years supply and just trying to swag it. So you'll come up with something that maybe the county could use.

Yep. That's what we wanna do is try to give you those tools to make those decisions when it comes to water supply.

Switching topic, I saw your your slide with the depth of the aquifers that goes east

Yep.

And shallower going west. So that also will get back into the computation. Yes. But the other thing in terms of the life of the aquifer, I see thousands of individual wells, but collectively in that kind of spit in the ocean compared to the industrial the commercial wells that we have in terms of actually use of the aquifer?

It depends where I mean, there are local areas of the Denver Basin that do have large declines of groundwater. We've seen it in Highlands Ranch in this county. We've seen it in other counties, Green Valley Ranch up in Adams County, these type of things where there's been heavy use in certain aquifers in decline. But overall, we still haven't really tapped the Denver Basin aquifers from a state as a whole. I mean there's still a ton of water in the Denver Basin. Localized areas have had some declines. But the challenge one of the challenges is going to be, and we're going to have to talk through in the report is what the supreme court came with and said these municipalities, these water providers, you individual, all landowner, have this volume of water underlying their land. That's it. It doesn't matter. You got you know, that's computation.

I mean, we the way the state rule is you compute a volume of water, you can pull it out one one hundredth per year. But that volume of water is all you get.

But if if there's less water recoverable than adjudicated, and you're saying you could pump a hundred years of what's adjudicated, that may not be relevant to what actual water you get out or what damage you're doing to the rest of the aquifer. I right? Yep.

I mean, there's gonna be water. There's water there. It's just not you can't pump it out of the ground. It's not physically recoverable. It's not really impacting anybody else. It's just

I understand.

Can't come out of the ground. But but

we're we're going forward under adjudicated water. And you're saying we need to come up with a methodology for determine recoverable water and then overlay that with a hundred year requirement from the state. Correct. And then overlay that with the flows to the large pumps and what that does particularly when I saw the western part of the county with how thin those aquifers are. That seems to me like those wells out there are very much at risk. Am I missing something?

They could be. I mean, I again, I haven't finished the analysis on that. It could be. I mean but yeah. I mean, it's the the the the Denver Basin is a challenge. I mean, everybody thinks that, you know, we have a hundred year off for life. We don't. The groundwater doesn't act that way. You stop pumping, water comes in from three sixty degrees and maybe not recover as fast as if you would in an alluvial system, but it's still going to recover. There's still a ton of water out there in all the aquifers.

It's just depending upon how much water is physically available, what other water rights being pumped. I mean it's a complicated analysis. I know the USGS has put together a comprehensive study on the Denver Basin and they did a mod flow model, but they didn't take into consideration of the legal definition of water, whether it's not nontributory actual or I can't pump that water around a hog plant. These are different analyses that come into play when you start looking at Denver Basin. So it's something that we're going to look at in our report about what water is available.

Terms of of determining recoverable, you know, I've been watching with great interest the PUC deliberations on energy and the cost of energy. Do you include in your recoverable amount the cost of I mean, you're lifting water, what, in some cases, oneeight of a mile. That's a lot of power. When you figure out what's recoverable, do you include in your computations what's economically recoverable? Or is the assumption is no matter what it is and what power costs, we're going to get it?

Well, I think it depends on the entity that's going to be actually going after the water.

So that's outside your scope?

Correct. But should

analysis there be or some idea in terms of the cost of lifting with this in terms of recoverable amount? Because at some point in time, it just costs too much to get it out of there.

Well, it's not only just the operational cost of lifting the water out of there. It's the drilling cost putting the well in to go that deep. And so your typical individual on lot, your typical homeowner is not going to be able to spend 500,000 to $600,000 to put it in a 1,200 foot well that would support a pump large enough to get water and lift it that that distance to the surface. It's just not economically feasible, but a municipality might have that. Water provider might have it.

