A regional news item about the expansion of Gross Reservoir, owned and operated by Denver Water, has significant implications here in Grand County.

A U.S. district judge has put a hold on construction for the expansion at Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir until environmental review processes are redone. Although the judge granted work to continue for a few more weeks, the longer implications of the ruling could impact the Fraser River in particular. Do I really need to note that the Fraser is the source of water both directly (surface use for water supplies) and indirectly (subsurface water use for wells) for many subdivisions around Winter Park, Fraser and Granby?

To put it simply, the half-billion-dollar expansion of Gross Reservoir was going to allow Denver to take more water from its Moffat collection system, which means more water from the upper Fraser River Valley drainages. Denver’s had the rights to that water, but it hasn’t had a place to put it once diverted.

So with the expansion of the Gross Reservoir, it would have a place to store that water from Grand County. This was confusingly called “firming,” which really just means taking advantage of water rights it already held. That water for which it has the rights amounts to roughly 70% of all the water that would have naturally flowed into the Fraser above Fraser Canyon.

Yes, that’s a huge amount of water for a river drainage that is already losing about 40% of its water to Denver. Many local efforts have been ongoing to try to address these issues, mainly through Kirk Klancke with Trout Unlimited and the county’s Learning By Doing program that hoped to address what was seen as the inevitable loss of lots more water from the Fraser drainage.

That program came up with compromises with Denver and other diverters that basically worked to manage the timing of water diversions, monitor river conditions and construct river improvement projects in an effort to keep the Fraser River’s water temperatures low and the flow as high as possible.

However, other environmental groups worked to fight Denver’s efforts. In particular, Gary Wockner and Save the Colorado has been fighting the Gross Reservoir expansion through the environmental review process. They had a victory with this judge’s ruling. While it at times appeared that the “environmental impacts” of the project were focused on the effects at the Gross Reservoir site in particular (construction damage, road impacts, loss of land around the reservoir), the judge’s ruling mentions specifically the environmental impacts in the Moffat Collection System area.

That refers to the impacts right here in Grand County around Winter Park, Fraser and Tabernash, where such a drastic drop in water flows would have serious impacts despite the efforts of the Learning By Doing process and management concessions made by Denver.

The judge also cited inadequate or insufficient environmental review of the permits granted for the reservoir expansion. This is important because the project did go through extensive EPA and other environmental impact review, but the judge didn’t see those reviews as sufficient to address the real concerns.

This is relevant when I remember how the Windy Gap Reservoir near Granby sailed through the environmental review process so many years ago, and a green light was given for it to be constructed. And yet it turned out to be a seriously flawed water-diversion project with issues both environmentally and practically. In particular, allegedly sound studies on the impact of the reservoir on invertebrates (bugs that fish love to eat) were flawed in that they envisioned little impact when in fact we now know the reservoir demolished the bug life on the Colorado River below Windy Gap through high temperatures, siltation and — indirectly, I think — whirling disease.

Maybe this sort of oversight in the studies is being remedied in this judge’s ruling relating to the Gross Reservoir expansion. But in general, the massive reduction in water flow in the Fraser River would be bad news for the valley and Granby, where we are now spending millions (think about recent huge water rate increases in Granby) on a new water treatment plant that must address, in part, water-quality issues relating to low flows in the Fraser.

I can only hope that one big takeaway of this ruling will be that environmental reviews will take on negative impacts from projects honestly rather than rubber-stamping the needs and demands of diverters and project advocates.

Patrick Brower is the enterprise facilitator for the Grand Enterprise Initiative. Contact him at 970-531-0632 or pbrower@consultbrower.com.