Want to water your grass limitlessly without risking a fine? In some Front Range towns, residents still can water without inhibition despite searing drought.
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Nearly the entire state is in some level of drought, according to U.S. Drought Monitor data released Thursday, but the aridity is especially intense over the highly populated urban corridor and the mountains that are the source of much of Colorado’s water. The winter’s record-low snowpack translated into this summer’s anemic streamflows, moisture-sucking soil and drained reservoirs. Federal authorities describe the drought frying the Front Range with sobering words: severe, extreme, exceptional.
Despite widespread severe drought, 13 of the 25 largest cities and towns in Colorado have not implemented additional mandatory water use restrictions. The 13 communities — including the cities of Fort Collins, Pueblo and Boulder — are home to more than 1.5 million people, which is about a quarter of the state’s population. Water managers in many of the communities without additional drought restrictions have asked customers to voluntarily cut back water use, to varying degrees of success.
Individual water providers set drought restrictions depending on their own portfolio of water sources and reservoirs. Communities that draw from multiple water sources, own powerful water rights and maintain large reservoir systems are best poised to ride out drought.
“Every district and provider is different; they have different water rights and storage rights, so you’re going to see vast differences from community to community,” said John Thornhill, Windsor’s director of community development.
Those differences can be confusing to customers who see headlines about extreme drought, shrinking reservoirs, other cities’ mandatory restrictions and the imperiled Colorado River system, said Kim Hutton, Boulder’s water resources manager. Denver Water and Aurora Water — along with many towns across the Western Slope — have implemented mandatory drought rules to curb water use. Pueblo, meanwhile, has neither mandatory nor voluntary restrictions in place.
Boulder is under a drought watch and city leaders have asked customers to voluntarily conserve water and irrigate outdoors only twice a week. Hutton doesn’t expect to implement mandatory restrictions this year based on the amount of water they have stored.
“We’ve gotten questions from community members asking, ‘Why aren’t you doing more?’” Hutton said. “It’s a hard message to say, ‘Well, we planned for this and we don’t need to do more.’”
Despite the planning, water managers are keeping a close eye on reservoir storage levels, water use and streamflows. One year of extreme drought can be withstood, managers said, but multiple years will test water supply systems.
“I do think it’s important for all of us to recognize that this drought is not a normal drought year,” said Pieter Van Ry, Englewood’s director of utilities. “This is unique and something that hasn’t been seen in decades, if ever, in the modern era of water supply.”
Different portfolios, different stances
Several Front Range water managers who have not imposed mandatory drought restrictions thanked previous community leaders for planning for drought and growth.
Fort Collins draws its water from the Colorado River via the Colorado Big Thompson Project, the Cache la Poudre River and the Michigan River, which is part of the North Platte River basin.
“Our predecessors planned well,” said Katie Collins, water conservation specialist with Fort Collins Utilities. “Even in this hot and dry year, our supply is enough to meet demand.”
Colorado Springs Utilities leaders have not implemented additional drought restrictions this year, though their customers are limited to three days a week of outdoor watering every year, regardless of drought status. The state’s second-largest city draws 70% of its water from the Colorado River, 25% from the Arkansas River and 5% from the South Platte River.
The utility issued a water supply watch warning customers about drought impacts, but will not implement further restrictions until it has less than 1.5 years’ worth of water in its reservoirs, water conservation supervisor Julia Gallucci said. The city currently has 2.7 years’ worth of water in storage.
“Plan for the worst, hope for best,” Gallucci said. “We’re already planning that we might have to do something far more restrictive next year.”
Many Front Range communities draw large portions of their water from across the Continental Divide. Major cities like Denver, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins draw significant portions of their supply from the Colorado River, which winds from the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park to the Utah border near Grand Junction.
The lack of watering restrictions in some Front Range communities irked Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, a taxpayer-funded agency that works to protect Western Slope water. Western Slope water users are working hard to conserve, he said, and farmers are fallowing fields because there is not enough to meet all the needs.
It’s difficult to know that some of that conserved water ends up on the other side of the Continental Divide watering lawns in towns without any mandatory restrictions, he said.
“Folks on the west side of the divide know we’re in a drought, they know we have conservation efforts in place and most people are doing their best to comply with that,” Mueller said. “Frankly, we’re not seeing that in the majority of the smaller cities on the Front Range.”
Even some Front Range water providers with powerful water rights are starting to feel the strain.
For months, Englewood was the only community in the southern Denver metro without mandatory water restrictions. Although the town of approximately 35,000 does not have much water stored in reservoirs, it owns some of the most senior water rights on the South Platte River, meaning they get first dibs, even when the flow is low.
“Typically our rights are so senior that even in dry years or a normal drought year they’re able to be fulfilled,” said utilities director Van Ry.
But this is not a normal drought year, he said, and even some of their most senior water rights are being curtailed for the first time in the town’s history.
Englewood’s city council on Monday will decide whether to impose mandatory watering restrictions, at the recommendation of utility staff. The restrictions will limit outdoor watering to two days a week.
There’s no record of the town ever imposing mandatory drought restrictions, Van Ry said.
“That’s the piece we can control – the demand side. We can’t control whether it rains or whether it snows,” Van Ry said. “The more we can do, the better we’ll be if this persists.”
Variable conservation results
The voluntary conservation metrics implemented by many communities have seen varying levels of success.
Water use is 10% below the 5-year average in Erie, which imposed a voluntary two-day outdoor watering restriction in May.
“We trusted that our community would respond and they did,” said Todd Fessenden, the town’s utilities director.
In Fort Collins, water use is up slightly above average, Collins said. In Boulder, use is tracking just at or below the 5-year average, Hutton said. Colorado Springs’ water use is up about 7% over the five-year average, Gallucci said.
All three water managers said they would have expected use to be much higher than average during such a long, hot and dry summer.
Denver Water, the state’s largest water provider, said at the end of July that water use across its 1.5 million customers had dropped 5% below the five-year average under its mandatory twice-a-week watering restrictions. In Aurora, use has fallen 9% from last year under similar mandatory restrictions.
Water managers across the Front Range touted years of water conservation efforts aimed at reducing use across the board, regardless of drought status. Municipal water use across the entire state is dwarfed by agricultural use, which makes up nearly 90% of the state’s water consumption.
While water use is up in Windsor this year over last year, Thornhill said, per capita water use in the booming town of approximately 44,000 is down 20% since 2012. Much of that increased water use occurred during the unusually warm spring, when dry and hot weather made people begin watering weeks earlier than normal.
Water use in the town of approximately 40,000 has been higher this year than in 2025 and 2023 — relatively wet years that required less watering — but lower than the dry year of 2024.
While this year’s drought is manageable, water leaders said subsequent years of dryness will cause exponentially dire problems.
“You can usually ride out the first year pretty well; it’s the second and third and fourth year that become a problem,” Thornhill said.
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