While the federal government has kept the money flowing to the Arkansas Valley Conduit in southeastern Colorado, there’s more to be had, according to Colorado’s two Democratic senators.
U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper sent a letter to the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Camille Touton, seeking additional dollars from either the recent omnibus spending bill or the bipartisan infrastructure law for the conduit.
The conduit is a 130-mile water-delivery system from the Pueblo Reservoir to communities in Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero, Prowers, and Pueblo counties. The project is estimated to cost between $564 million and $610 million, with the federal government expected to pick up 65% of the tab and the state and local communities the rest. It is scheduled to be completed by 2035 but could be finished sooner, depending on funding, and will provide clean drinking water to about 50,000 southeastern Colorado residents.
Colorado has already committed $90 million in loans and $10 million in grants to the project. The federal omnibus spending bill signed last month includes $10.1 million for the conduit.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has taken the lead in the construction of the main or trunk line from Pueblo to Lamar, as well as a treatment plant and water tanks. A construction contract for $42 million — for the first six miles of the trunk line beginning on the east side of Pueblo — was awarded in September. Bids for the next segment of the trunk line are expected to be issued in mid to late 2023.
“[T]he Conduit has been one of Colorado’s top priorities for nearly six decades,” Bennet and Hickenlooper wrote in their letter to Touton. “Continuing to invest in this project will allow the project’s stakeholders to plan for more effective construction and delivery of clean drinking water throughout Southeast Colorado.”
Last year, the bipartisan infrastructure act put $60 million toward the conduit’s construction.
“For years, this project languished due to insufficient funding and a prohibitive cost-share agreement … More investment, from the FY23 omnibus or future BIL awards, would accelerate the construction timeline and improve planning efficiency,” they wrote.
The conduit would help resolve a decades-long problem with water quality in southeastern Colorado.
Residents of the Lower Arkansas get their water from wells, but the water has high levels of salt, selenium and even radioactive materials. Two dozen water systems in the Lower Arkansas are, or have been, in violation of the Clean Water Act in recent years, with high levels of radium, uranium and, in a few instances, “gross alpha radiation.” Radium levels in some water systems in the eastern Lower Arkansas are 63 times higher than levels at the Pueblo Reservoir, and the amount of uranium is up to 12 times higher.
Congress and then-President John Kennedy in 1962 initially authorized the conduit, part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project Act.
