I can't speak to this particular county but the vibe I get from friends of mine who live in this part of Colorado is that the municipalities/counties will do anything/everything they can to stick it to the off grid crowd who are seen as poor and trashy in the best case and evil dangerous sov-cits, anarchists or other anti-government types in the worst case when in reality many/most of them simply wanted to live in BFE and it's not a money or ideological thing and they just want to do whatever works. They buy water from someone who trucks it in no different and with no more thought than they buy propane or pay for their septic to be pumped and trucked out.
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.
Same where I live, in California. One of my coworkers wanted to get a permit for a well, and the county's policy was to make the permit as expensive as running a water main to the property, making it always cheaper to subsidise their water infrastructure than to build your own.
Keep in mind that I'm in the part of the state that is extremely wet, where aquifers fill faster than agriculture can use it, and residential use is a literal drop in the bucket, compared to agriculture use. Most of Californias resevuoirs are built for flood control, with power generation as an added benefit, and shipping water off to the drier parts of the state as an afterthought.
In rural areas, people often directly support each other to get buy, and the urbanites absolutely can't stand it when they aren't relying on the urban fifedom. Just like the area in Colorado that the article discusses, it's illegal here to share well water. They've also made it illegal to pool your trash together for a dump run. Until the state stepped in, it used to be illegal to collect your own rain water, too. The same for inlaw quarters, which are really common in rural areas. (My county once spent nearly half a million, to unsucsessfully sue a group of people for a fraction of that amount, because one of them sold his land to the others, who each custom built their own houses, instead of having a county-approved developer build all of them.)
Even a few decades ago, California used to be the place for antiestablishment types, even in the urban areas, and its sudden changeover to forced top-down management has created a somewhat splintered government that alternates between extreme limits and strong reforms.
Are these rules decided at the county level? And can municipalities override them? I am wondering if the rural folk can incorporate to free themselves from these absurd restrictions.
Those are county rules, but every county has the same ones. I don't know if a cities could make leaner rules, because I've only ever seen them make them stricter.
It's crazy that picking up garbage is so universally a government enforced monopoly that every county seems to have independently required it. The county runs the dump, but anyone could transport garage with minimal capital, so the garbage company doesn't have the same monopoly excuse that other utilities have, yet I can chose from three cellular phone providers but legally only one garbage pickup service can serve my address. Not only that, but if the property is occupied and service is available, I'm legally required to pay for service, whether I use it or not, and if I don't pay for it, even if I'm not using it, it'll be added to my property tax bill, and if I don't pay it there, the county will auction off my house to pay for it.
I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved, but I don't see how it's spread to every county in the west coast.
> I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved
I'm in a fairly densely-populated part of the east coast and we have lots of options for trash hauling, and none of them are "official" or provided by the city.
... I do wonder about the wear-n-tear on the neighborhood roads from having like 5+x as many trash truck trips on them per week versus a municipal solution, given how fast road wear scales with axel weight. I bet it's enough to matter, which means we're all paying a hidden cost for being able to choose among trash companies. It also seems like the base costs would have to be significantly higher, given far more trucks required and way fewer pick-ups per mile driven.
The bit that jumped out at me was "a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda." Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement. So you get sneaky tricks like sneaking things into the agenda at the last minute, or outright lies like accusing citizens of threats when they were just asking questions.
> Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement.
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.
Water rights is a huge deal in Colorado. It is in the state constitution and there has been a lot of government corruption around the issue.
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.
It's hilarious how opposite of the east this is. Water is a massive liability. You can't (legally) even put up a garden shed within 100ft of "wetlands" (yes, that seasonal wet spot in the forest qualifies, better tip your surveyor generously lest it show up on a map, because once it shows up it never goes away) without state officials crawling up your ass in a manner befitting large industrial developments. Whereas if you've got water in the west you land is incredibly valuable.
I hate to be the out-of-state guy that tries to summarily come up with a solution, but in AZ they have two separate regulation on well drilling. Low-flow household consumption is "exempt" meaning if it is drilled using the approved techniques and far enough away from septic systems etc it is virtually guaranteed to be approved. If you DIY your own "exempt" well you do not even need a well driller's license and can do it with a "one-time" DIY permit so theoretically you could just buy some percussion rig for a couple grand off ali-express and go ham. Household consumption is also pretty trivial compared to agricultural and commercial use, so it doesn't have much meaningful negative impact on the the 'water rights' of commercial users.
As far as I know there is no way to sell the right away to drill an 'exempt' well. I hope CO looks into something similar.
Slang history. In the US BFE is well established as Bum-Fuck-Egypt to mean in the middle of nowhere. Explicitly stating Butt-Fuck-Egypt leans towards sexual imagery and is not part of the slang. I completely understand the confusion as bum is commonly used in the UK to mean butt. Someone on the linked site even got it wrong.
As an example of communication 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.
For what it's worth, growing up in Texas in the 90s, it was absolutely "butt-fucking Egypt" or "butt-fuck nowhere". I don't think I'd ever heard anyone use the "bum" variant.
But they have been buying the bootstraps. They were buying water from the town, and they were perfectly aware that it wasn't something the town was obligated to provide.
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.
Many people haul water in Colorado because the bootstrapping method of drilling your own well is now heavily restricted, and of course the same people stopping you from drilling the well (government) is happy to monopolize and sell you the water.
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.
I find this quite cynical, but I also can't speak to half of your family, ha!
I am one of the folks who, in my youth, purchased land in between Fort Garland and San Luis, with dreams of off-grid living. I succeeded, mostly, but not without many hiccups - the locals being one of them.
For me, "off-grid" was about _control_: control over my mortgage (none!), bills (no monthly subscriptions to privatized power companies generating profit!), and, well, life in general. I'd say the general theme wasn't so much about "sticking it to the man" (what's to stick and who?) or "being self reliant" (impossible), but about fighting classism _to some degree_ via a veritable case of civil disobedience.
To my understanding, it is basically illegal OR extremely difficult to find a living situation where someone else (bank, etc.) isn't profiting off folks, and I find that, well, avarice. But you could find a situation like that out in the valley, because land was cheap and you could "get away" with a lot out there, which basically is just another way of saying folks could _afford_ to be poor.
America is entrenched in classism, and everywhere I look someone with less money getting fucked. And this is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to building code enforcement: wealthy folks pay the same amount as poor folks for things like permits, et. al. ($$), code means nothing when you can afford to hire engineers to prove its safe, pay for costly zoning variations, etc. So as harsh as the valley was in climate, it was basically an oasis of sorts to younger me for all those reasons.
All that to say: there are other genres of fiction worth exploring :)
I'm one of those off grid people, but I'm not looking for 100% off grid.
What I want is the equivalent of an UPS, but for everything.
If the municipal power grid, water and sewage go down. I want to be able to live mostly like before.
If there's a disruption in the logistics chain for the grocery store for any reason, I can live with what I have and can grow for a week or two in relative comfort, a month would suck.
If the wired internet connection goes down, I want to have a wireless option that automatically takes over.
It's a fantasy, an aesthetic. There is no living off-grid when you depend on a giant gas-guzzling truck with a thousand moving parts for your every needs.
Slightly better, but how do you get parts to repair your vehicle or anything else?
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.
> How about an electric vehicle, a few dozen kW of solar, and a drilled well?
It's the same issue, you're still dependent on outside resources (especially if we're being realistic and understand that everything will break and need repaired/maintenance/replacement eventually), you're just switching which resources you're dependent on.
My point was really that "socialism" (in common use, especially on the libertarian right) is not really tethered to any historical definition. It's a political term to attach to things you don't like.
You have to very dense or bordering on disingenuous to not see the subsidized healthcare, subsidized childcare and spouses, subsidized moving costs, etc etc etc as "socialism" in the colloquial sense..... You can't get even 10% those benefits in the private sector without the same chuds screeching about communism.
