Usually seen with a camera slung around his neck, Allen Best edits a one-man online journalism shop he calls Big Pivots. Its beat is the changes made necessary by our rapidly warming climate, and he calls it the most important story he’s ever covered.

Best is based in the Denver area, and his twice-a-month e-journal looks for the radical transitions in Colorado’s energy, water, and other urgent aspects of the state’s economy. These changes, he thinks, overwhelm the arrival of the telephone, rural electrification and even the internal combustion engine in terms of their impact.

Global warming, he declares, is “the biggest pivot of all.”

Whether you “believe” in climate change — and Best points out that at least one Colorado state legislator does not — there’s no denying that our entire planet is undergoing dramatic changes, including melting polar ice, ever-intensifying storms, and massive wildlife extinctions.

A major story that Best, 71, has relentlessly chronicled concerns Tri-State, a wholesale power supplier serving Colorado and three other states. Late to welcome renewable energy, it’s been weighed down with aging coal-fired power plants. Best closely followed how many of its 42 customers — rural electric cooperatives — have fought to withdraw from, or at least renegotiate, contracts that hampered their ability to buy cheaper power and use local renewable sources.

Best’s first newspaper job was at the Middle Park Times in Kremmling, a mountain town along the Colorado River. He wrote about logging, molybdenum mining and the many miners who came from eastern Europe. His prose wasn’t pretty, he says, but he got to hone his skills.

Because of his rural roots, Best is most comfortable hanging out in farm towns and backwaters, places where he can listen to stories and try to get a feel for what Best calls the “rest of Colorado.” Pueblo, population 110,000 in southern Colorado, is a gritty town he likes a lot.

Pueblo has been forced to pivot away from a creaky, coal-fired power plant that created well-paying jobs. Now, the local steel mill relies on solar power instead, and the town also hosts a factory that makes wind turbine towers. He’s written stories about these radical changes as well as the possibility that Russian oligarchs are involved in the city’s steel mill.

Best also vacuums up stories from towns like Craig in northwestern Colorado, home to soon-to-be-closed coal plants. He says he finds Farmington, New Mexico, fascinating because it has electric transmission lines idling from shuttered coal power plants.

His Big Pivots may only have 1,091 subscribers, but story tips and encouragement come from some of his readers who hold jobs with clout. His feature “There Will Be Fire: Colorado arrives at the dawn of megafires” brought comments from climate scientist Michael Mann and Amory Lovins, legendary co-founder of The Rocky Mountain Institute.

“After a lifetime in journalism, his writing has become more lyrical as he’s become more passionate,” says Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company. “Yet he’s also completely unknown despite the quality of his work.”

Among utility insiders, and outsiders like myself, however, Best is a must-read.

His biggest donor has been Sam R. Walton’s Catena Foundation — a $29,000 grant. Typically, supporters of his nonprofit give Big Pivots $25 or $50.

Living in Denver allows him to be close to the state’s shot callers, but often, his most compelling stories come from the rural fringe. One such place is the little-known Republican River, whose headwaters emerge somewhere on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. That’s also where Best’s grandfather was born in an earthen “soddie.”

Best grew up in eastern Colorado and knows the treeless area well. He’s written half a dozen stories about the wrung-out Republican River that delivers water to neighboring Kansas. He also sees the Eastern Plains as a great story about the energy transition. With huge transmission lines under construction by the utility giant Xcel Energy, the project will feed renewable power from wind and solar to the cities of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins.

Best admits he’s sometimes discouraged by his small readership — it can feel like he’s speaking to an empty auditorium, he says. He adds, though, that while “I may be a tiny player in Colorado journalism, I’m still a player.”

He’s also modest. With every trip down Colorado’s back roads to dig up stories, Best says he’s humbled by what he doesn’t know. “Just when I think I understand something, I get slapped up the side of the head.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

The post Guest editorial: A dogged reporter covers our roiling world appeared first on Park Record.

