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Tribal leaders want to be included again in federal funding through the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for conservation programs in the Upper Basin. The money would pay groups like the Southern Ute Indian Tribe for water they are not using.

The old water law adage doesn鈥檛 capture just how difficult it is to lose a water right. And state policy limits the pool of possibly abandoned water even further.

Grand Valley water managers have a plan to nip a potential zebra mussel infestation in the bud, with one irrigation district beginning treatment of its water this fall. Mesa County plans to apply on behalf of the irrigation districts and water providers for more than $4 million in funding, which will come from the remaining $450 million of Inflation Reduction Act funding for projects in the Colorado River鈥檚 Upper Basin.

Water managers in the upper Colorado River basin took another step this week toward a more formal water conservation program that they say will benefit the upper basin states.

Some experts say the System Conservation Pilot Program, or SCPP, is costly and may not be the most effective way to save Colorado River water.

In 2020, a group of nine flood irrigators in the Kremmling area, scientists and conservation groups began a multiyear research project to find out what happens when irrigation water is withheld from high-elevation fields for a full season and a half-season.

Representatives from two lower basin states on the Colorado River have said they would finally address something that the upper basin states, including Colorado, have long pressed them to do: Fix the supply/demand imbalance sometimes called the 鈥渟tructural deficit.鈥�

The state will have to decide how to protect the wetlands that now fall outside the purview of the Clean Water Act, which water policy experts are calling 鈥済ap waters.鈥�

If the bill passes next year, it would prohibit local and state governments and unit owners associations from allowing the planting nonfunctional turf or nonnative plants, or installing artificial turf in commercial, institutional or industrial properties, beginning in 2025.

The System Conservation Program is paying water users in the four upper basin states 鈥� Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah 鈥� to cut back. Although water users from all sectors can participate, all of the projects in Colorado involved agricultural water users on the Western Slope.