Opinion: Colorado must prioritize restoring rivers instead of unnecessarily delivering municipal water via pipelines
Despite decades of evidence, there is still a false binary choice being hoisted upon Coloradans by municipalities and water development entities — either we almost completely dewater our rivers as they flow through lower elevation communities, decimating river health, river recreation and local economic opportunities, or we provide municipal water to rapidly growing suburban cities on the Front Range. Instead, our state government should help prioritize river restoration by championing in-channel water delivery projects. Water should be left in river channels until it reaches the nearest adjacent diversion point to its delivery location. Hundreds, if not thousands of ditches, tunnels and pipelines already exist, and basin-wide assessments of these diversion points were done under the Colorado Water Plan.
—Written by Evan Stafford, communications director for American WhitewaterRelated news release and blog: