I don't begrudge people who choose to live outside of municipalities in order to avoid taxes, but it's hard to empathize with them when the municipality they're not paying into makes a decision on behalf of their own voters/taxpayers. Hopefully the county/private sector resolves it soon.
Both have a price in the American west, and they did not pay the latter price.
The claim was that these people didn't pay. That claim turns out to be incorrect.
Of course, in my country we tolerate that - it's normal for food to flow into urban areas and money to flow out, water pricing is just an obscure element of that.
Otherwise it’s all wells, sometimes tremendously deep.
I live in iowa - nearly everyone is on rural water because wells don't produce much water. I'm on a well and I can't water my lawn - after an hour my well is empty. My well is about a meter in diameter so that should be a lot stored. it would be $20k to extend the city water pipe to my lot.
i used to live in MN, there I knew farmers on a 5cm well who had no problem watering lawns, and 50 cows from the well.
in colorado where this story is water is less available than iowa. (most farms have a year round creek that could be treated to become drinkable)
Basically, the idea that I'm required to sell something is silly. No one said any contracts were broken. People got what they paid for.
“I was always drawn to the mountains when I was traveling around the country and, to be honest, it was affordable,” she said. “It was off grid. It had a structure. It was away from people. The view is incredible. There’s climbing, hiking. It was somewhere I could afford and have land in Colorado.”
I wanted to live off the grid, but not that off the grid.
They are residents of some governance unit and, therefore, vote somewhere. Is that possible to have no right to vote because you live in the wrong place?
You don't have the right to vote in a city that you do not live in, and the water system is controlled by the city in this case. I assume they can vote for county offices, and the county is now determining how best they can serve their residents now that the city is unable to.
Sometimes the lines about what affects you are blurry, but the question of whether you get a vote isn't: you do or you don't. Maybe rural people should get a partial vote in town affairs, 3/5 or something like that.
Why is well sharing illegal?
Arguably, the issue here is that we're going to need to deal with the fact that many americans are bad at assessing personal risk. Living in the country is in fact expensive—there are fewer people to amortize costs across, especially in societies that don't have market-based housing (which is arguably why country living is considered cheaper). Water and electricity might be the easiest ways to see this, but it's stuff like "access to a hospital" that causes the most harm—a largely invisible cost until you actually need a hospital (or emergency response, or clearing roads from snow, access to postal delivery, etc etc....). At least you'll notice immediately if you don't have water.
The article addresses this. In this part of CO, wells can cost $25k to drill without any guarantee of hitting water. It's not a panacea for these people.
It is 100% disingenuous. In no municipality in America is the source of water not considered a long term source where change comes with months of notice. In no municipality is said change executed in a meeting without prior notice to the public with public commenting allowed.
They're paying for the water. It's not like they're getting it for free. Sure, the municipality could just not sell outside the municipality, but most utilities are forbidden from suddenly cutting off service due to health and safety concerns.
And that doesn’t mean water bought ‘on demand’ would have to be equally costly as what people who ‘subscribed’ to water pay.
So an irrational decision fueling conflict.
"Revenue for the water sales to rural residents totaled $43,000 per year, about 15% of total revenue."
This means that 'total revenue' is about $287k. I would guess that's the revenue of the water system, not the town's entire tax base. Still a significant figure, but not 45% of the town's tax revenue.
These people should not be living off the grid without securing water rights. This has been the system in the west since before statehood.
They probably pay more for their water than the people with metered service.
The government in question here is the one representing the tax-paying residents of the town of Fort Garland. They voted to stop selling their scarce water supply to the non-tax-paying residents of unincoporated Costilla County. So it seems to me that the "government" served the interest of their constituents fairly.
The water board didn't have to put it up to an immediate, unplanned vote that day, but they were inexperienced in dealing with "hollering" and waffled under a little pressure.
Add to it that they executed the short-term interests of their constituents with such ... alacrity that it put people in physical risk.
So who came out ahead here? I don't disagree that all those folks living off-grid really aren't living off-grid, and reality checks are healthy, but even a 2 week warning would have served everybody's interests, served the same FAFO lesson and maybe kept the animosity down a little.
