Session 1: Cities, Suburbs and Mountain Towns brought together water leaders from three points on the Colorado River system to explore the range of innovations changing the calculus for water in our communities. From wastewater reuse and local policy to pricing and targeted social marketing, we examined what it actually takes to shift how an entire community relates to water.

Liquid Courage: Water Solutions for a Drier West

Cities, Suburbs and Mountain Towns

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: My name is Kristan Uhlenbrock. I am the Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy. We are a part of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. We have been around since 2018, and we like to take on the really hard problems that are happening here in the state. We do not shy away from talking about the politics, the values, and all the nuances of what it means to work in climate, energy, water, natural resources, public health, AI, technology - all these “really simple” problems that we have. We ground the work we do in science and evidence because we believe that is how we make better decisions as a society. But it also involves people, and it involves hard conversations about what we should be doing or what we could be doing and what people's different values are.

So that's a little bit about the Institute and why we exist here at this wonderful institution that's been around for 125 years. We have the ability to bring people together in a room like this. I look around, and I see people of different ages and different backgrounds. Some of you work in the water space; for some of you, water is maybe tangentially related to your jobs; for some of you, water is just of interest because it's the thing that provides us with life. I love that we can bring folks together. Hopefully, you'll get a chance to talk to someone new today.

I would love to do a couple of quick thank yous before I introduce our topic and our speakers take it over today. There are so many people who work with us behind the scenes who make this possible. A huge thanks to my Institute colleagues, our amazing AV team, the catering team who somehow keeps all that water full out there, our security, and everyone who makes these events possible. Thank you, everyone. I also want to thank another important person who you're going to hear from today. Our partner in this two-part series is Allen Best with Big Pivots. I'll get a chance here to introduce Allen in just a minute, but we're really grateful for Big Pivots working with us to put this two-part series together.

This series is called Liquid Courage. Obviously, we are not passing around shots for you all this morning; it’s a little bit too early for that! But we came up with this title because we know how dire water is and how threatening it can be, and how serious, and how at times it feels like there are no solutions. And we know that there's a lot of conflict when we talk about water. We are in a water crisis. We can see this with the grass browning at our neighbors', and hopefully they are doing a good job and not watering their lawns or are getting rid of their grass. We can see this when we drive by those low reservoir water levels or the creek that has barely a running stream in it that should be flowing at a much faster pace than it is. We can see this in the smoky air outside. These are being exacerbated because of the aridification and the drought that's happening because of our warming climate. It is really important to think about the interconnection of all of our systems when we think about how we manage water here.

We did a survey recently, and we heard from the majority of people who are connected with us that this issue of water is one of the most critical ones that they think we should be talking about. We heard this from policymakers and decision-makers. We've heard this from our supporters and friends, and we've heard it from many others, so that's why we're hosting this.

A few years ago, we hosted a deeper dialogue convening series, where we brought together fifteen or twenty diverse thought leaders across the water space. A couple of them are in this room right now. We asked them to try to envision what 2050 would look like if we didn't have any sort of “water wars” - how you were managing a system where you had aridification, you had a changing climate, you had this population demand across the West. And what's really interesting about that convening is, while we didn't come up with any brilliant solutions because of how complicated this work is, what this group came out with was a guide called Roadmap to Better Decisions. Sometimes it's really important to think about the processes of how we make decisions if we're actually going to make change and come up with some really good, courageous ideas to help solve some of this.

The other thing to note is that we are making progress in water. I think most of us will read the media and we know how dire the situation is, but we have actually been making progress. There are really smart solutions and ideas out there, particularly across the West, but also across the U.S. and internationally. And our folks, both in this panel and in our next panel, are going to be sharing what they think are some really bright, hopeful solutions, ideas that work, between how do we think about policy and how do we think about community engagement, and how do we think about technology and all the things that come together to make some of this possible. So, I am really excited to introduce the first part, which is going to focus on our urban, suburban, and mountain communities as it relates to water. Part two, which you'll hear about a little bit later today, is going to focus more on solutions related to agriculture, which we know here in Colorado is a significant source of our water use here in the state.

With that, I would love to introduce our host and guide for both of these sessions, Allen Best. Allen has been a journalist in Colorado since 1970. Since 2020, he's been producing an e-journal called Big Pivots. I encourage you, if you have not subscribed to this and don't read Big Pivots - and I know there are probably some people in this room who do - subscribe. It is really great. He chronicles the energy and water transitions largely across the state of Colorado, and he's won multiple awards, including a recent award for his series in 2024 about water and urban landscapes in Colorado.

When I came across Big Pivots a number of years ago - I actually didn't realize it was started in 2020, because I think I came across it around that time - it was what I needed as an antidote to some of the other things that I read, because he goes deeper, and he really talks in a much deeper way about some of these really hard, sticky things we're talking about in a really accessible way. It's great to read our news and our media and get a snapshot of what's happening, and then I turn to Big Pivots to go a little bit deeper, and I'm never disappointed in the writing that you do, Allen. With that, I'm going to turn this over to Allen, and he's going to introduce our panel. Thank you all so much for being here today. I am thrilled for the brilliance that we're going to be hearing from and excited to have you all join us, so thank you.

Session Introduction: Urban, Suburban, and Mountain Towns

ALLEN BEST: Thank you, Kristan, and thank you to the Institute for the invitation to be part of this critical conversation. Empty spaces define the American West, but in fact, nearly 90% of us Westerners live in cities, suburbs, and towns. In those places, amid the mountains and the plains and the deserts, must come the creative solutions in response to the water scarcity. This morning we will hear from water leaders from three very different places. What they all have in common is they are struggling with this issue that we're all aware of in front of us every day: water scarcity.

On the Western Slope, the Eagle River originates in the Gore Range. It flows past Vail and Beaver Creek and joins the Colorado River near Glenwood Canyon. Denver and the suburbs with which it shares water get 50% of their water from the Western Slope, from Grand and Summit Counties, and the balance of it comes from here in the South Platte River Basin. As for Las Vegas, it lies in the Mojave Desert, a place that gets just a little over four inches of rain per year, and Vegas also gets about 90% of its water from the Colorado River.

I know these places in various ways. When I was young, and I was playing with the prejudice of where I was living, on the Western Slope and in little towns, I had a bumper sticker on my car. It said, "Damn the Denver Water Board." Now, for the last 28 years, I've been living in Arvada, where I get my water from the Denver Water Board. As for Las Vegas, during a trip there one December for the annual Colorado River Conference, I rented a car for one simple purpose: I wanted to see how water is used in residential areas, in the yards, in the long roads, and so forth.

If these places are very different, they all have this urgency associated with water. Today, we plan to explore elements of that urgency. First, though, it's important to recognize that there have been successes. These towns have done a lot, these cities, the jurisdictions that are represented on the stage here today, they've all done quite a lot of work. But how did that happen? How do we change attitudes? Culture change is a very interesting topic, and we'll dive into that somewhat today.

We also want to talk about conservation and its limits. There's a saying that you often hear when you go to conferences: "You can't conserve what you don't have." So, the question here is, does conservation look differently in different places? And finally, these people on stage with me, I don't think they think about water all the time, but they think about it an awful lot of the time. So the question here is, what keeps them awake at night? And the flip side of that, what excites them?

The three people here on stage with me have all had distinguished careers, and they come from very different places. They all are on the Western landscape that is warming and drying. Pat Mulroy comes to us from Las Vegas. There, she became CEO of the Las Vegas Valley Water District in 1985, and then added on similar duties in 1991 with the Southern Nevada Water Authority. It's a large organization. She held those titles until 2014. She has not sat idle since then. She was a senior fellow for the Brookings Institution. She also created Sustainable Strategies, a consulting firm that negotiates water agreements and assists in facilities planning. The company has a couple offices, including one about three miles west of here. Over the years, I've heard Pat speak maybe 10 or 12 times, mostly in Las Vegas, but also Phoenix, Boulder, Denver, and Vail. She is legendary. I just had somebody from the water community in Colorado here a few months ago tell me a story about Pat: "I had to follow Pat on stage. I had to up my game." She speaks very well extemporaneously for 45 minutes in clear, coherent sentences that add up to paragraphs. I wish she had been my speech instructor in college!

