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Hundreds lose water source in Colorado's poorest county with no notice
121 mooreds 205 8/25/2025, 2:50:21 PM coloradosun.com ↗
Like every small town/county, I bet if you follow the trail of financial and ideological interests of the parties involved you'll find that the personalities involved are motivated by more than just whatever their oath of office is. Seeing as there's only one water hauler I'd look into who he pissed off.
Keep in mind that I'm in the part of the state that is extremely wet, where aquifers fill faster than agriculture can use it, and residential use is a literal drop in the bucket, compared to agriculture use. Most of Californias resevuoirs are built for flood control, with power generation as an added benefit, and shipping water off to the drier parts of the state as an afterthought.
In rural areas, people often directly support each other to get buy, and the urbanites absolutely can't stand it when they aren't relying on the urban fifedom. Just like the area in Colorado that the article discusses, it's illegal here to share well water. They've also made it illegal to pool your trash together for a dump run. Until the state stepped in, it used to be illegal to collect your own rain water, too. The same for inlaw quarters, which are really common in rural areas. (My county once spent nearly half a million, to unsucsessfully sue a group of people for a fraction of that amount, because one of them sold his land to the others, who each custom built their own houses, instead of having a county-approved developer build all of them.)
Even a few decades ago, California used to be the place for antiestablishment types, even in the urban areas, and its sudden changeover to forced top-down management has created a somewhat splintered government that alternates between extreme limits and strong reforms.
It's crazy that picking up garbage is so universally a government enforced monopoly that every county seems to have independently required it. The county runs the dump, but anyone could transport garage with minimal capital, so the garbage company doesn't have the same monopoly excuse that other utilities have, yet I can chose from three cellular phone providers but legally only one garbage pickup service can serve my address. Not only that, but if the property is occupied and service is available, I'm legally required to pay for service, whether I use it or not, and if I don't pay for it, even if I'm not using it, it'll be added to my property tax bill, and if I don't pay it there, the county will auction off my house to pay for it.
I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved, but I don't see how it's spread to every county in the west coast.
I'm in a fairly densely-populated part of the east coast and we have lots of options for trash hauling, and none of them are "official" or provided by the city.
... I do wonder about the wear-n-tear on the neighborhood roads from having like 5+x as many trash truck trips on them per week versus a municipal solution, given how fast road wear scales with axel weight. I bet it's enough to matter, which means we're all paying a hidden cost for being able to choose among trash companies. It also seems like the base costs would have to be significantly higher, given far more trucks required and way fewer pick-ups per mile driven.
Caveat that there are very different factors in play in more populated areas.
As a thankfully-former Florida resident, there's also a current of hitherto politically unengaged (and still democratically uneducated) citizens showing up at meetings and deciding that if they yell the loudest they should get their way.
Some of the shit grown-ass adults did at Florida school board meetings was just mind-blowingly ignorant.
It also made me realize how low the bar of civic education is in the US.
Real democratic change comes from organizing, coalition building, compromise, and engagement with stakeholders. Not knee-jerk emotional outbursts.
It is common for people to buy up land just for the water rights, then transfer that water rights to other property. So if you search for land in Colorado it isn't unusually to find one plot of land in the millions and then another one a few miles away that is almost free in comparison. This is often due to the water rights associated with that property. The expensive land can be used commercially for things like farming, the other cannot.
And there have been cases of governments using tax money to buy up property just so they can use the water rights to help out private ventures, like building suburbs or golf courses without the knowledge or consent of tax payers.
Also it is pretty normal anywhere in the country that local governments react poorly from aggressive demands from people, especially when they are not voters.
All in all it is a nasty business and making sure you know exactly where your water is coming from, how you are going to pay for it, and what your rights are to it, and what you are allowed to use it for all need to be factored in heavily when moving out to the desert there.
As far as I know there is no way to sell the right away to drill an 'exempt' well. I hope CO looks into something similar.
