Tribal voices part of Colorado River discussion

However, the reality of the situation is a cost estimate of $1.81 million to $2.85 million to bring the building up to code. Don’t expect private interests to contribute to this cost. e whole cost would be a city expense which currently is not budgeted. at statement begs the question of what city services, programs or capital improvements

SEE CHRISTOPHER, P

Letter To The Editor

13 board.

Voices of Native Americans, long shunted to the side room, if acknowledged at all, are being heard more clearly in Colorado River discussions, as re ected in two recent water conferences in Colorado.

Cloud lauded Colorado for being ahead of many other states in including native voices. “We’re making strides,” she said but added that work remains.

BIG PIVOTS to Santa Fe in 1922 to apportion the river’s waters among the seven basin states, though the compact does acknowledge federal obligations.

Allen Best

At the rst, a drought summit held in Denver, a panel that was devoted to the worsening imbalance between water supplies and demands included Lorelei Cloud, the vice chairman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. Her presence was an overt acknowledgement by conference organizers that the Ute tribe, if a part of Colorado, is also a sovereign. at’s something new. e conference was sponsored by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s preeminent water policy agency. Cloud recently became a board member, representing southwestern Colorado. She’s the rst Ute ever on the e next week, she was on a stage in Boulder, at the Getches-Wilkinson Center’s annual conference about the Colorado River. irteen of the 30 federally recognized tribes that hold water rights in the Colorado River Basin were present. eir rights stem from a 1908 Supreme Court decision involving tribal lands in Montana. e high court agreed that when the U.S. government created reservations and expected tribes to live there, water su cient to the presumed agrarian ways was part of the deal. is decision, called the Winters Doctrine, has enormous implications for the shrinking Colorado River. Tribes collectively hold 25% to even 30% of the water rights in basin. Not all claims have been adjudicated. Most tribal rights predate others. e Southern Ute rights, for example, date to 1868.

All predate the Colorado River Compact. Tribes were not invited

LINDA SHAPLEY Publisher lshapley@coloradocommunitymedia.com

MICHAEL DE YOANNA Editor-in-Chief michael@coloradocommunitymedia.com

Now, with the Colorado River delivering an average 12.5 million acre-feet, far less than the 20-plus assumed by those who crafted the compact, with ows expected to decline further, we have hard decisions to make. Tribal voices are being integrated into the discussions. Not fast enough for some, but very di erent than just a few years ago, when the federal government merely “consulted” tribes in the 2019 drought plan. e states were fully engaged.

“We need to be at the table, not just at a side table,” said one tribal representative at the Boulder conference.

Some tribes have been amenable to leasing their rights to cities and others. But will tribes with a few thousand members exert as much in uence as California with its giant farms and its huge cities? California maintains that its senior rights be

SEE BEST, P39

Carrot or stick, just do the right thing It’s a sobering comparison. is year, Senate Bill 23-213 attempted to empower the State to hegemonize Colorado municipalities and counties by imposing zoning measures on those who, in the view of the bill’s sponsors, were ignoring the critical nature of Colorado’s housing crisis. In short, if the actions of local o cials did not e ectively address — or actually exacerbated — the una ordability of housing in their jurisdictions, then the State would do the job for them.

Voter-generated Proposition 123, on the other hand, seeks to augment the availability of a ordable housing by o ering State funds, through municipalities and counties, to developers willing to build homes that a signi cant number of people can actually a ord to buy or rent. Local authorities wishing to partake of this bounty must commit to increasing a ordable housing in their jurisdictions by 3% per year for three years.

And so we have a stick and carrot situation, in that order. Senator Moreno and his co-sponsors of SB 23-213 could see that enough local authorities in the state were follow-

SEE LETTER, P13 ing would housing—or an But authorities—including City to tives. daily’, elected having in have do you must sential may of in

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