Demise of historic Jefferson County ranch means long-term protection for a critical Arvada water source

Three of every four gallons of water used by Arvada residents come from Ralston Reservoir.

That key water source will gain new protection in January, when a 230-acre purchase of historic ranch land by Denver Water is expected to close. The sale will protect the reservoir from future development that could’ve impacted the quality of the drinking water source for tens of thousands of people.

Lazy Heart Ranch owner Steve Johansson calls the deal a “win-win” for both the Ralston Reservoir and his family’s century-plus attachment to the rolling land north of the reservoir.

“It’s time to wind it down,” he said of the land his great-grandfather William Johnson established in 1908 as the Lazy Heart Ranch.

Johansson’s mother recently moved from her longtime house on the ranch to a nursing home, he said, and the next generation of his family is not interested in maintaining the property.

Johansson, 68, said he was approached by a custom home builder earlier this year about a purchase of his property, with plans to drop as many as 200 houses across a bucolic landscape that sits just west of Colorado 93 along Indian Head Road in Jefferson County.

“I have 18 neighbors, and if I put 200 homes here, they would run me out on a rail,” he joked. “If you drive the stretch of highway from Golden to Boulder, there’s very little development on the west side of Highway 93 — you just get a sense of the way it’s been for 100 years.”

Johansson said he’d already been in contact with Denver Water about a land deal, which began to gel earlier this year. The utility, which serves 1.5 million customers across metro Denver, approved the transaction in September. The agreed-upon price: $5.6 million.

“This deal will stop or indefinitely delay any housing development on the ranch,” said Denver Water spokesman Jimmy Luthye. “The purpose of the acquisition is to prevent impacts to water quality, operations, safety and security that new development in this area could create.”

Ranching, which has been part of the land since the 1870s, starting with the Wagner family, will likely continue under Denver Water’s ownership, Luthye said. Johansson said he now leases his property to another rancher, who runs about 40 head of cattle on the land during the warm season.

A bonus of Denver Water’s acquisition is that the South Boulder Diversion Canal runs through the Lazy Heart Ranch, bringing water to Ralston Reservoir from a diversionary dam near Eldorado Springs. In a memo from Denver Water’s Sept. 24 board meeting, the utility concluded that the “acquired property will protect the canal from being surrounded by future private development and eliminate or defer the costs associated with enclosing the canal.”

Reservoirs have been at the center of recent fights over safeguarding water quality and the surrounding environment. Denver Water’s yearslong expansion of Gross Reservoir in Boulder County has run into numerous legal entanglements over the project’s potential impacts to the land around it, culminating in a stop-work order from a judge in April.

That order was lifted the following month, though the legal battle continues.

Across town on the eastern edge of the metro, neighbors have rallied for years against oil and gas drilling, which they worry will contaminate the nearby Aurora Reservoir. They are holding a protest on Tuesday ahead of an expected approval by state regulators of a 32-well oil and gas pad, which they claimed in a recent news release was “located dangerously close to the Aurora Reservoir, the main water supply for Aurora’s 400,000 residents.”

Ralston Reservoir, built in 1937, is one of Denver Water’s smaller storage facilities. It has a capacity of nearly 10,800 acre-feet, dwarfed by the utility’s two largest reservoirs: Dillon Reservoir in Summit County, which can hold 257,000 acre-feet, and Eleven Mile Reservoir in Park County, which can hold 98,000 acre-feet.