Keyword you seem to have missed is "colloquial". Yes I know they don't. But 99% of the time those are the type of programs being railed against by free market evangelist....
But in reality....The USA mic is the closest thing to actual meaning of socialism the USA has ever tried.
Colloquial usage of the word is simply incorrect. I don't see how the US is the closest when nowhere in its history have workers significantly controlled the means of their own production. It simply hasn't happened around the world and I doubt it ever will.
You are projecting an ideology onto these people for no reason other than to satisfy your own bias and/or earn a few cheap upvotes from likeminded readers.
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"
>You are projecting an ideology onto these people for no reason other than to satisfy your own bias and/or earn a few cheap upvotes from likeminded readers.
No, I read what they said during the interviews used in the article.
Which you didn't quote or reference and who's commentary was included because it is noteworthy, eye catching or controversial, not because it is representative.
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.
You don't need to pull quotes or provide references in a comment about the article you've just read and are commenting on.[1]
Of course, I read every word of the article instead of just the title, or skimming it, or having an AI summarize it and spoon feed it to me like I am a baby, and I expect others to do the same.
> Debi and John Marks moved from Florida to build their dream home in the high desert of Costilla County. They bought property in the ranches two years ago with plans to build a retirement home and live off the grid among the pines
...
> “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.
I think a lot of people are just cosplaying as Little House On The Prairie and think they're independent and "off grid" because they don't have monthly utility bills. Except they're buying their propane and buying their water, not to mention their clothes and everything else. So they're actually on-grid, but just with extra steps.
>These are people specifically moving to this unincorporated county in order to live "off the grid". This sounds ideological to me.
Realtors out there are selling sandcastles in the sky to flatlanders who don't know any better. The property they are buying is parceled out ranch land that went bust generations ago for the same reasons. These aren't "prepper" types so much as folks who want the Colorado high-country lifestyle when they can't actually afford it.
Seems like an everyone sucks here situation. People who bought houses and chose an off grid life in a water stressed area and did nothing to alleviate the situation, only add consumption. People who want to water their lawns and are unable to adjust their personal behavior in times of need. People with “I got mine” mentality who don’t want to share the space because they got there first and were able to exploit the resources to their desire. The town governance and realtors who keep allowing the sale of properties when there’s no water.
Yea, this is what happens when the hyper-individualistic "everyone for themselves!" becomes the prevailing attitude. Selfishness becomes a structural weakness for the whole community.
Sounds like a market failure caused by using the government to meter water. In this case, the 'selfish' method would work better.
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 government can meter stuff at market rates too.
Though, there also seems to be a lot of spite here, which the market may not be able to solve. Seems like the folks buying bulk water were paying FAR more, to the point that they were using less than 1% of the supply, but paying 15% of the cost. In a pure market, they would be the last cut off, yet they were the first.
Clearly there is something else at play stopping the market price from emerging, otherwise one of the in-towners could just resell the water to the excluded persons from their supply at a profit. I'm guessing they've made this illegal, though, since it's such an obvious solution of a win-win to a quick buck to a local that wasn't used. At the very least there is always a crackhead who needs $20 for a hit, I don't see how you can get the whole town to collude out of spite, it's just completely infeasible unless the people buying are like notorious child snatchers or something.
> 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.
What happens when growing alfalfa makes more of a profit than individuals have, such that individuals simply cannot buy water to drink? Or what if a company comes in with sufficient capital to corner the market, then bottles and sells the water at a profit to individuals, exporting the leftover to sell to individuals in other places?
Or what if some random billionaire decides he's mad at his neighbors for voting wrong and decides to buy out all the water for a huge swimming pool that only he gets to use?
It takes 100+ gallons of water to grow a pound of alfalfa.
Alfalfa value top out at something like $0.50 a pound for the very best stuff.
So your theory is what, that if alfalfa farmers are willing to take no profits at all they could potentially bid water up to 0.5 cents per gallon?
You are so incredibly grossly underestimating the cost and impracticality of bidding water up as high as you're imagining, it is mind boggling.
They can easily bid water high enough to make it commercially useless for many industries, outbidding it from access to human consumption would require mind-boggling amounts of money.
I want to see you dying of thirst one day with no money while I have all the water (for 1 million dollars a gallon of course) and when you ask for a drink I will say
They paid (over and over) for one time water allotments.
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.
Yes, in a way. They live within the bounds of a water district, which itself has water rights. These districts limit use (or the growth in use) by passing rules on the use (limiting the watering of grass, for example), or (fairly often in some places) limiting new service hookups. They won't let you connect if they don't think they can secure the supply long term.
Nothing is "guaranteed", so no. People usually congregate where resources exist, that's often why towns are where they are, near water for example. Where I live for example, freshwater comes from a pretty stable water source. Paying the municipality to operate and maintain that is as close to "guaranteed" as it gets probably.
Once the circumstances change, we'll have to adapt.
Water law in the US southwest is wild. The right to flows of water, into the future, is treated as a private property right and is bought and sold. Municipal water systems normally acquire the rights (and arrange transport).
As a homeowner I literally pay a fee every month to fund the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure that gets water to my home.
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.
The arrangement they had with the town was closer to buying water at a gas station. You sort of assume it’s always going to be there, but one day it wasn’t because they stopped selling it.
There land did not come with any water rights (something you've got to ask about for any land out here not already hooked up to a metro water system), and thus you are entirely at the mercy of others and not guaranteed anything. Why you would ever choose to build/buy a home without some relatively senior water rights or a metered water connection is entirely beyond me.
"Fort Garland uses 120 acre-feet of water per year — that’s 120 acres covered by 1 foot of water. Sales to people in cisterns account for about 1 acre feet per year, Pacheco said. Revenue for the water sales to rural residents totaled $43,000 per year, about 15% of total revenue."
Lack of water is not the problem here, especially now that the town's pump has been fixed.
Colorado Water access law is truly crazy and arcane in some cases (such as this, it would seem).
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.
I don't think it is just Colorado. The water law in the west (of the USA) is all messed up. Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.
> Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.
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.
I'm sure it made sense at the time. It was essentially homesteading. Just like you could grab a chuck of untamed land and fence it, plow it, build on it, and then you owned it. Water worked the same way.
Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.
It’s messed up anywhere there are periods of sufficiency and insufficiency, no matter what the rules are.
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?
The Water Knife is a fun fiction book about exactly this.
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.
Sounds like the water pump failed, and while it was being fixed restrictions were put in place for everyone. Some folks didn't like the restrictions and they blamed the folks who came to buy water because they live off the grid nearby, even if it does not appear those sales would change any of the restrictions.
Sad situation. Fear of outsiders and other people often pop up when people are stressed.
I went home to a somewhat rural area recently. They're very upset about a local hospital is closing, meanwhile they vote solidly for politicians who want to cut people's health insurance off.
Healthcare and medical insurance (private or government) are absolutely not the same thing. The ACA married them, probably to our detriment, but I think we'll eventually remember that they're actually separate concepts.
I bet these rural people are actually huge supporters of healthcare.
The hospital closing in this case is largely propped up by the county who effectively pays operating costs that can't be recouped from people who go to the hospital. Insurance coverage is a direct impact on their ability to operate. It's no mystery.
Their personal views on healthcare doesn't really matter if their voting pattern doesn't fit.
I feel like I must have run into some ideological topic here with you and your words mean something different to you than they do me.
Insurance or the individual pays the bill, that is no different than it ever has been. People without insurance are less likely to have their medical bills paid, that's just the way it is.
>Insurance or the individual pays the bill, that is no different than it ever has been.
Strictly speaking this is true. I agree with this statement.
However, our current insurance industry based system (colloquially known as the ACA or Obamacare) has caused "health care" to pivot away from providing medical treatment to individual patients, and toward a system of "health care" companies charging insurance companies for services provided to a 3rd party (the patient).
The patient is no longer a customer, the insurance company is. There is effectively no health care provider in the US that caters to a patient as a customer, especially if we're talking about hospital level medical care.
