Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, September 28, 2024-  The Colorado West Land Trust is looking to play a larger, more focused role in helping address the water challenges that face western Colorado.

The nonprofit has developed a water protection plan that aims to help strengthen agricultural water supplies, preserve important wildlife habitat and enhance watershed health.

Rob Bleiberg, the land trust’s executive director, said water is such a significant issue facing western Colorado that the organization needs to think creatively and try new things to help respond.

“This plan represents our goal of viewing water in a more systematic, comprehensive way, and increasing action that we are taking on the ground to benefit our community now and into the future,” he said.

The land trust, which operates in Mesa County and several other area counties, has worked for decades in cooperation with landowners to protect land from development through conservation easements. Bleiberg said that with ongoing drought, water scarcity problems and impacts on agricultural production and wildlife habitat in the region, the land trust felt an urgency to take a fresh look at water and not just think about what the land trust does on individual farms and ranches, but look at entire systems.

He said one aspect of the plan involves looking at what opportunities exist for protecting some of the most important irrigated farmland locally in terms of the seniority of water rights, quality of soils, and economic production that is occurring and its importance to local communities.

The land trust is looking at tools beyond conservation easements that it might employ. One that Bleiberg said it is already pursuing on a pilot basis and ideally wants to scale up involves buying irrigated farmland and then selling it with restrictions in place to ensure that it isn’t subdivided and developed and the water isn’t permanently separated from the land.

Bleiberg said retiring farmers in western Colorado who don’t have heirs wanting to farm but want to see their land remain available for agriculture don’t have a lot of options. The land trust wants to work with such farmers, pay them a fair price for their land, implement conservation measures on the farms and then sell them, ideally to young farmers, he said.

The land trust is hoping to boost the speed, size and impact of water conservation efforts, and do more work in areas such as promoting forest health and floodplain restoration and preserving and restoring natural habitats.

As an example, it is looking to help owners of conserved lands on the north slope of Grand Mesa to do forest restoration work that makes the lands less susceptible to catastrophic wildfire and improves wildlife habitat. That work also will better protect watersheds from which the Ute Water Conservancy District gets water.

Bleiberg said goals of the land trust’s water plan align nicely with some of the bigger-picture goals of the Colorado water plan as well as with goals for plans created by water roundtable groups for the Colorado River and Gunnison River basins within the state. And the plan envisions working collaboratively with partners, such as water rights owners, ditch companies and water providers, in pursuing those goals.

“This is the biggest issue facing the region from my perspective and we need to think creatively, we need to take new approaches, and it’s going to require a collaboration,” he said.

The land trust, which has 12 employees now, is looking to add at least one water program staff member and make more use of consultants and contractors as it works to implement its new plan.

“We as an organization need to invest more in water-focused conservation work, and as a community, as a region, as a state, I think we need to continue to invest and invest more in this most essential issue,” Bleiberg said.

More information on the group’s water plan may be found at https://cowestlandtrust.org/water-plan/.

By Dennis Webb- Read the Daily Sentinel article here.