The good news these days about Farmington, New Mexico, is that the air looks clear. That’s a huge change.

For 60 years the air was dingy, polluted by two enormous coal-fired power stations in nine units that produced 3,723 megawatts of generation — enough to power two million homes. Now, just 1,540 megawatts remain in two units equipped with modern, air-pollution control systems.

Starting in the 1960s, the town’s giant smokestacks could be seen from miles away, and their dangerous emissions helped add the designation of “national sacrifice zone” to this Four Corners area. Pollutants included “beryllium compounds, chromium compounds, cobalt, and five other carcinogens,” reports ProPublica.

But these days you might describe Farmington, population 46,422, as an attractive river town where “you can see mountains 100 miles away,” says Mike Eisenfeld, energy and climate program manager of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, a regional environmental powerhouse with 1,000 members.

Farmington is becoming known for its recreation, ranging from national parks and monuments to eight miles of river walks and mountain biking on 120 miles of trails.

“Jolt Your Journey!” is how the town promotes itself to visitors. A cultural battle, though, is being fought over what substitutes for coal as a power supply.

Given the town’s near-constant sunshine and underused grid tie-ins to Sunbelt cities, solar-powered electricity might seem the obvious replacement. However, the people with clout in town — Mayor Nate Duckett, City Manager Rob Mayes, and the nonprofit Farmington Electrical Utility — yearn for the good old days of fossil fuels.

Power from the now-closed San Juan Generating Station was cheap, says Mayor Duckett, who enjoys broad local support, having won his seat with 86% of the vote in his last election, in 2018. “It was also homegrown,” he adds, “and there were good jobs,”

To keep its coal plant open, Farmington chased a carbon-capture scheme even though its history is one of failure. All eleven of President Obama’s carbon capture projects have either gone belly up or were never built. A Mississippi coal project alone cost $7.5 billion, leaving only mountains of scrap.

Farmington’s failed carbon-capture scheme cost millions of dollars in legal fees and precious time. Without power-purchase contracts, Farmington Electric had no steady electrical supplier when its coal-fired electricity was switched off. The utility burned through a good portion of $100 million in reserves buying gas and electricity on the open market.

To rebuild a financial cushion, the Farmington utility raised customer rates in April. This angered many residents though resentment had been simmering for years. Everyone knew that coal was nearing its end, yet no plans had been made for developing a major replacement.

Aztec, a town of 6,163, was once a customer of the Farmington utility, but it rebelled, now buying carbon-reduced electricity from Guzman Energy. Neighboring Bloomfield, population 7,371, says it also wants to partner with Guzman. Meanwhile, solar development has been flourishing around Farmington, with 1,300 megawatts of utility-scale generation either planned or under construction.

Farmington could easily get into the action since it can self-permit. It also owns those valuable grid tie-ins through its substations. In fairness, it has vague plans for a solar array, but an inefficient, gas-powered plant is what’s in the process of getting built to augment a big gas plant they already own.

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which gave a boost to nonprofit utilities like Farmington Electric, there’s federal money available to help build solar arrays. The Act allows a utility to build and sell renewable electricity while also raking in generous government incentives. Farmington’s need is pressing, as both New Mexico and the region aren’t producing enough homegrown energy.

All of the financial support right now for developing solar power adds to the frustration of area conservationists.

Mark Pearson, executive director of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, says, “Farmington… wants to export chemicals manufactured from natural gas in the region. But they have the means to export a finished product — electricity made from the sun — via high-voltage electric lines.”

 The Alliance’s Eisenfeld thinks a tipping point is fast approaching. “You need the philosophical buy-in that the transition from coal to clean energy is actually upon us,” he says. “Then it all happens quickly.”

But for now, the good ole boys are still in charge.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

The post Guest editorial: Farmington needs a jolt appeared first on Park Record.

Reservoir manager Ken Beck says wryly that he has lots of water coming his way, “and I need a hole to put it in.”

