Local Control: Our Commitment to Our Neighbors

To me, local control means staying close to our customers, who depend on us for their health and well-being. I am part of the district; other than simply acting as a good neighbor, I don’t believe we are here to make decisions for the benefit of anyone outside of our district.

Besides my service on the Parker Water Board, I am a Member and Vice Chair of the Douglas County Water Commission. Why? First, because I am committed to being involved in water policy, via the countywide water plan, and shaping the future for all DougCo residents, especially Parker residents.

But I also am committed to protecting the interests of Parker Water customers in a county that includes 35 different water providers. In the face of our county’s explosive growth over the last decades, there have been overt attempts to manipulate our sources of supply, and particularly some recent efforts to have the county insert itself into our own water planning process.

I see this as a threat to our local control, but also as an opportunity to lead and develop collaborations and the sharing of best practices and resources. As Vice Chair, I have played a major role in developing the contract for a Douglas County Water Plan that will help our water providers meet the future, as well as educate the public on the issues and challenges related to water scarcity. I’m 100% behind the County plan objectives and believe it will be valuable to all county residents. It will also show the leadership of our utility on these questions.

To me, local control also means the full support to the Reuter-Hess recreational commission.  This is our reservoir! How fortunate we are to have it, and everything it offers! This is a $250,000,000 asset and a huge boon to the community: Not only for water (almost three years’ worth of water storage), but recreationally, as well. In 2022, operations of the recreational facilities were assumed by Douglas County under the direction of the Reuter-Hess Recreational Authority, with full-time rangers and additional improvements. It is a very popular amenity—our amenity—for all of us to share.

PWSD is a large, well-capitalized water utility, with over a billion dollars of assets used to provide life-sustaining services to our community. That equals $52,993 in assets for each and every account in the service territory. If you own a home, you think about the equity you hold in it as part of your personal financial base. But you also own a water tap—and the right to use the assets behind that tap to your benefit in the form of water delivery and wastewater services. In effect, you have something akin to an equity position in the water utility. Don’t you think the decisions made governing that utility should be made with your interests top of mind?

Recognition of the investments we have made in our utility is why we all should be concerned about outsiders or interlopers attacking the Board and our utility operations—as happened in the last election. These are attacks on our community assets, which we all own, not simply some faceless, uncaring, plodding, self-serving government bureaucracy. Our utility is literally owned by us customers, and attacks on the utility are indeed attacks on us, our community, and our future.

Local control means Parker Water can be forward thinking, focused intently on ensuring we have adequate water supplies—well—forever! In addition to developing and managing our extensive ground water resources, Parker Water has taken on the Platte Valley Water Partnership as part of the quest to make the necessary move to renewable water supplies. Notably, this is being done in partnership and collaboration with agriculture interests in the lower South Platte valley through an agreement with Lower South Platte Water Conservation District. This partnership aligns beautifully with the strategies articulated in the Colorado Water Plan. No landowner agricultural water rights are slated to conversion—that is, there will be no “buy and dry”—but rather the project will harvest currently unappropriated water from the South Platte River. This project, unlike the controversial Renewable Water Resources project, has not been conceived to profit investors—except for those of us personally invested in our own communities’ futures.

To me, local control means recognizing the irreplaceable value of our community’s water, and making decisions that benefit our utility and our customers. Not water speculators. Period.