KERSHAW DITCH ☆ My Water

Who owns it

• The Kershaw Ditch Company (nonprofit corporation) — probable match, from the Colorado Secretary of State business record ↗; verify before relying on it. A nonprofit corporation of this name, in good standing, with its principal office in Westminster; matched on the name and the location, not confirmed by the company.

DWR’s own records name no owner for a ditch, reservoir or well, so this comes from the source shown and can be out of date. Organisations only: a private landowner’s name is never listed.

The record and the river

Current administration

● In priority — no active call senior to this structure's rights affects its district (18 active call(s) checked).

8 further calls state no district and sit outside this one, so they are counted here rather than assumed either way.

Which of its rights are out of priority?

No active call verifiably reaches this structure (18 active call(s) checked), so none of its 47 rights is administratively curtailed today. (8 call(s) state no district and sit outside this one — not judged, not assumed.) In the 5 past years most like this one (2022, 2024, 2023, 2021, 2019), 3 of the rights shown below were out at least one week in at least one analog year.

Where it sits in line

Priority 1860-02-25 — 8th most senior of the 1815 structures with decreed rights in this water districtDWR's administrative subdivision of a river basin; the unit calls are usually stated in..

Under prior appropriationColorado's rule for sharing water: first in time, first in right. Age decides, not proximity or need., everything ahead of it in this line is satisfied in full before it receives any water. Immediately ahead: GOLDEN CITY WATER WORKS PIPELINE (1860-02-25)☆. Immediately behind: LINDSTROM NO 2 DITCH (1860-02-25)☆.

On MAINSTEM at river mile 59.0, it is 96th of 107 down the reach. Immediately upstream: WADSWORTH GRAVES DITCH☆. Immediately downstream: KERSHAW DITCH BYPASS☆.

Position on the modelled network, not a claim about whose water this is — a stream carries water from many rights at once, and diverted water returns to it.

Decreed rights (48)

Amounts marked cfs are flow rates; AF are stored volumes (storage rights are decreed in acre-feet). An absolute amount of 0.0 beside an alt-point amount is not a dead right: the water is decreed at another structure, and that row records permission to divert it here instead (an alternate point or exchange). A case listing several numbers reflects the original decree plus later change cases.

How much of this decree was in priority, by day

A right is in priority on a day when it is senior to every call administering this structure. Of its 11.44 cfs decreed rate, the average day over the last 6 year(s) had 11.44 cfs in priority (100% of the decree). No call in effect is a free river — that was 14.0% of days.

Calls are set and released at a time of day, not at midnight, so a day is counted by the hour: a call setting at 4pm costs that day a third of its rate, not all of it. A call began or ended mid-day on 38 of these days.

This is paper water. It is the decreed rate that was in priority — not water that was physically in the stream, and not water this structure diverted. A ditch can be in priority for 50 cfs on a day the creek carries five. What that distinction means →

Checked against DWR's own analysis

DWR publishes a day-by-day out-of-priority analysis for some rights. Where it exists we score this page against it — computed live, so it reflects what the code does right now, not what a memo once said. Agreement on this structure: 99.0% on whether a day was curtailed, and 88.5% of days land on DWR's exact percent of the day.

Legal record & documents

108 decreed actions on record across 18 court cases: 16CW3186, 13CW3164, 00CW0262, 99CW0207, 93CW0176, 97CW0142, 88CW0270, 88CW0268, 20CW3087, 00CW0263 and 8 more below.

532 imaged documents on DWR’s shelf for this structure — 527 water-court documents across 37 cases, including 37 decrees. Every row opens the scanned PDF at DWR. Listing as of 2026-09-05.

Imaged documents at DWR. DWR keeps the scanned documents for this structure — decrees, rulings, plats, correspondence — in its Laserfiche archive. Open the list directly: imaged documents for 0700597 ↗ (indexed by structure, not by case — the cases listed above appear within the list).

Other DWR records for this structure: DWR’s page for this structure ↗ — net amounts, water rights, transactions & adjudication history, and diversion records, all on that one page. On this site: the district’s full legal picture →

Filings that would move water above this headgate

2 water-court applications in the monthly resumes name a structure on CLEAR CREEK upstream of this headgate. A new right, exchange or change of use up there changes what arrives down here — the resume is the public notice, and the opposition window is how anyone affected answers it.

Judged on this structure’s own named stream only — a filing on a tributary that joins upstream is not judged here. Filings that name structures only in prose, without a WDID, are invisible to this card. Reading aid, not legal advice; the deadline is computed from C.R.S. 37-92-302(3), and the court’s own notice controls.

How often is it out of priority?

Across the 11 seasons whose call record is complete enough to judge this structure (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026), week by week from April.

DWR’s own out-of-priority analysis

The Division of Water Resources computes its own daily priority analysis for this structure (analysisservices/callanalysisbywdid) — the authoritative answer to “could this right legally divert that day”, from the agency that administers the river. Shown beside, never blended into, the climatology above: different method, different span, and you should know whose number is whose.

DWR’s series is cached for a scoped set of structures (the rights that move the most water, bracketed most-senior and most-junior) — absence of a right here means it isn’t in that set yet, not that it is never curtailed.

Structures it shares court cases with

This structure was a party to 13 court cases that also touched 24 other structures — changes of water right, augmentation plans, exchanges. Being parties to the same case does not by itself mean water moved between them; which way it ran, and how much, is in the decree.

1 further shared case not shown — the most specific are listed first, since a case binding two structures says more than one binding a dozen.

Also a party to 2 omnibus adjudications (89CW0099, 17 structures; 00CW0262, 13 structures). Those settled many rights at once and are listed separately: they say these structures were adjudicated together, not that they deal with each other.

Recorded use (last 15 years on record)

Years far under the decreed amount? That gap has a name — paper water vs. wet water, explained on this structure.

In a median year this structure has a recorded diversion of 918 AF. Its most recent year on record, 2025, came in at 648 AF — 71% of that, and 1st lowest of the 15 years with a recorded volume.

This structure records both diversions and reservoir releases — they are separate water movements and are accounted separately below.

Trends for this structure

Recorded use is falling over its last 15 recorded years (-50 AF/yr, Mann-Kendall p=0.000).

Its reference gage, Jim Baker Reservoir Inlet from Manhart: no clear flow trend.

Every gage and reach in this district →

How good is our record of it?

Grade A (10/10 points) — the components below are the finding; the letter alone is not.