Hundreds Lose Water Source in Colorado's Poorest County with No Notice

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.

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.

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.

Besides that, human psychology is such that these people probably couldn't afford anything else and then back-justified their constraints as "drawn to the mountains for hiking and the views".

So an irrational decision fueling conflict.

And that doesn’t mean water bought ‘on demand’ would have to be equally costly as what people who ‘subscribed’ to water pay.

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. This is why you'll never find the gas station runs out of bottled water because a nearby farmer used it to water his strawberries, despite the selfish/greed factor of the bottled water industry being off the charts.

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.

[1] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE

It is common for people to buy up land just for the water rights, then transfer that water rights to other property. So if you search for land in Colorado it isn't unusually to find one plot of land in the millions and then another one a few miles away that is almost free in comparison. This is often due to the water rights associated with that property. The expensive land can be used commercially for things like farming, the other cannot.

And there have been cases of governments using tax money to buy up property just so they can use the water rights to help out private ventures, like building suburbs or golf courses without the knowledge or consent of tax payers.

Also it is pretty normal anywhere in the country that local governments react poorly from aggressive demands from people, especially when they are not voters.

All in all it is a nasty business and making sure you know exactly where your water is coming from, how you are going to pay for it, and what your rights are to it, and what you are allowed to use it for all need to be factored in heavily when moving out to the desert there.

Caveat that there are very different factors in play in more populated areas.

As a thankfully-former Florida resident, there's also a current of hitherto politically unengaged (and still democratically uneducated) citizens showing up at meetings and deciding that if they yell the loudest they should get their way.

Some of the shit grown-ass adults did at Florida school board meetings was just mind-blowingly ignorant.

It also made me realize how low the bar of civic education is in the US.

Real democratic change comes from organizing, coalition building, compromise, and engagement with stakeholders. Not knee-jerk emotional outbursts.

Human nature is disheartening at times.

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.

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?