> However, our current insurance industry based system (colloquially known as the ACA or Obamacare) has caused "health care" to pivot away from providing medical treatment to individual patients, and toward a system of "health care" companies charging insurance companies for services provided to a 3rd party (the patient).
I have never encountered the notion that the ACA is the cause of this, and I was around before the ACA and don't see how that part wasn't the same before it, except other things were worse (the whole "pre-existing conditions" thing, for one). What do you mean?
> The fight over the water has pitted residents of Fort Garland who have plumbing and pay for metered water against those living outside the city limits with cisterns. The board of the Fort Garland Water and Sanitation District — which cut off water sales to rural residents Aug. 1 in a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda — has devolved into shouting matches and dysfunction.
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.
"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."
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.
From the article is sounds more like, some town folk don't like not being able to water their lawns. Said folks targeted the people buying water, despite them being less than 1% of the water used. Not to mention apparently they are providing 45% of the towns tax revenue with their water purchases.
> apparently they are providing 45% of the towns tax revenue with their water purchases
"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.
I agree with some of what you said, but doing it without warning seems unnecessarily harsh. This quote from the article is pretty ripe though:
“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.
Not having reliable utilities comes with the territory. If you want to live off grid, you need backups of backups. And a reliable water source is one of them.
There is every reason to think a town water system is reliable and safe. They were not using enough water to matter to the town, and providing the town a nice source of income.
I don't agree with how the city made the decision either. But the politics is pretty simple: you are going to support the interests of the people who voted for you over those who have no vote. And those who have no vote in this matter chose to have no vote by living outside of the city.
Obviously. The point is cutting off water with no warning in the hottest month of the year is unnecessary cruel. At least give people a few weeks to start accounting for the change.
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?
I live a couple miles outside the borders of a town, so I don't get to vote in town elections, just county and township elections. However, I do all my shopping in town, use the town library, drive on the town's roads, belong to some organizations that do charitable work in town, etc. It's fair to say that I'm affected by town politics in a lot of ways, but I don't get in a say in those politics.
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.
I don't lament my lack of a vote; I understand that it's an imperfect system.
As for whether I pay town taxes, it depends which ones you mean. Nothing on my property tax bill goes directly to the town's coffers for things like the parks and garbage pickup. But I pay the town sales tax every time I go shopping. I pay the town's sizable hotel and restaurant tax every time I go out to eat. I'm pretty sure the town gets some downstream fraction of the gas tax I pay every time I fill up.
Of course, all those taxes are voluntary in the sense that I could drive further to a different town. So does that qualify as "taxation without representation"? The Founders would probably say so, but it doesn't bother me enough to get chuffed about; I'm just explaining it for people who haven't experienced it.
Wouldn't this kind of reasoning - no taxes, no votes - end up making anyone who doesn't pay taxes, by whatever means, unable to participate in democratic governance?
Their companies pay taxes, so no that argument doesn't work. Every company pays some form of employee taxes and so on, there is no way to get around that.
> 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.
And sometimes, the private water company that services the county absolutely gouges customers because they're private and can get away with it. I saw this in Texas, where a guy I knew bought a house just outside the city limits to avoid taxes and then his water bill tripled compared to when he was on city water.
If you have captive customers and a product with relatively inelastic pricing and no competition, you can basically do whatever you want. That's also just markets
I'm not sure that, where I live, there's a lot of property outside of town/city limits. My water is about $200/year but I use very little outside water.
In the UK, because we are the kind of communist nightmare that terrifies the USA, there is no place outside the city that pays no property tax. Problem solved
While there are unincorporated areas in the US, I'm not sure no property taxes are a given even in those areas. I live in an incorporated town and definitely pay property taxes and get a variety of town services but do need to handle my own sewer and trash (though I get water and electricity along with fire/police/etc. services as well as public schools as relevant).
In fact, I'm not sure the degree to which just bowing out of public schooling is even allowed given that I think that's over half of my town's budget.
I grew up drinking from well water. People are seriously overestimating the amount that certain services need to be provided by a municipality.
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.
> I grew up drinking from well water. People are seriously overestimating the amount that certain services need to be provided by a municipality.
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’s not just Colorado. Used to live in rural northern California and digging a $25k well (typical price I was quoted) came with no guarantee that water would be found.
$25k is extremely cheap for a well. In my area of Arizona it is common to do well shares, several properties will chip in to drill a $50k-$100k well system, but the cost may be closer to $5k-10K per family.
How deep is the typical well, and is that the primary driver of the cost?
I’m east of the Mississippi and my well is 200 feet deep. But this aquifer is fully allocated; all the new construction has to go to a different aquifer with a typical well depth of 700 feet. Once that is fully allocated, I think there is another one at around 1100 feet.
The price at that depth is dominated by the per foot cost. But inside the per-foot cost is the licensing, regulatory, casing compliance, and permitting compliance.
It's about $50/ft just to drill. After that is electric, the pump, the pressure tanks, burying pipe to enough houses to make each share cheap enough, and the legal cost of setting up a well share.
If you just wanted a well for your own property and merely put a spigot powered by a generator right next to it, you might be able to get away with $35k to start with. If you are looking to do a well share so that it becomes more economically feasible to split costs, I think it would be minimum $50k.
Thanks. Around me I think it would be closer to $15-20k including all the equipment. Permitting is legally capped at $100 and there are about 15 or 20 businesses within 50 miles that do it, so competition abounds.
> 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.
Yes, but that's covered by my second part that americans are bad at evaluating risk (many humans are I imagine, I'm just trying to be narrow in my assessment). You don't get much more "on grid" than relying on a municipal water supply.
This is a disingenuous argument. Of course they weren't choosing to live with no human contact whatsoever.
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".
Many countries have rural water users subsidised by urban water users, because rural users need 100 times as much pipe buried and maintained per customer, but everyone pays the same rate for water.
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.
In this case it seems like it's the reverse. The article claims the "bulk water" customers are responsible for 15% of the system's revenue but consume less than 1% of the water delivered.
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)
That’s one of the real solutions - we shouldn’t be using potable water for everything. Houses that are plumbed on city water should have two water sources - potable and other.
They paid for the water that the municipality could afford to sell. They didn't pay into the municipality. If the municipality doesn't have excess water, why should they be forced to sell it?
There is a very real legal and practical difference between paying for 100G of water, and paying for the right to buy 100G per week for the next N years.
Both have a price in the American west, and they did not pay the latter price.
People are saying they weren't paying into the municipality. That implies people paying into the municipality are paying for more than just water. The people buying the water were just buying water.
Now, maybe that's now how you think of it, but I'm sure you can see how others see it.
Even YOU understand the difference because you had to misrepresent what people were saying.
> They paid the municipality for the water, but they didn't pay into the municipality.
That's the difference. "into" doesn't mean they are merely paying the municipality, but rather, they are paying to support the municipality.
The people buying water? They are merely buying water that's up for sale. That's it. There is no implication beyond that. Intent matters.
And it's clear that the outsiders had no intention of supporting the municipality even if you want to suggest that was the case.
Yes, they were buying water that the municipality could sell. And they got that water. The article suggests that the municipality is rationing its residents' water, so they don't have excess water to sell to outsiders.
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.
Right, but the system needed maintenance, and people would still need to ration water and not water their lawns, even if the water they sell to outsiders (less than 1%) stopped.
That's typical in the small towns around here that let you fill up water tanks at the base of the water tower. You'll pay a lot more than regular customers, but a lot less than buying it by the gallon at Walmart, and it costs the water company nothing except maintaining a hose.
Perhaps, but saying they don't deserve to be served by the township because they don't pay is disingenuous. In fact, them paying more subsidizes the other residents' water.
It’s more than that. There is a finite and shrinking supply of water. The water district has every right, and IMO an obligation to protect supply to existing users. They do this by limiting availability to others.
These people should not be living off the grid without securing water rights. This has been the system in the west since before statehood.
