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Water warrior: Chandler-Henry will never give up the fight for Eagle County water
Kathy Chandler-Henry, second from left, her daughter, Hilary, left, son, Zach, right, and husband, George, on an Eagle River Coalition float trip on the Upper Colorado.
Editor’s note: This story first appeared in the summer 2024 issue of Vail Valley Magazine.
The unquestioned queen of water policy in the Eagle River Valley the last dozen years or so, retiring Eagle County Commissioner Kathy Chandler-Henry now knows the form her state barge will take as she metaphorically sails into the sunset, Cleopatra-style on the Nile of life.
“We’re newly-minted paddleboarders and love it,” Chandler-Henry says when discussing water sports pursuits she enjoys with her husband, George, who’s also looking to retire as an electrician and solar installer soon. “We’ve been to some high mountain lakes, and we’re looking forward to trying out some rivers this summer.”
As anyone who’s attempted to navigate moving water knows, riding rapids is a significant step up in one’s paddleboarding game. But Chandler-Henry, who also considers both alpine and Nordic skiing water sports in their frozen forms, is always up for a challenge, whether it’s standing up for Western Slope water rights, battling Front Range water interests or taking on Lower Basin states in the increasingly contentious – and potentially litigious – seven-state, two-country, 30-tribe war over the consumption of the dwindling Colorado River.
A graduate of Eagle Valley Elementary and Eagle Valley High School, Chandler-Henry – who turns 69 this summer – was a director of institutional research at Colorado Mountain College before forming her own strategic planning and community survey company while she also ran Brush Creek Electric with George. When Eagle County Commissioner Jon Stavney stepped down to become town manager of Eagle in 2013, Chandler-Henry threw her hat in the ring.
She remembers one prominent member of the business community backing another candidate and telling her she wouldn’t be very good at the job: “That was pretty insulting and had the opposite effect of what they were hoping. It fired me up.”
Stavney, now the executive director of the regional advocacy group Northwest Colorado Council of Governments, was the county commission’s water guru at the time, so it was natural for Chandler-Henry to step into that role as she had been serving on the board of the Eagle River Watershed Council (recently rebranded the Eagle River Coalition) at the time.
Soft-spoken, nonconfrontational and very easy-going in a small, mountain-town kind of way, that doesn’t mean Chandler-Henry backs away from a battle, especially on water issues. She recalls a panel discussion at a Colorado Water Congressmeeting a couple of years ago when an attorney for the behemoth Denver Water was talking about how bad county 1041 powers are – the legislatively mandated authority counties have over some state infrastructure projects. It’s how Eagle County turned back the Homestake II water diversion project in the 1990s.
“This attorney was … talking about how bad 1041 is because you ended up with these uninformed, uneducated rural county commissioners making water decisions for the important, smart people in Denver,” Chandler-Henry laughs, admitting that fired her up too. “He was very well-spoken and had all of his points lined up, and I thought, ‘Boy, these guys are dangerous.’”
Chandler-Henry is currently the Eagle County representative for and president of both the Colorado River District and the Water Quality and Quantity (QQ) program of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments. She’ll be leaving those seats when her term is up as one of the three county commissioners — stepping down rather than seeking a third term – and she says Eagle County and its residents will always have to remain vigilant in the water wars in order to maintain our outdoor recreation economy and status as a high-altitude, headwaters community.
The Colorado River District, made up of 15 Western Slope counties, was launched when the massive Colorado Big-Thompson project in the 1930s rapidly accelerated the then-nascent concept of transmountain diversions (basically tunneling under the Continental Divide to move water from the state’s Western Slope drainage that feeds the Pacific Ocean and taking it to the state’s Eastern Plains and the Atlantic Ocean drainage). Chandler-Henry has a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation publication with a photo of a group of older white men standing around a table in the 1930s, signing the documents for that seminal Big-Thompson project.
