August 05, 2025 01:23 PM UTC

Colorado Congressional Delegation Wants Its Water Money

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• by: Colorado Pols

There’s a famous quote that is often used in discussing water issues in Colorado: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.”

Colorado’s water laws are uniquely complicated, owing in large part to the fact that some 40 million people in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California rely on water from the Colorado River to grow their crops and generally keep themselves alive. There are few political and policy issues more critical to Colorado, which is why it isn’t unusual to see bipartisan support for water-related topics.

Thus, as Shannon Mullane reports for The Colorado Sun:

Colorado’s entire congressional delegation, Republicans and Democrats alike, is calling for the release of $140 million in frozen funds for Colorado River water projects.

In January, the last days of the Biden administration, the Bureau of Reclamation awarded funding for 17 projects as part of the federal drought-response effort in the overstressed Colorado River Basin. Three days later, President Donald Trump issued sweeping executive orders that aimed to reshape federal spending priorities to match his administration’s policies. The Colorado projects were caught in the maelstrom.

Colorado water managers were thrown for a loop. It stalled hoped-for progress on everything from irrigation ditch repairs to fish passage projects. Supporters of the Western Slope’s effort to purchase powerful Colorado River water rights at Shoshone Power Plant saw the promise of $40 million evaporate.

The state’s federal lawmakers want that to change.

“We ask you to move forward with obligating the remaining $140 million worth of Bucket 2 projects in Colorado — not just for the benefit of our state, but for the resilience of the entire Colorado River Basin,” the lawmakers said in a joint statement. [Pols emphasis]

It’s nice to see both Republicans and Democrats on the same side here, but there should be no confusion about why this is a problem in the first place: President Donald Trump.

This $140 million pot of funding for water projects was already approved and paid for during the Biden administration, but executive orders signed by Trump on January 20 that were ostensibly about “unleashing American energy” — which is a short way of saying “let oil and gas companies do whatever they want” — tied up the release of this money from the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation.

None of the projects that should be underway already have any sort of partisan lean to them; there’s nothing “woke” about strengthening water security given recent droughts that led to dramatic drops in water levels at reservoirs such as Lake Powell. Back to the Sun:

The 17 projects proposed work across Colorado’s Western Slope, which is part of the Colorado River Basin. Colorado River water helps supply farmers, cities, industries and ecosystems across the state.

They identified rivers and flood plains where habitats were declining, deteriorating headgates and ditches that needed repair, dams that could be removed and other ways of improving Colorado’s aging water system.

So far, the Trump administration has announced that it intends to award funding for two of the projects. The Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, based in Palisade near Grand Junction, received up to $10.5 million to convert open canals into pressurized pipelines, improving water delivery efficiency and helping endangered fish in the process.

Another project is set to receive $1.5 million to install advanced water metering technology and real-time remote monitoring systems in the Orchard Mesa and Grand Valley area.

The federal lawmakers want to receive the rest of the promised funding, which totals $140 million, so Colorado can better respond to increasingly unpredictable water supplies and prolonged drought in the basin.

Water issues are always a particularly-relevant topic in the third congressional district. During the 2024 election, Republican Jeff “Bread Sandwich” Hurd regularly boasted about his outspoken efforts to protect water in the San Luis Valley. Of course, Hurd also repeatedly promised to increase health care access for rural Colorado before getting elected and promptly doing the exact opposite.

Perhaps Hurd and his fellow Colorado Republicans (Reps. Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, and Gabe Evans) can do a little more lobbying of their Dear Leader Trump beyond signing onto this joint letter. The money that is being withheld is a relative pittance in the overall federal budget — and much less than the $200 million that Trump wants to spend on a new ballroom at the White House.

If Hurd can’t manage to get this money freed up, then it should open up a new line of attack as he seeks re-election in 2026. Hurd already folded on Medicaid cuts that will decimate rural hospitals; if he can’t manage to release funds that were already approved for water projects along the Western Slope, it will be more than fair to ask if someone else should be given the opportunity to represent CO-03.