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There are times when Colorado does not enjoy a good reputation with its neighbors, and one of those occasions was a family picnic I attended in the summer of 1983.
That was a wet year, and I figured one of my cousins, who farmed wheat in western Kansas, would be anticipating a bountiful and profitable harvest.
But instead, he was complaining. Did you know that
it was front-page news in Dodge City that there was water
flowing in the Arkansas River?
No, I hadn't. And do you know how much damage that
caused, to have water in the river, to all the farm
machinery and other stuff parked in the river bed?
I started to explain that anyone with more intelligence than a Kansas farmer might know better than to store valuable equipment in a river bed, but he interrupted me.
We always thought that there was one thing we could
absolutely rely on: That Colorado would never let a drop of
water come into Kansas. You guys have half the water
lawyers in the world to look after your interests. What
went wrong this year?
But not all Kansans share his attitude about the utility of a dry river bed. In 1985, Kansas sued Colorado for not living up to its obligations under a 1949 interstate compact that required a certain amount of water to reach the Sunflower State via the Arkansas River.
Kansas won, and now the U.S. Supreme Court is trying to calculate how much we owe them. Colorado would prefer to send water, while Kansas wants cash -- about $62 million, money that would be hard to find in our state budget.
But maybe we could make Kansas an offer that involves some state asset that we could spare.
For instance, we've got thousands of mountains. The highest point in Kansas, Mt. Sunflower in Wallace County hard by the Colorado line, is only 4,039 feet above sea level, and those who have seen it say that it's not much of an eminence.
Clearly, Kansas could use a better mountain. We could offer to tear down one of our obscure and unnamed peaks and ship it to Hamilton County for re-assembly as a tourist attraction.
And if Kansas took the offer, we could cheat just a little and solve some of our own problems. We've got thousands of cubic yards of mine dumps and mill tailings, and much of that is toxic or radioactive stuff that the EPA wants us to remove.
Stack the rocks and grit in Kansas. They get a handsome
peak, and we solve some of our environmental problems while
compensating our neighbors for the water we didn't send
them. And in this era of adventure tourism, the
opportunity to climb Mount Toxic
or Radium Glow
Peak
should bring plenty of free-spending visitors to
Syracuse and Coolidge.
Even better, if the pile were shaped like an Egyptian or Mayan pyramid, persons seeking cosmic enlightenment might visit Kendall or Lakin instead of various Colorado mountain towns. Trust me, we can spare a few thousand New Age pilgrims to Kansas.
But Kansas has some sharp attorneys -- it must, to have beaten our water lawyers in court -- so we'll probably need to offer something besides a mountain.
History offers a suggestion for further reparations. Before Colorado Territory was formed in 1861, the entire Western Slope was part of Utah Territory. On the east side, Nebraska extended down to the 40th parallel (Baseline Road in Boulder). The San Luis Valley and eastward to the 103rd meridian (the west edge of the Oklahoma panhandle) was New Mexico. All the rest was part of Kansas Territory (and since Kansas gained statehood on Jan. 29, 1861, shortly before Colorado Territory was organized on Feb. 28, 1861, it was even part of the state for almost a month).
In that western Kansas panhandle was an El Paso County, pretty much where our El Paso County is today.
Why not give that back to Kansas?
It's certainly worth much more than $100 million, the most that Kansas has ever claimed as damage for not getting enough water.
We'd be losing a county with about 500,000 residents, almost all of them hard-core Republicans (I met an El Paso County Democrat once, and she said she'd introduce me to the other one the next time I visited Colorado Springs). Thus our state-wide politics would be more competitive.
And as a substantial part of the Kansas electorate (about 20 percent of the population), El Paso County would insure that there wouldn't be any more controversies about teaching evolution in the public schools -- the elected state board of education would always have a solid creationist majority.
This offer provides substantial benefits on both sides.
The only drawback would be that Colorado Springs residents
would have to change their speech habits. I have some
relatives in El Dorado, Kan., and they pronounce it El
Do-RAY-do
and assure me that this barbarism is just as
proper as Our Kansas River
for the Arkansas
River.
So it would be Co-lo-RAY-do Springs
in El
PAY-so County.
That's not a big deal. We could all
learn to adjust, and save Colorado water and money in the
process.
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