[1] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE
As an example of communication differences, in the US it is not uncommon for someone to say "Pardon me" when they are getting the way whereas people in England might assume they farted. Or another example where communications go wrong, someone in the US or the UK might give a thumbs-up when they agree with results or an idea but in some parts of Africa that is a death threat.
"No no we meant off-grid in every aspect save one!"
I know these people, half my family is these people. I've listened to them rail against the man for decades and decades and decades.
When you tell them that the invisible hands of the free market will gladly sell them the bootstraps they require, they get mighty angry.
The problem seems to be that the townsfolk want to water their lawn:
> “These men were brought in because I had put them on a water restriction schedule,” Pacheco said in an interview. “They are upset they can’t water their lawns while people can’t have water to actually live.”
They're not completely cut off; they just have to significantly further to purchase their water, and some of them do:
> Some are driving two hours to Pueblo to buy water. Many have been getting water in the town of Blanca, where officials offered — only as an emergency solution until the end of August — to let people fill up water tanks from a hose connected to a fire hydrant.
I don't think this is a situation where we're laughing at people who are in the Find Out phase.
Meanwhile you can use percussion drilling to drill a well of virtually arbitrary depth, at very little cost, as was done by the Chinese for thousands of years to depths well below 500ft with not much more than bamboo and rocks.
I am one of the folks who, in my youth, purchased land in between Fort Garland and San Luis, with dreams of off-grid living. I succeeded, mostly, but not without many hiccups - the locals being one of them.
For me, "off-grid" was about _control_: control over my mortgage (none!), bills (no monthly subscriptions to privatized power companies generating profit!), and, well, life in general. I'd say the general theme wasn't so much about "sticking it to the man" (what's to stick and who?) or "being self reliant" (impossible), but about fighting classism _to some degree_ via a veritable case of civil disobedience.
To my understanding, it is basically illegal OR extremely difficult to find a living situation where someone else (bank, etc.) isn't profiting off folks, and I find that, well, avarice. But you could find a situation like that out in the valley, because land was cheap and you could "get away" with a lot out there, which basically is just another way of saying folks could _afford_ to be poor.
America is entrenched in classism, and everywhere I look someone with less money getting fucked. And this is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to building code enforcement: wealthy folks pay the same amount as poor folks for things like permits, et. al. ($$), code means nothing when you can afford to hire engineers to prove its safe, pay for costly zoning variations, etc. So as harsh as the valley was in climate, it was basically an oasis of sorts to younger me for all those reasons.
All that to say: there are other genres of fiction worth exploring :)
What I want is the equivalent of an UPS, but for everything.
If the municipal power grid, water and sewage go down. I want to be able to live mostly like before.
If there's a disruption in the logistics chain for the grocery store for any reason, I can live with what I have and can grow for a week or two in relative comfort, a month would suck.
If the wired internet connection goes down, I want to have a wireless option that automatically takes over.
There's virtually no such thing as "off-grid", no such thing as a human being who lives totally unreliant on people around them in the modern age, unless you can carry everything you own in both hands, and can survive with nothing else. And there's damn few people out there living like that.
It's the same issue, you're still dependent on outside resources (especially if we're being realistic and understand that everything will break and need repaired/maintenance/replacement eventually), you're just switching which resources you're dependent on.
But in reality....The USA mic is the closest thing to actual meaning of socialism the USA has ever tried.
99.9% of these people are not living "off grid" for any particular ideological reason. They are living off grid because where they live is simply too dispersed and/or poor for there to be a grid. They've either always lived this way or adapted when they moved there.
Buyer: "but if it's off grid where do I get water"
Realtor: "there's services you pay for that truck it in and fill your tank, just like propane or heating oil"
Buyer:"oh, ok"
No, I read what they said during the interviews used in the article.
It ain't no different than the 5am news person interviewing people off the streets and only the "interesting" responses making the 7am news.
If we want to compare family anecdotes I can trot out my own but that's not the point.
