Welcome back to this biweekly meeting of the South Platte River Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the discussion as the South Platte River Committee starts now.

Real life is kind of tough right now.

Good afternoon.

Welcome everyone to the South Platte Committee of May 13th.

I'm Councilwoman Torres.

I represent West Denver District 3.

Today we have a briefing, and before we get to our uh guests from Denver Water, let's do introductions, and we'll start uh with those in the room on my left.

Councilwoman Vidres with Lucky District 7.

Good afternoon, Kevin Flynn, Southwest Numbers District 2.

Thank you.

And do we have any council members online?

You do.

Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

And thank you for joining us.

We will turn it over to uh Denver Water.

Thank you for being here.

And we're excited to hear what you have to present.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Council members for having having me today.

I'm Rick Marsachek, the chief water resource strategy officer at Denver Water, joined here today by Ashley Denalt, I think some of you know her.

And really going to focus on the drought and give you kind of an update on current conditions, compare that to maybe some previous years, and then talk about our response and then ongoing coordination and messaging.

Diving right in, just uh a little bit of overview, as all of you are probably well aware, some of the Denver water history, but we've been around for over 100 years, form you know, bought the Denver Union Water Company in 1918, um, and then have the charter obviously that talks about the coordination between City and County Denver and Denver Water.

Um we serve 1.5 million people, so about half of that's within City and County Denver, about half of that outside distributors.

So we have 61 distributor districts that we provide water to as well.

Maybe the most important item on this slide is the bottom.

This year anyway is the bottom bullet that we get all of our water from snow melt from um from the mountains from both the Colorado River and the South Platte River.

So this is a map of our collection system.

Um the orange line kind of squiggling through through the map there in the middle is the Continental Divide.

Um, and then we bring water from Dillon Reservoir through the Roberts Tunnel as well as from the Fraser River through the Moffat tunnel near Winter Park.

Um and then on the South Platte side, we have the we have a series of reservoirs on the South Platte.

Half of our water comes from the South Platte.

The um highest reservoir in the basin, Antaro Reservoir, we um are actually as part of our drought response.

We are moving water from Antero as we speak down to 11 mile and cheesemen.

Today is the last day that umtero reservoirs opened recreation.

Uh so you have about I don't know what time is it now.

You got about six, seven hours maybe if you want to cruise up the real fast and catch some fish before we close Antario for uh for recreation for the for the season, and the reason for that closure is that's our um we evaporate more water out of that reservoir than the other reservoir.

So to try to save water, we're bringing that water down into more uh into reservoirs that don't evaporate as much.

So we've been in coordination with with Park County with uh cultural parks and wildlife and whatnot in draining that reservoir and then harvesting the and relocating some of the fish.

Um this is just a map of Colorado.

This isn't the Denver Specific, it's not even only a Colorado, it's really the Western U.S.

situation and that really dark red there in the kind of upper left.

Um that's our West Slope Collection system.

Um, Summit County, Grand County is within that.

So um pretty pretty bad situation um statewide.

And this, you know, as we look at our system, um we our records really only go back about 40 years, and this is the worst year that we've seen.

But we went back even farther to um to the 1936, is when we use we measure snow through um both snow tels, they're kind of um they automatically kind of measure that uh we have telemetry that sends us those signals daily um but then we also go around and measure snow by hand um once a month and april first um snow pack uh is plotted on this graph back to 1936 and this is kind of statewide and you can see 2026 there as the by far the worst year ever and you can see kind of this downward trend from from climate change but um but this is by far the worst we've ever seen and we will likely be talking about 2026 for 100 years from now I mean that's how bad this is I hope we're talking about 2026 and not 2026, 7 and 8 and this because this is really going to be a multi-year situation.

But it is it is the worst that we've that we've ever seen.

Just another way of looking at this more specific to the South Platte basin specifically and this is a graph that is put out by the Carl State University climate climate center and the we're there in the upper upper left so the temperature is on the left hand scale and we're probably five or six degrees warmer than any other year that we've seen in history and and then on going towards the left one of the driest years you know I showed the April 1st snowpack being the worst and like well why is this not the worst well it's that temperature in in conjunction with the um the dry weather that resulted in that April one as you can see on this graph a lot of our snow has already melted off now this figure is um is what about almost a week a week old today if we were to look at this we have completely melted out in the South Platte there's no more snow in the South Platte basin and we are at two percent or nearly melted out in the Colorado so where um so this blue line is is 2026 the black line is kind of our average or median and usually this time of year we are still on a downward trend but if you look at the South Platte we're a lot of times we are um well it doesn't quite work on the monitor but um we still have significant amount of snow but this year we don't um so what does this mean it really translates into our reservoir storage and where um right now we are at 79% of capacity um in typically we're at 85 next year this time this time next year we'll be between 50 and 60 percent so we will we are basically serving our customers off of reservoir storage this year um what does that look like on the ground just a um couple pictures of the snake river near Keystone you can see on the left that's 2019 and on the right 2026 where there's really um really no snow uh so that was the doom and gloom bad news I'm gonna pivot now to talk a little bit more and a little bit more positively um about how we're responding and really want to um thank you all the the um departments at the city and county have been working with us and I'll talk more about that um in the future just the collaboration and cooperation that we have had as well as our customers who are really listening and have really responded well to the situation that that we're in you know always in place whether it's a drought year or not we have certain watering rules that's don't water between 10 and 6 don't water the sidewalk don't let water pool you know fix the irrigation system things like that.

Also our landscape transformation program and I will highlight it was just a month ago that we had a um groundbreaking or should I say sod rolling activity here with the um with the mayor and and um council members so just wanted to um highlight that that partnership that we have with you all and then ongoing um rebate program and you know you can learn more about that at um on our website so what is our what is our response look like we have four stages of drought um anywhere from a watch to um to stage three um currently and this was um our board approved a stage one resolution on March 25th, which puts us in and I'll talk more about that.

But the big piece of that is mandatory water use restrictions and no more than no more than two days a week.

Um then later in April we also passed drought pricing, and so um, and that starts with water use as of May 1, that'll be billed in June.

So currently any water use that's in tiers two and three on our rate schedule will have additional charges.

Um that tier one is kind of indoor use that's measured based on usage from January, February, and March each year, and that's um your tier one allotment.

Anything above that is in tiers two and three.

So, what's the goal, main goal of our our drought response?