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Discover how Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West in our new podcast, Western Watts!
We'll dive into the heart of energy issues, from reliability to wildfire mitigation, and share firsthand insights relevant to rural, agricultural and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.
This podcast may contain certain forward looking statements concerning Tri-State's plans, performance, and strategies. Actual results may differ materially because of numerous factors, and Tri-State undertakes no obligation to update these forward looking statements. We urge you to review Tri-State's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of these factors.
Jackie Brown:There's been a lot of research on water and the impacts to an individual, whether that's sitting next to a flowing river or how people's nervous systems change, whether they're by a water source or not, down to the fact that you need clean water in order to live and how much we take that for granted. There's a lot of people in Colorado today that don't have access to clean water, and that's shocking.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thanks for joining us for the Western Watts podcast. I'm Elizabeth Schilling.
Julia Eshleman:I'm Julia Eschelman.
Elizabeth Schilling:And today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Jackie Brown. Jackie, thanks for joining
Julia Eshleman:us.
Jackie Brown:Thanks for having me.
Elizabeth Schilling:What is your role at Tri-State?
Jackie Brown:I am Tri-State's senior water and natural resource policy adviser.
Elizabeth Schilling:Very nice. What is your job experience? What's your history?
Jackie Brown:I've been here over ten years, so it's hard to remember what I did before I worked for Tri-State. But I worked for the NRCS, federal government, and the Colorado State Forest Service before I came to Tri State. And I also did a bit of consulting during that time, but I thought I was going to be an architect when I got out of college. So I spent six years drafting residential architecture plans. Wow.
Julia Eshleman:That what you're hoping to go into, residential style stuff?
Jackie Brown:Yep. And then the economy crashed, so I had to rethink it.
Elizabeth Schilling:So where did you go to school?
Jackie Brown:I originally went to school at Boston University, and then I finished my degree at CU Boulder. I did some postgrad work at CSU and just finished my master's degree from the University of Arizona College of Law with an emphasis on alternative dispute resolution.
Julia Eshleman:Do you weaponize that degree with your family,
Jackie Brown:your conflict dispute? Yeah. I have a 14 year old son who wants to be an attorney, and he is always testing my negotiation skills on a daily basis.
Julia Eshleman:I always tell that to my husband. I say, you should have been a lawyer. You argue so much.
Jackie Brown:I know. Right? It's funny how that all comes out in your household.
Elizabeth Schilling:Be fun to observe. I wanna see how the 14 year old skills hold up against your skills.
Jackie Brown:Good. He can beat me down pretty well. You know? It's just at some point, you're like, fine. Whatever.
Jackie Brown:I don't even care anymore.
Julia Eshleman:If you win, you've battered me completely.
Jackie Brown:I'm too tired. What are we even arguing about? Fine.
Julia Eshleman:You can dye your hair blue. Fine. Fine.
Jackie Brown:You can have that third chocolate bar of the day.
Elizabeth Schilling:So your schooling and your career has taken some different paths. How did you get into the water community?
Jackie Brown:I've had a scrappy life, I would say. This is no different. Before I went to college when I was 17, that summer in between high school and college, I went on a river trip on the Grand Canyon for three weeks, and I was pretty smitten by the experience. I spent the summers after that raft guiding on both the Arkansas River and then the Yampa River and the Elk, which is a tributary of the Yampa. I was becoming a passionate recreator on water.
Jackie Brown:It was right about that time in twenty o five that the Colorado legislature passed the water for the twenty first century act, and that created nine basin roundtables essentially in each of the watersheds in Colorado, including where I was living in Steamboat Springs. I started attending those meetings, and it was a 100% male participation, and no one really liked the note taking or organizational aspect of it. I did volunteer to organize and take notes. And then after a while, they eventually voted me on to the roundtable and later became chair of the roundtable. So I've been doing that basically since they started.
Jackie Brown:And I think that really impacted me. It's something I was passionate about in my life. And then water history, especially in the West, is just incredibly fascinating. It hooked me from the beginning on that kind of stuff.
