Former Democratic state Sen. Michael Feeley, a lawyer-lobbyist who spent seven years as Minority Leader, is behind an advertising campaign aimed at torpedoing a rafting rights bill floated in the House by Rep. Kathleen Curry.

Pueblo Reservoir has more water than it has for the past decade as managers move water from other storage facilities. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the reservoir, says it has 261,200 acre-feet of water, or about 85 billion gallons. That's the most since March 2000.

A bill that could buoy or sink Colorado's rafting industry and affect hundreds of thousands of river enthusiasts and landowners may have floated through the House, but it's on the rocks in the Senate. The Capitol battle pits two core Colorado values against each other: the love of the outdoors and the allegiance to personal property rights.

Sen. Bruce Whitehead's renewable energy bill passed the Legislature on Friday in a 21-13 vote, but even before it passed, the bill generated enough heat to raise temperatures in the Senate. House Bill 1001 lifts the renewable power standard for Colorado's biggest utilities to 30 percent by 2020. It is one of Gov.

As winter melts into spring and McPhee Reservoir begins its slow ascent to full capacity, the placid waters conceal a raging battle with the hallmarks of history. Two major water providers, Montezuma Valley Irrigation Co.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., is the co-sponsor of a bill introduced Friday that will help municipalities and agencies fighting non-native invasive species that threaten Colorado's land and water supply. Those include tamarisk, zebra mussels, Eurasian watermilfoil and Russian olive, Bennet said in a press release.

Lawyers for senior water-rights owners sued the state government Monday in La Plata County and five towns, saying the state engineer is failing to protect water-rights owners from gas and oil companies. Gas and oil companies remove water from the ground after they drill wells.

Twenty-nine families afflicted by the salmonella outbreak in Alamosa's water supply sued their city government Monday. An investigation by the state Department of Public and Health and Environment concluded that salmonella bacteria from animal feces probably got into the drinking-water supply early in March 2008 and infected the entire water system for the nex

Ordinarily, it's a no-brainer for the Legislature to approve an annual bill that accepts hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for water projects. But not Friday in the House. The federal government puts up the money in low-interest loans as long as the state pays for a fifth of the costs and the state Legislature OKs the projects on the list.

It wasn’t officially “Water Day” at the state capitol Wednesday, but it certainly had the feel of it. The day included discussions of several reports on water issues, a debate in the Senate over funding for the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and a well-attended legislative luncheon hosted by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education.