Cedaredge Has Two Water Systems
Cedaredge has 1) a municipal, domestic water system and 2) an irrigation water system.
Are Cedaredge’s water resources something to worry about?
Worry? No, but they are something that Town Trustees, the Administrator, the Public Works Director, and all Town citizens need to understand, and to protect and preserve.
- Objective #2 under the Growth Management Goal of the 2017 Master Plan is for Town Government to provide Town residents with adequate and affordable public water and sewer service.
- Sub-sections include maintaining safe drinking water standards, supporting conservation of water in all uses, providing adequate wastewater treatment meeting State of Colorado Standards, and the upgrading of water transmission lines and storage capacity to meet projected future needs.
So, Town citizens have spoken about water in general, but have not distinguished between the Town’s municipal, domestic water and its irrigation water.
Why that distinction: domestic water versus irrigation water?
Because they are different, and citizens often lump them together when thinking about water use, water waste, and water rates.
What’s the difference?
Municipal Domestic Water:
- Domestic water is the Town’s potable water – the water that reaches citizens’ houses via underground pipes, flows to sinks, baths and showers, toilets, laundry machines, and to outside hose bibs and for which citizens pay a monthly standard flat rate and an additional volume usage rate.
- Domestic water runs in pipes from its source (several Grand Mesa springs) to the water treatment plant where it is filtered and treated. Fully treated water flows from there through pipes into Town neighborhoods and eventually comes out of citizens’ faucets after flowing through a water meter.
- Cedaredge has more than a dozen freshwater springs from whence our domestic water arises.
- The monthly standard rates and usage fees citizens pay support the maintenance of main and lateral transmission pipes, operation of the water treatment plant, maintenance of storage tanks, valves, fire hydrants, and all other elements of the Town’s domestic water system.
View the domestic water dashboard HERE at the Cedaredge – In Data menu of this website
Irrigation Water:
Irrigation water is the Town’s non-potable – water that winter snowmelt and summer rains provide that is collected in Grand Mesa lakes and reservoirs and then flows in creeks and ditches, is diverted, and stored in retention ponds, and eventually flows onto fields, crops, or in Cedaredge’s case, flows via gravity or is pumped into irrigation systems such as at the golf course.
Irrigation water does not flow through citizens’ water meters, so Town citizens pay no water bill fees for it.
It can’t be overly emphasized that the water flowing onto the golf course via its sprinkler systems is completely different than the water coming out of citizens’ faucets, and there is no billing whatsoever for that golf course water usage.
- However, it would be untrue to claim that golf course water usage doesn’t have to be budgeted.
- There are obviously costs to maintain the ditches, diversion points, storage ponds, pumps, water user association share dues, etc.
- Those costs, however, are a very small proportion (generally less than a few percent) of the Water Fund’s annual expenditures – what accountants call De minimus or too trivial to sort out and list as separate line items within the Water Fund’s expenditures.
- Dollars spent on the irrigation system varies from year to year depending on the Town’s capital expenditure budget to improve or maintain the irrigation system.
- For instance, the 2024 capital budget includes $50,000 to reconstruct the irrigation water impoundment at Chipmunk Reservoir.
- However, it’s important to note that when irrigation infrastructure improvements, maintenance, or general expenditures are specifically for the golf course, which they really always are, (the golf course is the only user of the Town’s irrigation water), they are budgeted within the Golf Course Enterprise Fund, not within the Water Fund.
View the irrigation water dashboard HERE at the Cedaredge – In Data menu of this website.