Please Attend Wednesday's Blue Ribbon Meeting

The next meeting of Blue Ribbon Advisory Committee on Public Service Board (PSB) Land Management will be held on Wednesday, August 22^nd at 8:00 a.m. in the City Council Chambers. The meeting will be open and televised.  El Paso’s water future is the key issue. Do we want the PSB to continue to manage land deliberately as part of an overall water conservation effort or do we want to sell land quickly for development and sprawl?  Judy Ackerman has stated it best: “Please invite others to attend and encourage the termination of the “Blue Ribbon” committee.  The reason that the PSB exists is to remove politics from sales of city owned land.  The purpose of the “Blue-Ribbon” committee is to put politics back in land sales.”

Please visit the elpasonaturally post Update on Sad Blue Committee for more background.  EPWU Public Information Specialist, Martin Bartlett, has provided some strong bullet points for keeping PSB doing what it has been doing since 1952.  See the post, Why the PSB Should Continue to Manage City Land.

Elpasonaturally continues to call for making the preservation of land as natural open space in perpetuity as one of the reasons why land should be declared inexpedient by the PSB and set aside rather than put on the market. (A reasonable condition for declaring property inexpedient is its intrinsic value as open space.)  Here are a few more action items for City Council to take rather than forming a committee to hurry-up land sales:

1.       The City is using too much water for turf parks. ( 20% of this year’s river water!)  We need to limit turf parks by setting a limit on the municipal water supply available for turf parks to a max of 10% of the project river water per year.  Conservation of water requires a transition to natural open space and passive recreation.

2.       The City Council needs to get out of the relationship between the Open Space Advisory Board (OSAB) and PSB regarding spending the 10% of your stormwater fee for open space.  This is really a PSB budget item and City Council needs to stop draining those funds and PSB needs to stand up to Council.  

3.       An OSAB member needs to be allowed to participate in land negotiations conducted by the PSB on open space land purchases.

4.       And again, dissolve the Blue Ribbon Committee and start putting more time and effort into strategic planning (both PSB and the City working together) about our water future in light of global warming, water shortage and drought.

Low flow shower heads and house by house rainwater harvesting make sense and do make a difference locally – but they are just drops in the bucket compared to the overall water issues currently facing us. Marshall Carter-Tripp wrote to say:

“I attended the Rain Harvesting session today. [TecH20 workshop this past Saturday.]  Reasonably informative.   But I kept thinking that this is in the category of the deck chairs on the Titanic.  If we save and use some rainwater, fine, we can reduce our reliance on city water.   We personally don't have the storage capacity to live off the grid as it were.   And of course, as rainfall totals drop, where are we going?  If every new house in EP had to have harvesting capacity installed, even if we retrofitted every house in EP, would that help?  At 4500 gallons a year total from a roof, seems unlikely to keep the problem under control, especially if we continue the headlong expansion of the city. Low-flow toilets, efficient washers, Yada Yada.   Helpful but . . .

“That big gorilla over there in the corner is our totally wasteful and totally unsustainable agriculture, which cannot be fed by rainwater harvesting.  (Nor can all those new swimming pools going in around the City.) What we are doing now is promoting minor actions that make a small number of people feel that something important is being done while we ignore that gorilla and his twin, "how many people can live in the Paso del Norte region?  Have we already reached that number?  What happens in 2042?”

It is time to look more critically at our choices of water hungry crops, irrigation canals subject to evaporation, and a water district out of our control – and more out of our control since the number of people who can vote in Water Improvement District #1 was cut dramatically through legislation by State Senator José Rodriguez. WID Manager, Jesus “Chuy” Reyes, won’t answer questions about voting rights denied.

There are those who are more optimistic about El Paso’s water future. Dr. Phil Goodell, THE Dean of Geology and a hero of mine, believes El Paso with its desalinization plant and prospects for importing water will have water for “hundreds” of years even if that water is much more expensive. I suspect that the truth lies somewhere between the most pessimistic assumptions and centuries of time. Do read, Dr. Goodell’s email to me posted here. Whatever the case, for sure his optimism is yet another reason to let PSB continue to manage land and water conservation. Manage with more transparency for sure. Manage as part of a comprehensive El Paso strategy for its water future, definitely. And manage with more environmental/conservation experts on the Board and less tied to development and industry and less whose institutions benefit from PSB/EPWU largesse.

Finally, if you don’t believe that global warming, long-term drought and water shortage are issues, just turn on the news. A reader just pointed out that last winter the north rim of the Grand Canyon received eight inches of snow when the average is 142 inches! Here’s a quick read about drought impact including links to more information. Cut to the chase? Just go to the Drought Mitigation Center.