Julia Eshleman:What's something you find really interesting about the water history in the West?
Jackie Brown:Unfortunately, all the arguing that has gone on about it, it's just really interesting to look at how California grew so much faster than the rest of the West, and therefore, how much more resources they needed in order to support that growth, including with water. And there's all sorts of stories about, like, the Arizona Navy, which doesn't actually exist, kind of battling for their water on the Colorado River in Arizona. There's endless stories that have to do with Colorado River water. Everybody needed it. You
Julia Eshleman:know? So nothing's really changed. It's still like Hatfields and McCoys kinda.
Elizabeth Schilling:It feels like a resource that's so easy to take for granted until there's any sort of scarcity, and then it's like, oh, nope. When you don't have it, you really realize how much you need it for so many things in life.
Julia Eshleman:I was listening to a video the other day, and I didn't think about it like this, but water is geolocated. You don't have random pockets of water in the middle of nowhere. Civilization and people and businesses are all around where the water is. It's not like you can just be like, oh, I'm just gonna have water here. I'm just gonna put a pool here.
Julia Eshleman:I'm just gonna start a business right here. A lot of civilization is really dependent on water, So that's why we've all clustered around it and then fought over it for forever.
Jackie Brown:Yeah. It's a good point. Especially in the West, when our country was formed on the East Coast, it was not as volatile to talk about water because there's so much water and so many creeks and streams everywhere you look. And then when they came out West, it was like, oh, we have one big river. It was nothing like what was happening on the East Coast.
Jackie Brown:So the rules and the laws came up to complement what the geography was. Now we have this incredibly complicated law of the river in the West that prevents the average person from understanding how we utilize water.
Julia Eshleman:I think that's a really good point because I understand that Tri-State needs water for cooling and to run the thermal generation plants, but I don't even know exactly why that is or how much water or if we even need water for other stuff. I don't understand how wastewater works. I'm not even a 100% sure how municipal water works either because apparently in what was it? Firestone? You can just end a contract with the municipal water, and they just might not have water in a couple years.
Julia Eshleman:I didn't even know that could happen.
Elizabeth Schilling:Wow. Maybe you can help educate us. How does Tri-State use water? What is Tri State's water portfolio?
Jackie Brown:I suppose taking from the history of Western water, you could actually probably write Tri-State's history. In the Colorado Ute bankruptcy, we purchased two reservoirs that supported electric generation. That's why they were built, essentially. Then the merger with Plains Electric brought us assets in New Mexico. Then prior to both of those things taking place, the Bureau of Reclamation had customer preference law, which gave us our allocations through WAPA in both the Colorado River Storage Project system and then the picks on the Missouri when we receive hydropower from both of those.
Jackie Brown:While that water isn't necessarily in our portfolio, it still becomes a liability and an opportunity for us. We monitor that fairly closely as well.
Julia Eshleman:Could you explain what WAPA is really quick?
Jackie Brown:Sure. Western Area Power Association.
Julia Eshleman:I know we say WAPA. Is that just the federal hydro that has been around since, like, the fifties?
Jackie Brown:WAPA is the arm of the federal government sells and markets the power that is generated from federal resources.
Julia Eshleman:Actually, fun fact. Tri-State's first source of power was hydropower. I'm pretty sure in rural areas. The first form of power was hydropower.
Elizabeth Schilling:I guess, weren't we, like, just managing contracts for that federal hydropower on behalf of our members? It was something like that was the role of Tracet in the beginning.
Jackie Brown:When those reservoirs were built, Glen Canyon and and the other Colorado River Storage Project reservoirs, customers, were able to sign up for those allocations and, I think, still have the largest federal lot.
Julia Eshleman:And is that just for power generation, or is that also include industrial use and stuff?
Jackie Brown:The allocation is the power, is the kilowatt or the megawatt attached to that. And that varies, of course, with the craziness of the Colorado River when we have drought years and what the releases, environmental bypass flows. There's all sorts of different components that go into that final annual tally of the allocation. It's really it's fascinating.
Julia Eshleman:Just scratching the surface with environmental bypass flows.
Jackie Brown:Yes. Which are water that doesn't go through the turbine at the hydropower station in the dam and goes around it instead for the fish.
Julia Eshleman:Tri-State kinda does that too right with the Yamper River. Is that a thing where we've released water if the river levels have been too low in the past?
Jackie Brown:One of the most memorable contributions we made was the Yampa River, mainly because of the area was slow to grow in Northwest Colorado and en route in Moffett Counties. I think it was twenty eighteen, we were able to work with the Colorado River District and release water out of Elkhead Reservoir to take the river off call, which meant that people could go back to irrigating. That was a huge help for the ranchers at the time that were in the middle of their growing season and needed to put more water on their fields before they harvested their crop.
Elizabeth Schilling:It sounds like Tri-State is in a position where we need to be able to manage water for what we are doing. But as we have that access or ability to manage water, we're not just looking at what's best for Tri State. What are the different things that we're looking at as we're managing our water rates or however that may look?
Jackie Brown:We do have to protect the asset. And oftentimes, it's very labor intensive to do that. So it's engineering, it's attorneys, it's policy people like myself. Absolutely. We look out for our members and this asset first.
Jackie Brown:But while we're doing that, it's not difficult to consider everything else, like wildlife. There's endangered fish and threatened species of concern in the river. I think we've done a really excellent job at stewarding the resource there. And then when you're in a community that is rural, be aware of how your neighbors are using water and what's their phone number, what's their name, how many kids they have, what do they do, where are they from, that you can build relationships. And if there is an issue or you're you are going through a really dry time that you can have a handshake agreement on how much water do you need, how much water do we need, can we figure this out without disrupting people's livelihoods.
Elizabeth Schilling:So it sounds like there's multiple individuals and groups who wanna be in the conversation about how are we handling water. What water groups do you participate in?
Jackie Brown:A lot. The Colorado Water Congress, I have been filling the industrial slash energy representative seat on that board since 2015. A lot of projects right now have to do with automation of diversion infrastructure that's miles away from the nearest road that's saving ditch companies a lot of time and energy and money by automating those so that they don't have to have a ditch rider down on the river every day in dangerous conditions, oftentimes with rattlesnakes and all sorts of crazy things happening.
Julia Eshleman:What's a ditch rider?
Jackie Brown:It's a person hired by a ditch company. Back in the day, it used to be someone that manually opened and closed ditch head gates, but then also cleaned them out after the spring runoff, a bunch of trees and branches and debris. Just check on it, make sure it's functioning. It's an old Wild West job title.
Julia Eshleman:You rattlesnakes in the ditch.
Jackie Brown:Yep. Absolutely. We talked about the basin roundtables. I still do sit on the Yampa White Green Basin Roundtable as the industrial representative. I've served on that board for, I don't know, fifteen years, maybe twelve years, somewhere in that neighborhood.
Jackie Brown:I did take a short break of being a voting member when I was appointed by governor Polis to the Colorado Water Conservation Board. I was the Yampa and White Basin director for the state water policy board, essentially. I chaired that board from 2023 to 2024. I served on the board for six years, your term limited. My last meeting was this past January.
Jackie Brown:Got a lot of free time back in my schedule after that, which was great, but a big honor to serve on that board. It was cool. Currently, I'm still chairing the Yampa River Fund, and so this was a really neat thing that Tri-State took part of as climate change has impacted our hydrograph, and we've had new projects and more people move into the basin. We've experienced these dry summers, and that is really bad for the fisheries. The river itself changes from a cold water fishery when you think of a creek or a stream with all the pine trees and aspens kind of tightly growing up next to it.