Has a well at at one level of electric cost that residents are happy with, you quintuple that or centuple, is that 10 times? Is what they're talking to PUC. That could be a whole different rail to your your residents. Yep. Are are we gonna do any analysis with that? Because that may go into decision process about the feasibility of renewable water projects versus less expensive groundwater.

Yes. I mean, think the analysis is your individual homeowner.

I'm on municipal wells. I've switched over to

Well, even if it's municipal wells, municipality may have the financial wherewithal to put in those deeper wells or might be something that the county wants to look at. We wanna put have municipalities look at the Arapahoe Walk versus the Denver or the Dawson because they may have the financial wherewithal to be able to do that. Is it going to cost more from an operational standpoint? Is it to cost more to drill the well? Absolutely. But that might be something that's obtainable by a water provider versus individual, not well.

But it might be useful to provide information to water providers of what that's going to be. You're talking serious cost increases.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. This is going to make infeasible renewable projects suddenly more feasible. If you can quantify it. I don't know we as a county have done work in that. Our water providers are very smart. I'm sure they've done some of it. I just see what's going on with the PUC. We're going to see very expensive electricity. Yep.

Anyway. Okay. Sean, Tom, I'll be real quick. Sure.

I know you gotta keep

rocking. So in the analysis, in the map, we're gonna have all the wells. What we have, again, refresh me, with the districts and the municipality, will we have their commercial wells on there as well?

And

we'll have the depth? Yep. Okay. So using whatever discount you put on your decreed amount general, say it's a 20% discount that recoverable water, we'll at least be able to see the depth of that well and if that aquifer stress. I think, Harold, it's starting to get closer. I I know exactly where you're talking. It's getting closer to being able to see which of our big municipal slash district wells are at risk given the stress on that aquifer.

Correct. And that's what you're going to have here is you're going to have each one of these points that are out there. We'll have We have the water providers. And what you're gonna be able to do is go over to this well, click on it, and it'll pull up all SEO data, your pump insulation report. You'll you'll see exactly how that well was constructed in-depth and all that. Amount. The The treated amount, everything. It's going to be just like you'll be able to point click on it and go right to a link, right where the SEO is going to be. So you're going have exactly the information. Wells we're going put in there is in that area, there are significant water level declines that we've already seen based upon existing monitoring networks.

We're gonna be doing that analysis, taking a look at that. We won't tell them exactly how they wanna manage their aquifer and how they wanna manage their water supply, but hopefully, we're gonna get that from some of the water provider information. How they're how they're doing with what, you know, what they're doing with, their existing water supply.

One last question. I'm sorry. I'm in monopolize. Are you gonna overlay anywhere radium hits and that type of thing?

It's there's there's not we're gonna look into water quality, but it's not a good network. We don't have good reliable data. We do from the water providers. Yeah. So we can take a look at that and include that. But, like, out in rural areas where there's individual it's just not a good

data set. Individual wells, they they don't know. Yeah. But I'm wondering the municipal, as you get it, if you might be able to have maybe a sketch of where we think this is a high radium

We will if the data is there, we'll definitely take a look at that water quality

information. Be good to know because there's people drilling wells out there. They ought to they ought to know that they're in a radium risk zone or something like that might be very helpful.

Yeah. I mean, we can we'll definitely look at what water quality is available. Thank you. And now we'll turn it over to Ted. Do have you have

a What's the secret for advancing the spots?

So you have to push this button down here. So

just that

There we go.

Yeah. Down. Okay. Great.

Is that it?

Yeah. That's it. Thanks. Okay. Great. Well, thanks, commissioners. Good afternoon. Ted Hyde, Michael Baker International. I've been before some of you before, but it's good to be back again. Staying on topic, of course, but kinda switching the conversation to that key relationship between water long term water supply and land use in the county.

So that's what we're gonna be talking about the next half hour. So just to revisit and to refresh a task summary, what is it we're doing here? Conducting some research and presenting some findings to assist the commission and really developing draft policies that will not only go into the water plan, but could ultimately be used to amend or modify county regulations as they pertain to water use. I think really tapping into what was just discussed and knowing that long term, there are going to be constraints on supply. To look at ways to reduce demand per capita in Douglas County and extend the uses of supplies that are available to us.

