< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
But across much of the state, the public doesn't get
much of a say in how its property is diverted, stored,
distributed, bought and sold. That's because these
decisions are made by entities called water conservancy
districts.
These districts can collect property taxes, enter into contracts and condemn private property. Thus they resemble other Colorado special districts -- school, sanitation, hospital -- in many respects, with one exception.
The directors of those other districts are elected and
have to face the voters and taxpayers. The directors of
Colorado's 50 water conservancy districts are not elected;
they're appointed by local judges, and so the directors
never have to face the voters in the conservancy
district divisions
they represent.
However, it is possible for voters and property owners in a conservancy district to petition a court for an election.
Possible -- but rare. Until 1999, there had been only one conservancy district election in Colorado history. That was a 1980 uprising in the Central Colorado water conservancy district that replaced seven of its 15 directors. Central, based in Greeley, operates in Weld, Adams and Morgan counties. Its manager, Tom Cech, arrived a year or so after that election, and said it was his understanding that many irrigators were mad at the board for paying too much for water that could have been bought for less.
Colorado's two biggest conservancy districts are Southeastern, based in Pueblo, and Northern, based in Loveland and extending east to the Nebraska line. Both were established to provide agricultural water, but now find themselves increasingly concerned with municipal water.
Southeastern, running across parts of nine counties in the Arkansas drainage, manages the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which was built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to divert water from the Frying Pan River on the Western Slope through a tunnel to the Arkansas River on the Eastern Slope.
Northern similarly manages the Colorado-Big Thompson project. It's the oldest conservancy district in Colorado, dating back to 1937, the same year the legislature adopted a law allowing residents of an area to establish a water conservancy district by petitioning a district court. Those were Dust Bowl days, when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation stood ready to bring water from the Western Slope to the parched plains.
But the federal government was supposed to be repaid
over time for the cost of building the reservoirs, canals
and tunnels, and this required the establishment of a
governmental entity with contracting, bonding and taxing
authority,
according to Colorado Supreme Court Justice
Gregory Hobbs.
Thus was born the governmental entity
in the form
of a conservancy district. The directors are required to
have backgrounds reflecting the agricultural, municipal,
industrial and other interests in the beneficial use of
water within the district
and be knowledgeable in
water matters.
Why have these directors appointed by judges, rather
than elected by the public? Daniel Tyler, author of a
1992 history called The Last Water Hole in the West,
wrote that the legislature opted for the appointment
process to keep directors out of politics and to free them
from costly campaigning. Thus constituted, water
conservancy district boards were theoretically more
independent to exercise their responsibilities.
And Hobbs observed that courts have administered water
in Colorado since 1879, so lawyers and legislators
interested in such matters would have gravitated to the
courts as the forum to handle the matter of formation and
appointment of directors for these local districts dealing
with water matters.
In 1984, the Utah Supreme Court overturned an almost identical water conservancy law as a violation of the constitutional separation of powers because such appointments were not a judicial function.
But Colorado's law was upheld by the state supreme court
in 1938. Part of the challenge was based on taxation
without representation.
The Colorado Supreme Court noted that under the 1937
law, a conservancy district has all the powers of a
public or municipal corporation
and that under the
state constitution, the legislature can provide for the
election or appointment of such ... municipal officers as
public convenience may require.
And if the legislature wanted to delegate this appointing to some judges, that was fine by the court.
That was the only serious court challenge to the non-democratic nature of water-conservancy district boards. Colorado's 50 conservancy districts vary widely in size and operation. Northern and Southeastern are big enterprises. Most districts operate only within a county or two, and some don't have much to do because they were organized for a reclamation project that was never built, like Savery-Pot Hook in Moffat County.
Almost all of them litigate, filing briefs in water court to protect their users' interests. Although that sounds public-spirited, several conservancy district officials said, with the understanding that their names appear nowhere near such thoughts, that such litigation is also a way to use public money (the district's tax revenues) to support a private interest (your water rights when you happen to be a district director).
At least one district -- Animas-La Plata in Durango --
uses public funds for lobbying, trying to get Congress to
build a project that was authorized in 1968 but remains
unbuilt and controversial. And several districts sell
augmentation permits,
which make it easier and
cheaper to get the water right for a domestic well on rural
property. This also means more sprawl-type development in
rural areas.
Perhaps Colorado residents want their water conservancy districts to use their tax money for litigating, lobbying and enabling scattered residential development. Or perhaps not -- without elections, who is to know what the public wants? In 1945, the legislature changed the law to allow for elections in conservancy districts formed after that date. In 1985, that was expanded to all districts, and in 1996, the petition requirement was changed from 15 percent of property owners to 10 percent of the registered voters within one of a district's geographic divisions -- each division has one or more representatives on the board.
That change has led to a small outbreak of democracy in the hinterlands, starting with the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District, which covers all Gunnison drainage from the Continental Divide west to Blue Mesa Reservoir in Saguache, Hinsdale and Gunnison counties.