Of course, I read every word of the article instead of just the title, or skimming it, or having an AI summarize it and spoon feed it to me like I am a baby, and I expect others to do the same.
[1] common fucking sense
...
> “We wanted to be as independent as possible, and so we searched all over the state for property that would fit our needs, and this fit the bill,” Debi Marks said.
...
> Amanda Ellis bought a house in Costilla County five years ago to live off the grid.
These are people specifically moving to this unincorporated county in order to live "off the grid". This sounds ideological to me.
Realtors out there are selling sandcastles in the sky to flatlanders who don't know any better. The property they are buying is parceled out ranch land that went bust generations ago for the same reasons. These aren't "prepper" types so much as folks who want the Colorado high-country lifestyle when they can't actually afford it.
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In a free market, the price of water rises so that there is no such thing as a "shortage." It would be uneconomical to waste water on lawns far before a significant amount of additional people would be unable to buy enough to drink. This is why you'll never find the gas station runs out of bottled water because a nearby farmer used it to water his strawberries, despite the selfish/greed factor of the bottled water industry being off the charts.
Though, there also seems to be a lot of spite here, which the market may not be able to solve. Seems like the folks buying bulk water were paying FAR more, to the point that they were using less than 1% of the supply, but paying 15% of the cost. In a pure market, they would be the last cut off, yet they were the first.
What happens when growing alfalfa makes more of a profit than individuals have, such that individuals simply cannot buy water to drink? Or what if a company comes in with sufficient capital to corner the market, then bottles and sells the water at a profit to individuals, exporting the leftover to sell to individuals in other places?
Or what if some random billionaire decides he's mad at his neighbors for voting wrong and decides to buy out all the water for a huge swimming pool that only he gets to use?
Alfalfa value top out at something like $0.50 a pound for the very best stuff.
So your theory is what, that if alfalfa farmers are willing to take no profits at all they could potentially bid water up to 0.5 cents per gallon?
You are so incredibly grossly underestimating the cost and impracticality of bidding water up as high as you're imagining, it is mind boggling.
They can easily bid water high enough to make it commercially useless for many industries, outbidding it from access to human consumption would require mind-boggling amounts of money.
""there is no such thing as a "shortage.""
Free market religion followers are crazy lol
They paid money for the water.
The price of guaranteed access to water is much much higher, and they did not pay for it. It was probably not even for sale, and they should have known that. They are not entitled to anything.
Once the circumstances change, we'll have to adapt.
If that water supply is cut off without valid reason, there is a complaint mechanism with the local utility commission where the issue can be heard and resolved.
I also live in the municipality where my water is supplied, and therefore am represented by its government.
Therefore I am both economically and politically invested in that infrastructure.
Unfortunately none of this is true for the folks in this article.
Is that a "guarantee"? No. Nothing is guaranteed. But it's far better than the arrangement these folks operated under.
Lack of water is not the problem here, especially now that the town's pump has been fixed.
It's sad & true & and I hate it.
Source: Had a friend in college that interned for a group of attorneys in Western, CO whose entire practice was around water access rights.
She explained to me some of the ridiculous things that neighbors requiring common water access could do to each other - based purely on who was using the water first.
https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=3750 has more details.
And straight up lies. The Colorado water compact “average flow” was known to be nonsense when it was established, but politicians ignored the engineers’ estimates of long-term averages which were significantly lower than the figure the compact is based on.
Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.
Either ‘first user wins’, like here, or ‘all users get allotment’ - in which case you can be screwed by someone building a new subdivision, or ‘gov’t entity allocates’ in which case corruption/payoffs become the norm, etc, etc.
At least it’s better than ‘shoot anyone using your well without permission’ like used to be the middle eastern standard eh?
The synopsis is that in the near-future water in the west is SCARCE and there are dueling factions (NGOs, state governments, criminals) fighting legally and physically over water, including digging through old libraries and government offices for water right contracts that may be older than the known ones to usurp the standing owner's right.
Sad situation. Fear of outsiders and other people often pop up when people are stressed.
