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State News and Southwest Basin Roundtable

Revisions to the Criteria and Guidelines of the Water Supply Reserve Account (WSRA) were recently approved by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) and the Interbasin Compact Committee (IBCC) boards. The revised Criteria and Guidelines document is available on the CWCB website at: http://cwcb.state.co.us/LoansGrants/water-supply-reserve-account-grants/Documents/WSRACriteriaGuidelines.pdf.  Major changes include: 

·  Consideration of requests from the Statewide Account in March and September.
·  Inclusion of a CWCB grant/loan package to leverage WSRA grant dollars against CWCB loans. WSRA grant requests for projects that may qualify for loans through the CWCB loan program will receive preference in the Statewide Evaluation Criteria if the grant request is part of a CWCB loan/WSRA grant package. For these CWCB loan/WSRA grant packages, the applicant must have a CWCB loan/WSRA grant ratio of 1:1 or higher.
·  A new match requirement for requests from the Statewide Account of at least 5% of the total grant amount from basin funds. The total 20% match requirement remains intact.
·  Revised allocation of WSRA funds between the Basin and Statewide Account, from 27% to 36% for the Basin Account, and 73% to 64% for the Statewide Account.

The Southwest Basin Roundtable (SBR) continues to work on the portfolio exercises developed by the CWCB to examine alternatives to agricultural dry-up and in an effort to address identified statewide water supply gaps, especially those along the Front Range. To satisfy CWCB requests/requirements, the SBR finalized three portfolios at their January 11th meeting. In addition, the SBR plans to have plenty of representation at the March 1st Statewide Roundtables Summit to be conducted in the metro Denver area. On a final note, the SBR Public Education Participation and Outreach (PEPO) Committee continues to work on a number of measures to include: Water 2012 activities; Southwest Basin 2012 Headwaters issue; and a variety of additional PEPO initiatives. For more information on the SBR or to answer any questions, contact Mike Preston, Chair, at (970) 565-7562.

 


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