The number of people living in the water-scarce West has skyrocketed in recent decades. Colorado, for example, was home to 2.2 million people in 1970. By 2015, the state had grown to 5.5 million people, more than doubling the population. Current estimates suggest Colorado will reach 8.5 million people by 2050. Cities throughout the region continue to rank among the fastest-growing in the country. To accommodate the surge of new people, local governments have approved scores of new developments. This rapid population growth, however, poses a particularly poignant problem: ensuring water supplies can keep up with increased demand.

Currently, many states—including those with limited water supplies—use a build-first-find-water-second approach to supplying water for new developments. Land-use planners approve and regulate new development projects absent any water planning. Water managers and utilities then react to the increased demand by procuring additional water supplies or implementing new systems to ensure supplies for new communities. For a long period of time, reactive water planning worked. States addressed the increasing demand for water through a combination of conservation efforts, water diversions, and market-based reallocations of water from agriculture to cities.

For Colorado and other arid states, however, extending the status quo is no longer an option—reactive planning is no longer sufficient. Colorado is anticipating a significant water supply shortfall in the next few decades with limited options for procuring additional water supplies to meet the projected demands. To save off this shortfall, Colorado and other states must integrate water and land-use planning for new developments. This change, however, is easier said than done and will require rectifying the historical disconnect between water and land-use planning processes.

The Governance Gap 

Often water planning and land-use planning for new developments are isolated, occurring within entirely separate legal frameworks. This so-called “governance gap” exists for two reasons. First, strategic water availability planning is traditionally a state function, while land-use planning for new development falls within the purview of local governments. Second, state water managers and local municipalities are often driven by different goals. Local officials are often under pressure to increase new development as a means of creating job growth or an increased tax base but have little reason to consider state-wide water availability (or the expertise to do so).

States typically take the lead in water management. State water administrators govern complex water regimes, often with the participation of federal agencies and tribes. States focus on ensuring long-term water supplies for their residents and are less involved in navigating competing demands like the “drying” of agricultural land or the need to engage the public.

Local governments, in contrast, oversee much of the land-use planning process. When local governments seek to grow and allow for new development, local planers typically create policy documents that set out the community’s long-term plans. Though these development plans can have a significant impact on water planning because they often include population estimates and details about the water infrastructure necessary to serve the community, they do not typically contemplate water supply planning.

To complicate matters, local governments may also participate in water planning through water companies and utilities. Municipalities own water rights and are generally responsible for determining the supply and demand for their service area and procuring the necessary water rights. This water planning can take place within the municipal government or, commonly, through a local water utility. Local utilities are frequently quasi-independent, and both physically and functionally separate from the municipal government. While development planners may need the approval of a local water utility after the plan is created, the utilities are seldom part of the initial plan, and development plans are often approved even where supplies are uncertain.

Now What?

While it is widely recognized that local governments should be given significant deference in controlling land-use planning, there is an increased focus on the role of the state in fostering sustainable growth through a more integrated planning process. Monica Green and Anne Castle at the University of Colorado suggest, “A starting point for this integration is the consideration of the availability of water to serve new development in the process of land-use approval by a local government.”

Similarly, Sarah Bates Van de Wetering at the University of Montana envisions an ideal system in which “water planning and development decisions . . . would incorporate deliberative public dialogue about long-term land-use priorities.” Specifically, in this system, “[l]and use planning would be mindful of water supply constraints, and would prioritize development that is most consistent with maintaining water quality and ensuring sustainable supplies.” At the same time, she says that “[w]ater suppliers would place a premium on making the best use of limited resources, minimizing demands, and ensuring that the impacts of water development on highly valued landscapes are acknowledged and taken into account before final decisions are made.”

Progress

Realizing the importance of incorporating water availability, supply management, and demand management into land-use planning, states and organizations have started to take action. Many states now require that new developments only be built where adequate supplies are available. While the extent of the water sufficiency review process varies, a few states have taken important steps to ensure decisions to approve developments accurately reflect the needs of the proposed communities, including helping to develop systems for realistic growth projections. For example, in Arizona and Nevada, state agencies provide expert review of water supply plans based on statutorily specified criteria. But, many state laws do not cover new development within current municipalities because municipalities are assumed to be able to handle the demands of new development. While this is sometimes true, significant new development within a municipality can strain or overwhelm a district’s resources.

