The Northern Water Board of Directors voted unanimously Thursday to increase its 2022 quota allocation for the Colorado-Big Thompson Project to 70%, which is exactly what Longmont officials hoped for.
The 70% quota means that Longmont, and all the other allottees that receive water from the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, will receive 70% of their units in the project. This is up from the initial quota of 50% announced in November.
Quotas are expressed as a percentage of 310,000 acre-feet, the amount of water the C-BT Project was envisioned to deliver to allottees each year. A 70% quota means that the Northern Water board is making 0.70 acre-feet of water available for each C-BT Project unit.
Longmont receives a little over 12,000 units from the project, so the city will get about 8,400 acre-feet of water this year from the C-BT Project. An acre foot of water is enough water for roughly two to three families for a year.
Ken Huson, water resources manager for Longmont, said that he was happy with the decision.
“The snowpack this year is just below average so the yield on all of our water rights should be about average,” Huson said, adding that the C-BT Project is one of multiple sources of water for the city. “So we prefer a slightly lower quota in a year like this, in that 60-70% range, because that gives us sufficient water for this year, but leaves a little bit more water in the Colorado-Big Thompson storage vessel. Next year, if we were to have a drought and get even drier and we needed more water, they’d be able to issue a larger quota.”
According to a release from Northern Water, board members expressed their desire to take a conservative approach to provide a water supply while considering the current water supply conditions in the Colorado River basin and the possibility that adverse conditions persist.
While current soil moisture conditions on Eastern Plains farmland prompted several board members to ask for consideration of a higher quota, the release said others cited the uncertainty of future water to support a more conservative approach this year.
Seventy percent is the most common quota declared by the board, which they have been setting since 1957. It was also the quota set for the 2021 water delivery season.
The C-BT Project supplements water for 33 cities and towns along with 120 agricultural irrigation companies, with more than one million residents inside Northern Water’s boundaries.
Huson praised Northern Water’s management of the C-BT project, especially considering the struggles currently facing some major water reservoirs.
“We’re happy to be sitting here where we are right now when you hear some of the stories like Lake Powell and Lake Mead being nearly empty — and the C-BT system being fairly full,” Huson said. “It’s been well managed over the years. It works quite well for us.”