On my left is Alan Salazar, who is the CEO and manager of Denver Water, a role he assumed in 2023 following decades of experience in public policy. He's held senior leadership roles with former Governor John Hickenlooper, former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, former Senator Mark Udall, plus a couple of other US senators. That's all very impressive, but let me tell you what impresses me most about Alan Salazar. Here in Denver, we pride ourselves on being the Mile High City, right? Well, Alan started life twice as high. He was born in Leadville, elevation 10,200 feet. Some might say that life would be all downhill from there, but you look at his resume, and he's done pretty well.

Our third panelist, Siri Roman, is the CEO of Eagle River Water and Sanitation District. She arrived at that position as a licensed professional engineer and has more than 20 years of experience in the water and wastewater field. I've been to Siri's office in Vail because I used to have an office down the street when I was in the newspaper world – this was long before she got there, by the way – and it sits right on Gore Creek, and Gore Creek can be absolutely wonderful. I also have to say that since I left Vail in the '90s, it's a different kind of world. And what really pops out at me is that the challenges Vail and the Vail Valley are facing are very similar to the challenges of the other panelists.

So let's get to the questions. Just yesterday on a Facebook post, somebody used the word “dismal” to describe our last winter. We had flows in the rivers - the Rio Grande, the South Platte, the Arkansas, and of course, the Colorado - that are at the lowest ever or near the lowest ever. By March, we had peak flow, right? That usually happens in late May or early June. It's been coming up a couple weeks over the decades, but this year it was in late March in a lot of places - if you could even tell, it was so minor. Then we had Denver Water and others announcing restrictions in March. And so, the question is, as we look into this very dry and hot summer, in just a few sentences, what does this summer look like? What does it feel like from where you sit now? Is it any different from what we've been through before? Who wants to take this?

PAT MULROY: I'll go ahead. First of all, thank you for inviting me. I always love coming to Denver, especially now that I'm a recovering CEO and no longer come to Denver as the protagonist from the evil Lower Basin. So it makes life a whole lot easier coming up here!

This summer is different only because the cumulative effect of all the summers that went before has come home to roost. All the cushion we had is gone. It's one thing to have 2002 when you had a bad winter, and Lake Powell started going down rapidly, but Lake Mead still had over 1,200 feet in it. We're now seeing the very real possibility that Lake Mead is going to go to 900 feet by next year, which means we're 10 feet above dead pool.

Thank God Metropolitan has just put a tremendous amount of water back into Lake Mead. They sold water to the federal government; they're replenishing Lake Mead. But that's what the problem is. It's never-ending, and the rate of change is so much faster than any of us expected. We know climate change is real. We know we're living it, but no one expected it to move this quickly.

SIRI ROMAN: From my seat, I think that 2002 changed water in Colorado, and 2026 is going to change it completely again. A lot of our planning and assumptions are being challenged this year. For us, it was 80 degrees for two weeks in March. We had a terrible snow year.

PAT: 80 degrees? I'm so sorry. [laughter]

SIRI: It's cool for you! But watching our very little snowpack, the lowest snowpack we had on record, nearly melt out in March was quite alarming to us. And then for us, we use our reservoirs, Eagle River Water and Sand. They're small, but they're mighty. But they weren't able to fill because the stream flows were so low. So all the planning that we did got challenged this year because the reservoirs couldn't fill the way we had assumed that they would. So for me, we're taking note this year and going to reset and be like, "Okay, what does the planning look for the next horizon?" There are a lot of things that I think we relied on that we're not going to be able to rely on moving forward. And so how do we get creative looking at demand, and looking at other solutions on how we can prepare to handle a drier year? The other thing I would just say is statistically, they always say you won't get two years like this in a row. I don't think we can say that anymore. We can't really rely on the statistics because we're just seeing such abnormal patterns.

ALAN SALAZAR: Allen, thanks for the introduction. We have Alan and Allen up here, so we'll have to keep track of who's who! As Allen mentioned, I come at this job not from years of experience as a water lawyer or as a water engineer. I've been familiar with natural resources issues from law school days, and that was what I started to do in government. But I'm basically a government guy with local, federal, and state political and government experience. And so with that as truth in advertising, I think this particular challenge is, as Pat mentioned,  an accumulation. Not an accumulation of neglect because I think we've done some good things. Just for context, Denver Water is responsible for delivering water to about 25% of the state's population. We use 2% of the state's water, and that has been pretty steady going back through the 1970s. That didn't happen by accident. It's because we took measures. My predecessor and Denver Water employees over the last 20 years have taken steps to use water more efficiently and with conservation in mind.

But my former boss - you mentioned Mark Udall. I spent 11 years with Mark, and he was an advocate of protecting natural resources, an early advocate of public awareness around climate change. And he had a saying. He said, "Alan, no matter how many laws we pass, no matter how many regulations we implement, Mother Nature bats last." And boy, is she batting. It's our responsibility now, when we are up to bat, to deal with that reality, and it's going to take innovation.

I totally agree that we're at a pivot point now that's different from 2002. It's more extreme. We had a heat dome that made the spring more difficult, and it's partly why our response from our customers has been a little lagged.  Because even though they're on water restrictions, the heat dome that we've experienced and the extremes in temperatures have put greater pressure on water use. So it feels quite a bit different. Maybe I lost a lot of oxygen when I was a baby in Leadville that caused me to go into the work that I'm in, but you want to be involved in work that's important and at a critical time. I'm not by nature an optimistic person, but I am a hopeful one, and I think we'll be able to navigate through this. But I'm concerned that it's not going to be a one-year deal. It may be a several-year deal.

Las Vegas’ Water Usage & Its Influence

ALLEN: Thank you, Alan. I have to add something in this vein. We had news last week from Anne Castle, who will be a panelist at the next session in August. And her group - we call them the Traveling Wilburys - reported that the combined storage of Lake Mead and Lake Powell had reached the lowest level since 1957, before there was a Lake Powell.

We do need to recognize successes, and there have been a lot. When thinking of Las Vegas, it's easy enough to think of the Bellagio, of the fountains there, of the Wynn Golf Club, or the desert heat. It's perhaps surprising to learn the success story the Southern Nevada Water Authority has had over the last 25 or 26 years. It's added a million people. It's now close to 2.5 million in population in Clark County. But the water use has not kept pace. In fact, water use per capita has declined by well more than half. Pat, what do we need to understand about the Las Vegas story?

PAT: To understand the Las Vegas story, you really need to understand what the Southern Nevada Water Authority represents and how the Southern Nevada Water Authority was created, and some of the things we did in creating the Water Authority, because it was foundational to give us the ability to have the success around conservation that we did.

When we created the Southern Nevada Water Authority, we did it through a joint powers agreement, which under Nevada law, any two governments can come together and form a third government, bestowing upon it any and all powers that they themselves have. So, the Water Authority has all the powers of the water district, the cities, and Clark County.

In doing so, foundationally, we threw away our priority water rights. We said they make absolutely no sense between cities. The notion that the city of Las Vegas could have water running down the streets while Henderson and North Las Vegas have nothing is preposterous. Because when you think about it, when does it matter that you have a priority water right? It matters during shortages. If you replace the notion of shortages and making your neighbor suffer more than yourself with the notion that we're going to share the burden together, and we're going to conserve, have a joint conservation plan that overlays the entire area, and everyone's going to live by the same conservation measures, you achieve the same thing without the acrimony and without the hostility that always comes along when you have priority water rights.

