Denver Water
Denver Water is a water utility that operates as a public agency serving the City and County of Denver, Colorado, and a portion of its surrounding suburbs. Established in 1918, the utility is funded by water rates and new tap fees. It is Colorado's oldest and largest water utility.
Overview
The challenge for any city in Colorado is the arid character of the countryside. Denver and its suburbs are an artificial oasis in a landscape that would otherwise be nearly without trees or bushes. The amount of water is also quite variable, both from year to year and within each year. The greatest water flows happen in the spring and early summer as the mountain snowpack melts. In order to have water in drier times dams have been constructed to hold back water from wet periods and transmountain diversions from the wetter Colorado Western Slope to the Front Range urban corridor and Eastern Plains have been created.Denver Water is an independent agency that derives its authority and existence from Article X of the Charter of the City and County of Denver. Though owned and employed by Denver, the property and personnel controlled by the Board of Water Commissioners are referred to as Denver Water. Though they have also, at times, been called the Denver Water Board, the Water Board, and the Denver Water Department. Historically, it was also called the Denver Municipal Water Works in its earliest years. The agency sets it own employment rules subject to the Denver City Charter and Article XX of the Colorado Constitution governing civil service employees.
Service area
Denver water provides water to the people living in the City and County of Denver as well as 75 contractual distributors in the surrounding suburbs of Denver in the combined service area. In 2024 this area had an approximate population of 1.5 million people.Water system
The sources of Denver's water supply are split almost evenly with half coming from west of the Continental Divide and the Colorado River system and half from tributaries of the South Platte River. In a year without water shortages or other issues around 20% of the total comes from the Fraser River and Williams Fork in Grand County. Another 30% comes from the Blue River, also on the West Slope and the primary water source in the east is the South Platte River itself, with smaller amounts also being sourced from South Boulder Creek, Ralston Creek, and Bear Creek.There are 17 reservoirs, lakes, or storage complexes that are owned by Denver Water or where it has a right to a portion of the water stored. The largest of these is the Dillon Reservoir with a capacity of., 90% of the storage capacity of the system feeds into the southern collection system. The 10% of storage in the northern system is collected through the Moffat Tunnel and most of the storage is in Gross Reservoir.
History
Private companies
The history of Denver Water is rooted in the private companies, personal water diversions, and government regulation that preceded its creation. The city of Denver itself was only founded in 1859 and at that time the high plains of the shortgrass prairie were widely regarded an "arid desert" as Francis Parkman described it in 1849. Traveling to Bent's Fort he described a water deficient landscape where, "the only vegetation was a few tufts of short grass, dried and shriveled by the heat." The first residents of the Denver area drank water directly from nearby creeks and rivers, using buckets to transport it to residences and businesses.This was not adequate for a settlement of any size so prior to the creation of Denver Water more than a dozen private water companies were founded in Denver, most of them short lived. The first of these was the Auraria and Cherry Creek Water Company. It was founded in 1859 soon after settlement began, but it made no progress in building any ditches to provide water. The second was the Capitol Hydraulic Company, which was granted a charter by the Kansas Territory legislature in 1860 and began construction the same year. Progress was slow and in 1865 businessman John W. Smith founded the Platte Water Company which bought out Capitol Hydraulic and moved the source upstream on the Platte River. By 1867 the City Ditch had been completed by the company and was delivering water to what is now the Capitol Hill neighborhood. The ditch delivered water to Smith Lake in what became Washington Park. Initially the work was done by hand, but an oxen powered rotary canal builder and railroad excavator was employed later in the construction.
The construction of irrigation systems rapidly transformed Denver and surrounding areas. By 1865 visitors like Albert Richardson reported that Colorado agriculture was quite successful. Ornamental lawns, gardens, and trees were planted in the 1860s and 1870s with visitors reporting on their beauty and success in contrast to earlier narratives of the dry and desolate appearance of the city.