Steve Glazer has lived in Crested Butte, on Gunnison drainage, for 30 years. After he retired, he started paying close attention to water matters by, among other things, attending every meeting of the Upper Gunnison district.
When the director's four-year term for his drainage's division expired in 1991, Glazer applied for it by sending a letter to the district judge. The judge re-appointed the incumbent. The same thing happened in 1995.
That director resigned her seat in 1998 with a year left in the term.
Glazer applied and the judge appointed someone else, even though Glazer had been endorsed by the town boards of Crested Butte and Mount Crested Butte.
Local activists in the High Country Citizens Alliance began circulating petitions for an election for that seat and one other, and in 1999, the Upper Gunnison district held the first election under the new law. Glazer, an active Sierra Club member who publishes an informative Western water newsletter on the Internet, was elected without opposition.
Last year, there was another election for two seats in the Upper Gunnison division that comprises the city of Gunnison. Both incumbents retained their contested seats.
Early this year, petitions were going around Buena Vista for an election for a seat on the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District Board. It is now held by Gary Merrifield, whose term expires June 1.
On March 20, District Judge John Anderson ordered an election, although the Upper Arkansas district has challenged the signatures. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday in Cañon City. Upper Gunnison also challenged signatures in both 1999 and 2000, and still ended up holding elections. Although she's the authority, since she has conducted two-thirds of all water conservancy district elections in Colorado history, Kathleen Curry is no fan of elections.
An unfounded rumor that should be true
Published 10 April 2001 in The Denver Post.
Maybe it has something to do with the phases of the moon or the alignment of the planets, but every so often, a canard starts making its way around the Internet.
It's a warning that the U.S. Postal Service wants the federal government to charge a tax of five cents per email message, and we should all write our representatives and senators to stop this before it takes effect.
This is a wonderful rumor that has no basis in truth. The Postal Service has issued several press releases in denial. No such legislation has ever been proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, where all revenue bills must originate.
But the more I think about it, the more I would like it if there were some truth to the rumor.
The U.S. Postal Service may develop a $3 billion deficit in the near future. It has postponed capital spending, and is considering the elimination of Saturday mail delivery.
As the publisher of a small magazine (which means I am also the circulation manager), I deal frequently with the post office. And I can't say I always enjoy the experience, or that the Postal Service is perfectly reliable.
But it does serve everyone everywhere in the United States, and American postal rates are lower than those in most other countries. When you think about it, it's almost amazing that 20 cents will send a postcard across the American empire from Puerto Rico to Guam.
The post card would take about a week to make the trip, and the process would be almost instantaneous with email, which doesn't cost anything -- that is, it doesn't cost anything after you've paid for a phone line, an account with an Internet Service Provider, a computer and the requisite software.
Not everyone has these things, whereas anybody who wants to can get or send regular postal mail. It seems only right to preserve this democratic and unifying feature of American life.
Could we do it by taxing email?
The only numbers I could find were from 1998, when Fortune magazine asked eMarketer.com (which may still be in business, for all I know) to tally how many email messages were sent that year.
The company came up with 3.4 trillion for the year, or 9.4 billion per day. Of that daily total, 2.1 billion messages were actual communication between people, and the other 7.3 billion messages were spam -- unsolicited commercial messages.
Break this down for the 81 million Americans using email in 1998, and eMarketer reported that the average user sent 26.4 messages per day.
(This seems high to me -- I always feel as though I engage in too much emailing, at the expense of more rewarding matters like walking the dog for our mutual well-being, and I sent 128 emails in this past March, or just over four per day. The most was 12 on one day, and my wrists and brain usually balk after five or six.)
At any rate, if emails were taxed at one mill -- 1/10 of a cent -- apiece, then I'm sure I could afford the 12.8 cents that March's emails would have been taxed. That average user with 26.4 daily outgoing epistles would have been taxed 80 cents for a month, or less than $10 a year.
And one day's worth of spam in 1998 would have generated $7.3 million in tax revenue at one mill per message. A year's worth would be $26.6 billion, considerably more than necessary to cover any anticipated Postal Service deficits.
Postal rates could thus be kept affordable while maintaining universal service.
The one-mill email stamp
would be no more than an
inconvenience for most of us, but for those spammers who
boast of their ability to send myriads of messages each
day, it could run into the millions every year.
One of three things would happen:
1) They might move off-shore to evade this tax -- but we do have an Air Force that should be able to install a smoking crater wherever there was a spammer who had been attacking American citizens.
2) They would pay the tax, thereby providing a social benefit in the form of an improved lower-cost Postal Service that served all Americans.
3) They would quit sending spam and go out of business. I need not detail the obvious social benefit from this result.
As I have written, and as many others have written, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that the federal government wants to tax email to subsidize the Postal Service.
But it is a good idea, and I'm more than willing to pay my 12.4 cents a month.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 INDEX ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >