Colorado

Historic Colorado River deal to conserve flows advances after winning key approval from state water board

Published

5 months ago

November 20, 2025

Historic Colorado River deal to conserve flows advances after winning key approval from state water board

A yearslong effort to purchase two of the most powerful water rights on the Colorado River has cleared another hurdle after the state water board agreed to manage the rights alongside Western Slope water officials.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board voted unanimously Wednesday night to accept the two water rights tied to the Shoshone Power Plant into its environmental flow program. The approval is a critical piece in the Colorado River District’s $99 million deal with the owner of the aging plant in Glenwood Canyon — Xcel Energy — but the deal has faced pushback from Front Range water providers that fear the change could impact their supplies.

Backers of the deal aim to make sure the water now used by the small hydroelectric plant — and then put back in the river — will always flow westward.

“The importance of today’s vote cannot be overstated as a legacy decision for Colorado water and the Western Slope,” Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, said in a news release. “It secures an essential foundation for the health of the Colorado River and the communities it sustains.”

Colorado water officials hailed the decision as a monumental achievement for the state that will help protect the river and its ecosystem. The state’s instream flow program allows the Water Conservation Board to manage dedicated water rights for the health of rivers, streams and lakes.

“Acquiring the Shoshone water rights for instream flow use is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve and improve the natural environment of the Colorado River,” Dan Gibbs, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, said in a news release.

One of the main sticking points during the hourslong meeting Wednesday was whether the board should manage the water rights with the River District. That would include decisions on how and when to require upstream users — like Front Range utilities — to send more water downstream. Generally, the board is the sole manager of water rights in its instream flow program, which the Shoshone rights are now a part of.

Several Western Slope entities said they would withdraw their financial support from the purchase if the Colorado River District was not allowed to co-manage the right with the board. Local governments and other organizations across the Western Slope promised more than $16 million toward the purchase.

Front Range water providers argued that the statewide board is the sole authority that can manage such rights and should have final decision-making power.

The water board instead approved the co-management strategy, which means that the two authorities will decide together how to act when there is not enough water to meet the right’s obligations.

The Colorado River District — a taxpayer-funded agency that works to protect Western Slope water — wants to purchase the Shoshone rights to ensure that water will continue to flow west past the plant and downstream to the towns, farms and others who rely on the Colorado River, even if the century-old power plant were decommissioned.

The Shoshone Hydroelectric Facility in Glenwood Canyon. The Colorado River District agreed to a deal to buy the major senior water rights associated with the plant from Xcel Energy to protect the instream flows. (Photo by Christopher Tomlinson/The Daily Sentinel)

A stream of Western Slope elected officials, water managers and conservation groups testified in support of the deal and the rare opportunity it presented.

“The Shoshone call is one of the great stabilizing forces on the river — a heartbeat that has kept our valley farms alive, our communities whole and our economies steady even in lean years,” Mesa County Commissioner Bobbie Daniel said, urging the board to approve the plan.

The meeting on Wednesday came after weeks of extensive mediation between the River District and Front Range entities. However, the representatives from opposite sides of the Continental Divide could not come to a consensus on a way forward.

Representatives from Front Range utilities have said repeatedly that they supported the purchase as a whole, but they stated concerns about the purchase changing the status quo on the river.

The water rights connected to the plant are the oldest major water rights on the main stem of the Colorado River, which means that they must be fulfilled before any rights established afterward. Those include more junior rights held by Front Range utilities to divert water from the river and bring it under the Continental Divide to their customers.

The plant’s rights can command up to 1,408 cubic feet of water per second year-round, or about 1 million acre-feet a year — enough water for 2 million to 3 million households’ annual use.

The Water Conservation Board’s approval is one of several that must be acquired by the River District. The deal now must go through the state’s water court and its Public Utilities Commission.

Along with the $16 million coming from Western Slope entities, the district will pay $20 million and the Water Conservation Board allocated another $20 million. The financial plan also includes $40 million awarded under the federal Inflation Reduction Act by the Biden administration, but that money remains frozen as part of the Trump administration’s broad halt to spending by the previous president.

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Water managers getting a birds-eye view of Colorado’s historically bad snowpack

Published

4 minutes ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room

Water managers getting a birds-eye view of Colorado’s historically bad snowpack

DENVER — This winter and spring have produced Colorado’s worst snowpack on record, often measured via weather stations throughout the high country known as SNOpack TELemetry or SNOTEL stations.

Over the last few years, a new kind of complimentary measurement has been taking off — literally.

What started as a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab research project became Airborne Snow Observations (ASO), a company that flies small planes over the mountains to measure the snowpack. Starting in 2015, a joint effort with the state began to deploy the technology and put it to work.

Denver7 got a look at the technology last year.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Airborne lasers are measuring Colorado’s snowpack, and the technology is taking off

The planes use light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems to measure the depth of the snowpack across an entire basin, as well as spectrometers that measure how reflective the snow is to determine how fast it is melting.