Except they didn’t. A proper municipality decision would have been discussed publicly with advance notice. This is like the board of directors of Toyota deciding to stop selling to the US without advance notice without input from the shareholders, the US, or advance notice.
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.
Kind of funny that this warrants a news article. I've been living in South Africa for the last couple years and this is basically just normal. The municipality just doesn't pay the water bill, so we don't have water half the time. What everyone does is install a giant tank and pump at their house so they can shower when the water is out. How quickly you get used to it...
This was the standard of South Africa as well not too long ago. I was just musing that it's funny how quick you get acclimated to complete dysfunction.
I haven't read The Water Knife, but I have read The Tamarisk Hunter, which I believe is related and paints a picture of the future of the American West with it's messed up water rights.
Anyone immediately think of Pump Six, by Paolo Bacigalupi, when they got to this part of the story?
> 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.*
> Others are wondering whether to scrap plans to build on their property, leaving home for showers and limiting their toilet flushes.
> 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.
it is absolutely wild that a 3-to-2 vote that wasn't announced beforehand could put so many people at risk. obviously governments haven't acted to serve the people since at least Citizen's United, but this is like, society breaking down shit.
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.
How well does it serve those constituents? Shutting off the water cut off 15% of Fort Garland's water revenue (while reallocating 1% of its water). That's a big dent in a budget that was probably directly keeping those tax payers' taxes lower and providing them valuable services.
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.
'Fairly'. I would love to see them argue that with St Peter at the pearly gates. 'Well we drew this arbitrary line on the ground, and refused to sell water to people in the other side of the line so they could drink and survive. We did it so we could water our ornamental lawns'
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.
After reading the article I come to the conclusion that this was never really about water. There wasn't even a water shortage, only a technical issue that would be resolved.
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.
I agree, none of this was really necessary. The board/city was broadly within their rights not to sell (and down the road, as water supplies become more strained they may in fact not have extra water to sell).
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.
Massive amounts of groundwater are being sucked out of Colorado by Chinese and ME companies that, for instance, grow alfalfa crops and then ship them to their home countries.
I don't know what people expect moving to south central Colorado, maybe they're taken in by the "cheap land" posts that flood everything like craigslist for Costilla and Alamosa counties. If you've never been there, it's amazing anything grows on that land at all (it's just high desert) and like the article says the people are really poor there; it's an entirely different world than the front range that people seem to extrapolate to the rest of Colorado. Everybody feels entitled to live in Colorado, but our problems are going to come to a head sooner or later when we face the reality that even the front range doesn't frankly have enough water for all of it's citizens or it's ag activies (and we keep building more and more crazy dam and pipeline projects). I personally believe we're going to see a major crisis level drought in the front range in the next 20-30 years that ends up potentially causing a significant population shrinkage in our metros, and it will likely be even more acute elsewhere in the state (as the front range metro basically gets preferential treatment to everywhere else).
Can't they at least get together, hire some tanker lorries and bring in water from somewhere else? Sure, it may be more expensive than the $43k they currently pay, due to transport costs, but at least they will have water.
> A more immediate solution is a potential plan to have a private company bring a water tanker to county-owned property in Fort Garland.
It seems like the residents are waiting for the local government to take care of this problem (with a potential plan), when they could instead address it directly by co-ordinating with their neighbours, who also need water, to take action.
Some context it seems a lot of folks in these comments have missed is that the off grid folks apparently use 1/120th of the town's water, yet contribute 15% of the town's water revenue. So effectively they are subsidizing the towns water system while using an insubstantially tiny fraction of the towns water, and even then the townies shut them out for reasons.
Scrolling throug the comments here, one could conclude the HN community finds it to be justified to remove water access without warning to people they find disageeable.
It's pretty weird, since I'm used to seeing people here arguing that the basic essentials of life like food and water should be provided to everyone without question, with the details of where they come from to be worked out later. Now all of a sudden in this case it's "Let them drink Perrier."
The land is cheap in the San Luis for a reason. It can't support much life. Ultimately these are not multi-generational folks being driven out. They are newcomers who have overwhelmed the existing infrastructure.
This thread is getting weird and with a lack of understanding; There's absolutely no reason to have a negative attitude to people wanting to buy water. I grew up 5mins from the largest shopping center in the southern hemisphere and we still had to occasionally buy water when there was a drought since we were on a rural stretch of road just off the main highway.
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.
I don't have a negative attitude towards people who live off wells, or local surface water, or some place that sells it to tank back.
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.
> 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.
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.
I can't speak to this particular county but the vibe I get from friends of mine who live in this part of Colorado is that the municipalities/counties will do anything/everything they can to stick it to the off grid crowd who are seen as poor and trashy in the best case and evil dangerous sov-cits, anarchists or other anti-government types in the worst case when in reality many/most of them simply wanted to live in BFE and it's not a money or ideological thing and they just want to do whatever works. They buy water from someone who trucks it in no different and with no more thought than they buy propane or pay for their septic to be pumped and trucked out.
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.
Same where I live, in California. One of my coworkers wanted to get a permit for a well, and the county's policy was to make the permit as expensive as running a water main to the property, making it always cheaper to subsidise their water infrastructure than to build your own.
Keep in mind that I'm in the part of the state that is extremely wet, where aquifers fill faster than agriculture can use it, and residential use is a literal drop in the bucket, compared to agriculture use. Most of Californias resevuoirs are built for flood control, with power generation as an added benefit, and shipping water off to the drier parts of the state as an afterthought.
In rural areas, people often directly support each other to get buy, and the urbanites absolutely can't stand it when they aren't relying on the urban fifedom. Just like the area in Colorado that the article discusses, it's illegal here to share well water. They've also made it illegal to pool your trash together for a dump run. Until the state stepped in, it used to be illegal to collect your own rain water, too. The same for inlaw quarters, which are really common in rural areas. (My county once spent nearly half a million, to unsucsessfully sue a group of people for a fraction of that amount, because one of them sold his land to the others, who each custom built their own houses, instead of having a county-approved developer build all of them.)
Even a few decades ago, California used to be the place for antiestablishment types, even in the urban areas, and its sudden changeover to forced top-down management has created a somewhat splintered government that alternates between extreme limits and strong reforms.
Are these rules decided at the county level? And can municipalities override them? I am wondering if the rural folk can incorporate to free themselves from these absurd restrictions.
Those are county rules, but every county has the same ones. I don't know if a cities could make leaner rules, because I've only ever seen them make them stricter.
It's crazy that picking up garbage is so universally a government enforced monopoly that every county seems to have independently required it. The county runs the dump, but anyone could transport garage with minimal capital, so the garbage company doesn't have the same monopoly excuse that other utilities have, yet I can chose from three cellular phone providers but legally only one garbage pickup service can serve my address. Not only that, but if the property is occupied and service is available, I'm legally required to pay for service, whether I use it or not, and if I don't pay for it, even if I'm not using it, it'll be added to my property tax bill, and if I don't pay it there, the county will auction off my house to pay for it.
I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved, but I don't see how it's spread to every county in the west coast.
> I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved
I'm in a fairly densely-populated part of the east coast and we have lots of options for trash hauling, and none of them are "official" or provided by the city.
... I do wonder about the wear-n-tear on the neighborhood roads from having like 5+x as many trash truck trips on them per week versus a municipal solution, given how fast road wear scales with axel weight. I bet it's enough to matter, which means we're all paying a hidden cost for being able to choose among trash companies. It also seems like the base costs would have to be significantly higher, given far more trucks required and way fewer pick-ups per mile driven.
The bit that jumped out at me was "a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda." Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement. So you get sneaky tricks like sneaking things into the agenda at the last minute, or outright lies like accusing citizens of threats when they were just asking questions.
> Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement.
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.
I don’t think you can put pump breakage on an agenda. Sometimes emergencies require emergency action.
The pump broke in June, the meeting was in August. Does it take more than a full calendar month to update an agenda?