“Who would have thought, ‘Let’s dig tunnels through the Continental Divide and take the water from the mountains to the Eastern Plains?’ It just blows my mind still,” Chandler-Henry says. “But that’s why the River District got started, because there was a recognition on the Western Slope that the water and the economy here was at great risk if there weren’t some protections, and if there wasn’t an organization looking out for water rights on the Western Slope. And there’s huge inherent tensions. One of the things that QQ works on is trying to get in place, and it is in the Colorado Water Plan, is that the basin of origin of the water has to be recognized and the impacts on that as well as the destination.”
The inherent tension, of course, stems from the fact that approximately 80% of Colorado’s population lives on those Eastern Plains along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, while a nearly equal percentage of the state’s water flows on the Western Slope. About 500,000 acre-feet of water is diverted out of the Colorado River Basin to the Front Range every year, and one acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons of water, or enough for two or three households per year.
“The reason people come [to Colorado] is so that they can get on I-70 and come ski in Vail on the weekend. It’s not because they want to live in Aurora. They like the outdoor recreation [on the Western Slope], which is dependent on water,” Chandler-Henry says, crediting the city east of Denver with pioneering water conservation programs, including turf-grass replacement. “But the reason they’re doing that is so that they can have more houses and more people and continue to grow their borders and add rooftops.”
Aurora and another Front Range city, Colorado Springs, are still trying to develop up to 20,000 acre-feet of Upper Eagle River water rights they obtained in the 1950s – long before manmade climate change and the aridification of Colorado were scientifically accepted facts. Opponents of that Whitney Reservoir proposal on Homestake Creek say that water needs to stay on the Western Slope.
The Colorado River, which starts high on the Western Slope in neighboring Grand County, meanders somewhat placidly through northwestern Eagle County (a stretch known as the Upper C) before the Eagle River pours into it at Dotsero and the Colorado picks up steam through Glenwood Canyon, plunging eventually into Utah, down through the Grand Canyon and terminating near the Gulf of California – a riotous recreational ride for boaters still reminiscent of John Wesley Powell’s deadly inaugural trip in 1869. Along the way the river now provides water to an estimated 40 million people, but it’s critically endangered by manmade climate change, historic drought, mismanagement and overuse, particularly by Lower Basin state agriculture interests.
Chandler-Henry chaired the legislatively mandated Colorado River Drought Task Force that last year produced a report to make recommendations for both interstate and intrastate drought management as the crisis of dwindling flows and rapidly depleted storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead intensifies and the seven Colorado River Basin states spar over consumption.
“The Front Range and the Western Slope should share equally in any curtailments that are required because of drought management, because the fear on the Western Slope is that all the cuts will come out of agriculture,” Chandler-Henry says. “Our economies over here are completely water dependent, whether they’re recreation or whether they’re agriculture, and if the Front Range diverters get their water and the cuts come out of the Western Slope, either voluntarily or otherwise, it has some pretty devastating effects on the economy over here.”
Given the population realities and political power dynamics, that concept didn’t fly as an official recommendation to the Colorado Legislature, but it is at least in the final report. Overall, about 80% of Colorado River water is used for agriculture – 56% for livestock feed and 24% for other crops, and an estimated 90% of the nation’s winter vegetables are grown in the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
The Upper Basin states are Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and, under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the two basins are each allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River Water a year. However, over the last 20 years of megadrought, the Colorado River is down to about 13.4 million acre-feet of water a year. Lower Basin states, Colorado water officials contend, regularly exceed their allotment, while the Upper Basin states don’t come close.
Colorado’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner Becky Mitchell, on a webinar last spring with stakeholders and press members, pointed out that current, intense negotiations are not over the compact itself but rather operating guidelines for Lake Mead and Lake Powell – the two massive reservoirs that are at their lowest levels since first filling in the 1930s and 1960s respectively. The current 2007 guidelines, which expire in 2026, tie the reservoirs together and require water to be released from Powell into Mead if demand below Mead takes it down too low.
