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The Upper Colorado River Basin has long been a crown jewel among the West’s most treasured resources, providing fishing, hiking, hunting, rafting and many other recreation and economic opportunities on which many of Colorado’s communities depend.

Many communities across the Front Range and throughout the West also depend on the Colorado River to meet their daily water needs. Within Colorado’s vast network of rivers, the Colorado and Fraser Rivers currently lose on average about 60% of their native flows to Front Range municipalities. Ignoring already evident impacts of these severe stream flow reductions, Denver Water seeks to draw an additional 5.5 billion gallons of water from the Fraser.

Listed as the third most endangered river in America in 2005, the Fraser River is showing signs of deterioration. The river may be at a tipping point – a point where it can no longer sustain a healthy trout fishery and ecosystem. Further depletions could push it to the brink of collapse. As currently written, the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Moffat Project ignores the negative impacts of existing diversions, assumes that further removal of water will have no harmful impacts, and fails to provide adequate mitigation measures to prevent a collapse and ensure sustained flows that support fish, wildlife, and rural communities that depend on the Fraser and Upper Colorado for survival.