City of Canon City/Town of Buena Vista/Parkville WD
CDPHE was a partner in the inaugural Salida water festival on August 13, 2016. These water systems set up an exhibit for kids to discover how contaminates get into our groundwater resources and to learn how source water protection plans work to reduce the risk of these contaminates. They also handed out water bottles with CDPHE’s source water assessment and protection website on it so people could learn more about source water protection planning efforts. Parkville WD and Lake County collaborated and signed the first source water-related Memorandum of Understanding between a county and public water system. Canon City also has an MOU with Fremont County.
The town of Basalt used a portion of their grant funds to create a 12-month photo wall calendar, which they distributed to local businesses and government offices. Each month had a locally taken photograph displaying the town's beauty pair with text on a potential source of contamination and tips to reduce its risk to the water supply. Use as reminders for the community as of what they can do to help source water protection.
Denver Water - with the professional assistance of the Coalition for the Upper South Platte - took on a larger scale protection planning effort in the Upper South Platte. There was a very diverse and large group of stakeholders involved in this project. Sarah Dominick of Denver Water led this effort and used the protection planning template to incorporate this important work into Denver’s other watersheds (ex: Fraser River Protection Plan). Denver Water was very pro-active in implementing Best Management Practices. They have collaborated and signed memorandums of understanding with Park, Jefferson, and Teller Counties. In addition, Denver purchased emergency spill kits and distributed them to local fire districts in the watershed.
The City of Boulder completed their protection plan in July of 2017. They had excellent stakeholder and inter-agency involvement and over 50 voluntary best management practices (BMP) were identified for implementation. They have a dedicated source water protection specialist, Kate Dunlap, to implement the management approaches through a well thought out and coordinated action plan with the stakeholders. Their keystone BMP project was the purchase of a goose waste harvester that is used to remove the waste from the beach and surrounding grass areas at Boulder Reservoir. Over 1,800 pounds of waste was removed in the first year of the project equating to 1,443 lbs of carbon, 91 lbs of nitrogen, and 28 lbs or phosphorus. The waste removal should reduce nutrient loading to the reservoir and assist with swim beach closures from excessive bacteria levels. The City of Boulder is now working with Open Space Mountain Parks to recycle this waste to enhance soils for agricultural use. A very innovative approach to reduce and reuse nutrients.
