Happy World Water Day or Is It?

Dry Rio Grande riverbed. Photo from El Paso Inc.

Happy World Water Day!

Or is it so happy? Here's a sprinkling of stories just from this past couple of weeks:

Most of you have noticed that water has yet to begin flowing in the Rio Grande in our upper and lower valleys. But not only is water a problem here in El Paso and New Mexico but throughout the Western U.S. Read Sheila Collins for a global perspective: The West's Coming Tragedy of the Commons.

El Pasoan, Dr. Marshall Carter-Tripp, expands on the global issue and brings it home in her excellent article Where Have All the Rivers Gone in the must-bookmark blog, Border X Roads.

Many thanks to Michael Bray, owner and manager of  EXIT West Realty in El Paso. He shared another great web site with us: GreenBuilder. In it Sara Gutterman posts The Energy-Water Nexus and discusses water conservation-smart homes.

EPWU has a recommendation for a water smart home. Yet, like most things in El Paso City government, it sits on a shelf - the victim of disapproval by the El Paso sprawlers - those developers and builders who don't give a hoot that we have more land than water. Moreover they want you and me to pay for their expansions instead of accepting very affordable impact fees - and just 75% of those impact fees a couple of years ago. (Of course, those fees now only cover 40% of expenses.) They say that a Neal report for the City shows that their developments pay for themselves. I'll be discussing this week the limited number of expenses that Neal talked about - not the total package for new infrastructure, schools, police and fire protection, maintenance on that infrastructure, etc., etc. More in the days to come.

More than anything the City needs a long-term development plan. Wait a moment - didn't we spend two years, involve thousands of people and spend $2Million on Plan El Paso? Like smart homes, Plan El Paso sits on a shelf while the current City Council conspires to ditch it, ditch the codes for intelligent growth, ditch the NW Master Plan ($600,000 for that one), yadda, yadda, yadda.

The bottom line is this: we are running out of water yet we continue to follow the dictates of a building community that believes in sprawl as if Ike were still President and the V-8 wasn't a juice drink but the number of gasoline-guzzling pistons under the hood of your car. 

Time to wake up El Paso. If the sprawler's growth will pay for itself and leads to prosperity, why are you and I and small business owners paying through the ying-yang with our property taxes that keep going up and up and up?

We may have been mad about the past City Council taking away our vote so we voted out all of the progressives - but these guys and gals could care less about the real grassroots decision-making we did with Plan El Paso, the 2011 Transmountain petition and the NW Master Plan. Who is taking our vote away now?

Happy Water Day!