Borrego’s Two Impotent Water Agencies
18 August 2006
At their July 2006 board meetings:
- The BWD, when confronted with an ambiguity in the language of its groundwater mitigation policy, followed its time-honored tradition of pusillanimity and sounded retreat. Jerry Jones and Roger Anderson, two members of the “Gang of Three” that scuttled the district’s attempt to pass a progressive tiered water rate policy to encourage conservation (the more you use, the more you pay), hastily dissociated themselves from the mitigation policy that they earlier voted for.
-
The Borrego Springs
Park Community Services District (BSPCSD) – the other water district:
- decided to keep their current, regressive “discounted rate for water use above a designated minimum” (the more you use the less you pay);
- disclosed that 60% of the water pumped from our aquifer by BSPCSD each year, “enough to fill a football field to a height of 1,864 feet,” goes “unsold and unaccounted for;” i. e., it is lost.
What these and other examples demonstrate is that these agencies lack the wisdom, will, ability, and moral courage to protect our shared, sole-source aquifer from the kind of mindless exploitation and waste that has brought the valley to the sorry state in which it now finds itself with respect to groundwater. Unless things change soon, we will all pay dearly for their collective inadequacy.
08/18/2006