In southern Colorado, Beck is the superintendent of Pine River Irrigation District and Vallecito Reservoir, which catches water from the 13,000 and 14,000-foot-high peaks of the Weminuche Wilderness. It’s a place so wild and beautiful that Teddy Roosevelt protected it in 1905 by creating the 1.8-million-acre San Juan National Forest.

The name Vallecito means “little valley” in Spanish, and the reservoir stores water for the town of Bayfield, population 2,838, as well as providing supplemental irrigation for 65,000 acres of tribal and non-tribal land to the south.

This winter, Beck has been faced with a near-record snowpack, now expected to turn into some 320,000 acre-feet of water. His 82-year-old reservoir, however, can only hold 125,000 acre-feet. What’s more, snow was still falling in early April.

In late March, Beck saw moisture going up dramatically. Any reservoir manager has to deal with uncertainty, but Beck’s job, which he has held for seven years, has an Achilles heel.

“I was told by the Bureau (of Reclamation) to manage my reservoir so I don’t use my spillway,” he says. “We’re restricted because of the needed repairs.”

Spillways are critical elements of any dam. When oncoming water overwhelms the intakes for hydroelectric and outlet works, excess water flows into the riverbed below. Beck has few options without the safety valve of a dependable spillway, so he may be forced to use it.

Beck is well aware that dams can fail. Six major dams have failed in Colorado since 1950, with the biggest disaster occurring in Larimer County, in 1982. When its Lawn Lake Dam failed, three people died and property damage amounted to $31 million.

Beck says Vallecito’s management challenges came to the fore after “the big wakeup call of 2017, when Lake Oroville fell apart in California.” California’s tallest dam, Oroville, resembles Vallecito in being earthen built. It nearly failed when its spillways began eroding during high runoff.

Soon after, Vallecito’s dam was closely inspected, revealing leaks and erosion in its spillway. The Bureau of Reclamation, which built the dam, patched up the spillway but also put the dam “under review.”

By the end of March, Beck had released 15 times more water daily than during the previous month. By late April, Beck estimates, the formerly half-empty Vallecito Reservoir will be just 20% full, better prepared for what could be an epic snowmelt.

In the arid West, this makes Beck a reservoir apostate. Spring is when reservoir managers follow a creed that’s been honed during periodic drought: Store as much water as possible as early as possible.

For Beck, that’s not wise. “But don’t mistake my being meek as weak,” he says. “I’ve got an Abe Lincoln style: Wrap good people around you and encourage them to say things you might not want to hear.”

Beck has surrounded himself with a team of straight shooters, though he relies most on Susan Behery, a Bureau of Reclamation hydrologic engineer, based in Durango. With Behery’s advice, Beck decided that Vallecito’s reservoir needed to be dramatically drawn down.

Evidence for doing that was obvious this winter as roofs sagged, driveways became mini-canyons, and snow at the nearby Purgatory ski area outside Durango reached 20 feet high in places. USDA SNOTEL sites above Vallecito Reservoir measured snowpacks at 170% and 180% of normal.

With so much big water ready to head their way, a reservoir manager might have decided to operate quietly and hope for the best. Instead, Behery says, Beck has been transparent with the public and collaborative. She admires Beck for it.

“I’m an engineer and nobody gets into engineering because they’re super good with people. I don’t do the fluffy stuff.”

Beck makes a lot of information available. He holds open meetings and emails a weekly newsletter to anyone interested. “A lot of people are asking why we’re turning out more water,” he says, “but I just met with farmers that say I haven’t brought it down enough.”

What does Beck predict will happen to his reservoir as snowmelt barrels toward Vallecito Reservoir?

“If spring rains come it will add to the pucker factor. But the spillway will hold.” Meanwhile, he’s a little bit on edge.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

The post Guest editorial: A Colorado reservoir gets ready for an epic snowmelt appeared first on Park Record.

