Finding Dollars For Drops | Resilience In The Rockies

Saving water is one challenge; finding the money to build conservation projects is another.

The fourth episode of Resilience In The Rockies examines how Colorado communities are assembling federal, state, local, and private funding to turn water-efficiency ideas into infrastructure, with WaterNow helping local partners identify opportunities, navigate complex grant programs, and strengthen applications.

Along the Rio Grande near Del Norte, partners combined a $1.2 million Bureau of Reclamation WaterSMART grant with state funding, private philanthropy, and contributions from water users to modernize the Farmers Union diversion, which serves 12 other ditches.

The rebuilt diversion improves agricultural water delivery while adding fish passage, automated head gates, streambank stabilization, and aquatic habitat—giving multiple interests a reason to invest in the same project.

In Alamosa, a failing irrigation system at Cattails Golf Course had pushed a planned city project to about $1.3 million, until a $500,000 WaterSMART grant helped close the funding gap.

The upgrade replaced more than 10,000 feet of leaking pipe and added precise irrigation controls that allow staff to reduce watering in roughs and other lower-priority areas during drought; the city says the system has been saving about a dozen acre-feet of water annually in recent dry years.

Greeley faced a much larger infrastructure problem as aging meter batteries began failing across a system with roughly 29,000 meters, leaving the utility with estimated readings and little ability to spot leaks quickly.

About $3.5 million in federal WaterSMART grants helped accelerate Greeley’s move to advanced metering infrastructure, giving the utility 15-minute usage data, improving meter accuracy, reducing manual reading routes, and giving customers much faster information about leaks and their own water use.

Across the three projects, the lesson is straightforward: conservation is infrastructure, and expanding it at meaningful scale requires capital, partnerships, staff capacity, and often outside expertise to help communities compete for the funding that makes projects possible.

Resilience In The Rockies is a waterloop series produced in collaboration with WaterNow and made possible in part by a grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, with support from PCL Construction, Norris Design, Merrick, and the City of Greeley.