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Water Rights Resources

Water law is complex, nuanced, and can be difficult to understand. We delve into common water law concepts and provide tutorials that describe how it use publicly available tools to learn more about water rights. To this end, below are a series of articles that are designed to help parties develop a general understanding of some of the basic principles of water law. The information provided below is for educational purposes only and if you have specific questions about your water rights, please contact the attorneys at Nazarenus Stack & Wombacher for legal advice. Use of this information is explicitly subject the website disclaimer available at this link https://www.nswlaw.com/disclaimer

Call Analysis Tool Tutorial

Every water right has a priority date, which dictates when that specific water right can lawfully divert water in relationship to all of the other water rights in the area. When there is insufficient water available to satisfy the demands of all of the water rights in a particular area, then only those with the most senior priority dates are allowed to divert water; all other water rights must cease diversions. Thus, it is important to understand the frequency at which your water right is available for diversion.

The Colorado Division of Water Resources has a tool that is designed to show when (historically) your water right was “in priority” (thus, available to divert water) and when it was “out of priority” (meaning it was prohibited from diverting water). This useful tool can be found at the following link: https://dwr.state.co.us/tools/ under the “Administrative Call and Analysis” tab, as shown below:

Clicking on the “Structure Call Analysis” link will take you to the following page where you can input the Water Division in which the water right is located and the name of the water right, as shown below:

Once you’ve located your water right, select the appropriate water right and enter the date range for your call analysis, as shown below. Note that the tool can only analyze 10 years at a time; if you want data for more than 10 years you will need to run the analysis multiple times using different date ranges.

Once you run the analysis you will recieve a report, as shown below. This report will tell you the percentage of days that the water right was out of priority and unable to divert during the analysis period and will provide a list of water rights that have placed calls on the river that impact the water right in question. As shown below, the water right for Chatfield Reservoir was out of priority 0.00% of the days during the analysis period, which means that the water right was able to divert at any time that it wanted water. This is the best possible scenario. Water rights with a more junior (i.e., more recent in time) priority may be out of priority for a large percentage of time.

If you have questions about the priority of your water right or the call analysis tool, please contact the experienced attorneys at Nazarenus Stack & Wombacher LLC.

William Wombacher