Jackie Brown:And then the Yampa turns into a warm water fishery, which is a desert river. There's more Fremont cottonwood trees and sagebrush around the area. So we recognized as water users in the Yampa that we needed to be able to fund releases out of Stagecoach Reservoir in a way that was more efficient than what we were doing. That included changes to Colorado water law and creating a fund that we had immediate access to on an annual basis if we knew that the water year was looking grim. We worked with the Nature Conservancy along with the other large businesses to build this endowment. Tri-State put in $60,000. We were able to create an endowment over three years that reached $6,000,000. Now we use the annual distribution of those disbursements to fund grants to the tune of approximately $200,000 a year, the majority of which goes into the highest priority of flow releases. And that has made a big difference for our fisheries, for our recreators, and just generally for the valley to not see your lifeblood struggle.
Julia Eshleman:How does the fund work? Is it one of those things where you pay an irrigator what they would have made in crops to not use that water to keep the levels higher.
Jackie Brown:Stagecoach Reservoir was built for Colorado Ute back when Craig Station was being designed. As part of that, it has other pools of water besides the pool that was leased by Tri State for many decades. It has municipal water available in it and really has multi benefit use water in it. There's a lot of places in the West that have a Bureau of Reclamation Reservoir. If you are a rancher and you have access to Bureau of Reclamation Reservoirs, then you're not paying for water.
Jackie Brown:You already have your share kind of built into whatever ditch membership membership you you have. Have. But But we don't have a bureau reservoir. We have this reservoir that is in a high mountain valley. We get typically one cutting of hay a year in Routon Moffett County.
Jackie Brown:Our ranchers, their operations really work off of a margin, and they can't afford to buy water, which leaves a bunch of water in that reservoir that isn't being used on an annual basis. So the Yamper River Fund was able to lease water out of there for flows Because even though people would love that water, they can't afford it.
Julia Eshleman:You have a kind of interesting duality going on where water policy is part of your job at Tri-State. It's industrial use, but then you also have this really strong personal attachment attachment and passion for water in general. You really care about the environment and the endangered fish species. You also care about ranch and ag, but then you also need to represent tristate. And how do you balance tristate and your own personal convictions too?
Julia Eshleman:It makes it easy that we're cooperative. Right? So if the principal's concern for community, we would not have work if we
Jackie Brown:didn't have our rural communities. They are not at odds. They're complementary of each other. By going back into our history, probably some folks remember stories of not having refrigerators until they became part of a cooperative. Having grown up in rural Colorado and being a Coloradan pretty much all of my life, I'm just very tied to that heritage and to how our rural communities make Colorado what it is.
Jackie Brown:We wouldn't have the Colorado that we all enjoy without rural landscapes, and rural landscapes exist because of water. These beautiful ranch lands exist because they're irrigating with water. They do more than affect the community that lives and works in the area. We call them a viewscape in natural resources. I think with a lot of people that work at Tri-State, your work becomes your identity.
Jackie Brown:And people that I work closely with, whether it's on the San Miguel or in Moffett County or with water users on the Front Range, people know me, and they know I work for Tri State. And it doesn't matter if you're a member of Colorado Cattlemen's or of the legislature. We all just become part of what we're passionate about. So luckily, the work we do is not at odds, but I think it is really helpful for people in rural areas to know that they can shoot me an email or call my cell phone and say, hey. I heard about this bill or I heard about this thing happening.
Jackie Brown:Do you know what that is? They don't have a lobbyist or they don't have water attorney that they can call. You just, you know, build those relationships by being friends and caring about the same things that other people care about. I don't know. It's never been hard for me to do both things.
Julia Eshleman:I've learned there are a lot of really specialized attorneys. Like, there's tree law, specifically.
Jackie Brown:I just read about that on Reddit. There's a whole community of tree law people. Don't ask me why I was looking at Reddit tree law.
Julia Eshleman:But Yeah. Tree laws have, like, a specific value that an arborist can measure. If you have a neighbor or something that decides your trees are blocking their center or whatever and they chop it down, there's potentially a really substantial, like, thousands of dollars fee that someone might have to pay.
Jackie Brown:It's pretty wild. It is wild. And we have amazing attorneys. Roger Williams is our in house water counsel, and he is a wealth of information when it comes to water law. And then we also get to work with several external counsel attorneys that are just amazing.
Jackie Brown:I've learned so much from both of them, and they also like nerding out in the weird water history and issues of the day. We get along great.
Julia Eshleman:Chris Reichert, who we had on a little while ago, said something really interesting that from the farming being done, it unintentionally created wetlands in Colorado that are now subject to regulation because, oh my gosh, all of a sudden, have wetlands, which is just crazy to think about man made wetlands as an accident.
Jackie Brown:No. It's true. That's a classic example of water availability in the West. Is when you irrigate a field using flood irrigation and that excess water runs off the field as it will because you're not gonna apply unless you're using, like, a sprinkler or drip system, that water only some of it that you apply will get consumed by the crop. So that extra water can go back into the aquifer too, and that creates late season flow availability.
Jackie Brown:Wetlands have to be dealt with under all the laws and regulations that Chris gets to deal with. The system itself functions pretty well with flood irrigation. It would be hard to replace it. We have those conversations in the industry all the time about the unintended consequences of becoming more efficient. There's just pros and cons of everything.
Julia Eshleman:Is it difficult juggling water policy between all four states?
Jackie Brown:Definitely. Craig Station is the largest plant that we manage. That doesn't mean that it's the most important, but a lot of my work goes into that because we have so much value in those water assets. I pay a lot of attention to Colorado policy. Our legislature is five months of the year, whereas New Mexico, they do every other year as a budget year.
Jackie Brown:I think somewhere around the neighborhood of thirty day sessions. Much different, much less time for people to get themselves into trouble. There really are some pointed differences between the way that the state manages resources in New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming. Then Nebraska, they have the Ogallala aquifer and pumping issues that take place for our members in Nebraska, but those aren't really related to our industrial generation assets.
Julia Eshleman:So from what you're saying, you still have to keep an eye out for policies that could affect members too. Right?
Jackie Brown:All of our government affairs people know that if there's a bill with water, they can send it to me, I'll read it. And then if needed, send it to Roger or Thomas Kennedy, who's our in house water engineer. Between the three of us, usually, we can figure, do we care? What's the impact? But Colorado probably picks up about 50 water bills a year.
Jackie Brown:And so that takes up a lot of our time from January to May.
Julia Eshleman:So there's you. You also have a water engineer, I just learned. Does Tri-State have a dedicated water team?
Jackie Brown:We do. It's a little bit ad hoc. Roger's in legal, and Thomas works under Steve Gray, and I think his title is water portfolio manager. Thomas has really important job of making sure that all the water we use in all of the places we use it is recorded and filed. When a headgate gets destroyed or something Thomas is the first person that gets to deal with that.
Jackie Brown:And depending on that issue, does Roger get involved? Do I get involved? Water's emotional because it's tied to people's livelihoods. Sometimes it can be political, and sometimes people are angry, and they're not really sure why they're angry. So we get some phone calls and try to work through whatever the perceived issue is or whatever the real issue is and be as good a partner as as we can while still protecting those assets and the assets of our members.
Julia Eshleman:What you touched on before talking about water usage and how obscure it is and difficult to understand in general, but especially compared to somewhere like the East Coast, is managing water in the West unique?
Jackie Brown:The most unique part about managing water in the West is that we're in an arid climate. We use now tree ring data from thousands upon thousands of years ago to inform us to drought cycles. Sometimes we can get in really long periods of drought. We're currently in a period of drought that has lasted over twenty years right now on the Colorado River. And I think that uncertainty of kind of flood versus drought on an annual basis makes everyone's work harder because you are always having to plan for redundant supplies.
Jackie Brown:You know, what happens in the worst case scenario? How do you keep a power plant running? How do you keep water for culinary use coming into the houses? How do you teach people to not water their lawns or to get rid of their lawns? You have just a lot more voices at the table, which is, on the one hand,
Elizabeth Schilling:really cool. On the other hand, just really does create a maze of regulation and policy that can get really tricky to make sure you're adhering to all the time. You talked a little bit about how at Tri-State we have to plan for those years where there's very much water or there's very little water. And obviously, there's impacts that we think about. There's impacts that farmers think about.
