Pueblog USa
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The Coming Water Wars — 051123
There are storm clouds on the horizon.
An interesting report in today’s Pueblo Chieftain.
It seems that the bigger city to our immediate north is getting upset about our county’s efforts to comply with existing state 1041 statutes…..
For the uninformed, the 1041 statutes are the states laws that relate to land and water use. They were established some time back in an effort to standardize how counties would manage their land and water issues so that things would be ‘easier’ to understand when various groups went to court over water rights; who had them and what could be done with them. This came about in 1974 with the adoption into law of House Bill (HB) 1041. Hence the reference; 1041.
So, one by one, the counties have begun to employ the 1041 statutes to form their own land-water use regulations to govern the way water can be used inside of their respective jurisdiction. It took the first county, Caffee until 1991 to develop theirs. Pueblo established theirs not very long ago.
Now Colorado Springs is complaining about Pueblo’s 1041 regulations. Not just complaining, they’re suggesting that such regulations are “unconstitutional”. Why? Well, because such regulations don’t allow C’Springs to suck all the water [they want] out of the Arkansas river, for goodness sake. After all, they own the water rights.
The courts will most likely side with the 1041 statutes. And therein lies the basis of the coming water wars.
Back in ‘74, someone saw the writing on the wall, vis-a-vis the infamous Baker v. Carr (‘61) case where the state constitutions were thrown out by the Supreme Court of the United States. In this case, every state senate was turned into nothing more than a glorified state house of representatives. This vested all legislative power in the hands of the metropolitan areas. So, some bright guy, realizing that in the long run there would be trouble for smaller communities and rural areas, when it came to water rights, came up with the 1041 plan as a bulwark to protect the less populous and therefore less powerful communities against rapacious conduct on the part of the metropolitan areas.
It has served us for a while, but in the end, the metropolitan areas will realize that they will have to revoke 1041 in order to get the water they want to continue their massive expansion efforts.
Without the checks and balances in our state legislature, that we enjoy at the federal level, in Congress—the Senate, based on political entities as opposed to the House based on population—the metropolitan areas will win this war. They will overthrow 1041 and take all the water they want.
This capricious behavior on the part of the metropolitan areas will continue and grow even more egregious as time passes. Especially after they have a clear majority in both houses of the state legislature. We’re already seeing it in areas such as money spending on construction projects. I point out the recently reported diversion of almost one million dollars from Pueblo to Denver. That money was ear-marked for a highway project to the Pueblo Chemical Depot but was diverted to build an operations center for homeland defense in south Denver.
Funny thing that. Building an operations center for dealing with a possible weapons of mass destruction event IN the affected area? Seriously….if you were supposed to be managing a nuclear incident would YOU want to be IN the area that was impacted by the blast, fallout, radiation? Or would you rather be somewhere outside of the effective casualty radius? Would your operations center even survive the initial affects of such an event?
This was, in my honest opinion, money ill spent. So much pork for some Denver plutocrat.
In summary, the real problem that must be addressed is the heinous SCOTUS ruling of Baker v. Carr. We did not realize the long-term affects of it when it happened. Now we can see the storm clouds on the horizon. The time to prepare/prevent the effects of the storm is now, before it actually crashes down upon us.
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