WASHINGTON – Both Colorado senators reintroduced a bill earlier this month seeking to increase funding for two major U.S. Forest Service programs to prevent water pollution and improve watershed health.
First introduced in 2023 by U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, the bill did not advance past the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, on which Bennet serves. A version of the bill in the House already passed the chamber in January as part of the Fix Our Forests Act.
The bipartisan bill, called the “Headwaters Protection Act,” includes cosponsors from New Mexico Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján and Sens. Mike Crapo and James Risch, both Idaho Republicans.
America’s national forests supply water for about 20% of Americans, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The most recent watershed condition classification map for the state of Colorado was conducted in 2011 by the USFS, and shows a mix of functioning and at-risk watersheds.
The San Juan National Forest has 139 watersheds. Seventy-two are rated as functioning properly, 64 are rated as functioning at risk and three are rated as impaired functioning, according to the Forest Service.
The Headwaters Protection Act is aimed at enhancing two programs: the Water Source Protection Program and the Watershed Condition Framework.
The bill would triple funding for the Water Source Protection Program from $10 to $30 million per year and authorize $30 million in new appropriations per year for the Watershed Condition Framework. It would also reduce financial barriers and broaden who can participate in and benefit from the Water Source Protection Program, including historically disadvantaged communities, while also prioritizing Water Source Protection Program projects that benefit drinking water quality and improve resilience to wildfire and climate change.
“In the West, the survival of our economy and our way of life depends on the stewardship of our forests and watersheds,” Bennet wrote in a news release. “We need to pass this legislation to protect critical water resources for downstream communities and make our forests more resilient to wildfire, drought, and a changing climate.”
John Livingston, spokesman for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said the increased funding in the legislation is “critically needed” as drought conditions intensify.
“CPW supports investment in our headwater streams to see these trickle-down benefits to the habitat and water users downstream,” Livingston wrote in a statement to The Durango Herald. “We have seen the benefits to habitat and ecosystem health and the myriad of benefits that come from doing this work. The passage of the Headwaters Protection Act would provide additional resources, stakeholder support and funding at the federal level that can complement the efforts being made on a state level to restore headwaters streams.”
Celene Hawkins, director of the Colorado River Program at the Nature Conservancy, said the entire Colorado River Basin is in a drought. She said she wakes up every day thinking about what communities are going to look like in the face of what seems to be a permanently dryer future in the basin. The Nature Conservancy is doing a “tremendous” amount of restoration work for healthy rivers and healthy watersheds, she said.
The Mountain Studies Institute in the San Juan Mountains is also working on restoration projects, said Anthony Culpepper, associate director of the Forest Program. One example of its work is mimicking beaver dams, a practice that has “demonstrated the potential to restore habitat, increase biodiversity, generate headwater storage and is broadly supported by the water community in the Southwest region of the state,” Livingston said.
As a nonadvocacy nonprofit, Mountain Studies Institute’s mission is to empower communities through education, research and practice. Though the organization is not advocating for or against any legislation, Culpepper said the increased funding from the bill would create more capacity for federal partners to collect data to provide greater knowledge and information to the community.
Catastrophic fire is one of the more prominent risks to overall watershed health, according to Culpepper. Ninety percent of national forest lands in Colorado are located in watersheds that contribute to public water supplies, and 80% of Colorado’s population relies on those water supplies, according to the Forest Service. Areas burned by wildfire each year are projected to increase 50 to 200% in Colorado by 2050, according to a 2017 report by the Colorado State Forest Service and the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
“Ideally, this legislation would provide the opportunity for better planning for those post-fire events when it comes to watershed health,” Culpepper said.
Though there is a lot of stress in the Colorado River Basin and on headwater streams in particular, Hawkins thinks that collaboration and investment into restoration work can be a “game changer” for the future.
“These are tremendous challenges (and) very hard for communities that are on the ground living through degradation of their river systems, but I also think that we can do things to heal these systems and make a better future for our communities,” Hawkins said.
Abigail Hatting is an intern for The Durango Herald and The Journal in Cortez and a senior at American University in Washington, D.C. She can be reached at ahatting@durangoherald.com.
