Middle Park Water official defends Circle C Ranch agreement, says rights were not 'given away'

Kent Whitmer, general counsel and manager for Middle Park Water Conservancy District, briefed the Board of County Commissioners on Feb. 11 about a multi-year effort to maintain and potentially develop conditional water rights in the Troublesome Basin.

Whitmer said the district’s existing conditional rights date to the 1960s and that a new landowner of the proposed reservoir site (Circle C Ranch) agreed to bear engineering, legal and permitting costs in exchange for a perpetual 2 percent share of reservoir capacity if a reservoir is built. “If they build it to full capacity, that’s the equivalent of about 400 acre-feet a year for nothing,” Whitmer said, and emphasized the agreement is structured as a trade—landowner-funded development in return for a share of created storage rather than a cash sale of rights.

Whitmer pushed back on reporting that compared the Troublesome water bundle to Colorado-Big-Thompson (CBT) values and concluded Middle Park had “given away $1 billion” of water rights. He said the CBT comparison is not valid because water values vary by location and market; he noted Wolford and Granby water have historically sold for far less in local markets. Whitmer also said the agreement contains explicit limits: water created by a district-origin project “has to be utilized for the benefit of the constituents in the district” and cannot be used for out-of-district, trans-basin export.

Commissioners questioned timelines, public opposition, and how much of the original bundle has already been developed. Whitmer said the landowner’s agreement includes four diligence cycles (roughly 24 years total) to complete permitting and financing; the district is working toward settlement with an opposer group, Save the World's Rivers, which had filed a statement of opposition in water-court proceedings.