The Report Card

Thursday, 22 Jan 2004

DENVER, Colo.

Today I attended the executive committee meeting of the Cherry Creek Stewardship Partners at Cherry Creek State Park. The park is an outstanding setting in the midst of southeast Denver sprawl, and is a symbol of what the Partners are all about — preserving and restoring what is left of the Cherry Creek corridor and working to ensure that future growth treads as lightly as possible.

Working committees on open space and habitat, water quality, and education do the Partners’ work, but the executive committee is essential to overall success. The committee has members from the key Partners’ jurisdictions and organizations. We have become friends through our many interactions. A few words and phrases to describe today’s meeting: energetic, thrashing, champions, lumpers vs. splitters, tail-wagging, fiduciary, and never-ending conversation.

So what’s the point of writing about a committee meeting? My daily activities often focus on urban watersheds. For the past four years, 20 percent of my time has been focused on the Cherry Creek, Colo., watershed and the impacts of growth on water resources — today’s subject.

Summer 2002 was the lowest Colorado water-flow year ever recorded — a year of fire and drought. You probably remember. I gave an EPA headquarters visitor a tour of Cherry Creek. Normal late-summer flows were even lower than the normal 10 cubic feet per second. A major stream in the Denver metro area is only 20 feet across. I knew what we would be looking at. My visitor was totally floored at how little water we have.

In the West, low stream flows drive up the economic (and environmental) value of water. Where there is less water, the competition for available water becomes more intense, and the laws of supply and demand push the value way up. In recent years, population growth and drought in the West have made water a very valuable commodity.

Water is big news out here. The only beneficial aspect of drought and growth has been that media coverage of water issues has greatly increased awareness. Monday’s local headline was “Water Tap Fees Soar.” The Cherry Creek area has also had its share of media attention. A December 2003 series of articles highlighted the lack of water to support future growth in the South Metro area. More people means more of many other things. With urban watersheds, it often means more roads, roofs, driveways, and other impervious surfaces. This translates into more stormwater flow to the stream, especially during peak storms, and more erosion. And with lower stream base flows, the contaminants in stormwater have more of an impact on water quality. More people can also mean less of some things, like fish and groundwater. The Cherry Creek watershed begins 50 miles southwest of Denver and flows north through the Denver metro area. As a Western stream, it is small, with a typical discharge of 20 to 30 cfs into the South Platte River.

Recently, and fortunately, Cherry Creek also has more people working on its behalf. What I have seen from 2000 to 2004 is a great story, although the improvement of Cherry Creek is clearly a work in progress, with a long way to go.

During the ’90s, two counties in the upper Cherry Creek basin grew by more than 200,000 people — a 47 percent increase, with predictions of much more to come. Water quality impacts from phosphorus and other nutrients have had major impact on the valuable Cherry Creek Reservoir fishery. In 2000, there was a turning point when the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission directed the Cherry Creek Basin Water Quality Authority to refocus its efforts on reducing nutrient loads (i.e., phosphorus) into the reservoir to preserve the fishery. Also in 2000, Partners was just beginning to coalesce as a local watershed group.

Since that time, Partners has expanded to become a coordinating mechanism for water and riparian land activity in the watershed. The Basin Authority has done an excellent job of reorienting itself and lending support to the Partners — and vice versa.

A project that has helped to transform the situation is the Smart Growth for Clean Water project. Cherry Creek was one of five national pilots demonstrating approaches to growth that minimize impacts on water resources. Since mid-2001, this project has achieved several things, including a multi-jurisdictional agreement to protect Cherry Creek, a land conservation and protection strategy, and it has also greatly increased awareness of development impacts on Cherry Creek.

The Phosphorus Facilitator was designed to tackle inattention to natural resource protection among developers and local planners, and address resulting stream and water-quality issues. The PF will bridge issues between planners and developers by identifying the developers who are willing to develop in a more environmentally friendly way, facilitating the formulation of acceptable projects, and working with planning departments on code changes or incentives that will lead to improved developments. There were few examples of smart development, so the Partners and the Basin Authority had to “make it up” as they went — which was a risk and took persistence on their part.

There has been remarkable progress from the conception of these projects to the present. I attended last week’s Advisory Committee meeting which focused on the search for interested developers. Attracting developer attention can be difficult. The good news is that the developer response has been overwhelming.

My role at Cherry Creek is now mostly advisory. A tremendous amount of local capacity has been built since the Cherry Creek organizations were founded. When Partners began, I was involved in several organization-building aspects. At the beginning of the SGCW project, I led the effort — and it was a rocky road. Now I’m pleased to be watching and pitching in my two cents’ worth.

This recent success does not mean smooth sailing in the future. Just preserving the status quo in the face of continued development is a major challenge, and it requires long-term persistence and commitment on the part of all Partners who wish to see Cherry Creek retain its natural beauty. The residents of the Basin need to become Partners. The sun will come up tomorrow, and will bring more people and more challenges.

I ended my day by revising a proposal under our Land Revitalization Initiative, which integrates the work of several EPA programs. The proposal supports planning and financing of community activities under these programs for a specific community. It is common for me to work on projects for which policy decisions need to be made prior to public involvement. This is one of those projects.