Speaker: Matt Bliss, PE, president,  DiNatale Water Consultants, Boulder CO;  CUBoulder Civil Engineering MS.in Water Resources 2005.

Title: The Colorado River “Law of the River” and the Grand Junction Gunnison Reservoir Project'

Abstract: The Colorado River has made a lot of headlines lately, with water levels falling in the nation’s largest reservoirs Lake Mead and Lake Powell to levels that have required significant cuts in water use and put hydropower production in jeopardy. The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million people, including residents of seven western states and many Native American tribes as well as Mexico. The flow the river is allocated and governed by a series of compacts, agreements, laws and regulations, beginning with the Colorado River Compact of 1922. This Compact allocated water between the Upper Basin (headwaters states of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) and the Lower Basin (Arizona, Nevada,and California).

The city of Grand Junction in western Colorado owns water rights that draw from a headwaters stream on the Grand Mesa on a tributary to the Gunnison River, which in turn is tributary to the Colorado River. The City’s rights are located upstream of a large senior water right on the Gunnison River and some of its rights are also junior to the Colorado River Compact. If there is insufficient water, the downstream senior Gunnison River right or the Compact could curtail the City’s use of the junior high quality headwaters water rights. The City is investigating the feasibility of developing two storage facilities on the Gunnison River by reclaiming existing gravel mining pits. Storage at these reservoirs would be used to deliver water to downstream water rights and allow the City’s continued use of its headwaters junior rights. In addition, the storage facilities can be used to meet Grand Junction’s future demands and as an emergency supply. Plans are underway to incorporate this infrastructure into a regional supply system for a neighboring water district, an irrigation district, and to provide environmental flow benefits to the Colorado Endangered Fish Recovery Program when the infrastructure is not needed by the City. DiNatale Water Consultants is providing the technical water resources engineering for Grand Junction for this project under a grant from the Colorado Water Plan. Preliminary design of pump stations and water treatment design is being provided by Burns and McDonnell.