Some say there’s charm in the town’s narrow streets and funky houses with affordable rent. What’s more, there’s no government except for a water district, though that’s what a recent controversy is all about.

For over a century, Somerset has been dominated by a parade of big money interests, from Kaiser Steel to US Steel and now by billionaire Bill Koch, younger brother to the Koch brothers, known for financing far right politics.

De facto government has long been from the coal companies, which provided water and even a store. In the early 1960s, mine owner at the time, US Steel, sold the houses to residents. But Somerset never created a town government, and minimal oversight comes from Gunnison County, two hours away by way of a twisting highway or dirt road over a pass.

The town’s water always remained a coal company’s responsibility until this year. On Jan. 27, Koch’s mine president, Mike Ludlow, sent a letter to the Somerset Water Board: “Oxbow Mining is hereby providing you with a six months’ notice of its intention to terminate the Agreement (contract of 1962) effective on July 31, 2021.”

The property under the plant and water rights from the North Fork River, however, will revert to Koch’s gas fracking company, Gunnison Energy.

How can tiny Somerset — its finances shaky and residents on the poorer side — possibly shoulder the burden? Maintenance of the aging water treatment plant costs $7000 monthly, and water from the plant consistently fails state-monitored water quality tests.

Saddled with finding a solution is lifetime Somerset resident John Mlakar, Somerset’s water manager. He says the town has $71,000 on hand, which isn’t nearly enough to build a new, $200,000 plant that would meet state standards and sift harmful compounds from the water.

One of those compounds is bromide. When mixed with chlorine used to kill bacteria in a water treatment plant, it causes total trihalomethanes, a cancer-causing mixture.

Bromide occurs naturally but concentrates after being stirred up by mining or natural gas drilling. Water tests by a Koch employee in 2018 found that bromide originated well above the West Elk mine, but below where Koch’s Gunnison Energy and others have natural gas wells.

Meanwhile, new people have been moving into the town’s 50 or so houses as retired coal miners move out. One champion of the reviving town is Terry Commander, who heads the town’s fire district. “The dynamics of the town are changing for the better,” she says.

You might think that Koch’s corporation, the state of Colorado or the county would be willing to help Somerset deal with its crisis. So far, no one has stepped up.

Gunnison County Commissioner Roland Mason says that dealing with “rights of way” in distant Somerset has always been a chore. Perhaps that’s why a visitor to the town notices abandoned cars parked willy-nilly and piles of junk that look as old as the town itself.

Yet Mason acknowledges that Somerset has been a valuable asset: “Ten years ago, 18 percent of our budget was from the severance tax when the mines were going.” That amounted to $11.7 million of the county’s $65 million budget. “The county had to rearrange their budget significantly when the mines closed,” Mason adds.

Impacts, however, were mostly felt in nearby Delta County, which for 60 years provided everything from schools, hospital and housing for hundreds of coal miners and their families. Delta County received some payment for its services, but they were never on the scale of Gunnison County, which could claim Somerset as its cash cow.

Koch’s mine closed after a fire in 2013, but Somerset still has one active coal mine, West Elk Mine, which sent $1.2 million direct severance taxes to the town and county of Gunnison in 2019 alone. Another $497,000 indirect severance grant paid for six solar arrays on Gunnison county buildings.

Mlakar says he’s happy to make the town’s pitch to Gunnison commissioners: “We need their help. I’ve been in the new Gunnison jail, though not for illegal reasons. That place is a palace.”

He compares prosperous Gunnison County to his own tight budget. “I make $905 per month. My house is paid off and money pays for food, heat and my water. You push the price of water any higher, and I’m broke, I gotta leave.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He went to school years K-12 with kids from Somerset.

The post Writers on the Range: Billionaire mine owner leaves a tiny town in the lurch appeared first on Park Record.

If there’s a dominant force in the Colorado River Basin these days, it’s the Walton Family Foundation, flush with close to $5 billion to give away.