Elizabeth Schilling:There's these serious ways that fluctuation can impact somebody's day to day. But coming back to just specifically reliability, I'm thinking of other people we've spoken to who have to plan for the coldest day and the hottest day, and there's gotta be power And on it feels like water is just another element of being able to be reliable and preparing for whatever we're facing. It seems like there's complexity. But, yeah, does that reliability piece play into what you're looking at every day?
Jackie Brown:Definitely. And affordability too because water has only gotten more expensive. There's tricky law in Colorado and most of the West. We have an anti speculation doctrine. You can't just go buy a whole bunch of water that maybe you'll use one day or maybe you won't.
Jackie Brown:That's part of why we are so cautious in protecting our assets because what we're really protecting is that historic consumptive use of the water. We have to make sure that as the climate changes and we have an earlier runoff that we're able to use our water supplies early, which can vary from water right to water right or what do you have in storage. And then how are we ensuring that we are using the water we have and also planning for the future.
Elizabeth Schilling:In 2023, you were appointed to the Colorado River Drought Task Force because of your experience with industrial water use. What's something you learned while on that task force?
Jackie Brown:The thing that was confirmed for me is that was a six month task force, and we probably spent four months of that arguing over little stupid things and getting to know each other better, which built some trust so we could get to the heart of the issues. I think the lessons are a little bit more societal rather than water necessarily. We ended up being successful, but it's like a family feud. You've gotta get all the dirty laundry on the table before you can move on and start to do the better work. But I think what they learned from me was electric resource planning.
Jackie Brown:I talked about the ERP and what we go through so much because people just assume Oh. They've closed nuclear station. They don't need any of this stuff anymore, and we're done. We'll just walk away. Talking about the incredible r and d that our industry does to determine what really will power the future and how we actually do that planning in house and what we need and why we can't just sell off our assets was really important for our legislators to learn and for our partners, both environmental and municipal utility providers as well.
Jackie Brown:I think people finally had that moment that electricity just doesn't come to your light switch. There's so much planning and so much preparation that our teams here need to do for the assumptions about future generation. I think that was huge in describing how we look at the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years as we become a state and potentially a nation that is electrified with our vehicles and our kitchens and all the other things. It was really useful.
Julia Eshleman:That makes sense. Even though those resources are coming offline for Tri-State, you still have that kind of water budget that's a use it or lose it. And you can't lose it for future purposes as load keeps growing. And even as renewables are added in the ERP, we might need natural gas. We might need batteries, which might require some cooling and
Jackie Brown:stuff like that. Yeah.
Julia Eshleman:We can't just totally shut down and start back up again because that water might not even be available in the future because there's definitely more people that can use it or want it or need it.
Jackie Brown:Perfect way to say it. We have other people that assume because there was a bill last year in the Colorado session that had this little paragraph in it that just said, site data centers where the former coal powered generators used to be, and they'll use that water. We're like, wait. Woah. No.
Jackie Brown:That's not how this works. Are you really just trying to educate people on how we plan? And I'm constantly surprised. Water can seem really foreign to people that don't work with it all the time. I think transmission is even more complicated, personally.
Jackie Brown:There's just so many facets of what we do that have so much complexity for planning for the future that anytime you get to share the heart of our planning, I think, really important for people to get it. You need water for electricity. The generation we think we're gonna use today might be different from the generation that we end up using in ten years. People are constantly talking about geothermal and pumped hydropower, and you just don't know.
Elizabeth Schilling:It feels like there's a lot of decisions we have to make about our short term needs and our longer term needs as you're talking about what might be the source of power generation years down the road where we can't just give up a water right and think that we won't need it in the future. But is it a lot of balancing what do we need now versus what will we need tomorrow or many years into the future?
Jackie Brown:A big win that we had after the drought task force was created. The following year, we were able to get sponsors and have legislation passed in Colorado that helped get to the heart of the issue that you're bringing up. That was senate bill twenty four one ninety seven. In the nineties, we were using a lot of water as we had three units online providing most of our power generation. And then as renewables came on, your water use is lessening.
