Fort Collins is abandoning its effort to expand Halligan Reservoir and will sign on to Northern Water’s Glade project, after concluding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would not approve a bigger Halligan dam.
Get top headlines and KUNC reporting directly to your mailbox each week when you subscribe to In The NoCo.
The Fort Collins City Council says the Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP) would provide permit certainty and significant cost savings, resulting in smaller rate increases for utilities and water customers.
Director at the Center for Collaborative Conservation with Colorado State University, John Sanderson, has been a Fort Collins resident and water utilities customer for over three decades. During that time, he has worked on water throughout Colorado and the West, including on the North Fork of the Poudre River—where the Halligan Water Supply Project would sit—for over two decades.
Sanderson joined Marty Lenz with his objections and concerns about this decision by the Fort Collins City Council to abandon the Halligan for Glade Reservoir.
Lenz: I just want to get your initial thoughts on Fort Collins moving away from Halligan to Glade. Do you like or dislike? Agree? Disagree?
Sanderson: I disagree. I've shared with the city council and staff very clearly that I believe they're making the wrong decision.
Lenz: And what is that based on?
Sanderson: The main points that I am thinking about is one that we've been hearing for years that we have these very senior, very secure water rights. We just need a place to store them, and this move to Glade Reservoir would store them as a very minority share in a project that is overwhelmingly dependent on much less secure, more junior water rights. I think there's some lack of security around those water rights. I've talked with a lot of experts on campus and elsewhere about this move, and a theme I'm hearing repeatedly is that because of our changing climate, Glade may never even fill because coming off a year like 2026, where it was so hot and so dry, knowing more of these years are coming, that also adds water security risk. And then I would say I've looked a lot at the history of what the city staff themselves have said about this project they are now proposing to join, and as recently as 2020, city staff concluded very clearly that Glade Reservoir will be harmful to Fort Collins from the Land Conservation and Stewardship Board. "Quote: NISPA brings no benefits to the city of Fort Collins. Unquote. They also said NISP presents quote dozens of risks to the physical river, its biota, and its surrounding ecosystems. So, for all of these reasons, I think they should just stick with the project that they've been working on for decades.
Lenz: One of the things they mentioned is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would not approve a bigger Halligan Dam. Do you understand that to be the case? Is that accurate?
Sanderson: At that October 20 meeting, city staff said the city views Halligan as a legally defensible project, and this staffer went on to say that the Corps' decision is quote troubling to me. So my question is, why doesn't city staff defend their decades of work and stand up for what they know is right? And I know again from my own experience and the experience of many others I'm working with, one can push back against the Corps of Engineers. It is true that there's a memo from the Corps saying it looks like we might not approve Halligan, but that memo is not definitive, and one could defend the work that we've done.
Lenz: City Council also said that going to the NISP would also provide permit certainty and significant cost savings, which I guess would result for smaller rate increases and for utilities, for water customers, water customers like you, is that accurate?
Sanderson: Let me first say about the budget generally. What was presented publicly two weeks ago is very high level, and it's laden with assumptions. I think one of the near-term steps the city ought to take is to share those assumptions and let's debate them and collectively reach some decisions about what financial assumptions are valid or not. But here's a couple of things I can say. In 2018, there was a study commissioned by the city that concluded that Halligan would increase water bills less than Glade would. And so, when I look at that current budget analysis, I ask myself, well, what has changed that suddenly makes Glade so much less impactful on utility rates compared to this conclusion that was reached just eight years ago, and that has not been revealed to us among what I think are a whole bunch of other discussions. But here's another really interesting one: another study that the city commissioned. Said that the value of flows in the Poudre, this was 2011. Okay, so it's not inflation adjusted. The value of flows in the Poudre are equivalent to 234 dollars per household every year. That's a less tangible value than utility rates, but it's a very meaningful thing because this value of the river is really important to the people of Fort Collins. And summing all of this up, I get the point that Fort Collins needs to keep our taps flowing. That's very important.
Lenz: Do you think the city council has been less than transparent, or is there something else that has made them decide to pivot away from Halligan and pivot towards Glade?
Sanderson: Well, there are a few things going on that they presented at the October 20 city council meeting, but to your observation, to your question of whether or not they have been transparent, the simple answer to that is no. They've had what appears to have been at least a year and a half of conversations about this decision. We only learned about this proposal about a week prior to the last city council meeting. They have, in my view, been inconsistent with the city's values around transparency and community engagement, and that sort of thing that the city has a long history of.
Lenz: As somebody who has a PhD in ecology, what are you looking at? What concerns you? What should we be aware of regarding water availability in Fort Collins or wherever one lives, and as much as we can in an affordable way?
Sanderson: If we look right now at what's been happening in the Colorado River Basin and here in Colorado down in the San Luis Valley, we are meeting the reality of our water future. We need to really adjust our approaches to how we plan for that future. I've heard it said that we're taking 19th century ideas and 20th century technology to solve 21st century problems. Well, what we really need to be doing is thinking about 21st century solutions to these 21st century challenges. That's just to support everything that we need water for, and water's life for us here in Colorado and here in Fort Collins, and it's life for the riparian trees, the trees that are growing along the river. It's life for the fish that are in the river. I heard recently that of the native fish that were in this river in the 1800s, only half of those species are still present in the river. This question of securing water supply is about making sure we have solutions to make sure water is coming out of the tap. It makes sure that we have a robust farming economy, which is tied into this question, and it's about making sure that we have a healthy river and all that it supports, we can do all of those things at the same time.