Water rights is a huge deal in Colorado. It is in the state constitution and there has been a lot of government corruption around the issue.
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.
It's hilarious how opposite of the east this is. Water is a massive liability. You can't (legally) even put up a garden shed within 100ft of "wetlands" (yes, that seasonal wet spot in the forest qualifies, better tip your surveyor generously lest it show up on a map, because once it shows up it never goes away) without state officials crawling up your ass in a manner befitting large industrial developments. Whereas if you've got water in the west you land is incredibly valuable.
I hate to be the out-of-state guy that tries to summarily come up with a solution, but in AZ they have two separate regulation on well drilling. Low-flow household consumption is "exempt" meaning if it is drilled using the approved techniques and far enough away from septic systems etc it is virtually guaranteed to be approved. If you DIY your own "exempt" well you do not even need a well driller's license and can do it with a "one-time" DIY permit so theoretically you could just buy some percussion rig for a couple grand off ali-express and go ham. Household consumption is also pretty trivial compared to agricultural and commercial use, so it doesn't have much meaningful negative impact on the the 'water rights' of commercial users.
As far as I know there is no way to sell the right away to drill an 'exempt' well. I hope CO looks into something similar.
Oh, this is absolutely true and covered in detail in the excellent book: _Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge_.
BFE = Butt f!ck Egypt, which means “in the middle of nowhere”. I had to google it.
Bum not butt. [1] I know, it seems like it's the same but it really isn't
[1] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE
What's the difference?
Slang history. In the US BFE is well established as Bum-Fuck-Egypt to mean in the middle of nowhere. Explicitly stating Butt-Fuck-Egypt leans towards sexual imagery and is not part of the slang. I completely understand the confusion as bum is commonly used in the UK to mean butt. Someone on the linked site even got it wrong.
As an example of communication 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.
For what it's worth, growing up in Texas in the 90s, it was absolutely "butt-fucking Egypt" or "butt-fuck nowhere". I don't think I'd ever heard anyone use the "bum" variant.
FYIW, Tri-state area born-and-raised here. We all said 'Bumble-fuck nowhere'
I like it.
Where I come from it was called East Bumf!ck (but never "EBF").
One of my favorite genres of non-fiction is when people who claim they value independence and off-griddyness are forced to be independently off-grid.
"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.
But they have been buying the bootstraps. They were buying water from the town, and they were perfectly aware that it wasn't something the town was obligated to provide.
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.
Many people haul water in Colorado because the bootstrapping method of drilling your own well is now heavily restricted, and of course the same people stopping you from drilling the well (government) is happy to monopolize and sell you the water.
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.
I find this quite cynical, but I also can't speak to half of your family, ha!
I am one of the folks who, in my youth, purchased land in between Fort Garland and San Luis, with dreams of off-grid living. I succeeded, mostly, but not without many hiccups - the locals being one of them.
For me, "off-grid" was about _control_: control over my mortgage (none!), bills (no monthly subscriptions to privatized power companies generating profit!), and, well, life in general. I'd say the general theme wasn't so much about "sticking it to the man" (what's to stick and who?) or "being self reliant" (impossible), but about fighting classism _to some degree_ via a veritable case of civil disobedience.
To my understanding, it is basically illegal OR extremely difficult to find a living situation where someone else (bank, etc.) isn't profiting off folks, and I find that, well, avarice. But you could find a situation like that out in the valley, because land was cheap and you could "get away" with a lot out there, which basically is just another way of saying folks could _afford_ to be poor.
America is entrenched in classism, and everywhere I look someone with less money getting fucked. And this is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to building code enforcement: wealthy folks pay the same amount as poor folks for things like permits, et. al. ($$), code means nothing when you can afford to hire engineers to prove its safe, pay for costly zoning variations, etc. So as harsh as the valley was in climate, it was basically an oasis of sorts to younger me for all those reasons.
All that to say: there are other genres of fiction worth exploring :)
I'm one of those off grid people, but I'm not looking for 100% off grid.
What I want is the equivalent of an UPS, but for everything.
If the municipal power grid, water and sewage go down. I want to be able to live mostly like before.
If there's a disruption in the logistics chain for the grocery store for any reason, I can live with what I have and can grow for a week or two in relative comfort, a month would suck.
If the wired internet connection goes down, I want to have a wireless option that automatically takes over.
Look who doesn't like solar power, the most pro-independence energy source. It's a solution that decouples you from everyone for a good 20 years.
Yes, solar, with atmospheric water generators.
It's a fantasy, an aesthetic. There is no living off-grid when you depend on a giant gas-guzzling truck with a thousand moving parts for your every needs.
How about an electric vehicle, a few dozen kW of solar, and a drilled well?
Slightly better, but how do you get parts to repair your vehicle or anything else?
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.
“No man is an island”
> How about an electric vehicle, a few dozen kW of solar, and a drilled well?
It's the same issue, you're still dependent on outside resources (especially if we're being realistic and understand that everything will break and need repaired/maintenance/replacement eventually), you're just switching which resources you're dependent on.
EVs will still need some maintenance. Are you planning on making your own tires?
Off the grid folks are cosplaying the Amish lifestyle
The Amish do not live off grid generally speaking
You will see the same with "stable-coins" and Wall Street move to Crypto...
That's just another profit making scam masquerading as legitimate business activity
A dismissal without a valid logical reason is in turn dismissable.
In the words of the immortal Lebowski, they're more off-grid than you, Dude.
Reminds me of people who hate 'socialism' but spend their entire lives in the military.
Do workers in the military control their means of production? If not, there's no relation to socialism.
In modern US politics, "socialism" is the Government giving people anything for free.
That still doesn't make sense, the Government is paying people to be in the military.
My point was really that "socialism" (in common use, especially on the libertarian right) is not really tethered to any historical definition. It's a political term to attach to things you don't like.
You have to very dense or bordering on disingenuous to not see the subsidized healthcare, subsidized childcare and spouses, subsidized moving costs, etc etc etc as "socialism" in the colloquial sense..... You can't get even 10% those benefits in the private sector without the same chuds screeching about communism.
You get those benefits in many programmer jobs, its just things companies provide since it attracts people to the job.
Not at all, those are just perks of the job, not socialism in any sense.
Benefits like that have nothing to do with socialism or communism.
Keyword you seem to have missed is "colloquial". Yes I know they don't. But 99% of the time those are the type of programs being railed against by free market evangelist....
But in reality....The USA mic is the closest thing to actual meaning of socialism the USA has ever tried.
Colloquial usage of the word is simply incorrect. I don't see how the US is the closest when nowhere in its history have workers significantly controlled the means of their own production. It simply hasn't happened around the world and I doubt it ever will.
Sure, however the people using that word are simply incorrect.
You are projecting an ideology onto these people for no reason other than to satisfy your own bias and/or earn a few cheap upvotes from likeminded readers.
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"
>You are projecting an ideology onto these people for no reason other than to satisfy your own bias and/or earn a few cheap upvotes from likeminded readers.
No, I read what they said during the interviews used in the article.
Which you didn't quote or reference and who's commentary was included because it is noteworthy, eye catching or controversial, not because it is representative.
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.
You don't need to pull quotes or provide references in a comment about the article you've just read and are commenting on.[1]
Of course, I read every word of the article instead of just the title, or skimming it, or having an AI summarize it and spoon feed it to me like I am a baby, and I expect others to do the same.
[1] common fucking sense
> Debi and John Marks moved from Florida to build their dream home in the high desert of Costilla County. They bought property in the ranches two years ago with plans to build a retirement home and live off the grid among the pines
...
> “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.
I think a lot of people are just cosplaying as Little House On The Prairie and think they're independent and "off grid" because they don't have monthly utility bills. Except they're buying their propane and buying their water, not to mention their clothes and everything else. So they're actually on-grid, but just with extra steps.
>These are people specifically moving to this unincorporated county in order to live "off the grid". This sounds ideological to me.