In a free market, the price of water rises so that there is no such thing as a "shortage." It would be uneconomical to waste water on lawns far before a significant amount of additional people would be unable to buy enough to drink.
They paid money for the water.
The price of guaranteed access to water is much much higher, and they did not pay for it. It was probably not even for sale, and they should have known that. They are not entitled to anything.
Once the circumstances change, we'll have to adapt.
If that water supply is cut off without valid reason, there is a complaint mechanism with the local utility commission where the issue can be heard and resolved.
I also live in the municipality where my water is supplied, and therefore am represented by its government.
Therefore I am both economically and politically invested in that infrastructure.
Unfortunately none of this is true for the folks in this article.
Is that a "guarantee"? No. Nothing is guaranteed. But it's far better than the arrangement these folks operated under.
It's sad & true & and I hate it.
Lack of water is not the problem here, especially now that the town's pump has been fixed.
Like every small town/county, I bet if you follow the trail of financial and ideological interests of the parties involved you'll find that the personalities involved are motivated by more than just whatever their oath of office is. Seeing as there's only one water hauler I'd look into who he pissed off.
As an example of slang differences, in the US it is not uncommon for someone to say "Pardon me" when they are getting the way whereas people in England might assume they farted. Or another example where communications go wrong, someone in the US or the UK might give a thumbs-up when they agree with results or an idea but in some parts of Africa that is a death threat.
This was about some people on the waterboard not being able to manage angry - semi-aggressive- people properly.
And now those people can irrigate their lawns while others can't even drink, wash or cook.
But the board handled the situation very poorly. The job of being on a board like this is often to sit patiently while people complain and perhaps yell. Try to keep things calm and moving along, let everyone make their statement.
They should have just accepted the feedback and then scheduled discussion on various options for some future meeting, with a final vote even further out.
Sad situation. Fear of outsiders and other people often pop up when people are stressed.
Human nature is disheartening at times.
Source: Had a friend in college that interned for a group of attorneys in Western, CO whose entire practice was around water access rights.
She explained to me some of the ridiculous things that neighbors requiring common water access could do to each other - based purely on who was using the water first.
https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=3750 has more details.
Either ‘first user wins’, like here, or ‘all users get allotment’ - in which case you can be screwed by someone building a new subdivision, or ‘gov’t entity allocates’ in which case corruption/payoffs become the norm, etc, etc.
At least it’s better than ‘shoot anyone using your well without permission’ like used to be the middle eastern standard eh?
Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.
And straight up lies. The Colorado water compact “average flow” was known to be nonsense when it was established, but politicians ignored the engineers’ estimates of long-term averages which were significantly lower than the figure the compact is based on.
The synopsis is that in the near-future water in the west is SCARCE and there are dueling factions (NGOs, state governments, criminals) fighting legally and physically over water, including digging through old libraries and government offices for water right contracts that may be older than the known ones to usurp the standing owner's right.
"No no we meant off-grid in every aspect save one!"
I know these people, half my family is these people. I've listened to them rail against the man for decades and decades and decades.
When you tell them that the invisible hands of the free market will gladly sell them the bootstraps they require, they get mighty angry.
There's virtually no such thing as "off-grid", no such thing as a human being who lives totally unreliant on people around them in the modern age, unless you can carry everything you own in both hands, and can survive with nothing else. And there's damn few people out there living like that.
The problem seems to be that the townsfolk want to water their lawn:
> “These men were brought in because I had put them on a water restriction schedule,” Pacheco said in an interview. “They are upset they can’t water their lawns while people can’t have water to actually live.”
They're not completely cut off; they just have to significantly further to purchase their water, and some of them do:
> Some are driving two hours to Pueblo to buy water. Many have been getting water in the town of Blanca, where officials offered — only as an emergency solution until the end of August — to let people fill up water tanks from a hose connected to a fire hydrant.
I don't think this is a situation where we're laughing at people who are in the Find Out phase.
Meanwhile you can use percussion drilling to drill a well of virtually arbitrary depth, at very little cost, as was done by the Chinese for thousands of years to depths well below 500ft with not much more than bamboo and rocks.