When we did that, it set the foundation for us when we needed it in 2002. Now, conservation is a journey, and we had started the journey very gently because, like you said, changing cultures is not easy. And in Las Vegas, the notion of drought-tolerant landscaping was rocks, a cactus, and a dead cow skull. That's what everyone thought that meant. When in 2002, we had that massive drought start to hit, and we knew that Lake Mead was going to start going down, and we knew that our water resources were shrinking, the first line of attack was conservation.

So the entire valley got together, and we agreed on certain measures, predominantly to take grass out. The reason for that is that the only water we lose is the water we use outside. We recycle 93% of all our wastewater. If it hits the sewer system, it either gets treated and returned to Lake Mead as a return flow credit, which we can take back, or it goes to a direct reuse facility, and that water gets delivered to golf courses, because you can't use potable water on golf courses. That was number one.

Number two was watering restrictions. You don't have to water your grass in the winter as much as you do in the summer, and no one knew that for some strange reason. In the winter, you can only water one day a week. In the fall and in the spring, three days a week. And in the summer, you can water six days a week, not seven, but not between 11 AM and 7 PM, when all it does is evaporate.

We tried some measures that failed. I never understood the emotional attachment that Southern Nevadans had to fountains. I tried desperately to get rid of fountains, only to be flogged summarily. So we backed off of that and said, "You can keep your fountain if you'll remove enough grass to equal 50 times the amount of water that that fountain uses annually." It achieved the same thing. I achieved more than that, and they kept their fountain, and I kept my life.

The other thing that's very dangerous is to get between a senior citizen and his car washing schedule. The pitchforks come out. So they don't want to take it to a car wash. Don't ask me why they don't like taking it to a car wash. My 80-year-old husband doesn't want to take his car to a car wash. It was impossible, so I said, "As long as you use a shut-off valve on your hose, fine, wash your car."

All that said and done, people began to get it, and I was shocked at the response we got from the community. The community wanted to participate. They wanted to help. Their biggest question to me everywhere I went was, "What can I do to help? What can I do?" Because we see it. Lake Mead is our backyard. We go out to the lake all the time. We boat on the lake. We swim in the lake. We can see that bathtub ring. To us, it's not hundreds of miles away like it is in Los Angeles. It makes a difference.

Grass started coming out left and right. It wasn't mandatory. You didn't have to do it. We paid you, at first, $1 per square foot. As it got worse, we've raised it. It's over $2 a square foot now. And for many people, that's the financial difference between being able to take the grass out and redoing their landscaping and not being able to do it. Water rates changed, and now there were rewards for conserving water in your water rate, and if you used more than you should, you started paying for it a little bit more.

All said and done, it was a huge success story, and it's been a journey that has now reached a point where I think we're going to be the example of what the limits of urban conservation are. My successor has had to make some really drastic changes to the conservation program in response to the ever-increasing drought. He had the legislature give them the authority to designate what is non-functional turf and mandate that it be taken out. He's in court. The reason for that is this non-functional turf. I always thought it was the grass in medians or in streetscapes, but the way they defined it, it also includes some community areas where you have old-growth trees. You stop watering the grass, the trees die. Those people have taken the Water Authority to court now. My guess, unfortunately, is they're going to lose that suit because I think they went a little bit too far.

They also tried to force anybody who's on a septic system to hook up to municipal sewers so that we could get the return flow credits. The pitchforks came out. Those people had no intention of letting go of their septic systems, to where the health district and the elected officials have said, "Nope, we can't do that."

And lastly, they have banned evaporative coolers. All cooling has to be dry-cooled. Now, here's the problem. It has never been done in an arid climate like Las Vegas. Yes, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and all those other countries use air-cooled, but the humidity is enormous. There's no humidity in southern Nevada. Those air-cooled systems release 180 degrees of heat 24 hours a day. Talk about creating a heat island. So there's a big discussion going on right now: let's just think about using the hybrids, which would use air-cooled during the cooler seasons and allow you to use evaporative cooling during the hotter seasons. The debate is going on. My guess is there will be some modifications made.

Las Vegas is now becoming the place where water and power are colliding, and that whole notion that in order to generate power, you have to have water, and in order to have water, you have to have power. So where's that new fulcrum? Where's that new balance point? Where's that new tipping point? That's where we're at in our journey, and we're going to probably be the poster child for the limits of urban conservation

ALLEN: Thank you, Pat. Very briefly, you've been a trendsetter. You've influenced other places. How strong has that influence been at this point, in Arizona and elsewhere?

PAT: I think the influence has been pretty significant. People have recognized that outside use of water has to be done very judiciously. And in California, they're actually taking grass out, which I never thought was going to happen. And they're taking it out in the Phoenix area. Tucson really was the first city that went out and started ripping up their landscaping. They were really the model for everybody else.

Water Use in Denver & Trade-Offs

ALLEN: Alan, I'll take us back to 2002. I remember that summer, it was smoky like this year. We had the Hayman Fire, 130,000 acres, as well as the Coal Seam and other fires. And sometime in June or July, there was a dedication of a statue. You can almost see the statue from here; it's the Martin Luther King statue. Well, I didn't go to the ceremony, but I did go later to see what it looked like. City Park has quite a lot of brown. There's a lot of brown grass, but right around the statue it was green. Well, I had to figure out what was going on. I got down… the grass had been painted.

PAT: Steve Wynn (owner of Wynn Las Vegas resort and casino) did that to the palm trees when we had a cold winter, and all the palms died. He went out and had them all spray painted!

ALLEN: Well, the takeaway from that summer was that the next winter was going to be bad too. We didn't get much snow in early 2003 until St. Patrick's Day, and then it snowed hard. Three feet in Denver and seven feet in the foothills. Of course, the crisis is over. But here's what was interesting about all that: water use by Denver Water's customers did not bounce back up to where it had been before the drought. It stayed suppressed. And so the question is, why? Was it pricing? Technology? Messaging? Regulations? And have we had a very fundamental shift in culture?

ALAN: I think the short answer is all of those things played a role. That's the easy answer, but it's also the true answer. And to Pat's point, we know how to use technology. We can adjust rates for drought pricing. We can encourage conservation and efficient use. We can protect indoor use. We know how to do many of these things. The culture part and the public reaction are the parts that we want to stay humble about. Mandates work in a crisis because people understand the crisis. They will remember what it meant to have the drought pricing and to go through the drought. So what we have is what you referred to as the next year: even though there's snow, people are still a little concerned about use. That's called the drought shadow.

The unhappy consequence of a drought shadow for an organization like ours is that’s revenue that helps to maintain the organization. We have 3,000 miles of pipe through our system. Something breaks every day. You have an obligation not only to worry about the environment and conservation use, but the infrastructure that people rely on, and that means investing in that infrastructure. So, I worry a lot about that drought shadow hitting our revenue because we have responsibilities to take care of the system.

It gets back to managing the cultural expectation of people. Folks don't want to think about their water use. They turn on the tap, they expect it to be there, and nobody in the water utility world that I know likes to be in a headline at all. We really appreciate being taken for granted. But I think that is changing, and I'm hoping that it will change in a positive direction, that we'll have the opportunity to take a drought like the one we're experiencing now, and use it to educate people. To Pat's point, people do want to contribute. They want to be part of the solution. And you've got to figure out ways to let that happen, but also to know what the limits of your authority are.

And you need to work in collaborative ways in public messaging. I’m very proud of Denver Water employees who on their own, not paid to do this, created a viral video two years ago based on a Backstreet Boys song. You may have seen it, and it went viral across the country. People were really pleased with it. It was about $3 million worth of free media because people were into it. They appreciated it. The employees were enthused about it. It was catchy. It wasn't beating somebody over the head. So in addition to being a water utility, I think we have to also start to think about our responsibilities to be good public communicators and educators, and it's that psychological, cultural piece that I think is maybe our saving grace.

ALLEN: Alan, this year, Denver Water, for the first time in 20 years, implemented drought pricing, charging more per gallon above essential indoor use. The goal was to reduce water use by 20%. Yesterday, the Colorado Sun reported that water use is down only 2%. Three questions: Are we right to be shocked at only 2% reduction when the goal was 20%? Second, how much of a pinch does this put you in? And third, what comes next?

