Perhaps Santa Claus has the same knack for real estate that he has for delivering billions of toys in a single night. Although he must have a sizable heating bill in the frigid North Pole, melting icebergs nearby provide plenty of water for his workshop.

Unless we want to wait on Santa to deliver some of that water, we had better get moving on implementing our own water supply programs.

Down here in Colorado, our water supply and demand problems were addressed in a two-year study released on Dec. 12 to mixed reviews. The “Colorado River Basin Water Demand and Supply Study” (Basin Study), produced by the Bureau of Reclamation, is an outline of the supply and demand problems facing our region over the next 50 years.

The good news is that we can start to solve our pending problems immediately, at virtually no cost to businesses, taxpayers, ratepayers, governments or water providers.

In fact, conservation and efficiency programs can be implemented within months, if not weeks. Western Resource Advocates has long pushed for specific, measurable conservation and efficiency programs because of the speed in which they can be put into practice (as opposed to 30+ years for a water pipeline); the