By: Marissa Markus

On May 10, 2017, I attended the Taylor Local User Group (TLUG) meeting as a guest. TLUG meetings are held at the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District (UGRWCD) office for users of Taylor Park Reservoir and Taylor River. UGRWCD hosts a diversity of meetings pertaining to constituents and their water management needs, but the purpose of this meeting was to incorporate users’ flow requests into the Taylor Park Reservoir operations plan proposal. Earlier this year, the group met and discussed how much water they wanted and when. In general, the plan incorporates hydrologic conditions, ramping rate stipulations, peak flow targets, end of year flow and storage targets, and release requests by users and requests discussed at the Four Parties meeting. The plan utilized the May 15 forecast data of 107,000 acre feet (AF) of April-July runoff into Taylor Park Reservoir. The plan was then updated and included actual data through May 18^th. Even since then, Frank Kugel, the General Manager at UGRWCD suggests that since inflows to the reservoir have been higher than previous projections, there may be a need to increase releases beyond what is presented in the current plan. Adjustments could be made to prevent Taylor Park Reservoir from spilling. This means that Frank will have to continue to make changes to his fun and fancy excel spreadsheets that compiles data and helps forecast flows.

As you may have noticed, predicting and managing flows for a diversity of stakeholders can be complicated and requires frequent adjustments. As Frank likes to say, “If everyone leaves equally mad, then I have done my job.” I didn’t find that to be the case, though. Remembering that this year is forecasted to operate as a wet year, I felt a good sense of community at the meeting. Frank successfully coordinated with Bureau of Reclamation, the angler representative, the agriculture representative, the private land representative, the Uncompahgre user representative, the marina representative, and the fisheries representative to adopt an operating plan for Taylor Park Reservoir. Managing flow releases from the reservoir is no easy task, but I would like believe that if there is a water challenge, UGRWCD likes to take a stab at a solution. Better yet, in this case, they created a useable solution and reasonable plan.