Human nature is disheartening at times.
I bet these rural people are actually huge supporters of healthcare.
Their personal views on healthcare doesn't really matter if their voting pattern doesn't fit.
Medical insurance in the US is a parasite that is killing its host (health care providers).
Insurance or the individual pays the bill, that is no different than it ever has been. People without insurance are less likely to have their medical bills paid, that's just the way it is.
>Insurance or the individual pays the bill, that is no different than it ever has been.
Strictly speaking this is true. I agree with this statement.
However, our current insurance industry based system (colloquially known as the ACA or Obamacare) has caused "health care" to pivot away from providing medical treatment to individual patients, and toward a system of "health care" companies charging insurance companies for services provided to a 3rd party (the patient).
The patient is no longer a customer, the insurance company is. There is effectively no health care provider in the US that caters to a patient as a customer, especially if we're talking about hospital level medical care.
I have never encountered the notion that the ACA is the cause of this, and I was around before the ACA and don't see how that part wasn't the same before it, except other things were worse (the whole "pre-existing conditions" thing, for one). What do you mean?
I don't begrudge people who choose to live outside of municipalities in order to avoid taxes, but it's hard to empathize with them when the municipality they're not paying into makes a decision on behalf of their own voters/taxpayers. Hopefully the county/private sector resolves it soon.
They're paying for the water. It's not like they're getting it for free. Sure, the municipality could just not sell outside the municipality, but most utilities are forbidden from suddenly cutting off service due to health and safety concerns.
So an irrational decision fueling conflict.
"Revenue for the water sales to rural residents totaled $43,000 per year, about 15% of total revenue."
This means that 'total revenue' is about $287k. I would guess that's the revenue of the water system, not the town's entire tax base. Still a significant figure, but not 45% of the town's tax revenue.
And that doesn’t mean water bought ‘on demand’ would have to be equally costly as what people who ‘subscribed’ to water pay.
“I was always drawn to the mountains when I was traveling around the country and, to be honest, it was affordable,” she said. “It was off grid. It had a structure. It was away from people. The view is incredible. There’s climbing, hiking. It was somewhere I could afford and have land in Colorado.”
I wanted to live off the grid, but not that off the grid.
They are residents of some governance unit and, therefore, vote somewhere. Is that possible to have no right to vote because you live in the wrong place?
Sometimes the lines about what affects you are blurry, but the question of whether you get a vote isn't: you do or you don't. Maybe rural people should get a partial vote in town affairs, 3/5 or something like that.
As for whether I pay town taxes, it depends which ones you mean. Nothing on my property tax bill goes directly to the town's coffers for things like the parks and garbage pickup. But I pay the town sales tax every time I go shopping. I pay the town's sizable hotel and restaurant tax every time I go out to eat. I'm pretty sure the town gets some downstream fraction of the gas tax I pay every time I fill up.
Of course, all those taxes are voluntary in the sense that I could drive further to a different town. So does that qualify as "taxation without representation"? The Founders would probably say so, but it doesn't bother me enough to get chuffed about; I'm just explaining it for people who haven't experienced it.
I'm asking for a couple billionaires.
Their companies pay taxes, so no that argument doesn't work. Every company pays some form of employee taxes and so on, there is no way to get around that.
Employees pay those. And companies don't vote (they need to bribe politicians through donations).
You don't have the right to vote in a city that you do not live in, and the water system is controlled by the city in this case. I assume they can vote for county offices, and the county is now determining how best they can serve their residents now that the city is unable to.
Also because it’s highest cost due to less populated area
In fact, I'm not sure the degree to which just bowing out of public schooling is even allowed given that I think that's over half of my town's budget.
Why is well sharing illegal?
Arguably, the issue here is that we're going to need to deal with the fact that many americans are bad at assessing personal risk. Living in the country is in fact expensive—there are fewer people to amortize costs across, especially in societies that don't have market-based housing (which is arguably why country living is considered cheaper). Water and electricity might be the easiest ways to see this, but it's stuff like "access to a hospital" that causes the most harm—a largely invisible cost until you actually need a hospital (or emergency response, or clearing roads from snow, access to postal delivery, etc etc....). At least you'll notice immediately if you don't have water.
