BOULDER, Colo. — The University of Colorado Boulder’s Acequia Assistance Project is helping members of centuries-old water agreements, called acequias, understand their rights in Southern Colorado.
“So acequias are a social institution, an irrigation institution, an agricultural institution that originated with Spanish and Mexican settlers in what is now the American Southwest, largely in New Mexico and in Colorado, and the four southern counties of Colorado around the San Luis Valley,” Gregor MacGregor, faculty fellow at CU’s Law School and leader of the Acequia Assistance Project, said.
MacGregor said acequias were established before the United States became a country and before Colorado became a state. But after statehood, acequias faced legal trouble.
“The acequia institution was not recognized by Colorado law. The Constitution said that only the law of prior appropriation applied, and because the acequias are governed by equity, by communal labor, by these practices that don't necessarily align with prior appropriation, they weren't recognized,” MacGregor said. “This changed in 2009 when a member of the community, Ed V. Hill, brought the acequia recognition statute to the Colorado legislature, which essentially legalized the formal and legal recognition of acequias in Colorado. So, it ended a 150 year period during which acequias had been excluded from Colorado's water courts, from the kind of financing structures and other benefits that come along with legal recognition and organization.”
MacGregor said CU’s Acequia Assistance Program is helping communities understand their rights.
“Just because your rights are recognized doesn't mean you have the money to hire an attorney, to write your bylaws, to take you to water court, to do all these things that we know are expensive and cost prohibitive for certain communities. So, in being able to actually provide those services on a pro bono basis, through funding from our PACES (Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship) Office, through the volunteer hours of our students and private attorneys, we've really been able to enable the community to chart their own path into the future,” MacGregor said.
David Meens, the director of CU’s Office for Public and Community Engaged Scholarship, said discussing acequias is especially important during Hispanic Heritage Month and during a time when water rights are a part of a larger national conversation.
“These alternative ways of organizing communities and dealing with water have the potential also to inform policy changes that are increasingly necessary at a broader scale. So, this work, which addresses the needs of very specific communities, also has the potential to impact the way we think about policy and resource management at larger scales,” Meens said. “It's an example of ways that the university, through public and engaged scholarship, can really provide resources that wouldn't be available to communities that don't have, you know, significant budgets to devote to retainers for fancy law firms, you know, and in terms of maintaining the historical, traditional ways of life that predate statehood.”
The Acequia Assistance Project is currently spread across three separate locations based around Colorado acequias.