Potentially 54,000 new residents blocked from moving to Thornton due to water pipeline dispute, city officials say

By Kati Weis and Dillon Thomas

Whether you're a native with decades of family roots, or a new addition to the Centennial State, the signs of growth — and growing pains — are impossible to miss.  Housing is harder to find, the roads are more crowded, and the demand for drinking water is greater than ever. 

In that vein, two Colorado municipalities are debating over water, fighting over how to transport a pristine water supply from western Larimer County down south to the city of Thornton.  

Thornton city officials tell CBS News Colorado that dispute is costing the city in a major way. They say the construction of 18,000 housing units is on hold until the fight is resolved, preventing potentially 54,000 new residents from moving into the city. 

And while the water sits in Larimer, it's doing no good for thirsty mouths. Larimer County can't use the water, since Thornton owns the rights.  

Thus, Thornton officials are seeking a compromise everyone can agree upon, but as CBS News Colorado found, that journey has been lengthy and complicated, and a quick solution isn't in close sights.  

Thornton's position: Officials 'wish there could be more dialogue with Larimer County' 

This story began four decades ago, when the city of Thornton bought the 19,000-acre water supply in the 1980s as a way to plan for future growth.  

"There are a lot of people that came before us and planned for this," said Brett Henry, Thornton's executive director of infrastructure. 

Henry says Thornton first tried to tap into that purchase in 2014 to make way for more population growth.  

"The Thornton water project, specifically, actually kicked off in 2014, starting the whole process of figuring out okay, 'how do we take this water and bring it down?'" Henry said.  

To access that precious resource, the city tried to build a pipeline to send it down south, but grassroots groups fought hard against it. Some activists wanted to see the water be sent down the Cache la Poudre River instead of through a pipeline, to help increase the river's flow.

"For myself, more so is the disruption of the Poudre River," one No Pipe Dream activist told CBS News Colorado in 2018. "The future of the Poudre River is the future of the Front Range." 

But Thornton officials counter that solution would barely make a mark in the river's strength, and would instead cost the city nearly $1 billion to re-cleanse the water once it reaches Thornton's borders.  

Henry says right now, the drinking water the city owns in Larimer County is free of toxic PFAS, also called "forever chemicals," but if it is sent down the river, that could change.  

PFAS contamination is already an issue the city of Thornton is battling. A CBS News Colorado investigation reported in September the city is currently examining how to lower the PFAS levels in the city's water supply already flowing within the city limits.

"The Poudre River is actually the hypotenuse of a triangle, it would actually shave off a lot of miles of potential pipeline, but unfortunately, it goes right through the center of Fort Collins. There's wastewater discharges, urban runoff, so you have you have a degraded water supply at that point, versus where it currently comes off the river," Henry said. "Any water utility knows you're going to take it from the better source, not the worst source." 

Henry added, "the type of treatment that would be necessary for that would be extremely expensive, and then even the discharges associated with the treatment processes can be difficult to find an appropriate place to dispose of that byproduct material as well." 

After Larimer County commissioners shot down Thornton's original proposal, the city sued, and this October, the city lost in a state appeals court. But Thornton also received somewhat of a win in the judgement, with the court saying Larimer cannot force Thornton to send its water down the Poudre River.  

"The court of appeals very clearly stated that that was not something that the Larimer County commissioners could be considering," Henry said. "So, we thought that some good bumpers were also put on the conversation." 

Instead of appealing any further in court, Thornton has decided to go back to the drawing board and try to make things work with Larimer County commissioners. 

The city is now hoping to put forward a new pipeline proposal everyone can agree on. It's a compromise the city's deputy director of city development, Jason O'Shea, says Thornton desperately needs.

"We have over 100 active development projects in some phase or fashion. We currently have a population of 147,000, we have a water in our water portfolio to get us to 162,000, and most of that water has been taken for developments, so it's been spoken for," O'Shea said. "So, people that are entering the projects, or in the projects, unless they can get subdivided, we can't provide them certainty of water. So, those people are kind of frozen in those phases." 

O'Shea added there are about 20 to 30 projects that are in that "frozen" state as a result of the pipeline dispute. Some of those development projects include large apartment complexes.  

"Up to 18,000 units for example," O'Shea said. "So, say three people per unit, do the math there, that's 54,000 people that would be added, just from what we've gotten zoned already, or that are applied in process." 

Asked how he feels about all of those potential residents being blocked from coming to Thornton, O'Shea said, "it's frustrating for sure." 

For a compromise to happen, O'Shea says they have been asking for a sit-down meeting with Larimer County Commissioners, to better understand their position on what should be done differently. However, the city says commissioners have refused, despite multiple requests for sit-down meetings.  

Thornton argues the issue is no longer under judicial review, now that the lawsuit is off the table, so legal barriers preventing a meeting can no longer be raised as a reason against a meeting. Regardless, city officials have only been able to meet with Larimer County staff, and they feel they are still left with questions and concerns on how to create the most productive proposal that commissioners will actually approve.  

"I've seen the town grow and the city grow from 90,000 people to 147,000 people. So, opportunities are definitely being lost in the short term till we get certainly in water," O'Shea said.  

While Thornton waits for Larimer to come to the table, the city is drawing up new plans to propose to Larimer County, and hoping they will be accepted.  

"Generally speaking, the alignments that we're looking at tend to stay north… and then follow either previously crude pipeline projects, such as the northern integrated supply project, that was the pipeline in Larimer County improved after ours (was denied), or other areas that kind of minimize impacts to the local residents or the local natural resources," Henry said.  

