Thanks for that info! I had no idea such a law was happening. No goodness for us city-dwellers unfortunately.

Last year at a conf I heard some of these things might be in the works, but lawyers had a lot of fighting to do and billable hours to collect to make it happen. This will help on a small scale, but as to getting enough water around here for all future users, well, fuhgeddaboudit.

Dan

If you've ever had to deal with the 'water police', and I have (over building a small pond) then you would know that the odds of getting caught, rain-barrel wise, are infinitesimally small.

Not that I'd suggest anything illegal. Nope. But there are a lot of people I know around here with buried cisterns for roof snow / rain, and use grey water on their gardens, and so on. These folks live beyond the normal, domestic water supply lines and haul domestic water once a week in a truck.

David,
Who ARE the water police?

I can't help but wonder just how the water in a sump pit is classified? If it's in my basement, is it mine? :-)

I wasn't actually researching anything about rainbarrels, I clicked a link from a blog and found the info on the changes. Just thought I'd post it here in case it actually applied to anybody reading here.

Well, when I lived in Castle Rock, the water police were city employees that were paid around $10/hr to drive around the subdivisions at all times of the day and night and document who was watering that shouldn't be.

We were only allowed to water every 3rd day, between the hours of 5 - 10 (am or pm) and unfortunately, the home we purchased had an irrigation system that was only programmable for every other day, or you had to manually go in and program it each week. The few times we forgot to change it at the beginning of the week, yep, you guessed it, a citation from the water police! If you had more than a couple of warnings per season, they would add a surcharge to your water bill, though I can't remember now how much it was.

Here we are allowed to water 3 days/week, but we are supposed to use the irrigation ditch water, not house water. Our pump won't run, and the landscaper guy says it's not the pump, but an electrical issue, so until we track down the problem, I'll be using housewater, and will probably get fined for that ... sigh

Bonnie

Here ya go.... These guys issue well permits, and as well, you need their permission to build a pond, up to 10 acres in size. Above 10 acres, you then need to get it cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers. And I bet you didn't know that every pond has to have a name. Thats the law, Ma'am, no exceptions.

The lower part of my property was a cat tail swamp, fed by the lavish flood irrigation practices of my up-hill neighbors, and when I moved in, I thought I'd build a pond. About half way through, the Division of Water guys came out and handed me an official looking order to stop construction immediately - so I had to jump through a bunch of hoops, fill out applications, and wait. The pond filled anyway, since it was just seepage from above. They lost the first application somewhere between local HQ and Regional HQ, what with being a Gub'mint bureaucracy, and I had to do it twice. Finally, after going in a few times and chatting about fishing and common acquaintances and elk hunting, they told me to go ahead and finish it up, just so long as I put a drain in it, so they could come get the water when they needed it for Las Vegas or Phoenix or something, since it wasn't my water. I put in a syphon for the drain, which has long ago been buried by weeds and I noticed several years ago it was broken.......

I found out later that the neighbors down the draw, with their pond, were worried that I'd take all the water and they couldn't fill their pond, and they'd filed a complaint. Turns out that the next year, the uphill folks put in side roll irrigation, part of the big Federal Colorado River Salinity Project, which cut out the seepage, which means that I fill my pond with my own irrigation water, and if I didn't fill my pond in the fall, then the pond lower down the draw would just dry up over the winter. So they now depend on the natural, slow seepage of my pond to keep their pond full.

And then you get into disturbing 'wet lands' and all that.

The guy immediately uphill from me used to run thousands of sheep on the National Forest, using the now removed narrow gauge railroad to haul them up to Lizard Head Pass for the summer. He had an enormous barn to winter them and for lambing. This burned down some years ago, and his sheep operation is now in the hundreds, not thousands. Anywho, the bottom of my pond is I-dunno-how-thick in 50+ year old composted sheep manure and other organic matter, and every spring, I go down and scrape off the very top inch, and haul it up with a wheel barrow for my gardens.

Here is a link that might be useful: Colorado Division of Water Resources