Water ways: supply conference holds hope for state's future.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Attitude at Altitude - American Water Resources Association annual symposium

The primal moment of the water conference, its highlight, had to be when former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, once known as "Governor Gloom," held up balled fists on each side of his head, and with a grimace on his face between them, declared:

"There's always going to be somebody holding up a sign that says the world is going to end tomorrow .... And the world hasn't ended."

Yet Lamm was there, before 150 engineers and government officials, at nicely plush Mount Vernon Country Club, overlooking the Platte River Valley and the Denver Basin, a set of aquifers, issuing another stern warning about America's and Colorado's future if certain dire trends are left un-addressed. The latest trend and Lamm's topic: global warning.

Lamm's lunchtime keynote speech was designated "A Heretical View of Colorado Water Policy--Rethinking Colorado Water Policy in a Time of Global Warming." And, of course, the first heresy involved therein is Colorado's absolute lack of any water policy to cover the state.

The meeting itself was a gathering of the Colorado Section of the American Water Resources Association, its annual symposium, held for old water buffaloes and potential new ones. And yet the session had a youthful flare: young men and young women considering the symposium's 2005 topic--Colorado Water Supply, Status and Sustainability.

In other words, how the young people in attendance hoped to make sure they would have the water they would need to raise their children in Colorado during the next couple of decades.

Rick Brown, a young Colorado Water Conservation Board scientist, spoke of what comes closest to a statewide water plan but he denounced calling it a plan from the start. In fact, to make clear that the water board's $3 million Statewide Water Supply Initiative (it's referred to as SWSI, pronounced: swazi) was in no way an attempt to dictate water policy to local water authorities throughout the state, Brown denounced false impressions he said were spread during the campaign for the failed water-storage Referendum A in 2003.

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"Unfortunately, connections were made between Referendum A and SWSI," said Brown. "Some language (was) actually put into Referendum A that said any project that would come out of SWSI would be funded by Referendum A .... (But) there was never any connection from the Colorado Water Conservation Board's perspective."

But then Brown went on to deliver an eloquent and studied presentation of the state's projected...