Fight for Green River water continues.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: [NATURAL RESOURCES]

Frank Jaeger was in Wyoming in June trying to sell a plan to bring water to Colorado. He was short on specifics, but the general idea is to draw water from the Green River across the Continental Divide, 400 miles to Colorado's Front Range.

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Jaeger, the long-time manager of the Parker Water and Sanitation District, didn't say so, but presumably one of the customers of the water would be his own water district and others in Denver's south metro area that remain reliant upon what some experts have described as dangerously diminishing aquifers.

Call Jaeger's idea Out-of-the-Box Plan B.

This is the second installment of that idea. The first came from Aaron Million in 2003 when he was a graduate student at Colorado State University. While studying a map, he observed that the Green River, after being impounded at Flaming Gorge Dam, briefly dipped into Colorado on its way to a confluence with the Colorado River near Moab, Utah.

Compacts governing the apportionment of the Colorado River Basin waters among the various states do not say that each state's water has to come from within the state, he said. And by capturing it in Wyoming, he reasoned, it could be pumped through a pipeline alongside Interstate 80, avoiding Colorado's more vertical topography.

The idea was audacious--and literally out of the Colorado box

And from the outset, Million's plan had one clear vulnerability: He was a private entrepreneur, without any clear customers. What would prevent somebody else--presumably government agencies, the more traditional purveyors of water--from executing the same idea? They would instantly have the customers, thus overcoming Colorado's laws that bar speculation in water.

Parker water district's Jaeger has now made two appearances in Wyoming this year, in June accompanied by Rod Kuharich, executive director of the South Metro Water Supply Authority, according to officials present at the meeting in Rock Springs, Wyo. Jaeger said he was assembling members for the Colorado-Wyoming Water Coalition, but did not...