Now that will become to available to us over the long term. And by that, 2050 is what we mean. And really to set the commission and the county up with a sustainable use framework to really accommodate that growth that we know is coming, not just residential, commercial, industrial, and to not exhaust supply. So that critical nexus there on the right, the form and function of future land uses in the county, we know is going to significantly affect water demand. Okay.

So very quickly, some of the policies and guidance that we've looked at thus far in our research, we we've looked at key sections of the zoning resolution, the section that relates to landscaping and irrigation, the water supply overlay district, the provisions there. Flict at that that 2040 comprehensive plan, that essentially master guiding document in section seven as it relates to water supply and the goals and policies therein. Much more brief, but the the Douglas County Water Alternatives Program flyer. And then it's just a fact sheet created by Colorado State University, but it pertains to rainwater harvesting. So we've looked at a variety of different resources in our initial research here.

Okay. And so our initial assessments, just a high level kind of impression thus far is that and and and and let me emphasize, this is not unique to Douglas County. I think it's relevant to a lot of your peer counties around the metro area and in Colorado, but that it will likely need to go further in its formalization or codification of water conservation requirements. Why? And, again, it's really to accommodate that long term growth that is projected for Douglas County, residential, commercial, industrial, and to be able to say in 2050, okay.

We've put the pieces in place to set ourselves up with a sustainable long term supply. Okay. How are we gonna do this? What are some ways? What are some of the key levers you might say?

And something we're gonna be looking very closely at, and you're gonna see this come through in our recommendations, is really the potential for future zoning amendments. And working with community development, looking at the types, the locations, things like lot sizes of new development that are are permitted in unincorporated areas. The the thought of, okay. We're not so much capping the amount of new development, but steering or guiding new development into areas that we know to already be served by established water suppliers. Less likely that you would have the majority or a good portion of your development being permitted in areas that are served by isolated wells.

Okay? That last bullet there is an example from Alamosa County where they have a a minimum lot size for private outdoor wells to provide irrigation of 35 plus acres. Just put that in there as an example of the type of provision, that Douglas County may wanna consider in future years to manage that water supply. Okay. Importantly, as, say, new primarily residential, but new commercial does come online, new applications for, say, subdivisions do come in, what are some provisions that can be put into place?

Your neighbor just to the north of Arapahoe County has gone a long way in terms of their requirements as it relates to landscaping. Okay? Knowing that the irrigation demand from landscaping can have a significant effect on on water supply. The amounts of landscaping, the types of landscaping can really affect important reductions in irrigation. Types of appliances and fixtures.

Okay. So look at this diagram to the right and the the the the idea of use and reuse systems and employing gray water. So right there in this residential washing machine, a portion of that water is siphoned off, routed through some sort of filtration device, and can be used partially for outdoor irrigation, lawn, garden, trees, patio, etcetera. And then one of my personal favorites, rainwater and snow melt collection, and using that for irrigation supply. Quick show of hands. Anybody around the table have a rainwater collection or harvesting system at your property? Four people. Alright. 56. Okay.

11. Have a question. Yes. Please, Harold.

The rainwater harvesting pilot program expires next year.

Okay.

That's not self serving. All you have to be is in water court. Believe me, we're there.

Okay.

So it doesn't matter to me. But I think for the county, one of the things we may want to recommend to the commissioners, there's interest in legislature for extending the private, assuming the pilot program so that more can do it. Okay. So we may wanna be recommending to the commissioners and their lobbyists that they take a look at expend like I said, we're covered. I'm fine. But but rainwater harvesting works. It works everywhere except here. People are getting used to the rain barrels. It should be expanded and they certainly should extend that pilot program for others that want to come in.

Okay. Excellent. Thank you for that. It wasn't aware, so we will we're gonna incorporate that in our recommendations when you go to the public, the community.