The article addresses this. In this part of CO, wells can cost $25k to drill without any guarantee of hitting water. It's not a panacea for these people.
I’m east of the Mississippi and my well is 200 feet deep. But this aquifer is fully allocated; all the new construction has to go to a different aquifer with a typical well depth of 700 feet. Once that is fully allocated, I think there is another one at around 1100 feet.
The price at that depth is dominated by the per foot cost. But inside the per-foot cost is the licensing, regulatory, casing compliance, and permitting compliance.
It's about $50/ft just to drill. After that is electric, the pump, the pressure tanks, burying pipe to enough houses to make each share cheap enough, and the legal cost of setting up a well share.
If you just wanted a well for your own property and merely put a spigot powered by a generator right next to it, you might be able to get away with $35k to start with. If you are looking to do a well share so that it becomes more economically feasible to split costs, I think it would be minimum $50k.
Yes, but that's covered by my second part that americans are bad at evaluating risk (many humans are I imagine, I'm just trying to be narrow in my assessment). You don't get much more "on grid" than relying on a municipal water supply.
Besides that, human psychology is such that these people probably couldn't afford anything else and then back-justified their constraints as "drawn to the mountains for hiking and the views".
Of course, in my country we tolerate that - it's normal for food to flow into urban areas and money to flow out, water pricing is just an obscure element of that.
Otherwise it’s all wells, sometimes tremendously deep.
I live in iowa - nearly everyone is on rural water because wells don't produce much water. I'm on a well and I can't water my lawn - after an hour my well is empty. My well is about a meter in diameter so that should be a lot stored. it would be $20k to extend the city water pipe to my lot.
i used to live in MN, there I knew farmers on a 5cm well who had no problem watering lawns, and 50 cows from the well.
in colorado where this story is water is less available than iowa. (most farms have a year round creek that could be treated to become drinkable)
Both have a price in the American west, and they did not pay the latter price.
The claim was that these people didn't pay. That claim turns out to be incorrect.
That's literally not what people were claiming. This is a lie.
People are saying they weren't paying into the municipality. That implies people paying into the municipality are paying for more than just water. The people buying the water were just buying water.
Now, maybe that's now how you think of it, but I'm sure you can see how others see it.
Even YOU understand the difference because you had to misrepresent what people were saying.
> They paid the municipality for the water, but they didn't pay into the municipality.
That's the difference. "into" doesn't mean they are merely paying the municipality, but rather, they are paying to support the municipality.
The people buying water? They are merely buying water that's up for sale. That's it. There is no implication beyond that. Intent matters.
And it's clear that the outsiders had no intention of supporting the municipality even if you want to suggest that was the case.
Basically, the idea that I'm required to sell something is silly. No one said any contracts were broken. People got what they paid for.
They probably pay more for their water than the people with metered service.
These people should not be living off the grid without securing water rights. This has been the system in the west since before statehood.
It is 100% disingenuous. In no municipality in America is the source of water not considered a long term source where change comes with months of notice. In no municipality is said change executed in a meeting without prior notice to the public with public commenting allowed.
> Salina Pacheco, who is the manager of the town water district and training to become a water system operator, knew it was coming. She had been talking to the five-member water board about it for two years and had helped secure a $105,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs to upgrade the water system, which was suffering from “extreme water hammer” because water traveling through the pipes in opposite directions was colliding.
> The pump failed in June, before the system’s planned overhaul.*
> The pump failed in June, before the system’s planned overhaul. Townspeople were asked to use the “bare minimum” of water — flush the toilets, but don’t water the lawn.
It blows my mind they are using flushing toilets in the desert. Composting toilets are not some new-fangled technology, and require zero water. You live in a desert! Come on!