Run by the heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton, the foundation donates $25 million a year to nonprofits concerned about the Colorado River. It’s clear the foundation cares deeply about the River in this time of excruciating drought, and some of its money goes to river restoration or more efficient irrigation.

Yet its main interest is promoting “demand management,” the water marketing scheme that seeks to add 500,000 acre-feet of water to declining Lake Powell by paying rural farmers to temporarily stop irrigating.

In November 2020, that focused involvement paid off. The Colorado Conservation Water Board boosted demand management into a “step two work plan,” moving the concept closer toward policy in the state, which leads the Upper Basin states of New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah in drought-management planning.

But is this approach, which verges on turning water into a commodity, good for the Colorado River? And was the public debate sufficient for policy about a water source that’s vital to 40 million people?

Without doubt, the foundation has supported the region’s nonprofits. During the last four years, over 60 Colorado River philanthropic organizations received between $5,000 and $2.9 million each, with seven organizations including the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy, and Western Resource Advocates each receiving $1 million or more in 2019 alone. A good share of the Walton Foundation’s $25 million in annual donations also went toward testing demand management on numerous creeks and tributaries in the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.

The Walton Foundation also paid EDF millions to carry out crucial aspects of a $29 million pilot program for demand management in the Lower Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona.

Then, there’s the Walton Foundation funding media to do stories about the Colorado River. What’s troubling is that some of the stories produced omit the Walton Foundation’s role in advocating for demand management.

Because the foundation’s reach is so extensive, few of its critics are willing to speak publicly. They charge that the Walton Family Foundation doesn’t just have a seat at the table, it sets the table’s agenda. Lately, though, some “water buffaloes” seem skittish about a policy that leads to water speculation, which raises the question: Are the critics of demand management gaining traction?

Dan Beard, former chief of the Bureau of Reclamation under President Clinton, hopes so.

“They (Walton Family Foundation) think they’ve found the solution,” he said “The way they’ve done that is to get all the nonprofits on their side. I think that’s a horrible result, especially for the environmental community. We need to sow the seeds of intellectual curiosity. If you’ve come to a conclusion and you don’t deviate from that, you’re nothing more than an intellectual dictator.”

Then, there’s the impact of Walton Foundation money on media nonprofits.

Brent Gardner-Smith runs Aspen Journalism, a nonprofit statewide news organization that has received $100,000 annually for six years from the Walton Foundation. Public radio station KUNC has received three years of similar funding for its “water desk.”

In May 2020, the two nonprofits collaborated in a story exploring the investment group Water Asset Management (WAM), speculating that it sought to “buy and dry” agricultural water, leaving behind barren dust bowls. What was not reported, that only municipalities can “buy and dry” under Colorado’s already tough water anti-speculation laws. The big omission was that a Walton-funded nonprofit, the Nature Conservancy — had an ongoing demand management study — exactly where WAM was buying land.

Colorado College journalism instructor Corey Hutchins said he was surprised to hear the size of some of the funding KUNC and Aspen Journalism each receiving $100,000 apiece for several years: “That sounds like a big Colorado water story in itself,” he said. “You might also worry about self-censorship.”

A story by Politico, a for-profit news conglomerate, is illustrative. In 2018, Politico received a $200,000 grant from the Walton Foundation for special projects. In December, Politico ran a feature on the drought-stricken Colorado River that quoted the Walton foundation’s head of Colorado River philanthropy, Ted Kowalski. Yet the foundation’s involvement in river policy wasn’t mentioned; nor was Politico’s previous funding from the Walton foundation noted.

Even odder, the recent New York Times article on water speculation in the Colorado River Basin omitted the Walton influence.

Joel Dyer, former editor for Boulder Weekly, who wrote a critical Walton piece, sees the issue of transparency this way: “They’ve (the Walton Family Foundation) spread their money so much they’ve diluted anyone who could push back. The big stories, the big ideas, who’s going to look into that?”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

The post Writers on the Range: Who calls the shots on the Colorado River? appeared first on Park Record.