I'm not really legislature blood stream water harvesting so we can get it through, but someone's gotta run a bill.

Yeah. Okay. K. Good. Yeah. It's amazing how much water can be collected off a rooftop and then redistributed for other purposes. So let's let's take a look at some quick examples here. Woman on the right, you know, filling a, what do you call those? The words escape. Yeah. Watering can. Thank you. Watering can. Okay. With some rain or snow water.

And then, you know, a larger barrel, probably a 96 to a 100 gallon drum up above with a a a spigot off the bottom. What I wanna point out here in this image, let's see if this there does. Okay? So the landscaping requirements revisions I referred to earlier does not mean that all of a property would necessarily have to be zero escaped. But in this example, which has potential implications in many parts of Douglas County, you can have your portion of Kentucky bluegrass, but then that can be coupled with hardscape, xeriscape, and drought tolerant landscaping.

So a good hybrid or a mixture of the two. Less so here up above, I don't see any turf per se, but some ex excellent examples of zero escaping. And we found a lot of these examples through research up in Arapahoe County and the provisions they adopted. An excellent example here of a storage container, snowmelt being captured there, probably combination of snowmelt and rainwater. But imagine the number of properties that that could serve through hypothetically a subdivision somewhere here in Douglas County for irrigation purposes.

Okay? And then adjusted production factors. I'm gonna be working with Bill closely on this when we get into exploration of this idea. But the idea that when you're identifying the water demand and the ability to serve, say, new subdivision, what you factor what you account for, what you provide as a aquifer groundwater production factor And how conservative do or don't you make that based on what you think could be provided? Bottom bullet there, the whole intent is to reduce or minimize the risk that it becomes uneconomical for new development to rely on specific aquifer allocations.

And then connected systems. We talked about it. We know well. Bill showed some really good illustrative data to show there's distribution of independent isolated private wells throughout the county. And I'm not knocking that and saying it's a bad thing.

But perhaps going forward as a means of sustainably managing supply, there could be some consolidation of those wells or potentially a reduction in the drilling of new wells and a greater moving the compass and the needle toward greater reliance upon connected systems that are tapped into supplies from existing water providers throughout the county. And then specific use provisions. This a couple of thoughts came up here and and one is car washes. I don't know how hot the market is for increased car washes throughout Douglas County, but I'll tell you, I'm a resident of Lakewood. And I feel like I see one to two of these come online every single year.

So whatever it is, new car washes seem to be coming online, and I imagine that's not gonna be the that will include Douglas County. So this is a high water land use, for example, and it's just one of several where you could say, okay. We require to get through the development review process and to earn your certificate of occupancy, you have to have an a system in place to recycle, in the case of Arvada, 50% of your on-site water to be put right back in to a closed loop system to service the vehicles. My colleague, Anne, he who's with me here today, has done some research on the amount of water used by data centers, and it's a very intensive water use. And the idea of data centers working with water providers such that a lot of the water they use to cool their internal systems is recycled.

Okay? So that's another idea and something we're gonna be exploring in terms of our our recommendations. And then protocols, practices on county owned land. I think the county is probably doing a lot of things already. We're still researching that, but there's also a lot of, I think, exciting opportunities. So the idea of a tiered watering program where the county says, okay. We have Park A, and this is a park that's high in demand. A lot of families use it. People picnic there. People relax there.

There's a lot of passive recreation. Okay. We we're probably going to irrigate that property and park more. Park Z, lightly used. There is not a lot of recreational uses such as the one you see here.

People just use it as a viewing point for some, mild mild amounts of passive recreation, we're going to remove all or some of the irrigation, at that park so that, use and employment of irrigation is tiered according to the intent of the park and the use of the park. And then, again, where it's appropriate and safe to do so, using that gray water for irrigation at those facilities. This third bullet here, Water Smart Moisture Sensitive Irrigation Systems. Have you, show of hands, please, ever been driving down the street just after a rainstorm or on a rainy day and you see a rainbird going full blast onto a hillside. Right?