> “These men were brought in because I had put them on a water restriction schedule,” Pacheco said in an interview. “They are upset they can’t water their lawns while people can’t have water to actually live.”
Watering lawns? In the desert? How is this not illegal? This feels like the entire climate change "controversy" in a nutshell: people so brazenly into the abuse of their own resources that they will fight to continue wasting them until they no longer exist.
The government in question here is the one representing the tax-paying residents of the town of Fort Garland. They voted to stop selling their scarce water supply to the non-tax-paying residents of unincoporated Costilla County. So it seems to me that the "government" served the interest of their constituents fairly.
The water board didn't have to put it up to an immediate, unplanned vote that day, but they were inexperienced in dealing with "hollering" and waffled under a little pressure.
Add to it that they executed the short-term interests of their constituents with such ... alacrity that it put people in physical risk.
So who came out ahead here? I don't disagree that all those folks living off-grid really aren't living off-grid, and reality checks are healthy, but even a 2 week warning would have served everybody's interests, served the same FAFO lesson and maybe kept the animosity down a little.
Overall it seems tough living around there, large parcels of land were divided and sold 30+ years ago via mail order and land values haven' tracked inflation in a lot of cases. A lot of people moving there for a second chance or fresh start.
But cynicism aside, this is just the beginning. This will scale to a lot of the US. Even folks in the burbs.
This was about some people on the waterboard not being able to manage angry - semi-aggressive- people properly.
And now those people can irrigate their lawns while others can't even drink, wash or cook.
But the board handled the situation very poorly. The job of being on a board like this is often to sit patiently while people complain and perhaps yell. Try to keep things calm and moving along, let everyone make their statement.
They should have just accepted the feedback and then scheduled discussion on various options for some future meeting, with a final vote even further out.
Alfalfa takes a massive 33% of that water.
Most of that alfalfa goes to the Middle East.
But sure, yeah metro areas getting the blame, as is tradition.
> A more immediate solution is a potential plan to have a private company bring a water tanker to county-owned property in Fort Garland.
It seems like the residents are waiting for the local government to take care of this problem (with a potential plan), when they could instead address it directly by co-ordinating with their neighbours, who also need water, to take action.
Not every part of the continent should be covered with homes.
You don't have to live far out of town to have no town water. The pipes don't go far out of city/town limits at all.
You always get periods of prolonged drought even in otherwise perfectly reasonable self-sustainable properties.
This isn't some "HAHAHA suck it libertarians" attitude. This is a "anyone who lives slightly outside of town wanting to buy water and being told no" type of situation.
What I have a negative attitude towards is developing housing in an area of the arid western US without access to water. Water rights (the right to buy water) has controlled development here since before statehood. It's very simple: you don't develop without water rights, it's irresponsible and puts an unfair social burden on others.
https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s...
It’s distressing to see human rights violations in the richest country on earth.
> multistory homes with sweeping decks facing Blanca Peak
> The water crisis has forced older residents to contemplate selling their dream homes, where they had planned to retire
The article's framing seems to waver between "how dare you do this to the poor and starving" and "how dare you do this to the older, richer retirees". I'm sure there are people of all kinds affected by the water issue but it's not as simple as the clickbaity title suggests.
But, as an older person, I am not interested in living somewhere that I can’t get an ambulance or quick access to medical treatment.
Saved you a click.
Fort Garland sits just below Blanca Peak, the highest in the Sangre de Cristo, which receives a ton of precipitation. So what's the problem?
The pump broke.
There are water issues in the San Luis Valley. It's a cold desert which happens to be the best place in the United States to grow a recently popular cash crop: quinoa. About 77% of water use in the region is for agriculture, not weird prepper cisterns. This supply is strained, but the current drought status is only D1.
TFA is really more of a closing-frontier issue than a drought issue. The states northeast of Pennsylvania manage all of their land via townships. Everywhere else you can get these weird municipal-unincorporated disputes. See also: Walmart locating outside city limits to avoid taxes.