Selling Water to Fund State Programs
Kari Chisholm at Blue Oregon is expressing shock! and indignation! at a new plan floated by Oregon Republicans: selling water to water-starved states like Nevada and California (though interestingly, his link to the Republicans’ “Leadership Fund” doesn’t mention the plan at all). He quotes Jeff Mapes at the OregonLive blogs:
David Nelson, R-Pendleton, who convinced the Senate R caucus to take up this idea, insists that times have changed and that Oregon could be a Saudi Arabia of water. “We wouldn’t allow them to take it,” he says of other regions. “We would sell it to them.” And he adds that it could make the kind of profits that will help support a level of state services that the taxpayers aren’t willing to fund.
Mapes points out that there are several problems with the plan, not the least of which is that Oregon is already embroiled in all sorts of water-rights litigation involving Native tribes, farmers, and fishermen. Such criticisms are certainly fair and, as the continuing controversies surrounding the Columbia and Klamath flows illustrate, the issues involved are delicate and often intractable.
Chisholm, on the other hand, seems to feel that the idea itself is beyond comprehension, having little to add aside from
Seriously.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Perhaps Kari Chisholm is unaware that the Bonneville Power Administration already sells massive amounts of hydroelectric power from the Columbia to neighboring states and that California already gets huge amounts of water from sources like the Colorado River, which has experienced increasingly smaller flows as places like Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico (which is legally entitled to part of the Colorado River flow), to say nothing of California itself, require increasingly large amounts of water to sustain growth.
Or perhaps he does know that electricity generated by the BPA is consumed in other parts of the country and is simply under the same misapprehension as one of the people posting in his comments section and believes that BPA power is simply given away free to people outside the Pacific Northwest rather than being put to good use near where the power is generated.
Either way, and admitting that there are some real potential issues that arise if we start selling water to California and elsewhere, why does Chisholm think that the plan is so utterly beyond the pale? If the water can be spared without endangering fish runs and Tribal fishing rights, etc., one fails to see how making up for budget shortfalls by selling water is supposedly so outrageous.
After all, we all know that the budget isn’t going to shrink itself since taxpayers aren’t terribly excited about taking even more money out of their pockets and the government isn’t willing to alienate interest groups by cutting programs. It’s clear we can’t rely forever on Band-Aid measures like Federal timber payments, so if a profit can be made using some of Oregon’s natural resources, and it can be done without endangering other interests that Oregonians have decided are important (fish runs, etc.), it seems incredibly short-sighted to pass up that opportunity.
[EDIT]
Then again, maybe Kari Chisholm was too caught up in basically calling Gordon Smith a fatty poo-poo head to be bothered to write anything more substantial about potential plans to exploit Oregon’s natural resources.