“The holistic perspective is an important one,” ASO Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Deems said. “And by that I mean not just the full basin perspective on the snowpack, but how that snowpack evolves with our changing forests, the subsurface hydrology, soil moisture and groundwater. All of this adds up to what our managers and what we ultimately see in our rivers, behind our dams and in our reservoirs and in our taps.”

Through the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement (CASM) program, ASO works with more than 100 water management partners ranging from small irrigation districts to large utilities like Denver Water. Deems said the more nuanced data helps those groups decide how to manage reservoirs or water restrictions.

Deems, who lives in Carbondale, said ASO’s flights cover 16 watersheds in Colorado.

“The full basin perspective is really showing us that there’s parts of the watershed that have more snow than others, and that information can really help managers on the ground anticipate what parts of their watershed or what diversion structures or what reservoirs are going to have better inflow versus other parts of the basin,” Deems explained. “That granularity can really help them out come operations time, now.

“The less [water] you have, the more you need to know about it,” he added.

Broader perspective ‘actually even more dire’

Deems said this year, ASO had to move flights up earlier than usual because the snowpack peaked early and began to rapidly melt. He said ASO did 18 survey flights in just one week in March.

ASO Inc.

Watersheds across Colorado saw much less snowpack in 2026 compared to 2025.

Data from those flights show the huge drop off in snowpack this year compared to last.

Watch the full story in the video player below.

Water managers getting a birds-eye view of CO’s historically bad snowpack

“In some cases, the full basin perspective is actually even more dire than what we’re seeing from the [SNOTEL] station network this time of year,” Deems said. “With early melt, those stations are still protected in their little forest pockets and aren’t melting as fast as the more open areas. So we’re seeing perhaps faster declines in the snowpack, and less overall than the stations would indicate in some areas.”

“In other basins, we’re seeing that there’s still a good bit of high elevation snow up there, similar to last year. So not that last year was a huge runoff year, but in some parts of the watersheds, not quite as dire,” he added.

The airborne observation technology is gaining more continuity in the state, with the CASM network expanding.

“And then just last year, a brand new program within the Colorado Water Conservation Board really takes that stakeholder-led effort and creates a state program,” Deems explained. “Having that background of a lot of years of working with these data in different parts of the state really helps with that confidence moving forward, so that folks know how to apply it and how to look to these data in times of crisis, like right now.”

Denver7 | Your Voice: Get in touch with Ryan Fish

Denver7’s Ryan Fish covers stories that have an impact in all of Colorado’s communities, but specializes in covering artificial intelligence, technology, aviation and space. If you’d like to get in touch with Ryan, fill out the form below to send him an email.

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Toyota Game Recap: 4/16/2026 | Colorado Avalanche

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12 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room

Toyota Game Recap: 4/16/2026 | Colorado Avalanche

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Thursday Rockpile: The Rockies’ mixed ABS Challenge results

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1 day ago

April 16, 2026

Press Room

Thursday Rockpile: The Rockies’ mixed ABS Challenge results

After having spent years experimenting in limited capacities and controlled environments, MLB officially rolled out the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System for the 2026 season.

The allure of analyzing the entirely new type of data that ABS challenges present has been hard to resist. To be able to draw any useful conclusions, though, we all collectively needed to wait for the sample size to get to a somewhat meaningful size. On Tuesday, official ABS challenges in regular season MLB games crossed the one thousand mark. That big round number would seem to be a reasonable minimum mark to start looking at the data.

At start of play Wednesday, here’s where the league wide basics stood:

Overall success rate on challenges has been 54% so far, with a notable difference between those initiated by hitters (47%) vs. those from fielders (60%).
Almost all fielder reviews have been initiated by catchers, with only 21 of the 554 having come from pitchers.
Teams so far have very different tendencies for when to challenge: The range of challenge attempts extends from the Minnesota Twins at 58 all the way down to the Boston Red Sox at only 20.
Teams are spreading their challenges around: No individual batter has initiated more challenges than José Caballero of the Yankees with a mere seven.

How have the Rockies specifically fared with this new system given their pre-season preparations?

The answer to that is vastly different between their batters and their fielders.

Before Wednesday’s game, the Rockies batters had challenged 21 pitches and only succeeded on eight of those for an obviously poor 38% success rate.

Baseball Savant has put together a new metric called Runs vs. Expected which attempts to create a digestible overall run value for a team based on the challenges they attempted, their success rate, and the challenges they did not attempt but could have been expected to based on average trends. Essentially, the idea is to spit out an estimate of how many runs have been gained via ABS challenges compared to what an average team would be expected to have in the same circumstances.

The Rockies overall challenge win rate is not the lowest; however, their poor win rate combined with having initiated the fourth highest number of challenges means that Baseball Savant ranks the Rockies batters dead last in terms of Runs vs. Expected.

