Although the final decision on the acquisition of water for Wiggins is yet to be made, the town council unanimously approved a lease-purchase agreement Wednesday to buy land and water on a farm north of town.

The agreement will not be final until it is signed by both parties on the Sept. 30 closing deadline, and the final objection deadline is Sept. 17, according to town water attorney Steve Jeffers.

Town Attorney Sam Light said the ordinance authorized the execution and delivery of an agreement for a lease with the option to purchase 10 water shares from the Weldon Valley Ditch Co., along with related property. The agreement would include any ditches, laterals or other facilities that would help deliver the water, he said.

The approval came after Jeffers advised the council to do so.

“I think it’s important that you go ahead and take that next step tonight,” he said. “It still gives you the ability up until the September 17th deadline to make objections and decide not to close on the deal, but you really need to approve it tonight to keep the process moving.”

Dubbed the Wiggins Project, the acquisition of water from the farm land would cost about $5.5 million up front, Jeffers said. In addition to the upfront costs would be annual charges to pump the water out of the ground and the possible treatment of effluent, he said.

“It certainly meets standards, but you may or may not want to do some treatment,” he said.

The town may also need to hire additional staff if it went forward with the Wiggins Project, Jeffers said.

“With all these moving parts, you may need another staff person to run a system like this,” he said. “So we have to factor in those additional costs.”

Wiggins is also considering purchasing a portion of Fort Morgan’s Colorado-Big Thompson water, Jeffers said.

To obtain that water, he said, the town would need to meet the regulations of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which manages the C-BT water.

One requirement would be to annex the town into the district boundaries and pay the associated back taxes, Jeffers said.

“These kinds of inclusions go on all the time,” he said. “It’s more typical to see a subdivision be included or a parcel of land, not a whole town. But that does happen on occasion.”

Additionally, Jeffers said, the district would require Wiggins to return a portion of water to the South Platte River through a pipeline or make up the return flow loss by buying water rights.

“They expect that the return flows from that use will go back to the river so that other land owners within the district boundaries will get the benefit of those return flows,” he said.

The Fort Morgan City Council will discuss the potential water sale in the coming weeks, Jeffers said, and he hopes to hear the cost of out-of-town service by the end of August.

“All of these things start off as being just a concept, and then as you dig into them you find out that there is a lot more moving parts on every one of them than we thought,” he said.

After several audience members objected to the water acquisition issue not being placed on voter ballots, Light said TABOR generally requires voter approval only for a new tax or debt.

“A lease-purchase transaction is not a debt within the constitutional sense,” he said.

Council member Vince Longcor said the community had opportunities to influence the council’s decisions during monthly public hearings, but he has not heard enough to decide what the public wants.

“I haven’t heard enough opinions outside of this room to really make a decision one way or another, because I really haven’t heard anything from a lot of the citizens of the town,” he said.