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EDITORIAL: Water and Gold |
Bill Hudson | 5/12/08
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In recent conversations with two directors of the San Juan Water Conservancy (SJWCD) board, I have heard Colorado’s increasingly scarce water resources referred to as the “gold of the 21st Century.”
No such description could be farther from the truth.
 Gold — that uniquely malleable and rare yellow metal that has both instigated and financed wars and conquests around the world — continues to be one of the most highly valued elements on the planet. Up until December 31, 1974, Americans were forbidden by federal law from privately speculating in gold bullion, but today speculators around the world are free to buy and sell gold, and the recent international market price hovers around $900 an ounce.
Please note, the operative word here is “speculating.”
Most of the world’s people live their entire lives without possessing even an ounce of gold — let alone speculating in the gold market. Simply stated, access to gold is not necessary to human life.
Water, on the other hand, is a unique substance that happens to be absolutely necessary to every life form on earth. Although it is one of the most plentiful compounds on the planet — in the form of salt water in the world’s oceans — we humans require it on a daily basis in a much more scarce form, as clean drinking water.
Simply stated, human beings cannot live without water.
For us to begin thinking of drinking water as “gold” would be the worst kind of disaster for mankind. Yet that is already happening in America, as witness the recent comments expressed in our water district boardrooms.
In 2004, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District, better known as PAWSD, was the only government agency in Archuleta County with a well-thought-out plan for the future. Unfortunately, that plan seems to have been based on a disturbing amount of speculation.
PAWSD and SJWCD went to district water court Judge Greg Lyman in 2004 and requested the conditional rights to store 64,000 acre-feet of water, drawn from the San Juan River and stored in the proposed Dry Gulch Reservoir. For those of you who enjoy big numbers, 64,000 acre-feet is equal to 20.8 billion gallons, enough to supply drinking water to at least 300,000 Archuleta County residents for a year.
Unbelievably, Judge Lyman granted this request, and thereby brought about a lawsuit from fishing organization Trout Unlimited — a lawsuit that continues to cost PAWSD rate payers considerable legal expenses, four years later. I have never heard PAWSD announce how much they have spent in legal fees since 2004, other than the remark made by PAWSD Manager Carrie Weiss last February, when she referred to PAWSD legal fees as “thousands and thousands of dollars.” Weiss continued:
“I’m frustrated. I’m sorry, but I’m really very disappointed in this process. The cost is getting outrageous. We have no choice but to proceed, but it just irritates me that a national organization, most of whom don’t even have a clue where Pagosa Springs is, is fighting this. And they have a lot of money and a lot of power. It’s frustrating.”
But the point here is not the legal fees paid by PAWSD customers. The point is the refusal of the PAWSD and SJWCD directors to adjust their 2004 projections — which were thoroughly rejected by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2006 — to reflect the economic downturn in Archuleta County since 2005.
That the community agency which once led the way in planning for the future, would continue to request water rights in excess of ten times what they calculate they will need in 2035, strikes me as unethical speculation in water resources.
It also creates a potentially devastating burden upon new businesses hoping to move into Archuleta County. These potential businesses are being asked to help finance this speculatively-large reservoir via PAWSD new Water Resource Fee — a fee that can easily exceed $50,000 for a new business.
In our modern world, the average human being uses less than 3 gallons of drinking water per day, less than 1,000 gallons a year. And drinking water is the only kind of water that PAWSD has a mandate to acquire and deliver.
However, in their February 2008 brief submitted to Judge Lyman, PAWSD and SJWCD continued to ask for an enormous reservoir, capable of storing 29,000 acre-feet of water. At 326,000 gallons per acre-foot, my pocket calculator rings up that total at 9.45 billion gallons. Since PAWSD currently serves about 9,500 residents, the new Dry Gulch reservoir would provide about 1 million gallons per current resident — over one thousand times the amount needed by an average human being on planet earth.
Even more unsettling, the PAWSD and SJWCD boards continue to state that Dry Gulch would serve the community as a “recreational reservoir.” Yet neither board has ever been mandated to provide recreational facilities in Archuleta County.
The western United States is in the midst of a growing water crisis that promises to change forever the way we think about drinking water. Within the next decade or two, all of us living in the West — from the millionaire in Los Angeles, to the condo owner in Pagosa Lakes — will be required to seriously reduce the amount of drinking water we use for non-drinking purposes such as watering lawns, flushing toilets and washing clothes.
In the midst of this drinking water crisis, it will certainly be tempting for certain people to begin viewing water as a speculative commodity — or worse yet, as something to be used to fill a “recreational reservoir.”
For the sake of the world’s people, however, we must watch ourselves carefully, to assure that we never begin to think of water as the “gold of the 21st Century.” Gold is gold and will always be bought and sold by speculators. Drinking water is drinking water, and we must strive to assure its availability — as best we can — to all the people of the world, and never to speculators. |
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