Realtors out there are selling sandcastles in the sky to flatlanders who don't know any better. The property they are buying is parceled out ranch land that went bust generations ago for the same reasons. These aren't "prepper" types so much as folks who want the Colorado high-country lifestyle when they can't actually afford it.
Seems like an everyone sucks here situation. People who bought houses and chose an off grid life in a water stressed area and did nothing to alleviate the situation, only add consumption. People who want to water their lawns and are unable to adjust their personal behavior in times of need. People with “I got mine” mentality who don’t want to share the space because they got there first and were able to exploit the resources to their desire. The town governance and realtors who keep allowing the sale of properties when there’s no water.
Yea, this is what happens when the hyper-individualistic "everyone for themselves!" becomes the prevailing attitude. Selfishness becomes a structural weakness for the whole community.
Sounds like a market failure caused by using the government to meter water. In this case, the 'selfish' method would work better.
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 government can meter stuff at market rates too.
Though, there also seems to be a lot of spite here, which the market may not be able to solve. Seems like the folks buying bulk water were paying FAR more, to the point that they were using less than 1% of the supply, but paying 15% of the cost. In a pure market, they would be the last cut off, yet they were the first.
Clearly there is something else at play stopping the market price from emerging, otherwise one of the in-towners could just resell the water to the excluded persons from their supply at a profit. I'm guessing they've made this illegal, though, since it's such an obvious solution of a win-win to a quick buck to a local that wasn't used. At the very least there is always a crackhead who needs $20 for a hit, I don't see how you can get the whole town to collude out of spite, it's just completely infeasible unless the people buying are like notorious child snatchers or something.
> 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.
What happens when growing alfalfa makes more of a profit than individuals have, such that individuals simply cannot buy water to drink? Or what if a company comes in with sufficient capital to corner the market, then bottles and sells the water at a profit to individuals, exporting the leftover to sell to individuals in other places?
Or what if some random billionaire decides he's mad at his neighbors for voting wrong and decides to buy out all the water for a huge swimming pool that only he gets to use?
It takes 100+ gallons of water to grow a pound of alfalfa.
Alfalfa value top out at something like $0.50 a pound for the very best stuff.
So your theory is what, that if alfalfa farmers are willing to take no profits at all they could potentially bid water up to 0.5 cents per gallon?
You are so incredibly grossly underestimating the cost and impracticality of bidding water up as high as you're imagining, it is mind boggling.
They can easily bid water high enough to make it commercially useless for many industries, outbidding it from access to human consumption would require mind-boggling amounts of money.
I want to see you dying of thirst one day with no money while I have all the water (for 1 million dollars a gallon of course) and when you ask for a drink I will say
""there is no such thing as a "shortage.""
Free market religion followers are crazy lol
How is being able to buy water for $1M worse than not being able to buy it at all?
"People who bought houses and chose an off grid life in a water stressed area and did nothing to alleviate the situation, only add consumption."
They paid money for the water.
They paid (over and over) for one time water allotments.
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.
They knew they didn't have guaranteed access. It's in the article.
Do ordinary homeowners ever pay for guaranteed access to water? Surely not, right?
Yes, in a way. They live within the bounds of a water district, which itself has water rights. These districts limit use (or the growth in use) by passing rules on the use (limiting the watering of grass, for example), or (fairly often in some places) limiting new service hookups. They won't let you connect if they don't think they can secure the supply long term.
Nothing is "guaranteed", so no. People usually congregate where resources exist, that's often why towns are where they are, near water for example. Where I live for example, freshwater comes from a pretty stable water source. Paying the municipality to operate and maintain that is as close to "guaranteed" as it gets probably.
Once the circumstances change, we'll have to adapt.
Water law in the US southwest is wild. The right to flows of water, into the future, is treated as a private property right and is bought and sold. Municipal water systems normally acquire the rights (and arrange transport).
As a homeowner I literally pay a fee every month to fund the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure that gets water to my home.
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.
The arrangement they had with the town was closer to buying water at a gas station. You sort of assume it’s always going to be there, but one day it wasn’t because they stopped selling it.
There land did not come with any water rights (something you've got to ask about for any land out here not already hooked up to a metro water system), and thus you are entirely at the mercy of others and not guaranteed anything. Why you would ever choose to build/buy a home without some relatively senior water rights or a metered water connection is entirely beyond me.
Well, what happens when 300 people move to a town where there’s only enough water for 100 people? Is just paying money enough?
"Fort Garland uses 120 acre-feet of water per year — that’s 120 acres covered by 1 foot of water. Sales to people in cisterns account for about 1 acre feet per year, Pacheco said. Revenue for the water sales to rural residents totaled $43,000 per year, about 15% of total revenue."
Lack of water is not the problem here, especially now that the town's pump has been fixed.
If money isn't solving the problem you're just not using enough.
It's sad & true & and I hate it.
Colorado Water access law is truly crazy and arcane in some cases (such as this, it would seem).
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.
I don't think it is just Colorado. The water law in the west (of the USA) is all messed up. Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.
https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=3750 has more details.
> Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.
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.
I'm sure it made sense at the time. It was essentially homesteading. Just like you could grab a chuck of untamed land and fence it, plow it, build on it, and then you owned it. Water worked the same way.
Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.
It’s messed up anywhere there are periods of sufficiency and insufficiency, no matter what the rules are.
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?
The Water Knife is a fun fiction book about exactly this.
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.
https://youtu.be/XusyNT_k-1c?si=8R8oXaj8Itmwxw0V good overview in video form :)
I remember reading in Colorado you aren't allowed to collect rainfall for your own use.
It makes complete sense based on when the laws were passed. You dam a creek and your neighbors cows starve.
Sounds like the water pump failed, and while it was being fixed restrictions were put in place for everyone. Some folks didn't like the restrictions and they blamed the folks who came to buy water because they live off the grid nearby, even if it does not appear those sales would change any of the restrictions.
Sad situation. Fear of outsiders and other people often pop up when people are stressed.
Those folks cut off used 1% of the water but paid 15% of the costs. They were paying far more than their share, but got the blame.
I went home to a somewhat rural area recently. They're very upset about a local hospital is closing, meanwhile they vote solidly for politicians who want to cut people's health insurance off.
Human nature is disheartening at times.
Healthcare and medical insurance (private or government) are absolutely not the same thing. The ACA married them, probably to our detriment, but I think we'll eventually remember that they're actually separate concepts.
I bet these rural people are actually huge supporters of healthcare.
The hospital closing in this case is largely propped up by the county who effectively pays operating costs that can't be recouped from people who go to the hospital. Insurance coverage is a direct impact on their ability to operate. It's no mystery.
Their personal views on healthcare doesn't really matter if their voting pattern doesn't fit.
Again, you're conflating insurance and health care.
Medical insurance in the US is a parasite that is killing its host (health care providers).
I feel like I must have run into some ideological topic here with you and your words mean something different to you than they do me.
Insurance or the individual pays the bill, that is no different than it ever has been. People without insurance are less likely to have their medical bills paid, that's just the way it is.
Not ideological, I'll try to explain better.
>Insurance or the individual pays the bill, that is no different than it ever has been.
Strictly speaking this is true. I agree with this statement.
However, our current insurance industry based system (colloquially known as the ACA or Obamacare) has caused "health care" to pivot away from providing medical treatment to individual patients, and toward a system of "health care" companies charging insurance companies for services provided to a 3rd party (the patient).
The patient is no longer a customer, the insurance company is. There is effectively no health care provider in the US that caters to a patient as a customer, especially if we're talking about hospital level medical care.
> However, our current insurance industry based system (colloquially known as the ACA or Obamacare) has caused "health care" to pivot away from providing medical treatment to individual patients, and toward a system of "health care" companies charging insurance companies for services provided to a 3rd party (the patient).
I have never encountered the notion that the ACA is the cause of this, and I was around before the ACA and don't see how that part wasn't the same before it, except other things were worse (the whole "pre-existing conditions" thing, for one). What do you mean?
