Rain and snowmelt have provided the first water for a reservoir on Long Hollow Creek near Redmesa, a long-planned storage unit that will help Colorado meet its contractual water obligation to New Mexico and indirectly provide water for irrigators in southwest La Plata County.

Construction was completed in June 2014 on the Bobby K. Taylor Reservoir, named for the late rancher whose land is now disappearing under the advancing water. When full, the reservoir will be a lake one-mile long.

Flow from Long Hollow Creek and Government Draw fills the reservoir, which has a capacity of 5,300 acre-feet.

“We had 385 acre-feet this morning,” Brice Lee, chairman of the La Plata Water Conservancy District, said Tuesday. “It’s not as much as we’d like, but we’ll take it.”

Colorado shares La Plata River water 50-50 with New Mexico, but the erratic flow makes fulfilling the obligation problematical. Now, Taylor Reservoir water can be released to the La Plata River a mile away for New Mexico consumption, and this will allow Colorado irrigators to take water from the La Plata River.

Construction of the reservoir was on a tight budget. When the Animas-La Plata Project, the last major water work in the West, was downsized in the 1990s, water for irrigation was eliminated.

Long Hollow project advocates patched together a financing plan. They acquired $15 million the Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority had set aside for projects in the area, got $3 million from the Ute Mountain Ute tribe and, finally, $1.6 million from the state Legislature last year.

daler@durangoherald.com