This commentary is by Steve Maxwell, chair of the City of Boulder Water Resources Advisory Board (WRAB), and former WRAB chairs Kirk Vincent and Dan Johnson. These are the personal opinions of the writers and do not represent the official position of the Water Resources Advisory Board.
There is no doubt that future water availability is one of the most critical issues facing the American West. Overstressed water resources will increasingly constrain the growth and expansion that many Western cities have enjoyed over the last century or so. Boulder will experience constraints on its growth as well. However, in his Aug. 22, 2025, commentary in the Boulder Daily Camera — “Boulder’s water supply and climate change” — Steve Pomerance grossly mischaracterizes Boulder’s overall water situation.
In fact, Boulder has one of the most secure and well-supplied future water scenarios of any major town or city along Colorado’s Front Range. As Pomerance notes, about 70% of Boulder’s water comes from the North and Middle Boulder Creek drainage basins — water rights legally secured by the city decades ago, thanks to the foresight of Boulder’s early leaders. These sources, which by themselves can typically meet most or all of Boulder’s annual water demand, are secure. The remaining 30% of the city’s available supply, derived from the Colorado River headwaters through the transmountain diversion project known as the Colorado-Big Thompson (C-BT) Project, is indeed more likely to be subject to possible future curtailment.
While Boulder’s Utilities Department, in order to be ultra cautious, attempts to model even the most extreme future scenarios, the chance of losing this entire source of supply is vanishingly small. If such a scenario did occur, most other Front Range cities, as well as much of Eastern Slope agriculture, would have already dried up. That would be a true doomsday scenario, and one that is extremely unlikely. Pomerance’s characterization of both the staff’s forecast and the situation is simply inaccurate.
From its three primary sources, Boulder currently has a total water supply of approximately 30,000 acre-feet (AF) per year. The city’s demand has historically ranged between 20,000 and 25,000 AF. Current demand, thanks to conservation gains the city has made since the major drought of 2002, is around 17,000 AF per year. This figure will slowly grow as the city continues to grow, but even if there were a significant cutback in C-BT water, Boulder would not face an immediate threat of major cutbacks or shortfalls. While the city has restricted outdoor watering once — during that 2002 drought — Pomerance’s warnings about restrictions on indoor uses and his speculations about data centers are unfounded.
There are legitimate worries that climate change could cause earlier and faster snowmelt, reducing storage capacity to spread water use across the full year. But the City of Boulder has not yet experienced this effect. Moreover, Boulder already has sufficient storage to capture larger volumes of early snowmelt, which typically occurs before most agricultural users are starting to irrigate.
Finally, Pomerance alleges, without basis, that the city’s “tap fees” — charged to cover the infrastructure costs of adding new customers — are insufficient, and that Boulder lacks a “reality-based” plan for future water resource management. In my view, Boulder does have a constantly evolving, carefully updated, reality-based plan that balances varying future water scarcity scenarios with the overriding objective of providing adequate water to residents at a reasonable price.
That said, we should all be concerned about potential overuse of finite water resources, and this must be factored into the planning of Boulder’s future growth. At some point, Boulder’s growth (like that of many Western cities) will necessarily flatten out due to water availability. However, Pomerance’s apocalyptic characterization of Boulder’s situation is neither factually correct nor helpful from a planning perspective. To appropriately balance and optimize Boulder’s future, we should resist “the sky is falling” storylines and instead focus on the facts.
I appreciate this rebuttal. Thank you.
Precisely nobody who makes Pomerance’s NIMBY arguments about water is tearing out their non-native lawn, or avoiding locally-grown animal products, or trying to get their cities to replace golf courses with native plants. It’s resource-hogging masquerading as environmentalism.
Thanks to the folks on the Boulder Water Resources Advisory Board for their comments on my August op-ed. But IMO they are seeing Boulder’s water situation through rose-colored glasses.
1) City staff openly admits that in a serious drought, Boulder’s supply would only meet around 2/3 of demand. And unless something drastically changes, that’s what we’ll almost certainly see in the future. That’s why I advocate “Better safe than sorry!”
2) Boulder East Slope supply via Boulder Creek (North and Main) will produce significantly less, simply because runoff will occur earlier and we don’t have reservoir capacity or storage rights to compensate. And we can expect less precipitation and more evaporation, further reducing supply.
3) Boulder’s West Slope supply, via the Colorado-Big Thompson project, is subject to the Colorado River Compact, which requires Colorado and the other Upper Basin states to deliver 7.5 million acre feet of water on average to the Lower Basin. Given the drastically lower flows over the last 20-30 years, the current deficit, and the reasonable expectation that those flows will go even lower, we should plan on a significant reduction in water from our C-BT rights.
4) Boulder’s city council has effectively committed us to some 20,000 more housing units, plus more job growth, so inflexible demand will go up significantly.
IMO we should see this as the potential emergency it likely will become. That’s why I advocate raising the tap fees enough to allow purchase of pre-Compact west slope rights and senior east slope rights to enhance our water supply, so we don’t get caught with our pants down, so to speak.
And for a bit of history relative to the reference in their op ed, I was the council member who in 1977 pushed to do our first Raw Water Master Plan. This eventually resulted in Boulder’s purchase of Barker Reservoir in Nederland and 8,000 acre-feet of storage rights, which enhanced our then water supply by about 50%.
Once again, we need to take the long view and plan for the reasonable worst-case scenario.
Steve Pomerance, former Boulder city council member
Hi Steve,
Thank you for your past service to Boulder and city council. Nonetheless, to counter your concern about increasing housing unit counts and assumed increase water use from a higher population, recent studies have shown that even as population and density increased in Western U.S. cities, total water use by munincipalities actually went down.
See this Colorado Sun article from Sept 2024 https://coloradosun.com/2024/09/29/western-cities-population-growth-water/#:~:text=After%20gathering%20data%20for%2028,or%20so%20the%20thinking%20goes and this Westwater Hydrology article from 2019 https://westwaterhydro.com/disconnecting-our-water-use-from-economic-and-population-growth/#:~:text=The%20article%20follows%20the%20standard,put%20our%20minds%20to%20it
The reasoning is that there is substantially less water use per capita relative to population increase due to shared water infrastructure that will leak less per capita as well as lower amounts of landscaping being watered per capita as families will more often live in multifamily apartments and condos with smaller yard footprints. However, if those same folks were priced out of downtowns due to insufficient built units to house them, they’re then more likely to opt to live in a distant suburb in a single detached home with large yard and substantially larger water usage (let alone the increased traffic they’ll bring likely commuting into urban centers regularly for work). Either living option should be legal but the water costs to the homeowner should be much larger in the suburb than they should be to homeowner in the city.
Therefore, as an improvement to your tap fee proposal, I’d recommend a substantially larger tap fee for greenfield, new building structure development that reflects the higher cost for longer distances of new pipework and other infrastructure to bring water to those suburban units. If the development instead is a rebuild or infill development where perhaps only expansion of an existing pipe is required, that tap fee should be less. Especially since the tap fees, not subject to TABOR as a tax, must accurately represent the true cost to the city for that service, which perhaps should be proportional to the longest length side of a lot parcel. An upgrade to an existing pipe or shorter distance of laid pipe should cost less when figuring out how to price tap fees which would be reflected in such a fee structure proposed above.
What do you think about that likely more accurate price structure for tap fees?