> The fight over the water has pitted residents of Fort Garland who have plumbing and pay for metered water against those living outside the city limits with cisterns. The board of the Fort Garland Water and Sanitation District — which cut off water sales to rural residents Aug. 1 in a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda — has devolved into shouting matches and dysfunction.
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.
"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."
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.
From the article is sounds more like, some town folk don't like not being able to water their lawns. Said folks targeted the people buying water, despite them being less than 1% of the water used. Not to mention apparently they are providing 45% of the towns tax revenue with their water purchases.
So an irrational decision fueling conflict.
> apparently they are providing 45% of the towns tax revenue with their water purchases
"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.
Indeed. IMO, the municipality should have raised water prices for everyone to make supply match demand.
And that doesn’t mean water bought ‘on demand’ would have to be equally costly as what people who ‘subscribed’ to water pay.
I agree with some of what you said, but doing it without warning seems unnecessarily harsh. This quote from the article is pretty ripe though:
“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.
Not having reliable utilities comes with the territory. If you want to live off grid, you need backups of backups. And a reliable water source is one of them.
There is every reason to think a town water system is reliable and safe. They were not using enough water to matter to the town, and providing the town a nice source of income.
I don't agree with how the city made the decision either. But the politics is pretty simple: you are going to support the interests of the people who voted for you over those who have no vote. And those who have no vote in this matter chose to have no vote by living outside of the city.
Obviously. The point is cutting off water with no warning in the hottest month of the year is unnecessary cruel. At least give people a few weeks to start accounting for the change.
> those who have no vote
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?
I live a couple miles outside the borders of a town, so I don't get to vote in town elections, just county and township elections. However, I do all my shopping in town, use the town library, drive on the town's roads, belong to some organizations that do charitable work in town, etc. It's fair to say that I'm affected by town politics in a lot of ways, but I don't get in a say in those politics.
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.
Do you pay town taxes? Or do you avoid paying those town taxes and still lament your lack of vote?
I don't lament my lack of a vote; I understand that it's an imperfect system.
As for whether I pay town taxes, it depends which ones you mean. Nothing on my property tax bill goes directly to the town's coffers for things like the parks and garbage pickup. But I pay the town sales tax every time I go shopping. I pay the town's sizable hotel and restaurant tax every time I go out to eat. I'm pretty sure the town gets some downstream fraction of the gas tax I pay every time I fill up.
Of course, all those taxes are voluntary in the sense that I could drive further to a different town. So does that qualify as "taxation without representation"? The Founders would probably say so, but it doesn't bother me enough to get chuffed about; I'm just explaining it for people who haven't experienced it.
Wouldn't this kind of reasoning - no taxes, no votes - end up making anyone who doesn't pay taxes, by whatever means, unable to participate in democratic governance?
I'm asking for a couple billionaires.
> I'm asking for a couple billionaires.
Their companies pay taxes, so no that argument doesn't work. Every company pays some form of employee taxes and so on, there is no way to get around that.
> Every company pays some form of employee taxes
Employees pay those. And companies don't vote (they need to bribe politicians through donations).
> 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.
At least Internet/communications seems to increasingly have other options but some other largely essential utilities often don't.
And sometimes, the private water company that services the county absolutely gouges customers because they're private and can get away with it. I saw this in Texas, where a guy I knew bought a house just outside the city limits to avoid taxes and then his water bill tripled compared to when he was on city water.
If you don't buy in bulk you'll spend more. Isn't that just markets?
If you have captive customers and a product with relatively inelastic pricing and no competition, you can basically do whatever you want. That's also just markets
I'm not sure that, where I live, there's a lot of property outside of town/city limits. My water is about $200/year but I use very little outside water.
>because they're private and can get away with it.
Also because it’s highest cost due to less populated area
In the UK, because we are the kind of communist nightmare that terrifies the USA, there is no place outside the city that pays no property tax. Problem solved
While there are unincorporated areas in the US, I'm not sure no property taxes are a given even in those areas. I live in an incorporated town and definitely pay property taxes and get a variety of town services but do need to handle my own sewer and trash (though I get water and electricity along with fire/police/etc. services as well as public schools as relevant).
In fact, I'm not sure the degree to which just bowing out of public schooling is even allowed given that I think that's over half of my town's budget.
They are available, just not at the price point a lot of off the grid folks want to pay.
And the article mentions well sharing is illegal, so pooling resources to dig a single well is not possible.
Why is well sharing illegal?
I grew up drinking from well water. People are seriously overestimating the amount that certain services need to be provided by a municipality.
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.
> I grew up drinking from well water. People are seriously overestimating the amount that certain services need to be provided by a municipality.
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’s not just Colorado. Used to live in rural northern California and digging a $25k well (typical price I was quoted) came with no guarantee that water would be found.
$25k is extremely cheap for a well. In my area of Arizona it is common to do well shares, several properties will chip in to drill a $50k-$100k well system, but the cost may be closer to $5k-10K per family.
How deep is the typical well, and is that the primary driver of the cost?
I’m east of the Mississippi and my well is 200 feet deep. But this aquifer is fully allocated; all the new construction has to go to a different aquifer with a typical well depth of 700 feet. Once that is fully allocated, I think there is another one at around 1100 feet.
The depths are 600-700ft.
The price at that depth is dominated by the per foot cost. But inside the per-foot cost is the licensing, regulatory, casing compliance, and permitting compliance.
It's about $50/ft just to drill. After that is electric, the pump, the pressure tanks, burying pipe to enough houses to make each share cheap enough, and the legal cost of setting up a well share.
If you just wanted a well for your own property and merely put a spigot powered by a generator right next to it, you might be able to get away with $35k to start with. If you are looking to do a well share so that it becomes more economically feasible to split costs, I think it would be minimum $50k.
Thanks. Around me I think it would be closer to $15-20k including all the equipment. Permitting is legally capped at $100 and there are about 15 or 20 businesses within 50 miles that do it, so competition abounds.
> 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.
Yes, but that's covered by my second part that americans are bad at evaluating risk (many humans are I imagine, I'm just trying to be narrow in my assessment). You don't get much more "on grid" than relying on a municipal water supply.
This is a disingenuous argument. Of course they weren't choosing to live with no human contact whatsoever.
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".
they do pay into it, every time they buy the water. exchanging currency for valuable goods is a pretty well-established process.
Many countries have rural water users subsidised by urban water users, because rural users need 100 times as much pipe buried and maintained per customer, but everyone pays the same rate for water.
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.
These users were not in the piped network. They were driving to a station to collect water in tanks. If anything, that's cheaper to maintain.
Even if it's not "cheaper" it's not the utility's problem what the user's hauling equipment costs.
In this case it seems like it's the reverse. The article claims the "bulk water" customers are responsible for 15% of the system's revenue but consume less than 1% of the water delivered.
I’ve never seen “rural” properties on “city” water unless a pipe happened to be running down the road for an existing development anyway.
Otherwise it’s all wells, sometimes tremendously deep.
Depends on the area.
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)
That’s one of the real solutions - we shouldn’t be using potable water for everything. Houses that are plumbed on city water should have two water sources - potable and other.
that won't help much. Water costs are mostly not in the treatment in general. pipes and pumps are the larger costs for most.
They paid for the water that the municipality could afford to sell. They didn't pay into the municipality. If the municipality doesn't have excess water, why should they be forced to sell it?
They paid the municipality for the water, but they didn't pay the municipality. Got it.
There is a very real legal and practical difference between paying for 100G of water, and paying for the right to buy 100G per week for the next N years.
Both have a price in the American west, and they did not pay the latter price.
Nobody is arguing otherwise, including the people interviewed in the article.
The claim was that these people didn't pay. That claim turns out to be incorrect.
> The claim was that these people didn't pay.
That's literally not what people were claiming. This is a lie.
If anyone actually cares about this thread, please hit "parent" a few times to see what everyone really wrote.