99.9% of these people are not living "off grid" for any particular ideological reason. They are living off grid because where they live is simply too dispersed and/or poor for there to be a grid. They've either always lived this way or adapted when they moved there.
Buyer: "but if it's off grid where do I get water"
Realtor: "there's services you pay for that truck it in and fill your tank, just like propane or heating oil"
Buyer:"oh, ok"
...
> “We wanted to be as independent as possible, and so we searched all over the state for property that would fit our needs, and this fit the bill,” Debi Marks said.
...
> Amanda Ellis bought a house in Costilla County five years ago to live off the grid.
These are people specifically moving to this unincorporated county in order to live "off the grid". This sounds ideological to me.
No, I read what they said during the interviews used in the article.
It ain't no different than the 5am news person interviewing people off the streets and only the "interesting" responses making the 7am news.
If we want to compare family anecdotes I can trot out my own but that's not the point.
But cynicism aside, this is just the beginning. This will scale to a lot of the US. Even folks in the burbs.
Not every part of the continent should be covered with homes.
Saved you a click.
Fort Garland sits just below Blanca Peak, the highest in the Sangre de Cristo, which receives a ton of precipitation. So what's the problem?
The pump broke.
There are water issues in the San Luis Valley. It's a cold desert which happens to be the best place in the United States to grow a recently popular cash crop: quinoa. About 77% of water use in the region is for agriculture, not weird prepper cisterns. This supply is strained, but the current drought status is only D1.
TFA is really more of a closing-frontier issue than a drought issue. The states northeast of Pennsylvania manage all of their land via townships. Everywhere else you can get these weird municipal-unincorporated disputes. See also: Walmart locating outside city limits to avoid taxes.
> The pump failed in June, before the system’s planned overhaul. Townspeople were asked to use the “bare minimum” of water — flush the toilets, but don’t water the lawn.
It blows my mind they are using flushing toilets in the desert. Composting toilets are not some new-fangled technology, and require zero water. You live in a desert! Come on!
> “These men were brought in because I had put them on a water restriction schedule,” Pacheco said in an interview. “They are upset they can’t water their lawns while people can’t have water to actually live.”
Watering lawns? In the desert? How is this not illegal? This feels like the entire climate change "controversy" in a nutshell: people so brazenly into the abuse of their own resources that they will fight to continue wasting them until they no longer exist.
> multistory homes with sweeping decks facing Blanca Peak
> The water crisis has forced older residents to contemplate selling their dream homes, where they had planned to retire
The article's framing seems to waver between "how dare you do this to the poor and starving" and "how dare you do this to the older, richer retirees". I'm sure there are people of all kinds affected by the water issue but it's not as simple as the clickbaity title suggests.
But, as an older person, I am not interested in living somewhere that I can’t get an ambulance or quick access to medical treatment.
> Salina Pacheco, who is the manager of the town water district and training to become a water system operator, knew it was coming. She had been talking to the five-member water board about it for two years and had helped secure a $105,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs to upgrade the water system, which was suffering from “extreme water hammer” because water traveling through the pipes in opposite directions was colliding.
> The pump failed in June, before the system’s planned overhaul.*
You don't have to live far out of town to have no town water. The pipes don't go far out of city/town limits at all.
You always get periods of prolonged drought even in otherwise perfectly reasonable self-sustainable properties.
This isn't some "HAHAHA suck it libertarians" attitude. This is a "anyone who lives slightly outside of town wanting to buy water and being told no" type of situation.
What I have a negative attitude towards is developing housing in an area of the arid western US without access to water. Water rights (the right to buy water) has controlled development here since before statehood. It's very simple: you don't develop without water rights, it's irresponsible and puts an unfair social burden on others.
https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s...
It’s distressing to see human rights violations in the richest country on earth.
Alfalfa takes a massive 33% of that water.
Most of that alfalfa goes to the Middle East.
But sure, yeah metro areas getting the blame, as is tradition.
Overall it seems tough living around there, large parcels of land were divided and sold 30+ years ago via mail order and land values haven' tracked inflation in a lot of cases. A lot of people moving there for a second chance or fresh start.
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