ALAN: Well, I'd rather talk about the 2% that we use and the 25% of the population we serve. But I think we were disappointed by that 2% reduction. I also think that it's the beginning of the process, and I think that number will improve. Our reservoir levels actually are better today than they were in the drought in 2002, so we've learned a lot about how to manage these circumstances.

I was talking to my counterpart in Aurora, Marshall Brown, last week about one advantage they have. I said, "You guys are doing a really good job of enforcing the drought restrictions.” Aurora, some years ago, invested in advanced metering infrastructure, which basically means you've got a technology-based solution in your meter. Instead of having meter readers come out and test, there's the ability to immediately know what everybody's using. Some infrastructure that I think we ought to consider. The issue for us is when you make that investment and what are the trade-offs for that investment.

We made infrastructure decisions some years ago, or my predecessor did, I think wisely, to do three things: first, invest in expanding capacity. If you know about the Gross Reservoir expansion in Boulder County, you know that's what that's about. Second, to invest in the next generation of water treatment facilities, and we have a state-of-the-art water treatment facility that was just completed two years ago. And the third was maybe against self-interest and against what every lawyer would've said at the time, to replace the lead service lines in people's homes. Now, people are responsible for their own service lines, so Denver Water could have taken the approach, "Hey, you're on the hook for replacing your service line." And there are technologies and chemical ways of addressing the lead service issue. But Denver Water made a decision to invest in the replacement of those service lines. Now, in retrospect, maybe we should have thought about AMI, advanced metering infrastructure. You have these trade-offs.

I talked about the infrastructure challenge of our pipes. The industry standard, what you want to get to in terms of replacement of your infrastructure, is to have at least 1% of your infrastructure get ahead of the replacement so you don't have breaks. We've gone from 0.3% about 20 years ago to 0.7% today. I need to get it up to 1%. But again, it's an infrastructure investment decision. What do you defer? What do you wait to pay for? What do you take on? So I think my answer to the question is we'd like to see that number get higher than 20% reduction. I think we'll get there. I think the public is understanding the gravity of this circumstance. And the enforcement of it really is on us. People think that the City of Denver, the police department, enforces water restrictions. They don't do that. So, we're really trying to do this in a way that is getting back to the culture.

Water Usage in Vail & Cultural Practices

ALLEN: Siri, when I was in Vail - forever ago - we had some big newspaper issues at Christmastime. One year I remember I said, "We're bigger than the Rocky Mountain News," if any of you remember that newspaper. We had run well more than 100 pages on one issue. First week of May, it was a completely different story. You could have homeless people on Bridge Street, and they would be undisturbed. I think things have changed somewhat, but you still have that population swing, and I don't think Denver has that same sort of swing at all. I believe that one of the statistics that has come up is that there's a swing of 700% in usage between peak times and non-peak times.

In addition, part of that bigger story is that you also have a lot of affluence, and the affluence plays out in different ways. You have people there just a few weeks a year or a few days perhaps. You have people that don't actually turn on their own water faucets. You have property managers. You also have the sort of wealth for which money is no problem. The Vail Daily recently had a story about one house using as much as a hotel. Just one house. So that obviously presents some challenges of management. How do you deal with that? What kind of context do you have, what has been successful, and what are you thinking about going forward?

SIRI: I think one area we're very lucky, and Pat mentioned this with the residents of Las Vegas being so connected to Lake Mead, is that you come up to Vail because you're going to recreate on water in one form or another. That's why people come, whether it's the rivers or the skiing, Nordic skiing, hiking. So, that's what we had with us: people actually were very much paying attention that it was a terrible snow year. This year, we knew very early that we were going to have a really hard year. So in January, we were already talking internally that there weren't going to be enough snowstorms that could get us out of this. In February, we started to reach out to our towns and all of our partners, our metro districts. March we really went into communities... I've done dozens of presentations.

I think the beauty of our community is that the way we've found success is really from the inside out. So going to the metro districts early, going to the towns. The town of Vail had already bought all their annuals, and we said, "You can't plant them. This isn't the year." And they've responded amazingly. Really what I've seen as a success is that everyone understands the “why” and that we're in this together, and the only way we're going to be successful is if we all do our part. And that's the hope I have, is that people got it. They understood that we're at the headwaters, that we didn't get the snow, we don't have the water. And I would say out of hundreds of conversations, maybe one or two were resistant.

Our water reduction is 24% down. And if you drive up to Vail, you see it. Everything is beige. You get off at the Vail roundabouts; there are no flowers, there's signage to let our visitors know this is to protect Gore Creek and to protect Eagle River. We don't want the water on your lawns. We want it in our streams. We want it for the aquatic health. So Beaver Creek, town of Vail, town of Avon, Single Tree, Cordillera, you name it, all of them are down with their outdoor watering, and everything looks beige. It looks terrible, but that's pride to us. And so, it's not green, it's brown. Everywhere is brown. But the beauty is the change that we're trying to make because we're not going to get out of this next year. Don't change your turf this year because that's going to take more water. Let it go dormant. But really embrace what the native landscaping looks like. So for us, what is it?

PAT: Rock, a cow skull, and a cactus.

SIRI: I knew she was going to say that! That's not what we're saying. It's not going to look like Arizona, but it can be beautiful with lupines and columbines, and our state flowers, and natural grasses, and all you have to do is go hike a little bit up the hillside and make your lawn look like that. And protect your trees. Please, it's so hot. That's where we want the water to go, is to the trees, to the rivers. And then for us, a lot of our success too was working directly with the town of Vail. Ford Park is quite a gem, and they said, "We need to water it a little bit more than you're asking." And we said, "Okay, you can water a little bit more, but what are you going to cut back in other locations?" Because functional turf, if kids are playing soccer, we want to see that. You know, lacrosse, soccer, we want to see the water where it should be, but not in our lawns. I am so moved by our community and the reduction that we've done. Every single community has had meaningful reductions.

We have worked really closely with what we call our excessive users. Let me ask one question. How many people know how much water they use a month? For us, it's if you use over 30,000 gallons three months or more a year. We've started this since 2023, reaching out to them. And to Allen's point, it's been, "Come with us. What's your why?” My director of finance, his why, he's like, "I'll find their number." But money doesn't mean a lot for this demographic. They don't see the bills. So for me, the why is Gore Creek. I live near Gore Creek. I cold plunge every day. Now it's a warm plunge, unfortunately, because it's so low and warm. But for us, we've really been methodical about working with our community. What's your why? How can we support you? Come with us. How can we make this a positive thing to make the change to really care for the valley that we all love? But let's not make it look like where we come from. Let's make it look like Vail.

So water use is down 24%, outdoor irrigation is down 41%. We are at a two-day-a-week water reduction. This is one thing that I think there's some pressure. Why don't you go to one day a week? And I said, "We're not." We couldn't ask our community to do better. They're doing fantastic, but follow the data. Don't go by just one day a week. I know that if we were to go to one day a week, it would be less efficient. People would increase their run times. Operationally, we're risk managers. We have operations. We have over 47 tanks, and to run those two days a week for watering, because you're either an odd day or an even day, is challenging for operations. But I was like, "We're going to hold." We need our community to hold, and if they continue to do this great job, which if you go up, you'll see it, it's beige. Then we're going to keep it two days a week watering. So I really hope that the state, instead of just saying, "How many days are you watering?," they're talking about the data. "What's your reduction?" - that's what we want to see.

We are on advanced meter technology, and I think that's really important because our customers can have almost direct time data; they can get online and see what their use is. And then there are algorithms that can project your use for the month, because we do have pricing signals. If you use more than 18,000 gallons per month, your water is going to be more expensive. We have a lot of people that are getting on there very frequently because they want to stay in tier one or they want to stay in tier two. And I think giving our community access to the data so they can make their decisions is very important.

