Unlike last year, the end of the Colorado legislative session Wednesday came with no fireworks — no protest walkouts, no intracaucus tensions boiling over into public, no last-minute implosions of keystone policy bills.
The final day of lawmakers’ nearly four-month session instead was dominated by noticeably brighter spirits as the General Assembly put the finishing touches on a slew of legislation that had dominated the final weeks.
Thornton will be able to build a critical segment of a 70-mile pipe to bring water from the Cache la Poudre River to the fast-growing suburb north of Denver, after elected leaders in Larimer County unanimously — if begrudgingly — approved a permit for the northern segment of the pipe on Wednesday night.
Colorado’s sixth-largest city, with a population of nearly 160,000, has been claiming for years that without access to Poudre water shares it has owned for decades, long-planned residential growth in the city is jeopardized — including affordable housing.
But a procession of county residents has spoken out against the proposed project at a series of public hearings held over the past couple of weeks, insisting that Thornton simply could allow its shares in the Poudre River — equaling 14,700 acre-feet a year — to flow through Fort Collins before taking the water out for municipal use.
Doing so, they say, would increase flows and improve the river’s health.
But just hours before Wednesday’s meeting, one of the opposition groups to the project — No Pipe Dream — said it sensed momentum had turned the city’s way, issuing a public statement that said “we’ll skip the torture of tonight’s hearing on our ‘good neighbor’ Thornton’s plans to win the water tap lottery and appease hungry developers.”
Before casting her yes vote Wednesday, Larimer County Commissioner Kristin Stephens said she wished Thornton would send its water down the Poudre “because that’s what the community wants.”
“We can’t do that,” she said, referring to a 2022 Court of Appeals decision that ruled that Larimer County cannot force Thornton to use the river as a conveyance.
“Thornton’s pipeline is the best of what feels like a bad solution,” she said.
Commissioner Jody Shadduck-McNally also said she wanted to keep the water in the Poudre “for as long as possible,” but noted that Thornton had satisfied the county’s land use criteria and state water law with its pipeline.
When/if Trump retakes the White House, the first thing he needs to do is investigate the DOJ’s conduct vis-à-vis Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago criminal case.
Jailing Trump is self-detonation for the Democrats, but the reality is that charging Trump with 34 felonies leaves the court with no wiggle room whatsoever.