The state water plan is just a week away from being finalized, but last-minute suggestions are still coming in, including a letter from the interim Water Resources Review Committee. One of those is from state Rep. J. Paul Brown, R-Ignacio, suggesting a storage solution for the South Platte River that could provide about a half-million acre-feet of water, at least in wet years.

His proposal is to resuscitate the Narrows project, a dam that was planned along the South Platte in Morgan County.

“This should be the No. 1 priority in the state water plan,” Brown recently told The Colorado Statesman.

The South Platte is the only river that doesn’t have a storage project on its main stream, Brown said. “It’s important to put storage right on the river. That way, we can store every gallon of water that we aren’t legally obligated” to send out of state. In the last six years, more than 4 million acre-feet of water has gone up the South Platte to Nebraska, over and above the amount required by law.

“We need to dust off those plans and do this first,” Brown said.

Brown believes the benefit of the Narrows reservoir is that it could help refill the Denver aquifer and free up water for Aurora, Denver and other metro communities.

The reservoir could resolve flooding problems in LaSalle and Sterling that have led to flooded fields and basements. Most importantly, he maintained, it would offset the demand for Western Slope water. “We just don’t have water to send over,” Brown said.

Most experts acknowledge that the Colorado River, one of the main sources for diverting water over the Continental Divide to the east, is already over-appropriated — that is, it’s required to send more water to the Eastern Slope and to downstream states than it generates.

“We need to figure out another source of water” for the Front Range, Brown said. “That’s the South Platte.”

Finally, Brown said, the Narrows reservoir would satisfy a demand for urban water that would protect agriculture along the South Platte and diminish the need for “buy and dry,” the practice of buying agricultural land for its water rights.

The Narrows project came within a veto-pen stroke of being built in the 1970s. It was part of a larger system of 300 water projects, devised by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the late 1920s. Congress authorized the Narrows, and hundreds of other water projects in the Missouri River Basin, in 1944.

According to a Bureau of Reclamation history of the project, Congress first authorized the Narrows in the late 1940s, although a precise location for the project had not yet been determined. The Bureau liked the area for a reservoir largely because it was less expensive and would provide flood control, a need that continues to this day.

The Narrows started as a station on the Union Pacific Railroad, about eight miles northeast of Fort Morgan. The Bureau began looking at a site in that area, but local opposition from farmers and ranchers forced them to look at other sites. Opposition also came from upstream users closer to Sterling and Julesburg who feared they would lose some of their water.

The Narrows project did have the support of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and other state and local officials. It also got some help from Mother Nature: the 1965 flood that devastated Denver and everything else along the South Platte. According to the Bureau history, the flood reversed a lot of the opposition to the Narrows.

In 1966, after feasibility studies were re-done, the project’s cost was estimated at $61.8 million, and it would provide irrigation to 166,000 acres of land, along with flood control, recreation, and fish and wildlife enhancement. After hammering out various other objections, and with the full support of the governor, senators and Republican Colorado Rep. Wayne Aspinall, who had been its strongest supporter in Congress, a second bill authorizing its construction was signed in 1970.

Aspinall predicted it would be at least another decade before the project was built. A final environmental statement was completed in 1976, which estimated the reservoir would hold 636,000 acre-feet of water. (An acre foot of water is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre of land, about 325,000 gallons of water.)

The Narrows still had opposition from local landowners; the final site chosen would wipe out 95 farms, 28 businesses, two churches, a school and “some of the most productive farmland in the state.” In 1976, landowners banded together and sued the Bureau to prevent its construction. The problem wasn’t helped by what locals called the callous attitude of Bureau employees in their efforts to relocate residents out of the Narrows site.

Despite two Congressional authorizations, a third wasn’t in the cards. Within a month of taking office, President Jimmy Carter started cutting the federal budget, and the Narrows was put on hold.

Another round of studies, ordered by Carter, showed the project still had possibilities. But in 1983, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dealt the final blow, stating the project would harm a 53-mile stretch of the river in central Nebraska and could dry up wetlands downstream. The Environmental Protection Agency also warned of contaminates flowing into the reservoir from sewage, livestock waste, pesticides and insecticides from nearby farmland, and said the reservoir would become “a stagnant cesspool unfit for recreation or use as a potable water supply.”

However, according to the Bureau history, the project was never de-authorized. The Bureau still owns some of the land, leasing it to farmers and ranchers in the area.

Despite Brown’s enthusiasm for the project, it hasn’t found its way into the statewide water plan. The joint implementation plan devised by the South Platte and Metro Denver Basin Roundtables, groups that have provided input into the state water plan, does call for more storage along the South Platte, including a location that is close to one of the Narrows sites. The plan also acknowledges that storage along this part of the South Platte would be based on intermittent dry-and-wet periods.

The Narrows project has the support of local officials including state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, and former Commissioner of Agriculture Don Ament.

Ament discussed the Narrows project with the Water Review Committee last month. He has a long history with the project — he used to travel to Washington, D.C., with then-Gov. Dick Lamm to lobby for it in the 1970s.

But he’s not optimistic that an “on-channel” — on the river — reservoir like the Narrows could be built, in part due to permitting problems. But storage on the South Platte, he said, is the answer.

— marianne@coloradostatesman.com