Though successful, the Platte River Company also frequently fell short of expected water deliveries. Critics thought the company had not correctly engineered its system while the company blamed low water in the river. Seeing an opening for competition, businessman James Archer formed the Denver City Water Company in November 1870. The company built a system of pipes fed by a pumping station built near the mouth of Cherry Creek where it empties into the South Platte River. With two pumps built by Holly Manufacturing, this first pumping station was capable of providing
of water each day.
Because the well supplying the pumping station was in the middle of the city, the water became contaminated by the growing population. Between 1879 and 1896 there were at least six major outbreaks of water borne typhoid fever. In response the company built a filtration plant using sand beds in 1889. Together with the 1897 typhoid vaccine and introduction of water chlorination outbreaks of the disease in Denver became rare in the early 20th century.
While private companies were the rule, concerns regarding the stability and cost of supply were growing. In 1874 the territorial legislature amended the Denver city charter allowing it to, "own water works of any description." This enabled the city to purchase Smith's City Ditch in 1882 to continue providing irrigation water to the city's lawns and trees.
Internal squabbling at the Denver Water Company also lead two of its founders, Walter Cheesman and David Moffat, to leave and found the Citizens' Water Company in 1889. This new corporation began purchasing agricultural land and its senior water rights and building works far upstream of the city at the entrance to the Platte Canyon in Jefferson County. A drought in 1890 reduced the flow in the Platte and Citizen's responded with new infrastructure projects for storage including the Ashland Avenue Reservoir, the Alameda Avenue Tank, and Marston Lake.
The competition between Citizens' Water Company and the Denver Water Co. was fierce, but ended with victory for Citizen's in 1894. The renamed Denver Union Water Company purchased the rival company's assets out of receivership and was thereafter the only water provider in Denver.
Denver Union Water Company
The new monopoly did continue with improvements to its infrastructure. The Capitol Hill Reservoir and it pump station were completed in 1899. In order to store more spring runoff for the drier parts of the year plans were made to build a dam and reservoir in the Platte Canyon. The location selected by the company, unlike San Francisco's O'Shaughnessy Dam or the Los Angeles Aqueduct, was neither a beloved natural wonder or settled by farmers so there was no controversy surrounding its construction. The company applied for the needed permissions in 1894 and construction started in the spring of 1899. The construction on the dam was almost complete when spring floods came in 1900. On May 3 the earth fill dam was overtopped and swept away. Work almost immediately began on an improved hybrid arch-gravity design for Cheesman Dam. The second dam was also constructed of masonry where the first had been an earth fill design faced with concrete and steel. The large granite blocks, some weighing as much as, used to build the dam were cut nearby. Construction of the dam was finished in 1905. At 221 feet in height it was then the tallest dam in the world, a status it would hold for the next seven years.Moffat had continued to be a major force behind Denver Union Water, but his project to build the Denver and Salt Lake Railway pressed for more funds and he began to try to sell the company to the city. Denver was interested but a price could not be agreed upon. While residents recognized the value of the infrastructure that has been built by the company, they also resented the corruption that had allowed Cheesman and Moffat to acquire valuable natural resources and monopolize the provision of a necessity to the people. During the negotiations the city explored attempting to build a new, city owned system instead of the $9 million price offered in 1898. The city engineer thought that the total value of the system to be $3.75 million and the city council offered $4.7 through a bond issued approved by the voters 29 November 1899. This election question was ruled invalid on technical grounds in 1901, but it made the city unable to proceed with either negotiations or construction of its own system. Negotiations began again as the end of the company's franchise approached in 1910. Independent engineers were hired to appraise the company's assets in 1907 and their March 1909 report valued it at $14.4 million. Both the city and the company rejected this independent valuation. Many rounds of offers, rejections, and litigation followed over the next nine years and Moffat died in 1911. The final valuation of the system was created by attorney W.J. Chinn. This valuation was disputed by the company which took its case all the way to the US Supreme Court, where the valuation was upheld. This finally cleared the way for the sale.