Baseball Savant

Like most teams, the Rockies are spreading their challenges around — the only hitter on the team who has challenged more than three times is Hunter Goodman. As a batter, Goodman has a won one challenge and lost four for a success rate of 20% in a very small sample size.

The fielding side is a very different picture. The Rockies have initiated 27 challenges and won 19 of them for a sparkling 70% success rate.

Using the same Runs vs. Expected abstracted stat from Baseball Savant as examined above for their batters, the Rockies rank fourth in the league for fielder initiated challenges. They are tied with the Kansas City Royals and rank behind only the Miami Marlins, Seattle Mariners, and Minnesota Twins.

A table featuring data on fielder initiated ABS challenges from all 30 MLB teams as of April 15th. It is sorted by the highest Runs vs. Expected (Minnesota Twins at 2.2) down to the lowest (Los Angeles Angels at -1.4).

Baseball Savant

Both of the Rockies catchers have a success rate of over 70% and rank within the top ten in the league in total challenges won. The teams overall average is brought down slightly by José Quintana’s single failed attempt, but the tandem of Hunter Goodman and Brett Sullivan both been very good at utilizing this system.

Most players and teams strategies for how best to use this system in practice vs. in theory are still evolving. It will probably be a few seasons before these numbers start to really stabilize and we learn what the norms are. But, at first glance, the Rockies are in an interesting spot.

Their batters are doing far worse than average but their catchers (when not batting) are doing far better than average. They can go one of three ways given this:

Put coaching resources into trying to improve their hitters success rate.
Limit the circumstances in which they want to let their hitters challenge, thus saving more challenges for their fielders.
Wait for more data before jumping to conclusions.

Any path forward is fine, so long as it’s not one that limits Brett Sullivan and Hunter Goodman while behind the plate as they both seem to be pretty darn good at this so far.

Triple-A: Albuquerque Isotopes 4, Oklahoma City Comets 3

A home run from Nicky Lopez and a big four hit day for Vimael Machín was pretty much all the offense the Isotopes needed to best the Comets. Keegan Thompson threw a solid 4.2 innings of two run ball before handing it off to the bullpen which shut down the Comets until a shaky 1.1 innings from Seth Halvorsen who allowed their final run in the ninth.

Double-A: Hartford Yard Goats 11, Richmond Flying Squirrels 13

On a warm night in Hartford the bats were scorching. Bryant Betancourt was four for six including a homer, Skyler Messinger was two for three with a double and two walks, and Zach Kokoska (who came in for Benny Montgomery after he hurt his leg on a play against the right field wall) was two for four with a walk and a home run. On the mound it was a tough night for both the starter Jake Brooks and closer Cade Denton as each of them allowed five runs.

High-A: Spokane Indians 6, Vancouver Canadians 14

The Spokane lineup managed to score six runs despite no individual batter having more than two hits and Max Belyeu’s triple being their only extra base hit. A true team effort! On the mound it was, sadly, a similarly collective effort in terms of every pitcher contributing to the mountain of runs allowed. Yujanyer Herrera (five runs in 2.1 innings) and Justin Loer (four runs in 0.2 relief innings) bore the brunt of the damage from the Canadians’ bats.

Low-A: Fresno Grizzlies 9, Ontario Tower Buzzers 16

Wednesday was a night that Jhon Medina likely wishes to forget after having allowed eight earned runs in 0.2 relief innings after Marcos Herrera was pulled for the fourth after 77 pitches. On the hitting side, things went better, as Fresno hitters earned nine walks en route to those nine runs. In terms of standout performers, Jack O’Dowd hit the lone home run for the Grizzlies but Tanner Thach reached base three times including once on a double.

How to Judge the 2026 Colorado Rockies fairly | Mile High Sports

Drew Creasman digs into how best to evaluate a Rockies team that is expected to lose a lot. It’s a similar premise to an article I wrote before the season looking for a metric to judge the team by, but Creasman lays out the case for a measure that allows checking in more regularly and directly corresponds to how fun the team is to watch.

Broncos owners made Russell Wilson go away. It’s time they make Kris Bryant go away, too. | The Denver Post ($)

Sean Keeler makes a case for something that is probably familiar with Rockies fans: Now is the time to work out a restructured contract with Kris Bryant that officially sees him removed from the team. Keeler draws parallels between what could become of the current situation with Bryant and how the Bronco’s saw almost immediate success after parting ways with Russel Wilson.

Colorado School Breaks College Softball Winning Streak Record | Westworld

Benito L. Kelty puts the spotlight on the Colorado Christian University softball team who are currently amidst a 38-game winning streak. This is the record within the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference that they play in and it is possible that they could soon be challenging for the overall NCAA record of 55 consecutive wins. This is a local sports story absolutely worth keeping an eye on even if not directly tied to baseball.