The last thing - landscapers and property managers have been our greatest advocates. Because some of these homeowners are only there for a couple weeks a year, the people that are doing the work are the landscapers, the property managers. They're telling their customers, "We're in a drought. You can't do this. We have to keep you using this much water. We're going to turn off this zone," and changing the expectations. I had one landscaper stop me and say, "Siri, I have to fire a client. They're not getting it." Really, it's that passion to the watershed and the community, and it's really holistic, and it's coming from the people.

ALLEN: Siri, you go to the Colorado River Basin Roundtable occasionally and the other conversations on the Western Slope. The question here has to do with permanent drought restrictions. Now, we talked earlier about how Denver's water use did not bounce back because the culture had changed. But is this an opportunity? Is this something that maybe what you're doing this year in the Eagle River Valley that you might want to tighten up, continue, or do you think others should be doing that too?

SIRI: We've seen our greatest users, tier five, that's gone down 77%, so very few people are getting into tier five. When we get to the end of the year, we need to really look at the data and look at our excessive users, and reach out directly to the people that are using excessively to try to see how we can collaborate and do this together. I do think there's going to be some – I’m afraid of overuse of the word, but – aridification of the West. Times are changing. It's not a drought, and we're going to get out of it. It's a new way of living. So really, I don't see permanent drought pricing, but our tiers are always evolving. Tier five, 1,000 gallons, is over $35. It's very expensive as you use more water. We'll continue dialing in the numbers based off of the use, based off of the patterns, and really with a legal rational nexus, which we have that obligation to our community. So, I want to continue to ask people to come with us and do it in a positive framework because we're seeing positive change. Of course, there's going to be a few bad actors, but how much time do we want to spend with those versus working with the willing? So, I think that we'll evaluate after this season; it’s going to give us a lot of information.

Behavior Change Around Water

ALLEN: We've been talking much of this morning actually about behavior change, and I'd like to dive down a little bit deeper on the marketing aspect of that. Denver Water has been recognized across the country for its social media campaigns. One of them has been “use what you need.” Yet this year, Denver has turned to mandatory restrictions and drought pricing. This raises the question we've been talking about - how far can voluntary appeals take us? Where is that fine line between inviting people to do the right thing and requiring it? And when exactly do you know when the time is to cross that line?

ALAN: It's a great question, Allen. There's no metric around it. It's understanding where people are, what their capacity is, what the economic challenges are in a community. I would be concerned about permanent drought pricing and restrictions to jump ahead of where people are. There are economic consequences. People do worry about the value of their property. So you want to try and create programs that not only educate the public – I think Denver Water's led in that space – but also support legislation like the state passed a couple of years ago around non-functional turf. We've led that effort, collaborating with municipalities all along the Colorado River in a memorandum of understanding, to reduce non-functional turf in our urban environments. I see Happy Haynes, former parks director in the Hancock administration, leading the effort to make the city more aware of climate strategies, not only just in water, but also in energy. Providing free seed for folks who want to do their own landscape changes, garden in a box - we do that kind of program. Expanding the opportunity for people who are in a low-income circumstance that won't have the ability to do that without some help. Preserving affordability programs around essential use. Getting people to understand that this will be a trajectory that will take some time, and to do it in a way that is consistent with the environment that we live in.

We started a program, with Mayor Johnston a few weeks ago, ripping up the turf around City Hall and replacing it with what we call Colorado-scaping. It's a small thing, but it's also a demonstration that it works. Working with Riverside Cemetery, which is one of the oldest cemeteries in the state of Colorado… it fell on hard times because it did not have water use. And if you've been to the cemetery, you know it's a historic place. We're working with the cemetery to have a landscaping project to beautify that cemetery, but in a way that is water-wise. So I think it's a number of steps.

When do you know whether or not to “exercise the hammer” is what you're asking. When does the mandate happen? When does the alarm bell go off? I think we're in that space right now where we have to understand that we've got to think about there is no exit ramp on this. We're going to have to change the way we look at the use of water and energy. Now you throw data centers on top of that and the changes with AI… there are a lot of things happening in the economy that are going to be additional challenges.

But the other point I would make is to try and do this work without pointing fingers. As I said, we use 2% of the state's water, and we provide water for 25% of the state. The big grass problem on the Front Range is what we've been talking about, but we also have a grass problem in agriculture: pasture, alfalfa, growing crops that probably don't make sense for this part of the world. And I don't say that with a finger pointing to ag, because I think it's very difficult to make a living as a farmer or rancher, and I have members of my own family who have made their living that way. It's not to point a finger at the 80%, but to say, how do we collaborate in a way that we're all using this resource more efficiently while also maintaining the standard and the quality of life and the economy that we want to see? We have to have a conversation that is about the whole of our communities and not just one.

ALLEN: Agriculture is a fascinating topic, and we will be talking about it in depth a month from now. I would love to follow up on that, but let's give Pat an opportunity. You talked a lot in the Las Vegas story about the many tools you used. Are there more tools that you would want to talk about that are instructive in this conversation?

PAT: First, I’ve got to say a couple things. I'm sitting here ready to explode. What do you think a large water bill is in the Denver area, Alan? Cost-wise, what's a large water bill?

ALAN: In Denver or the service area? The city of Denver is different than our service area.

PAT: Your service area.

ALAN: $150.

PAT: Okay. I don't have a blade of grass at my house, not a blade. I have all drought-tolerant landscaping. My bill is $1,200 a month. People in southern Nevada who aren't doing what they should be doing are paying $30,000 to $40,000 a month for water. If I could just pay $150, I'd be a happy camper. The extraordinary pricing doesn't work. Pricing alone just flat doesn't work. It just makes people mad. That's all it does. It infuriates them. I was so mad when I got my water bill, I called my successor and ate him for lunch. I was furious. It just invokes this visceral reaction. And one of the things the AMR system works really well with though is leak detection. We have it in Vegas, and the minute I have a leak, I get an email. If they see that the water's been running continually, you get an email. It says, "You got a leak somewhere. You better go find it."

In order for cultural change to happen, you have to be the partner of your community, not the one with the whip in your hand and going after their pocketbook and making them do things that they don't want to do or aren't ready to do. Granted, Vegas is this weird place. The largest customer in southern Nevada is the Sultan of Brunei. Take a guess how much he uses: 14 million gallons. Now, what would you like to charge the man that has $500,000 front doorknobs? You can't. He doesn't care. They just write the check. You don't get anywhere.

I think Alan was absolutely right: you have to raise the level of understanding, and it's through constant dialogue. Go to every community group, speak to the community, show them what's going on, explain to them what's happening. That constant repetitive conversation is probably the biggest key and the most effective tool that you have, and that is to be out there communicating constantly with your community because people will change if they know there's a reason why they have to change. Change is anathema to people, and the older we get, the less we want to change. Trust me.

But tell me why I need to change. What is it that I am doing that, if I do it differently, will make a significant difference? Then people will react. Then they will step up to the plate. I've become absolutely allergic to pricing being this panacea that's going to create this instant efficiency. It doesn't. It just infuriates people.

Water Infrastructure & Desalination

ALAN: Pat, can I tee off of that for just a second?

PAT: Sure.

ALAN: Do you think the price of water, the market for water, is reflected accurately as a resource that we use and depend upon?

PAT: You're going to get the worst debate under the sun. There is this constant debate between water, the “economic commodity,” and what it should be valued at, versus the group that says water is a basic human right, and I have a right to water. I can't exist without it.

When we had to start charging more because we built a billion-dollar third intake into Lake Mead, which is the only thing that's providing water to southern Nevada right now, people were getting a little upset about the pricing. And they said, "Water is a basic human right." And I said, "I agree with you. Here's your bucket. Go to Lake Mead. Knock yourself out. Take all the water you want.” What you don't have a basic human right to is the billions of dollars of infrastructure that gets that water, treats that water, and delivers that water to you. That's what you don't have a basic human right to. It's a very delicate balance. It's the strangest commodity on the planet, because it's not really a commodity. It doesn't live in the commodities market. And I'd rather strangle the next economist that gives me the commodity speech because it just doesn't ring true.