“The crisis on the Colorado River was facilitated by the current guidelines and also somewhat by Mother Nature,” Mitchell says. “When there is overuse and drawdown in Lake Mead, Lake Powell gets drawn down as well, and essentially, takes away a level of certainty and security that we have across the entire system. Everybody across the entire basin deserves some level of security and certainty and we understand that, but the only way to do that is to use less.”
Put more simply, Mitchell says “operations are out of touch with current hydrologic conditions.”
For Chandler-Henry, water policy was imprinted on her DNA at an early age because her mom, Marge Chandler, grew up on a ranch north of New Castle near the Colorado River that her grandfather had first homesteaded. Kathy’s sister still runs the ranch, and deals every year with the growing scarcity of water in the Upper Colorado River Basin due to climate change, overuse and changing hydrology. Snowpack, Colorado’s biggest reservoir, is shrinking every year.
“They’re lucky to have water through July, and the ditch rider comes around and shuts off the headgate and that’s it for your crop,” Chandler-Henry says of her sister’s ranch. “When I was on a Lower Basin tour [in 2022], we were at an alfalfa growers, and I said, ‘How many cuttings do you get? [In Colorado] it’s two and maybe three if it’s a good year.’ They said, ‘Oh, nine to 11.’ Because there’s just so much more water. It seems like water wealth down there [in California and Arizona]. And when you’re up here, everybody’s counting every little drop.”
Besides keeping a sharp eye on basin-wide negotiations and an even closer eye on Front Range diverters, Chandler-Henry says Eagle County must do it all it can to protect critical wetlands in the headwaters of the Eagle River and along all the high-mountain streams and tributaries that flow into the Colorado River at the western end of the county. She’s very concerned 1041 could be a target after Boulder County backed down in a standoff with Denver Water in 2022.
“[1041] is what we have relied on here, but it feels a little tenuous,” Chandler-Henry says. She also points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision last year – in which an Idaho couple simply didn’t want to have to apply for a federal wetlands dredging permit — that stripped away 50 years of Clean Water Act protections for fully two-thirds of Colorado’s wetlands and streams.
“Now that [definition of] Waters of the U.S. is much more limited than it was, the things that [SCOTUS] said are not Waters of the U.S. are ephemeral streams, disconnected wetlands and fens,” Chandler-Henry says. “So on the Western Slope, the mountains, nearly all of our streams are not year-round streams. They flow when there’s water. So if those are not protected anymore by the feds, then are they going to be protected by the state or not?”
As of this writing, two competing pieces of legislation were working their way through the state legislature to set up a state regulatory framework to permit the dredging and filling of wetlands on both private and public lands in Colorado. But water experts point out Colorado has already lost about half of its wetlands since statehood, and they are critically important forms of water storage, pollution filtration, wildlife habitat and a buffer against climate-fueled wildfires.
Asked to enumerate her greatest accomplishments as a county commissioner on water issues the last decade-plus, Chandler-Henry quickly points to “strengthening funding for the Eagle River Coalition, Roaring Fork Conservancy and the Eagle County Conservation District. Those organizations are doing the important work and should be supported.”
She then adds, “elevating the conversation about the importance of connecting land use and water planning [Powell would be proud]” and “chairing the Colorado River Drought Task Force in what were civil, thoughtful and intelligent discussions on drought resiliency in Colorado. I think the work of the task force will pay off in future dividends.”
Asked for her biggest accomplishment period, and it’s no surprise she cites another water issue: “Signing the Purchase and Sale Agreement with Xcel on Dec. 19 [2023] on behalf of the River District. That’s an accomplishment going back decades and many people, so I had the great honor of representing the accomplishments of many. We have a lot of work left to do but I feel certain we can get this across the finish line, and it’s a big deal!”
That’s the ongoing push by the Colorado River District to buy Xcel Energy’s water rights currently used for producing hydropower at the Shoshone Dam of the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon. But once she hangs up her commissioner’s gavel and replaces it with a paddle, Chandler-Henry says she’ll never stop protecting Eagle County and Colorado’s water.
“I certainly will be here as a resource and to help however I can,” she said. “And I won’t quit caring about water, that’s for sure.”
David O. Williams
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