TED’S PLACE — Thornton needs water. Developers are scrapping homebuilding projects out of fears that the city can’t guarantee them a water tap in the next few years. Thornton has water.

It’s waiting here at a headgate where the Cache la Poudre’s pristine high Rockies snowmelt is siphoned off into a farm ditch and reservoir network, 70 miles north of Thornton in western Larimer County. Thornton secretly started buying the water off farmland far from home in 1986, and now owns about 19,000 acres — and the accompanying water shares — across Larimer and Weld counties.

Thornton needs a way to get its priceless water.

Weld County is fine with 50 miles of pipeline to convey the good stuff south toward the Denver suburbs.

Asked by Thornton to host the first six miles of that pipeline, Larimer County is a “no.” Sue them? Thornton tried. Hard “no.”

Put your water down the Poudre River, some helpful environmental groups are telling Thornton. Colorado has been draining and abusing the Poudre for more than a century, they point out. The river could use a revival, they say, and at the other end, Thornton gets its water.

Read more at ColoradoSun.com.