Jackie Brown:So the historic consumptive use in this bill, we asked that we didn't get punished from the decreasing use from 2020 to 2050 as long as we owned those water rights in 2019. It gave us this incredible gift of time, which gets to your question. How do you manage it? Under current Colorado water law, we've been very concerned that we would have our water rights potentially abandoned after that nonuse began at the units. So that bill was huge to get passed and brought into law.
Jackie Brown:It broadened the discretion of the water judge when he's determining diligence for any conditional water rights that we have. And then every six years, we do what's called diligence on that water and show why we think we're gonna use it. When the ERP comes into that planning, even if we're not using it right this second, will we need it in the future? And water law requires you to prove that you will. So we do that with our water rights.
Julia Eshleman:You mentioned abandonment of water rights as a policy thing. What are other policies that can affect the way an industrial user, like Tri-State, operates with water?
Jackie Brown:I gave you the example of the bill that randomly put in that data centers could use our water rights, and a lot of that is as Colorado population grows and as the type of people that move to Colorado starts to change the makeup. So if it's people from California that are in the tech industry, their interests versus the interests of a rural farmer might be different. Right? Our values are shifting and changing, and we try as an industry to be somewhat flexible with water rights so that we're not an arcane legal system that has zero movement when it comes to keeping water in the river for fish or just for the general health of the river or for kayakers or whatever it is. We toe the line as an industry, allowing for some flexibility and then drawing the line when it gets to be too threatening to the existing water rights.
Jackie Brown:As we do that as a water community in the West and in Colorado, we also do that within Tri-State. How can we be flexible when it comes to these ideas that people have but still protect our interests and the threats they come through in a number of ways. Because water law is so complicated, we get a lot of requests for just donating water or giving up water. And once you don't use water, it goes away. To give away or donate water to somebody that doesn't really know what they're gonna do with that water, we don't feel good about that because then that water just goes away or it goes to the next user in line.
Jackie Brown:We steward that for the future generations, whether it's for Tri-State or for another user down the line.
Julia Eshleman:When it's a use it or lose it, does the water lost go back into the water, like, some kind of state or federal controlled bank that then they dole out again, or is it sold to other individuals or something like that?
Jackie Brown:Because we, again, have seen our hydrographs decrease. We just don't have as much water as we have in other decades. Really, that water is just going to the next user.
Julia Eshleman:I can understand why it's so contentious because you have three utilities slash basic needs competing with each other. You know, you have food, and you have water, and you have electricity all competing with each other for hierarchy in the same system. How do you decide all that stuff's gonna be more important to a different person depending on a point in time, x, y, z? A lot of fights to be had over very important things, honestly.
Jackie Brown:Yeah. And overlay that with just water in the river. Our law was designed to, unfortunately, suck rivers dry because people weren't thinking, oh, there's never gonna be no water in a river. That was a hundred years ago, and now people are like, wait. We can never not have water in a river.
Jackie Brown:That can't happen. We need this water. So we're juggling that too because it's a non consumptive use, but it requires water to be in a stretch of river for a long period of time. I think as a society, no one wants to see a dry river. That's the biggest balance between the other uses that you describe.
Jackie Brown:Industry uses consumes less than one half of 1% of all water use in Colorado. And so you would think, oh my gosh. Why do we even have you? That's nothing. But because it's associated with one use, people are always watchdogging us.
Jackie Brown:How are they using it? Oh, they're going away? Great. We can dole out that water to another use. Agriculture for sure uses the most water.
Jackie Brown:But, again, we talked earlier about the benefits of what that water does besides grow food. It also has those viewscapes and return flows into the river, etcetera.
Julia Eshleman:I can understand the importance of trust building because water loss or water scarcity is also this primal psychological fear. There's been a
Jackie Brown:lot of research on water and the impacts to an individual, whether that's sitting next to a flowing river or how people's nervous systems change, whether they're by a water source or not, down to the fact that you need clean water in order to live and how much we take that for granted. There's a lot of people in Colorado today that don't have access to clean water, and that's shocking. Right? We have people lower down on the Arkansas whose water is contaminated, and they've been working to build a water pipeline since president Kennedy's time to give people quality water coming out of their taps. And then, of course, we have the tribes in Southwest Colorado that still don't have running water to their homes.