ALLEN: Pat, you mentioned the third straw, the tunnel that comes up from the bottom of Lake Mead, and you were a champion of that. It cost a billion dollars, if my information is correct.

PAT: I have the scars on my back to prove it.

ALLEN: That's big infrastructure. Hoover Dam big infrastructure.

PAT: It was only $435 million.

ALLEN: Do we need more big infrastructure? And let me add another question to you: In Vail a few years ago, you spoke about the need for desalination. And already we have desalination in various places, but most prominently in San Diego. It allows them to take water from the ocean, and they don't need to take as much water, if any perhaps, out of the Colorado River.

PAT: Oh, they still take from the river.

ALLEN: Oh, do they? Well, what are our solutions? Are there limits to conservation?

PAT: There are limits to conservation, and I've never sat on a one-legged stool because anybody that says conservation is a panacea and is going to get us out of this is crazy. It is a balancing act between 21st-century infrastructure and viewing 21st-century infrastructure differently, conservation, and adding to the resource.

I've reached the conclusion that the Lower Basin has a responsibility to the Upper Basin by diversifying where their water comes from, to take the pressure off the river and stop this silly talk that's been going on on the river. To do that, why does the federal government not create a Lower Basin commission made up of the states and the federal government that has one responsibility and one only: they have the financial resources, and they have the ability to hire engineers and scientists. They have the ability to have bilateral conversations with Mexico, and they need to find ways to augment the system predominantly through desalination. You can bring water in from northwest Mexico, bring it into the Imperial Valley. You don't have a high lift. You build an inland desalter using geothermal resources. The cities pay for IID (Imperial Irrigation District) to use that water, just like they do in Israel, and they send their treated wastewater to the Negev and don't use potable water. And then IID leaves water behind in Lake Mead for the cities that paid for it. That's the future.

You can't say to IID, "We want you to cut half of what you're growing, or cut half of the water  that you're currently using." You're destroying communities. You're destroying family farms. It's a ridiculous argument, a ridiculous fight. But work with them. Let's build the desalination facilities. There is science out there that shows you can build them, and you can build them safely without destroying the marine life that's near.

Is it going to cost money? Yes. We build hotels that cost $5 billion, and we're choking on building infrastructure that we need to live? We're building $12 billion airports. Seriously? And we have these apoplectic seizures if we crossed, you know, $900 million to build a desal facility and put in the necessary infrastructure so that we can become sustainable in an aridified West. Make those changes, and know that you will not use your infrastructure 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And then if you don't use it all the time, it's not stranded infrastructure. You have to be adaptable. You have to be flexible. Use it when you can, leave it alone when you have to leave it alone. That's the future. It's a very complicated, but actually a pretty simplistic way of looking at how we use our facilities and our water resources. If everyone else in the world can go to the ocean, what in the world is wrong with us? We're supposedly the most sophisticated country in the world, the most advanced, and we're sitting here paralyzed. Now that I'm on my soapbox!

ALLEN: You've been on this soapbox for a while now.

PAT: Well, yeah, let me take it one step further. I'm furious with the federal government at this point. In 1944, when Congress signed the treaty with Mexico, Congress ratified the treaty with Mexico. In it, they gave Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet. In that legislation, the Congress of the United States commits to the seven basin states that it will replace that one and a half million acre-feet. They've never done it. Ever.

So I can't get upset to say, "Federal government, pull out your checkbook, meet your obligation, meet the commitment you made to the states decades and decades and decades ago, and help us solve the water shortages that are currently happening. And you, federal government, were a part of it." I'm not saying Mexico doesn't deserve a portion of the Colorado River, don't get me wrong, but if you want to talk about a structural deficit, that's where the structural deficit happened. That was step number one in the structural deficit journey. So let's fix it. We're not going to take it away. Let's help Mexico help the United States, and let's finally get off the damn dime.

ALAN: Pat, I know you don't want to be controversial, but you're tweaking something in me that is also boiling up. And it's not just the cost of infrastructure, but it is our own well-meaning and well-intentioned efforts to protect the environment, and protect public safety, and to stop abuse. And I've been part of it.

PAT: You're a lawyer.

ALAN: This is true. But part of the effort was to make it almost impossible to build infrastructure even when you have money. And the story I tell is a personal one. When I started to work in the 1980s for a US senator, Two Forks was a dam... You probably know about it. If you don't know about it, it's great history. But the idea was for Denver Water to build Two Forks Reservoir. And a long saga, but the Environmental Protection Agency, under the first Bush administration, canceled that project. But it was very controversial in Colorado in the 1980s and when I was coming up. And the senator I was working for proposed, along with the environmental community at the time, that instead of building Two Forks, why doesn't Denver Water just simply raise the dam they already have from the 1950s, Gross Reservoir in Boulder County? That was the preferred alternative of the environmental community at the time, of which I was a part.

Fast forward 20 years later, Denver Water decided to do just that. But we're in federal court now. We've been given permission to finish the construction, but with the potential of an absurd result that I hope does not come out of the courts: that we can complete the construction but we can't fill the reservoir.

PAT: Why would you complete the construction?

ALAN: Committed investment, bonded, all of that extraordinary engineering, collaboration with the community, creation of an environmental pool, all of these things, and it's 20 years of work. I think in addition to the financing, we have to be thoughtful and self-reflective and self-aware to think, “should we look at the way we regulate?” And the litigation challenge of infrastructure in this country is a serious one. I'm part of that “abundance” crowd that gets itself into trouble. I do think this is an amazing and important opportunity, and people may not think it's related to the drought. It is completely in the centerpiece of the drought, because we're going to need infrastructure to get ourselves out.

PAT: There's a great book called Breakneck written by Dan Wang that compares the economy of the US with the economy of China, and he reaches one conclusion. The reason the Chinese actually get infrastructure built and we can't: the Chinese government is made up predominantly of engineers. We're made up predominantly of lawyers. They get things built; we don't.

It took the Carlsbad desalter that you mentioned 10 years to get permitted. Ten years! And the last lawsuit was from the surfers, who for some crazy reason thought it would change the way the waves came in. I don't know. It was nuts. Absolute insanity.

I have a great story about how you get around it. We lined the All-American Canal. One of the things that came out of the first round of negotiations between the states and the QSA (Quantification Settlement Agreement) in California was that San Diego would pay to line the All-American Canal that brings water to the Imperial Valley, and take the 60,000 acre-feet of seepage savings and be able to use that in San Diego. Everybody agreed, everybody signed on, the bulldozers were sitting on the All-American Canal ready to go to work, and someone filed a lawsuit to stop it. So, I went to Harry Reid, who was Senate majority leader at the time, and I had him insert a little sentence into a reconciliation bill that said, "The Secretary of Interior shall line the All-American Canal." It was no longer discretionary. It was the law of the land. The lawsuit was dead. It's the only way we got that canal lined.

ALLEN: Pat, before we move on to the next question, I'm curious how much traction your idea of desal has gotten.

PAT: People are paralyzed. They are afraid to even talk about it because the minute you start talking about it, all the groups that are opposed to it for one reason or another - many of them are driven by growth-related motivations - start screaming, "Oh, it's going to cost so much. Oh, it's going to destroy the environment." How can we say it's going to cost too much when we don't even know what we're going to build?

ALLEN: Alan, on a similar vein, you have a lot of federal experience, and Pat's talking about a larger federal role or a different federal role. Do you have any read on that where the federal government should maybe come in on this desal issue and the broader issue that Pat had brought up with her idea?

