Posted: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 12:00 am
FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) - Phil Cafaro spent Saturday morning counting birds along Poudre River.
"The river is the best place to find screech owls," said Cafaro, a member of the Audubon Society's Fort Collins chapter, which every year counts birds in the area.
Audubon and a handful of other groups are preparing for the next chapter in a looming tussle over the Poudre - the off-stream Glade Reservoir.
A federal report scheduled for release next month is expected to chronicle the environmental impacts of the proposed reservoir, which is part of the Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, an effort of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District.
The district manages the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which pipes water from the Western Slope to the Eastern Slope for cities, agriculture and industry, including Fort Collins.
The current proposal pairs Glade - at 180,000 acre feet it slightly would be larger than Horsetooth Reservoir - and a second plains reservoir with water trades on the Poudre to deliver 40,000 acre-feet of water to growing communities along the Front Range. Fort Collins is not part of the project.
An acre-foot is enough water for two urban households for a year.
There are 16 water providers in the $400 million project, most of which supply small but growing towns.
The so-called draft environmental impact statement by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, due in January, will lay out impacts of NISP on the Poudre, as well as detail other possible alternatives to the proposed project.
One possible impact is a decline in the Poudre, which runs through Fort Collins and is seen as a major economic driver, not to mention a coveted environmental piece of the city's image.
Brian Werner, a spokesman for Northern, said there's a demonstrated need for the project.
"We wouldn't be going to the extent we are if we thought it didn't make sense for the region," Werner said.
But Audubon, which has joined groups such as Sierra Club and Trout Unlimited on the Sustainable Water Interest Group, thinks conservation should get a harder look before reservoir building begins.
"These people are talking about killing our river," Cafaro said. "If you want to do that, you (darn) well better show conservation can't get you that water."