Jackie Brown:It's something that can very easily be taken for granted. It's really important to recognize, like, how lucky you are if you have just clean water and you don't have to question what's gonna happen when I drink this. It's really important.
Elizabeth Schilling:Well, I think this conversation has been very enlightening about the importance of water on many fronts. And to have your depth of knowledge on all the ways that it's used has been huge. Can you give us any tips just for your regular listener? What can we be doing to conserve water just to be thinking about it differently in our day to day use?
Jackie Brown:As a mother of a teenage boy, if he was sitting here, he would say, turn the water off when you brush your teeth because I just hound him about that all the time. That's little things, I think, that just bring your awareness to the resource like we talked about. It may not make a dent. Little things being aware sometimes I'll go, a few days without showering. I think we all can do that.
Jackie Brown:But then I feel like, okay. It's okay if my shower today is a little bit longer because I forfeited that shower the last two days.
Julia Eshleman:Actually, you gave up your water rights since you didn't shower every day. So now you can only shower every other day going forward.
Jackie Brown:So that would be tragic. Just being mindful when you wash the dishes and brush your teeth, people leave the faucet running. Just turn it off in between when you're doing the scrubbing or utilized. Something that I heard, this isn't necessarily water use, but when you do your laundry, you can always use the cold cycle. Pretty much across the board, the cold cycle is just as good as the hot cycle.
Jackie Brown:That is what the laundry people say. But then if you move outside, I think it can be really tough to look at your landscaping and decide that you're gonna do a big thing and get rid of your lawn or maybe just get rid of a lot of your lawn, but not all of your lawn. And it's really difficult cost wise. It's very expensive to go through those processes. For me, I have a garden that I put my drip system in, and I have a very small patch of grass for my dogs.
Jackie Brown:It's maybe, like, 30 by 15 square. And I always answer the question of how do you bring your awareness back to your water use and recognizing that it is such a huge resource to us all, and what you do now will have an impact later. Yeah. You better watch out. Or the water police will take you to water jail, and the water attorney will get
Julia Eshleman:you in trouble with the water judge.
Jackie Brown:Oh, yeah. You got it.
Julia Eshleman:For a lawn replacement, I'm sure it depends on where you're at, but Denver at least will do a square footage lawn replacement. They'll pay you for
Jackie Brown:the grass you remove. I think we're getting better at that across the West. Las Vegas is amazing at reusing water and created policy with their golf courses that you can only water the greens. You can't water whatever the stuff is on the side. I don't golf, so I can't remember what it's called.
Jackie Brown:But that's pretty cool. People are finding ways to still have the things they enjoy and recognize that you can use less and you can get creative.
Julia Eshleman:My tips are you can leave your grass a little bit longer. The reason why people like to keep their grass cut so short is it's back from, like, the Victorian times. It was a sign of class to be able to have this ultimate power over nature and have it cut so short because if your lawn was cut, you were literally having a dude out with a scythe cutting it. Having this perfect, short, immaculate lawn was really a class symbol, kinda like how the whole green grass is a class thing we brought over from The UK. But actually, when you leave your grass a tiny bit longer, it shades the roots so you have a little bit less evaporation.
Jackie Brown:Hey. I'll trade classiness for that anytime.
Julia Eshleman:It's like, who has the tie in the year of our Lord 2025, so we're trying to compete with the Victorians on lawn manicure.
Jackie Brown:I definitely am not. I have already heeded that advice on knowing that it was making me less classy, but stay less classy, Tri-State. Stay less classy, Tri-State.
Elizabeth Schilling:Well, I think this has been super educational. I've learned a ton. Thank you, Jackie,
Jackie Brown:Thanks for joining us
Elizabeth Schilling:for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.