ALAN: Well, I 100% agree with Pat. She will know more about desal than I do. But for relieving some of the pressure on the Colorado River, it's always struck me as an important thing to do. We have to think in the same way around energy. For a long time, I was a skeptic of nuclear energy. I'm no longer a skeptic of nuclear energy. There's no easy way out, and there's no pain-free way out, and there's no way to avoid risk. It's simply a question of how you move through a list of difficult choices. If you want me to opine on the Colorado River, I’m not going to do that in advance of what the feds say. But I think there are some technological and investment opportunities that we should think about. I don't know if this administration will do it, but I hope that there's some appetite for it.

Perspectives on “Common Fate”

ALLEN: Moving on to the final set of questions. Pat has talked about the idea that we have a common fate in the river system. We've talked about tensions this morning. We've talked about some elements of collegiality. But given the different geographies, the different hydrologies, the different climates, the different histories, I'd like to explore that from the different perspectives.

And Siri, you're at the very top of the system. The snow melts, and it's there an hour or two later, running past your office as water. When I lived there, it was hard to imagine Vail ever running out of water, but here we are. Does the idea of a common fate of all those in this water system hold up from your perspective at the headwaters? When you look downstream or across the Continental Divide, do you feel linked in arms with your colleagues on stage here this morning? Is there a common fate?

SIRI: Oh, absolutely. I think the only way we can get through this is all doing our part and all working together. We're all feeling the pain. One of the saving graces for our watershed was that the Grand Valley irrigators curtailed their use so that we were able to put more water in Green Mountain Reservoir to the benefit of the historic users pool for a lot of us. So that was very moving to our community to see that our partners in Palisade and Grand Junction were curtailing their use early season. And I think that's the only way, and it's exactly what you're saying... I'm still amazed you were able to get rid of your appropriation dates.

But it's things like that that we're going to have to work together on. I understand the water in Colorado is for the state of Colorado. We know that Denver has its right. But as we work through tough things, like the Shoshone water right is super valuable to the Western Slope. We're at the lowest stream flows on record. The Eagle River is below the in-stream flows 33 days earlier than we've ever seen it. What we're seeing is just that it's so hot, the river is suffering, and so there's only so much water to give. But if we can work together, I think that's the only way that we're going to see a solution. And so common fate, absolutely.

ALLEN: Alan, the same question for you. As you provide water for 25% of Coloradans, your most prominent agency in the past has had people like me putting on bumper stickers. What special responsibility do you have, being the biggest in Colorado?

ALAN: Well, I think some humility helps to understand that we are in it together. One of the first people that I met when I took the job at Denver Water was one of my counterparts on the Western Slope, Andy Mueller, who's the head of the Colorado River District. Knowing the historic tension between the Front Range and the Western Slope, I wanted a personal and human relationship with Andy. I just use Andy as an example, but I could use county commissioners in Grand County and elsewhere outside of our service area, but we're dependent upon a positive relationship.

And I've found, at least in my political life and government life, that you can solve problems better if you do have a personal relationship with people. Break bread with them, joke with them, josh with them, hang out with them. So many of our problems as human beings are not just about metrics, not just about science, not just about financing, but about some commonality in creating relationships.

Pat and I were talking about my predecessor, Jim Lochhead, who had extensive experience on the Colorado River as an expert on Colorado River policy. Part of the reason that Jim was successful with his colleagues is because he had personal relationships with Jim Kightlinger and others. And we were talking about and bemoaning the loss of that. So, part of it is human relationships, trust-building, and it's just at a very human level. On the policy level, Denver Water, we belong to Club 20. Just a small example. I make efforts to go visit with the county commissioners in our service area and outside of our service area, try to be visible on the Western Slope. We talked about Shoshone. Denver Water was one of the few – I think we're the only Front Range entity – that advocated for the federal dollars that are going to be used so the Western Slope can acquire the Shoshone water rights. We have some issues with it, and we made our point with the CWCB (Colorado Water Conservation Board), and we're going into water court, and we'll sort that out, but we're intending to sort that out in a collaborative way.

One of the concerns I have about the Colorado River controversy is that as we deal with that challenge, and when politics doesn't seem to be working toward a solution, one of the worst things that we could do in Colorado is ignite the Front Range / West Slope fight all over again. It's largely been contained, and I think we need to continue to contain it. So with great responsibility comes humility and a desire to collaborate. And it's what we do at Denver Water, and we'll continue to do it that way.

PAT: He's absolutely right. The worst thing you can do on the Colorado River is say, "We have a problem, and it's your fault," which we love to do. And I cringe every time election season comes around because there's nothing a politician loves more than to get on his white steed and defend his constituency against the hordes coming in from outside. It’s ridiculous. We're never going to get there if we keep this up. Keep pointing the finger at ag, make statements like, "Half of agriculture needs to be taken out of production." Seriously? Have you looked at what the consequences of that are going to be? He's 100% right.

Know your neighbor. Know why he functions the way he does. What is it that's making him demand certain things? They're not doing it for no reason. Something's going on. Be able to understand that. Be able to make their arguments as well as you can make your own arguments.

ALLEN: One final question I can think of, because it's come up in Colorado certainly for the last 50-60 years: are there limits to growth?

PAT: Oh, please don't start that.

ALLEN: I've got to.

PAT: There's only one city that's ever successfully controlled growth, and that's Boulder City, Nevada. They own every square inch of land within the city, and they only release X amount of land for growth every year. They're a federal charter city. Other than that, you don't even have the tools to control growth.

ALLEN: Alan?

ALAN: What she said.

ALLEN: Do you run into that in the Eagle Valley, Siri?

SIRI: Quite a bit. Eagle River Water and Sanitation District's a special district, and we're formed for the sole purpose of water, and we operate across three towns in the county for water and wastewater. For me, I really think we have to connect with land planning, and we have to work with our partners to go back to decisions that were made when water was very different in the early '90s and question things. So, as far as I think there's smart growth, and the way we maybe grew up, we have to go back and make some changes. And then, sometimes mistakes happen. I mean, there's a hotel in Vail that has non-functional turf. I define it the way you define it - as a median. Anytime you're walking on grass just to mow it, get rid of it. That's what we say: if you're just going on it when you mow it, get rid of it. But this one, it's right on the north frontage, and it has a bright green little median strip between the trail and the road. And all of us, including town of Vail, think “how did that get through? How did that get approved?”

For me, while we're doing conversations with the metro districts, the towns, the DRBs (Development & Residential Builders), anyone who will listen to us, it's equally as important with the decision-makers in land planning because a lot of code is very antiquated. And I tell people, even in established communities… for example, Cordillera changed the amount of square footage you're allowed. They took it down on their own. And so that's what I'm kind of hoping to see, is that as people know more and understand that they're making those choices, that I understand that this is how the property rights were at this time, but it doesn't make sense. Let's change it. And then making sure any future development is indoor use only. We have water for indoor use. It's the outdoor use, with the high consumptive rate, that's what we need to change. When you look at growth, not all growth is equated equally, so we just have to look at what kind of growth and how do we make that water last longer.

ALLEN: Thank you. And now we'll move into the final portion of the meeting. We'll have some questions and some more answers.

Audience Questions

MAX NEUMEYER: Please join me in thanking our panelists. I'm Max Neumeyer. I'm the Deputy Director for Policy and Engagement here at the Institute. Send us your questions and while you're doing that, I'll start us off.

One person asked about water quality. Siri, Eagle River Water and Sanitation District has a gold medal fishery right below one of your wastewater treatment plants. You've said that protecting the watershed for the future matters as much as providing water for our users today. What does that look like in practice? How do you balance those concerns about water quality with getting people the water they need today?

SIRI: That's a great question. Where our wastewater treatment facility is in Vail, when it was built in the late '60s, was the edge of town, and now we're located across the street from a Ritz Carlton. This is kind of how it works up in Vail. I would say the gold medal fishery starts at our outfall. Wastewater treatment - you won't find a greater environmentalist than the operators that run those facilities. You just look at the water coming in and the water going out - it's unbelievable how clean of water they make, and a lot of the parameters are actually cleaner than drinking water because aquatic life is more sensitive. Our operations staff is so acutely aware of the water quality of the receiving body, and then we have strict permits that we have to meet.

The gold medal fishery starts there because of our outfall. The nutrients that we all dispose of in our urine and our fecal matter, we remove that in our wastewater treatment facilities, but we need those nutrients there to live; they create a better aquatic environment, especially at the headwaters where there's nutrient limitations. This isn't the same once you get below ag, and as you go further down the water body, of course that changes. But since we're the first people using that water, that is why the gold medal fishery lives there. We're actually asking people not to fish now because the fish are very stressed because the water is so low and warm.

But really, for me and Alan, we’ve talked about infrastructure… so much of our jobs is balancing risk. We know what to do, we just can't afford to do it all. So, we really have to be looking at all of the risk, which is very much aging infrastructure, regulatory drivers, water supply, and then of course, employees and housing and all the things. But for us, I'm always saying let's leave the organization better than we found it, and certainly when you look at water quality, it's directly connected to quantity. So for us, we're always working with CDOT on Vail Pass with mag chloride sediment. From the Eagle River, we have the Eagle Mine, which will forever be a collect-and-treat water treatment plant with high metals. There's risk all around us, but we just work with our partners collaboratively with the data to make sure that our source water is protected. Because the better the source water, the easier the treatment, the lower we can keep the cost for our customers so that we can reinvest in our assets. And that's really how we look at it, very holistically. We don't look at it as just one thing, your water right; they are all connected. And so, for us, it's looking at the whole picture.

A good example is PFAS. There's so much of it in the news, and you almost get the sense that we're creating it in the plant. It's really like stop it at the source. All of these things, if you can stop it at the source, then you, our customers, aren't paying for us to remove it at the end. And that's a lot of the work that we're doing, just making sure that we protect the source water quality. And we're lucky at the headwaters because we have such fabulous source water quality.

MAX: We have time for just one more audience question before we do a final round, and it'll surprise nobody that it's about AI. The question is, what threats or opportunities do you see arising from the emergence of AI and data centers, and what strategies do you envision to accommodate it? And I'll just add, are there places you see AI aiding in your water operations? Alan, do you want to take this one?

ALAN: I don't want to take it, but I will! Big topic, obviously, way bigger than water. Global implications for the economy and culture. I scroll between the optimists and the doomsayers about what AI is going to do to us culturally and all of it. I think it's a responsibility for all of us to educate ourselves about what it may mean for us.

Narrowing down just to the water utility space, two things. One, the tools are useful, and we use them, and in predicting leaks, for example, is probably one of the easier ones to point to. But I have 1,100 people who work at Denver Water. They have careers at Denver Water. And I want them to know that there are ways to be AI literate, not to push them out, not to get rid of their job, but to prepare them for their careers. I feel an obligation as an employer to our employees to do that. So there's that.

I think of it in concentric circles. The way you use the tool, how you support your employees in the use of the tool, to have the right ethical protocols around the use of the tool, and then to think about what the broader implications are for society, data centers, energy use, demands, the water-energy nexus that people talk about that's going to come at us. And then the bigger, broader circle is I have a 29-year-old son. I care about his future. He's going to be living in an environment that may be very, very different from what I'm used to, and what are we doing politically to create governance structures around AI? So big topic.

I'll close with this. I have a great passion for the message that Denver Water is an anchor institution. What do I mean by that? We are placed here in a permanent space, not just to deliver water, but to think about our broader obligations to support the prosperity of the community we serve. Not to get us away from our mission, but to broaden the aperture of what we're responsible for at least contributing to. And in the AI space and in the data center space, I think water utilities should not be a siloed entity just worrying about the water implications. We deserve and ought to demand a seat at the table with government and others defining what that policy is because we'll have to live with the consequences. So the anchor institution idea for me is: We have an obligation. It's not just about water. It's about broader prosperity, including the people that work for us, including the people we serve. Give us a seat at the table as these policies develop.

Hope About Water in the West

MAX: A final question from each of you. I'd like you to give the audience one reason for genuine hope about water in the West, as well as one thing to pay attention to.

PAT: I'm a perennial optimist. No matter how frustrated I get and how much venom I spew every so often, I have a fundamental belief. I go back to what Winston Churchill said, "Americans will always do the right thing, but not until they've explored all the alternatives."

I am convinced that we're going to reach a point where the Colorado River community and the West realize how fundamental the aridification and the change is. The necessary new facilities and new infrastructure will be built because they have to be. New attitudes will develop around water use because they have to. Change will come because it is here, and people have to adapt, and they will. And so I really believe that. I won't be around, I know that, but when I look down the road to, let's say, when my granddaughter is in her 20s or 30s, I really believe we will have come a long way to changing the dialogue and how we view and how we react to infrastructure, to conservation, to water resource management, and our interconnection and our need for a larger collaborative environment.

SIRI: I think the hope that I've left with is really what our community has demonstrated in the Eagle River Valley: that people can make change when they understand the why, and it's their choice to make the change. As I look to the future, it can be done. And then I think what to look out for is the convergence of the water rights, the water quality, the water supply. The solutions aren't going to be in one lane. It's going to be us working together to solve a lot of them. The best solutions are going to be the most efficient that consider all the concepts, and I think that the only way to solve these issues is to really put our heads together and get creative with the solutions, which is going to be questioning the regulatory framework, is going to be questioning some of the legal assumptions, and maybe putting down those strong held rights for what's better for the whole state

MAX: Alan, you get the final word.

ALAN: Unlike Pat, I am not an optimist. I was born a pessimist. But I am hopeful, and I draw hope from... look at the number of people who've shown up on an early morning to hear about the topic of water. I have a great deal of enthusiasm about the opportunity and the ability of people to work collaboratively to solve problems. My whole life has been about that. Some successes, some failures I've observed, but for the most part, people want to do the right thing, and they want to do it together, and I think that's true in water, energy, whatever public problem you have.

I also draw optimism from the next generation, the younger people. I met with a group of young interns at Denver Water last year, and it's still in my mind. Eighteen, and they were all women. There was not one man among the group. Young women who wanted careers in water science, water quality, watershed health, corrosion control. Who knew there was a degree in corrosion control? And I sat down with them, and they're bright. They're excited about their careers. They bring a sense of energy. And I thought, "Okay, the idea here is to get out of their way and make sure that there's a career path for them, and not to hold onto old views, and old beliefs, and old grievances." So, I'm optimistic about that.

And the other thing I would say, going back to our opportunity to educate people about water, is so antithetical to the way we are structured. We don't want to be in the headlines. We don't want to be creating controversy. We want you to take us for granted, but I don't think we're in the space that we can continue in that way. So, educating people about water, why it matters, why it's so critical to our future, and Allen, you do that all the time with your writing, and I want to give you a shout-out for that because we need it now more than ever.

MAX: Great. Before we close today, I'm pleased to extend to you all the very first invitation to our next session of Liquid Courage: Water Solutions for a Drier West. This will be on agriculture and will be held on Thursday, August 27th at the same time, here, from 8 AM to 10 AM. This session will explore how agriculture can adapt to a drier West. We'll look at examples like crop switching, which is moving away from water-intensive crops to more drought-tolerant alternatives, and we'll look at producer-led conservation in which ranchers and farmers voluntarily redesign their operations to adapt to a drier climate. This conversation will push back on the assumption that agriculture and conservation are necessarily at odds, but will also raise some hard questions about how we do this at scale. Our next session will include Robert Sakata, who is president of Sakata Farms, as well as senior advisor to the commissioner at the Colorado Department of Agriculture. It'll include Anne Castle, who is a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center at CU Law. Nathan Coombs, a board member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and a farmer in the San Luis Valley, Sarah Jones, the co-founder of Rye Resurgence, and will be moderated again by Alan Best. So again, we hope to see you there. And with that, please join me in thanking our panelists and our moderator one more time.