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Staff outlines integrated water-supply planning tied to Boulder comprehensive plan; scenarios show supply adequate under most futures
Summary
Utilities staff presented four future scenarios to inform an integrated water supply plan and the city’s comprehensive-plan update, finding Boulder’s municipal supply is broadly robust under three of four modeled scenarios but that more extreme climate impacts could create significant risk.
City water staff told the Water Resources Advisory Board on July 21 that the Boulder comprehensive-plan update — and the integrated water supply planning that will follow it — should together guide long-term decisions about how land use and water supply align through 2050.
Crystal Mori, senior engineer in Water Resources, led a presentation showing four future scenarios (optimistic, continuing trends, stressed and severe) that were run through the city’s water-supply models to test reliability under climate, Colorado River and demand uncertainties. Mori said staff will develop a formal integrated water supply plan after the comprehensive-plan update is complete; that plan will combine supply, demand and conservation options and evaluate trade-offs among affordability, environmental effects and level of service.
Mori and other staff summarized key findings: under three of the four scenarios, Boulder has sufficient municipal supply to meet projected demand to 2050 when the city’s current demand projections and planned conservation are included. In the severe scenario — described as an extreme warming case with substantial streamflow declines — model runs showed material risks to supplies that would require more aggressive measures.
Staff framed the analysis within the Colorado Water Plan’s approach and the South Platte Basin projection, which the memo noted estimates a supply gap across scenarios of 500,000 to 800,000 acre-feet per year by 2050 for the entire basin (a statewide planning context, not a direct Boulder-only shortfall). Mori told the board that modeled streamflow changes across scenarios ranged from roughly a 10% increase in an optimistic case to about a 30% decrease in the most severe case, and that demand-side drivers include projected increases in irrigation needs as temperatures rise.
On conservation and demand management, staff said existing gains are primarily indoor-efficiency driven and that larger future savings would require more structural actions such as landscape conversions from turf to water-wise plantings, system capital investments to reduce distribution losses, and expanded metering and customer outreach. Staff provided a rough current split of water use as about 55% outdoor and 45% indoor and said more aggressive conservation efforts (for example, large-scale landscape conversions and real-time metering) would require significant capital investment and sustained programs.
Staff also discussed how the comprehensive plan’s land-use decisions matter to utility planning: changes in allowed land use (for example, industrial to higher-density residential) affect timing, location and magnitude of future water demand and therefore infrastructure needs. The comprehensive-plan update began late in 2024; staff said planning-team briefings to the board are scheduled in September and staff expect to return again in the first quarter of 2026 as the comp-plan process identifies preferred directions and population projections to feed the integrated water supply plan.
Board members and consultants on the call commended the scenario approach and suggested complementary analyses such as stress tests (which identify how much change the system can tolerate) and more emphasis on variability as well as long-term mean changes. Mori and staff acknowledged those suggestions and said more detailed analysis would be part of the integrated water-supply-plan scope once the comprehensive-plan policy direction is set.