Asked if he feels Larimer is holding his city's water hostage, Henry replied, "the court of appeals was, like I said, I think a good check on kind of the whole process, the entire process that showed we've always gone into this with good faith efforts… I do wish there could be more dialogue with Larimer County themselves as far as again figuring out what their needs are and what our needs are, and how we can actually meet in the middle." 

Larimer's position: 'It is not necessarily an us versus them thing'

For more than four years, CBS News Colorado has been seeking comment from Larimer County on their stance when it came to the evolving application processes completed by Thornton. However, each time requests were comment were declined due to either pending applications or ongoing litigation.  

For the first time, now that a judge has sided with Larimer County and the litigation ended, Larimer County agreed to have an interview on the topic.  

CBS News Colorado asked the Larimer County Board of Commissioners for interviews on their rejections of Thornton's applications to better understand why they felt the project did not meet their 12 criteria outlined in their initial land use application process. However, the board referred the interview requests to Michelle Bird, a spokesperson for the county.  

"It is not necessarily an us versus (Thornton) thing," said Michelle Bird, Public Affairs Director for Larimer County. "The commissioners made their decision and the court reinforced that decision. That is where we are today." 

Bird argued that Thornton's proposals for their project did not prioritize the wellbeing of Larimer County and it's residents, saying Thornton was not giving their best effort to meet the standards outlined by the county's ordinances. Bird said many other projects in the county are permitted every year after meeting the same criteria which Thornton's proposals failed to.  

"The county absolutely thinks that the criteria in the land use code are achievable criteria," Bird said.  

Bird said the county's board of commissioners has an obligation to review applications for land use projects and weigh whether or not the projects would jeopardize residents and their wellbeing.   

"It is put in place to protect the health, the safety and the welfare of our Larimer County residents," Bird said.    

Many residents, like Dick Brauch, argued Thornton's pipeline would jeopardize those qualities of life for them. Brauch owned property along Douglas Road in Larimer County, just north of Fort Collins city limits. The farm he operated was going to be impacted by Thornton's project.  

Thornton planners told CBS News Colorado they needed to build a pump station on Bracuh's property and planned to buy the land from him in order to do so. However, when reached by CBS News Colorado, Brauch said he didn't have much of an option as Thornton was going to use eminent domain to force him to sell some of his property.   

He admitted that Thornton was willing to negotiate with him on where the station would go on his farm. However, unless he was willing to give up his beloved work shop garage, the pump station would have to be built in the dead middle of his farm in order to meet county guidelines on distances between driveways along Douglas Road.  

Therefore the building would then be in the way of his ability to freely irrigate and tend to his farm without a major blockade in the way.  

"It makes it pretty much impossible to farm any of this," Brauch said. "I have no desire to sell this farm, it has been in my family for 60 years." 

Many other residents along Douglas Road argued the pipeline would cause months, or years, of traffic detours. Thornton officials told CBS News Colorado they were only going down Douglas Road as a way to avoid construction through private properties, also noting that if a pipe did break the damage would be easier to fix under a road than under someone's lawn. However, if the residents wanted the roadway largely unobstructed, Thornton at the time was willing to build the pipeline through yards instead.  

Bird said the county's commissioners had to weigh the impacts the proposed project would have on residents and ultimately deemed it was more than just an inconvenience to residents with traffic delays.  

"It is not necessarily an instance of inconvenience. That is not why the application was denied, it was the impact of the health safety and welfare," Bird said.  

When Thornton first attempted to claim their water there were only a dozen criteria they had to meet in order to get an approval. Now, in 2022, a new board of commissioners has more than doubled the amount of criteria needing to be met, with more than two dozen new boxes that need to be checked.  

While Thornton city officials told CBS News Colorado they wanted to sit and meet with the commissioners to reach a deal on how both sides could make the project work, Bird said the county commissioners have no interest in negotiating any short cuts around their rules.  

"Unfortunately, this is a situation where we don't do negotiations. That is not how land use processes work," Bird said.  

Bird said the commissioners aren't middle men who try and strike a deal between the residents of the county and applicants. Rather, she compared the commissioners to judges who rule on laws and apply them between two parties in a disagreement.  

"The application did not meet the criteria necessary to approve the application, so the application was denied," Bird said. "If a project can't be done without jeopardizing health and safety, maybe it is not a good project to do." 

Bird said the county commissioners did not create additional criteria for their land use codes purely because of Thornton's applications and lawsuits.  

"We have a new board of county commissioners since this application was last heard. This board of county commissioners saw how our community is growing very quickly, the urban renewal interface is changing, and they decided they needed to update the land use code to further protect the health and welfare of our community members," Bird said.  

The county itself also has to meet the standards they lay out for any projects they may want to complete. Bird noted that the county would never create a set of rules that would make their own projects for their own residents either unreasonably expensive or difficult to complete.  

"They're not interested in preventing projects from happening, or preventing people from doing things with their property that they want to," Bird said.  

Larimer County commissioners are said to be open and willing to welcome another application from Thornton to claim the water which they legally purchased decades ago. Bird said there is no denial from the county that Thornton owns the water and rights. However, the dispute lies in both sides not being able to find a pathway to getting the water out of Larimer County and to the portions of the pipeline already installed through Weld County.  

With Thornton refusing to give up on their efforts to claim what is theirs, Bird said the county looks forward to seeing an application that meets all of the additional standards the county now expects from applicants.  

"The commissioners made their decision and it is done. If Thornton wants to renew the project they will have to go through the process again. They will have to start from the beginning," Bird said. "If Thornton can submit an application that meets all of the criteria the commissioners are interested in making sure that is a project that can meet their needs and also keep our residents safe."