That's not what people are saying.
People are saying they weren't paying into the municipality. That implies people paying into the municipality are paying for more than just water. The people buying the water were just buying water.
Now, maybe that's now how you think of it, but I'm sure you can see how others see it.
Even YOU understand the difference because you had to misrepresent what people were saying.
> They paid the municipality for the water, but they didn't pay into the municipality.
That's the difference. "into" doesn't mean they are merely paying the municipality, but rather, they are paying to support the municipality.
The people buying water? They are merely buying water that's up for sale. That's it. There is no implication beyond that. Intent matters.
And it's clear that the outsiders had no intention of supporting the municipality even if you want to suggest that was the case.
I won't repeat anything I've already repeated. That seems to be a waste of time.
I believe they were paying for the water
10 cents a gallon, it says, and they haul it themselves.
Yes, they were buying water that the municipality could sell. And they got that water. The article suggests that the municipality is rationing its residents' water, so they don't have excess water to sell to outsiders.
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.
Right, but the system needed maintenance, and people would still need to ration water and not water their lawns, even if the water they sell to outsiders (less than 1%) stopped.
It is silly on the towns part as they lost far more. The rural restedents were paying a lot more than the locals.
> municipality they're not paying into
They probably pay more for their water than the people with metered service.
That's typical in the small towns around here that let you fill up water tanks at the base of the water tower. You'll pay a lot more than regular customers, but a lot less than buying it by the gallon at Walmart, and it costs the water company nothing except maintaining a hose.
About 1% of use, 15% of revenue according to article.
unfortunately it seems you can't do society a la carte
Perhaps, but saying they don't deserve to be served by the township because they don't pay is disingenuous. In fact, them paying more subsidizes the other residents' water.
It’s more than that. There is a finite and shrinking supply of water. The water district has every right, and IMO an obligation to protect supply to existing users. They do this by limiting availability to others.
These people should not be living off the grid without securing water rights. This has been the system in the west since before statehood.
I don't read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, but I have seen that plot more than once.
They maybe avoided municipal taxes but they overpaid for their water relative to the municipal users
Except they didn’t. A proper municipality decision would have been discussed publicly with advance notice. This is like the board of directors of Toyota deciding to stop selling to the US without advance notice without input from the shareholders, the US, or advance notice.
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.
Kind of funny that this warrants a news article. I've been living in South Africa for the last couple years and this is basically just normal. The municipality just doesn't pay the water bill, so we don't have water half the time. What everyone does is install a giant tank and pump at their house so they can shower when the water is out. How quickly you get used to it...
This is the standard of the richest country in the world
This was the standard of South Africa as well not too long ago. I was just musing that it's funny how quick you get acclimated to complete dysfunction.
Saw this on a social network with a mention of Paolo Bacigalupi's "The water knife", which is a great scifi book about a future with water wars.
I haven't read The Water Knife, but I have read The Tamarisk Hunter, which I believe is related and paints a picture of the future of the American West with it's messed up water rights.
Yeah, the Tamarisk Hunter ( https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/t... ) is fantastic and set in the same world.
We are already in the current water wars in some places around the globe
Anyone immediately think of Pump Six, by Paolo Bacigalupi, when they got to this part of the story?
> 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.*
They think they were an angry mob before, now they have cut off one of their essentials for life. I suspect they could get rather angrier...
> Others are wondering whether to scrap plans to build on their property, leaving home for showers and limiting their toilet flushes.
> 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.
it is absolutely wild that a 3-to-2 vote that wasn't announced beforehand could put so many people at risk. obviously governments haven't acted to serve the people since at least Citizen's United, but this is like, society breaking down shit.
I don't know Coloraeo laws but I suspect a state judge will issue an injunction on the city to sell water. Courts tend to look poorly on such things.
> governments haven't acted to serve the people
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.
How well does it serve those constituents? Shutting off the water cut off 15% of Fort Garland's water revenue (while reallocating 1% of its water). That's a big dent in a budget that was probably directly keeping those tax payers' taxes lower and providing them valuable services.
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.
'Fairly'. I would love to see them argue that with St Peter at the pearly gates. 'Well we drew this arbitrary line on the ground, and refused to sell water to people in the other side of the line so they could drink and survive. We did it so we could water our ornamental lawns'
A book with stories about different people that have settled in that area https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60206504-cheap-land-colo...
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.
If you want to LARP as a pioneer maybe do some research about their mortality rates.
But cynicism aside, this is just the beginning. This will scale to a lot of the US. Even folks in the burbs.
Even though we know its coming, when it does come, the suddenness of it will still take many of us by surprise, despite all the warnings.
After reading the article I come to the conclusion that this was never really about water. There wasn't even a water shortage, only a technical issue that would be resolved.
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.
I agree, none of this was really necessary. The board/city was broadly within their rights not to sell (and down the road, as water supplies become more strained they may in fact not have extra water to sell).
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.
Massive amounts of groundwater are being sucked out of Colorado by Chinese and ME companies that, for instance, grow alfalfa crops and then ship them to their home countries.
Exports of alfalfa should not be allowed
I agree.
I don't know what people expect moving to south central Colorado, maybe they're taken in by the "cheap land" posts that flood everything like craigslist for Costilla and Alamosa counties. If you've never been there, it's amazing anything grows on that land at all (it's just high desert) and like the article says the people are really poor there; it's an entirely different world than the front range that people seem to extrapolate to the rest of Colorado. Everybody feels entitled to live in Colorado, but our problems are going to come to a head sooner or later when we face the reality that even the front range doesn't frankly have enough water for all of it's citizens or it's ag activies (and we keep building more and more crazy dam and pipeline projects). I personally believe we're going to see a major crisis level drought in the front range in the next 20-30 years that ends up potentially causing a significant population shrinkage in our metros, and it will likely be even more acute elsewhere in the state (as the front range metro basically gets preferential treatment to everywhere else).
“ Agriculture uses approximately 80% of the Colorado River's water, with irrigation for crops like alfalfa and hay being the largest consumers.”
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.
Can't they at least get together, hire some tanker lorries and bring in water from somewhere else? Sure, it may be more expensive than the $43k they currently pay, due to transport costs, but at least they will have water.
> A more immediate solution is a potential plan to have a private company bring a water tanker to county-owned property in Fort Garland.
It seems like the residents are waiting for the local government to take care of this problem (with a potential plan), when they could instead address it directly by co-ordinating with their neighbours, who also need water, to take action.
Some context it seems a lot of folks in these comments have missed is that the off grid folks apparently use 1/120th of the town's water, yet contribute 15% of the town's water revenue. So effectively they are subsidizing the towns water system while using an insubstantially tiny fraction of the towns water, and even then the townies shut them out for reasons.
I thought it would be MAGA but no, apparently it is a Democratic stronghold
Scrolling throug the comments here, one could conclude the HN community finds it to be justified to remove water access without warning to people they find disageeable.
It's pretty weird, since I'm used to seeing people here arguing that the basic essentials of life like food and water should be provided to everyone without question, with the details of where they come from to be worked out later. Now all of a sudden in this case it's "Let them drink Perrier."
The land is cheap in the San Luis for a reason. It can't support much life. Ultimately these are not multi-generational folks being driven out. They are newcomers who have overwhelmed the existing infrastructure.
And access to utilities is on of the only tools that counties have to discourage unsustainable development.
Not every part of the continent should be covered with homes.
This thread is getting weird and with a lack of understanding; There's absolutely no reason to have a negative attitude to people wanting to buy water. I grew up 5mins from the largest shopping center in the southern hemisphere and we still had to occasionally buy water when there was a drought since we were on a rural stretch of road just off the main highway.
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.
I don't have a negative attitude towards people who live off wells, or local surface water, or some place that sells it to tank back.
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.
I’ll just leave this here:
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.
> poorest county
> 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.
It’s definitely an article with a personal PoV.
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.
>the pump broke
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.