Western Governors Set Up “Study Panels” on Water Crisis; Will Citizens Defeat the Brownshirt “Solutions”?

In Texas, as well as California now, there are dry wells, water-hauling, temporary tanks, and other contingency measures, along with desperation, and people moving out. The same is true at sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and other Western localities. So far only California’s Gov. Brown has issued a statewide order for mandatory water use cuts, and so far California is the epicenter for “climate police” enforcing the mandatory greenie fraud, that nothing can be done, nor even discussed. Dry up and die. Many other governors have resorted to forming panels of “experts and stakeholders” to come up with solutions.

All this poses the question for citizens everywhere: Will we stop the Brownshirt “solution”? Will the new water-crisis panels be Brown triage agencies? Or will we succeed in restoring science, water and a future to the nation and world?

TEXAS “We have towns in West Texas that are out of water, that are having to truck in water,” was the message from the new Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Sid Miller, given at a March 25 state symposium on water. For example, Miller just authorized state aid to drill new wells in two West Texas communities whose wells are expected to go dry within four months. At least 11 public water systems in the state have had to truck in water episodically over the past couple years, with no water security in sight.

KANSAS Gov. Sam Brownback issued a state water program in 2013, to discuss actions to take. But the mode of operation is to talk while drying up. The hopeless watch-word is, stay “local.” That is, ‘local solutions to local problems.’ Over the past year, more than 13,500 people participated in various ways. Meetings were held January-March, in 14 separate run-off basins in the state.

Meantime, the decline of groundwater and drought in western Kansas (the lower Ogallala Aquifer area) is a world-class wheat- production crisis. Kansas farm and other interests proposed a regional canal across the state, to divert some Missouri River run-off, in excess years, out to west Kansas. The Army Corps of Engineers was deployed to do a work-up. Then, just before Easter, state authorities nixed the whole concept outright, as “too expensive.”

ARIZONA Gov. Janice Brewer, in October, 2014, issued Executive Order 2014-O, for a “Governor’s Council on Water Supply Sustainability.” The 15- to 25-person board is to issue its findings by the end of the year on how to develop the water supply “for Arizona’s next century…” Meantime, localities are scrounging to cope. For example, the city of Williams, in northern Arizona, has a crisis of low reservoirs. It spent $2 million trying unsuccessfully to revive a city well; and $450,000 to bring an abandoned well back to life.

NEVADA Gov. Brian Sandoval, on April 8, signed an order for a new state panel to come up with ways to cut water use in the state.

So much for practical approaches.