Okay? Not smart irrigation. Right? And we've all seen it. We're we know it's out there. But, when the county employs irrigation for county owned property, making sure that it's using systems and technologies such that it is not going to be irrigating county property right after a rainstorm. Okay? The minimization of turf and medians and county owned roads. So where where it's difficult to effectively irrigate, minimizing the inclusion of things like Kentucky Bluegrass on those properties to again help cumulatively reduce that demand. And then using where where it makes sense to do so, applying organic soil amendments, which have really been shown to okay.

When it does rain, when there is snow, it really helps the soil texture and the soil componentry retain that water more effectively, especially in this dry climate that we live in. Alright. And then collaboration with water providers. And we know that many of the providers, if not all of them here throughout the county, are probably already using tiered water rates. But the county has an opportunity to to work with them such that more Douglas County residents know, okay.

Well, if I stay within a certain tier, my rates can somewhat reliably stay at this level. Oh, I didn't know that if I use 2,000 more gallons this month, I'm gonna go into a whole another tier of pricing and cost. And when a lot of households households are more closely watching their bottom lines, this could be a real important factor to them. And that would be a means, economically speaking, of incentivizing less use of water. Okay.

And then goals policy objective. I think this is my last slide or second to last slide. But when the county does come up on that important comprehensive plan update and is engaging stakeholders in the community as, okay, Who are we? What are our values? What are our priorities? Where do we wanna go? Making sure that the water plan we're gonna provide to you and the the key elements of that are appropriately integrated into that long term vision for the county. Okay? Having looked at the the existing comprehensive plan, that element of it could go further to say, okay. We we live in a very dry climate.

Trying to sustain sustain supply through 2050. Here are a set of much more targeted goals, policies, and check and objectives to help us get there. Okay. And that this is my last slide. Slide.

I just want to show you a a sample format of ultimately what you might see in the water plan as it relates to land use policies. This is an example directly taken out of the Arapahoe County plan. Not not intended for you to read the whole thing. I realize it's a lot of text. But but what we did in this case and for several other policies is we identified it as a as a county, what could be a county administered policy, some key discussion and considerations related to that particular issue.

And then in the callout box in the green, what might be some of the regulatory or zoning implications or updates that would need to accompany moving forward with that? So just wanted to prime the pump for you and give you a a sneak peek as to what you might see in the actual plan, you know, some months from now. So that was all that was all I had. Any any questions for me, commissioners?

Clark Clark? In an earlier

Clark Hambleman. Yeah. In an earlier slide, there was a I think it was in the land use policy recommendation to the 35 plus acres. Yeah. Was that did I do I understand that correctly that only lot sizes larger than 35 acres, if this were part of the zoning, would be allowed to have a private well?

For exterior irrigation. Yep. For exterior irrigation. Yep. That's for Alamo most

Oh, but not for indoor use.

Correct. That does not apply to indoor use. That would just be that applies specifically to external irrigation. Yeah.

Down there is unique, though, because everybody's a farmer. So 35 acres suddenly turns into a hayfield. So FYI. Mhmm.

One back. That AP2, we just went through that discussion with a land use application that was adjacent to Castle Rock. And so something along those lines, the policy that if you're near a system, you have you you shouldn't be drilling individual wells Mhmm. Because we just went through that. And I think that's something we wanna be considering as a policy. A second, I really wanna come back to this radium. I don't know how it works. If someone drills an individual well, they don't always inspect for radium. I think the county may want to have some kind of a fail safe on that. Mhmm.

So if you're out in a radium area, if you can identify where that is, that there must be additional testing before you get a building permit for your home. Otherwise, you know, you're bathing your kids in radioactive, and they're drinking radioactive water. I mean, it can't be good.

You you know, I think radium, though, is one of the tests required by the health department when you do drill a well. And I see I've had people I I know that have had them and been told you've got radium issues. So I don't know if it's consistent. But I do know people who have drilled a well and told that they had radium issues, but I don't know what happens after that. But I've just seen it.

Well, and I'm concerned someone buys a a five acre lot out there to and drills a well and then finds that he hit radium. What do you do? Yeah. You know, it seems to me we need to be notifying people if you're in a risky area before you put up a million dollar home, you better check to make sure you've got your water supply. I think that's gonna get worse anyway.

So radium's everywhere in Colorado. So you're gonna find it no matter where you are if you go deep enough. So Perry Park just in the last eighteen months drilled two wells into the Arapahoe, 1,500 some feet deep. And as so we went through the Dawson and the Denver and went down to the Arapahoe, got a great water source. But as they engineered the screen for those deep wells, they log those wells.

And so where there's hotspots in the Arapahoe, which is 300 and some feet deep down there, then they just the screen is solid in that spot. So you avoid that hot area. The hot area is in the seam. It's not in the whole aquifer usually. So if you block off that hot seam and then just have the screen in the area where it's not an issue. At least that's how it was done on the two wells we just completed. Okay.

Anybody else? I do have a couple of questions about some of the regulatory issues that you looked at since something I've been involved in in the past here.

Yeah.

So let's talk, first off, as an example of heavy water use commercial environments such as data centers and car washes, specifically. The problem is that you run into conflict of water rights. And you're gonna find water providers saying, you know, you're now holding back water that is ours, and it's not getting to the because we own all the surface water. That water would have been calculated as part of, the water flow and the surface water requirements. And now you're reusing it.

And so we had situations where a water provider in Parker, I hate to say it, unfortunately, back then, would not allow car washes to use a recycling system because it took away from their water supply and everything they needed. Now Parker right now has 29 car washes, just so you know. I didn't make a hobby of counting them. There's so damn many of them. But, anyhow, so this is one of the things where we run into a real issue.

That is a state law conflict with the local use ordinance desire, which would be to say, hey. Reuse your water. And it's also what happened when they said, let's make them install Braxton's that they can reuse water in their households. Same fight took place when you're in the part of a metro of a water provider's district. That's our water. You can't do that without our permission. Now that's where the rainwater collection saved people because that then allowed the state to provide an exemption if you got approval to use rainwater because that was not somebody else's water Right. Quote, unquote. It's kind of interesting. It may fall on your roof, but it's their water.

And so just it would be interesting to find out once we get through this and we get to the regulatory piece. Just wanna make the board aware. It's we we would love the recommendations, the means, and the technology, but then we gotta bank that against regulation. Yeah. And how do we get by that?

And I don't know, but it's gonna be a real tough one. Because to me, the real solution at the end of the day, and this goes back to Perry Park and your issues that you just talked about and all that, quite frankly, is it's gonna be small storage vessels everywhere because it's gonna be cost way too much to try to extract water once we run into a water problem. And I think that's part of what we've got to come up with is how would you create a small storage vessel arrangement, maybe even shared across the county that you could begin then to because to try to build a large reservoir, I mean, it took we're here seventeen years to get that approved. Yeah. So look at the Northern Water project, how many years that took.

So there's just not gonna happen. But if you stay under the 200 acre foot, I think it's 200 or whatever it is, there's a point where you you can keep the feds out of your world.

Okay.

And that's just a concept too. So okay. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you, Jack. That's good. Well, thanks for the questions, everybody. Appreciate it. Yeah.

Okay.

Anybody else, sir?

That was it for us.

That's it.

Thank you for your attention.

You bet. So we we now have had our which is a great job, by the way. I really thank you for this great update. And it gives us an idea where you're going and what we can foresee, what might be coming out of this, and allows us to start thinking about, I think, what we're looking for. Are there any other questions while we got them here? Anybody would like to ask any ideas? No? Well, then let's go to general discussion. We won't have any general discussions, the commission. Yes, Patricia.

To Bernhardt, did you want to discuss the email that was sent out this morning, from Karen Hickman regarding the number of wells? Did anybody want to discuss that?

Well, I think well, let's just back up just a second. Great question, by the way. So the first quest the question is, I don't everybody see the email from a sick man? Everybody see it? Okay.

So the issue becomes it looks like we may have three or four different entities counting wells, but it's who's right, who's wrong. And the other question I have on it and so I think I would like just to kick it off with I'm looking at who I pay and who I don't. But so it's like, who do we use as our source for determining that? And then the other question is, I don't know how we would go about trying to get all three of those entities to come together with closer in their own numbers because I don't know how they counted them, what the deviations that they used and the exceptions. So, Tricia, you might wanna give us a briefing on what she was explaining.

I think Karen's, concern is just that, counting, you know, the number of people that are on individual wells is an important feature of the water plan. Obviously, LRE and Forest Gren are working on different methods of counting the wells. I think there will always be inconsistency. The number of individual domestic wells is probably somewhere between 8,010. Individual wells are not having much of an impact on the Denver Basin.

Most people's wells, as we discussed, are exempt wells that probably cannot extract more than 15 gallons per minute. The pumps were set back. So the impact of those individuals on the groundwater is insignificant in my opinion. So whether it's 8,000 wells or 10,000 wells, it probably doesn't make that much difference overall on an annual basis. The bigger issue is how many people or how many households there are.

2,000 additional households is a lot of households to be concerned about that are impacted by the extraction of groundwater from the other wells from the commercial and large water districts and municipalities and the amount of water that's being withdrawn there, reducing the groundwater levels to those individuals. So you do have a high number of individuals. I think Karen's trying to show that there's a higher number than we're saying with 8,000. I do think it's very difficult to come up with the exact number.

Any comments? So to give you an example in the numbers, we had one entity saying there was 6,800 wells. We had another entity saying there was a little over 11,000. And we just saw numbers here that we've been discussing that are between that eight to 11,000 range. The real thing that I always concerned me as a commission, to be quite honest with you, was the coning effect and the effect on the, head pressures because that's when you gotta drop your well.

You may have water. It's right there, but you're only getting it out of two gallons a minute, you ain't taking a shower. And maybe you need to also because one the things I pushed for, didn't get very far on it, was maybe all of our homes should have a cistern in it, period. Because you can pump a well for twenty four hours and fill up a cistern, and guess what you got? Now you got enough water to take showers and meet all your household stuff without having to go deeper.

And so those are the kinds of things I think we need to explore and go through that entire environment. And, but what you're talking about is the conflicts between adjacent wells. And I agree, Tricia. That's gonna be a real issue, especially when it seems like typical land use goes high density, a little less, a little less, a little less, a little less. When in reality, probably, we need to start thinking about high density, low density, higher density, lower density so that you don't end up with, especially if you have water providers, with this overall conflict where we're messing with the wellhead pressures, which then force people to do the inevitable.

And it is not cheap. My sister just did one, that's why I know, happened to redrill a well. And I'll tell you, I think they're up to fifty, sixty thousand at this point. So it's I just hate to see our residents go through that.

Yes. Jim Mars, Jack, I'm not sure if there's a house size requirement, but any of the new houses that are being built, which are sprinkled, all have a cistern in them. Oh, that's that's right. But I don't know if there's a certain house size that hits that requirement or if it's just all new houses. But I know a number of newer homes that they have pretty big cisterns down in the lower level

Yeah.

To back up their your you know, their sprinkler system in their house.

Yeah. I think it varies based upon the density and how many and if you're doing, like, a development of, like, two and a half acres, like Kings I know Kings Landing down south here or Kings Court, whatever it is, they all have cisterns, and and, they have to have water suppression systems. But there are some that don't still. So but it's a good point. Thank you. Anybody else? Oh, if anything, we're all learning something. Okay. Well, I'm not seeing anything else. And with that, you have the gift of time, five minutes. So the five minutes I started late, you just got it back.