©The Daily Sentinel
Byline: Gary Harmon

Water wars in the East should serve as a warning to Colorado to store more water, Sen. Wayne Alllard, R-Colo., told Western Slope leaders on Saturday.

Allard, who is in the final year of his second term as senator, said that droughts have sapped water in the East and that fights such as that between Tennessee and Georgia could be previews to water fights in the West.

To avert fights over the state’s water, Colorado must immediately figure out how to store the 1.2 million acre-feet the state has been allotted under the compact that divvies up the Colorado River and its tributaries, Allard told Club 20, the Western Slope lobbying and promotional organization.

Club 20 met for its spring meeting at Two Rivers Convention Center.

In the worst case, Congress would draft new laws to make water decisions, or the federal government would mediate water fights among the states, Allard said.

“Even the best-case scenario scares me,” he said to about 200 people during his keynote speech.

“We must increase storage capacity to deal with droughts,” Allard said. “The state should move to do so immediately.”

Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Tennessee are embroiled in fights over water, most recently marked by Georgia’s effort to redraft its boundary with Tennessee so Georgia could obtain more water for its parched lands.

Allard is retiring after two terms in the Senate and three in the House. Democrat Mark Udall and Republican Bob Schaffer are the presumptive candidates to replace him.

In his final months, Allard said, the federal government has made too little use of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act to deal with the bark beetle, which has destroyed 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine in Colorado’s headwaters counties.

Those trees are “a tinderbox waiting for a lighted match” and need more attention, he said.

Colorado’s oil shale also needs to be developed, Allard said. Although regulatory schemes are being established, “we should not bring the entire process to a grinding halt,” he said.

Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat, has taken a reasonable approach “so far” to drilling for natural gas on the Roan Plateau, Allard said.