Pagosa Daily Post Glenn Walsh | 10/30/08
Monday afternoon, Andrew Peternell, director of the Colorado Water Project for Trout Unlimited, filed an appeal of Judge Gregory Lyman’s September 11 judgment awarding the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District and the San Juan Water Conservancy District an additional water storage right of 19,000 acre feet for their Dry Gulch Reservoir project and the right to pump water from the San Juan River at the rate of 150 cubic feet per second.
PAWSD presently has the right to divert 6300 acre feet of water from the San Juan River for storage and to pump 6.9 cubic feet per second from the river to its Snowball treatment facility. The 150 cfs grant in Lyman’s decision represents a more than twenty-fold increase. Significantly, the 150 cfs right is 700% larger than the right the water districts’ engineer Steve Harris claimed was necessary to meet 2040 demand in his initially engineering report for the Dry Gulch reservoir.
