[7] The agency sets it own employment rules subject to the Denver City Charter and Article XX of the Colorado Constitution governing civil service employees.

[11] In a year without water shortages or other issues around 20% of the total comes from the Fraser River and Williams Fork in Grand County.

The city of Denver itself was only founded in 1859 and at that time the high plains of the shortgrass prairie were widely regarded an "arid desert" as Francis Parkman described it in 1849.

Traveling to Bent's Fort he described a water deficient landscape where, "the only vegetation was a few tufts of short grass, dried and shriveled by the heat.

The second was the Capitol Hydraulic Company, which was granted a charter by the Kansas Territory legislature in 1860 and began construction the same year.

[31] Initially the work was done by hand, but an oxen powered rotary canal builder and railroad excavator was employed later in the construction.

[34] Ornamental lawns, gardens, and trees were planted in the 1860s and 1870s with visitors reporting on their beauty and success in contrast to earlier narratives of the dry and desolate appearance of the city.

Together with the 1897 typhoid vaccine and introduction of water chlorination outbreaks of the disease in Denver became rare in the early 20th century.

[40] This new corporation began purchasing agricultural land and its senior water rights and building works far upstream of the city at the entrance to the Platte Canyon in Jefferson County.

[42] In order to store more spring runoff for the drier parts of the year plans were made to build a dam and reservoir in the Platte Canyon.

[39] The location selected by the company, unlike San Francisco's O'Shaughnessy Dam or the Los Angeles Aqueduct, was neither a beloved natural wonder or settled by farmers so there was no controversy surrounding its construction.

[49] While residents recognized the value of the infrastructure that has been built by the company, they also resented the corruption that had allowed Cheesman and Moffat to acquire valuable natural resources and monopolize the provision of a necessity to the people.

This election question was ruled invalid on technical grounds in 1901, but it made the city unable to proceed with either negotiations or construction of its own system.

[2][31] The papers making the sale official were signed at a midnight meeting, 1 November 1918 by company president Edwin S. Kassler.

[64] Plans for an even more ambitious diversion (eventually named the Roberts Tunnel) were first filed with the Colorado State Engineer in 1927,[65] though it would not start diverting water until 1964.

[67] Denver did succeed in gaining a right to Blue River water in 1952, but only half as much as it had initially claimed and with a priority dated to the formal start of tunnel work in 1946.

[68] In 1955 bonds for $75 million dollars to construct the project were issued by Denver and after the engineering plans for the reservoir were complete clearing the land started 22 April 1960.

[69] Though even more ambitious projects were still being planned, in the 1950s officials at Denver Water began to think about limits to what was feasible for the agency to provide.

In 1965 the location was called, "a perfect dam site," by George Cranmer, Denver's former city manager of public works.

The Bureau's plan was to build and operate the dam for the purposes of flood control, electricity generation, and to provide water to both Denver and Aurora.

[78] However, environmentalists continued to be strongly opposed to new projects and were quite suspicious that Strontia Springs could also serve as an afterbay for a larger reservoir.

The Metropolitan Water Development Agreement apportioned the costs and benefits of the project with 20% being supported by Denver and the remainder by suburban providers.

[83] Meanwhile the Colorado Environmental Caucus worked to catalogue and publicize the natural environment of the canyon that would be flooded were the project to go ahead.

[84] Thirteen and a half miles of free flowing river habitat and the surrounding mountain canyon would be flooded under 1,100,000 acre⋅ft (1.4×109 m3) of water should the dam be filled.

After public comment about the report the head of the EPA, William K. Reilly, announced the agency's veto of the project on 23 November 1990.

[90] The veto did not require Denver Water to change its policies or operating practices, but the agency chose to reexamine how it did business.

[95] Part of what ultimately doomed Two Forks was the 1977 Foothills Settlement Decree with the EPA that required a program of water conservation.

The agency hired Sukle Advertising to create humorous ads that would attract more attention to the cause with slogans like, "Instead of a Dishwasher, Get a Dog.

Instead of pulling out Chips Barry met with the district and worked out a deal to provide more financing in exchange for a lease that could be later converted into permanent ownership of 40% of the water.

[102] In 1994 Barry also met with irrigators from the Grand Junction, Colorado area to address their concerns over the saltier water that would be released from Wolford.