A few states have also recognized that truly effective planning requires more than just legitimate water adequacy determinations. For example, Washington requires that each application for a building permit demonstrates adequate water supply; whereas, California only requires assured water supplies for subdivisions greater than five hundred homes. Additionally, states throughout the West have taken steps to improve conservation.

While no state has fully overcome the obstacles to integrated planning, and more work is needed, many states are beginning to take the critical steps necessary to better integrate their water and land-use planning processes and thus are helping to mitigate some of the potential water shortfalls expected in the West. Colorado, for example, created its first state water planin 2015, which outlined objectives, goals, and actions for addressing the state’s future water needs. The plan incorporated input from water providers, local governments, the general public, and other stakeholders.

Many of these stakeholders are also the ones helping to implement Colorado’s water plan. For example, one proposed project was to create a Colorado Water and Growth Dialogue to develop recommendations for communities to create water savings in new developments and create a plan to disseminate the recommendations to local planners. Over two years—with funding from a variety of sources—a group of planners and other stakeholders met and achieved significant successes, including developing a residential land-use and water demand tool, which allows planners to understand differences in water demand for new developments.

Looking Forward

Many states are beginning to take steps to combat the governance gap and help mitigate potential water supply shortfalls over the next several decades, yet there is significant work left to be done. In Assured Water Supply Laws in the Western States, Monica Green and Anne Castle have cataloged the steps numerous states are taking to insure water sufficiency in the future. Their work illustrates that some states have made progress, but no state has fully solved the challenges of separate water governance systems.

Local and state officials will continue to have disparate priorities, and local control of land development remains a jealously guarded right. States with help from outside organizations, however, have succeeded in starting the process and educating communities. Whether or not states will take sufficient action has yet to be seen, but the importance of improvement cannot be overstated: the ability to live in the arid West hangs in the balance.

Sources

Anne Castle, John Sherman, & Larry MacDonnell, Integrated Land and Water Planning in Colorado, (2016), http://www.waterpolicy.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Integrated-Land-and-Water-Planning-in-Colorado.pdf.

Drew Beckwith, New House New Paradigm: A Model for How to Plan, Build, and Live Water-Smart (2009), http://westernresourceadvocates.org/download/2381/.

John Murray, Denver’s population has swelled in the last 7 years, Denv. Post, Sept. 28, 2017, http://theknow.denverpost.com/2017/09/28/denver-neighborhoods-growth-2017/160032/.

Kevin Hamm, Colorado’s population could increase by nearly 3 million people by 2050, Denv. Post, Jul. 18, 2017, http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/28/colorado-population-forecast/.

Kevin Reidy, Water Conservation Technical Specialist, Colo. Water Conservation, Presentation at 2015 Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute Conference, Land Use and Colorado’s Water Plan, (Mar. 15, 2017) (presentation slides), http://www.law.du.edu/documents/rmlui/conference/powerpoints/2015/REIDYLandUse-CWP.pdf.

Monica Green and Anne Castle, Assured Water Supply Laws in the Western States: The Current State of Play, 28 Colo. Nat. Resources Energy & Envtl. L. Rev. 67 (2017), https://www.colorado.edu/law/sites/default/files/attached-files/castle_final.pdf.

Nelson Harvey, Show Us the Water, Headwaters, (Jul. 7, 2017), https://issuu.com/cfwe/docs/hw_sum_2015_final_opt.

Sarah Bates Van de Wetering, Bridging the Governance Gap: Strategies to Integrate Water and Land Use Planning, U. Mont. Pub. Policy Res. Inst. 6-10, (2008), http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=water-resources-and-transformation-of-American-West.

Colorado Water Conservation Board, Colorado’s Water Plan Executive Summary, (2015), http://cwcbweblink.state.co.us/weblink/0/doc/200996/Electronic.aspx?searchid=ab75ea87-7dbe-4fea-98dc-b924c94c17f0.

Western Resource Advocates, Hardest Working River in the West: Common-Sense Solutions for a Reliable Water Future for the Colorado River Basin (2014), https://westernresourceadvocates.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CO_River_Solutions_Hardest-Working-River-in-the-West_Whitepaper.pdf#page=36.