Paonia, a small town in western Colorado with a handful of mesas rising above it, wouldn’t green-up without water diverted from a river or mountain springs. The lively water travels through irrigation ditches for miles to gardens and small farms below. But this summer, irrigation ditches were going dry, and one, the Minnesota Canal and Reservoir Company, stopped sending water down to its 100-plus customers as early as July 13.

Drought was hitting the state and much of the West hard, but a local cause was surprising: Water theft.

Longtime residents who gather inside Paonia’s hub of information trading, Reedy’s Service Station, have a fund of stories about water theft. It’s not unusual, they say, that a rock just happens to dam a ditch, steering water toward a homeowner’s field. Sometimes, says farmer Jim Gillespie, 89, that rock even develops feet and crosses a road.

But this is comparatively minor stuff, says North Fork Water Commissioner Luke Reschke, as stealing ditchwater is a civil offense. Stealing water from a natural waterway, however, is a crime that can bring fines of $500 per day and jail time. That’s why what was happening to people who depend on the Minnesota Canal company for their fields or gardens was serious: Water was being taken from Minnesota Creek before it could be legally diverted for irrigation to paying customers.

Once the ditch company “called” for its water as of June 8, only holders of patented water rights could legally touch the creek. Yet during three trips to the creek’s beginning, starting in mid-June, and then in mid-July, I noticed that two ranches — without water rights — were harvesting bumper crops of hay. How could that have happened unless they’d illegally diverted water to their fields?

At first, no one would talk about the early-drying ditch except to hint broadly that it wasn’t normal. Then one man stepped up: Dick Kendall, a longtime board member of the Minnesota canal company, and manager of its reservoir. “On July 5,” he told me, “I saw water diverted from the creek onto one of the rancher’s land. And I wasn’t quiet about it.”

Kendall reported what he saw to Commissioner Luke Reschke, who oversees the area’s 600 springs, ditches and canals. Reschke dismissed it, he told me, because “The rumor mill is something else on Minnesota Creek. The only people who give me trouble are the new people who don’t know how the system works.” But locals say that four years back, Reschke’s predecessor, Steve Tuck, investigated when locals complained.

Though it may not be neighborly, stopping any illegal diversion is important, said Bob Reedy, owner of Reedy’s Station: “Without water, you’ve got nothing around here.” Annual rainfall is just 15 inches per year, and without water flowing into irrigation canals from the 10,000-foot mountains around town, much of the land would look like the high desert it truly is.

But it’s not just a couple of high-elevation ranchers dipping into the creek. The West Elk Coal Mine runs large pumps that supply water for its methane drilling and venting operations in the Minnesota Creek watershed.

Mine spokesperson Kathy Welt, said the diversion is legal, and that they only take early-season water when the creek water isn’t on call. That early water, however, is what begins to fill the Minnesota ditch’s reservoir.

In other ways, the mine has damaged the watershed by building a sprawling network of roads in the Sunset Roadless Area (Threats at West Elk Mine). A cease and desist order from the State Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety on June 10, sought by environmental groups, halted the building of an additional 1.6 miles of new roads this spring (Colorado Sun). Satellite images of the road network resemble a vast KOA Campground: Where trees once held back water and shaded snowpack from early melting, their replacement — gravel roads — shed water and add to early runoff.

For all of Minnesota Ditch’s challenges, warming temperatures brought about by climate change could be the real challenge. Kendall said that this spring, when he plowed out the Minnesota Reservoir road, dust covered the parched ground beneath the snow.

Water — so precious to grow grapes, hay, organic vegetables and grass-fed beef, and to keep the desert at bay — had vanished early on Lamborn Mesa above Paonia. Farmer Gillespie summed it up, “there’s just no low-snow anymore — and it’s not coming back.”

David Marston is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives part-time in Colorado.

The post Writers on the Range: If the water goes, the desert moves in appeared first on Park Record.