Something In The Water

October 17, 2017

The water Ponzi scheme

Arizona has a sordid history of fraud, predating the predations of Ned Warren, whose land frauds in the 1960s and 1970s bilked hundreds of millions of dollars from gullible Americans. It continued through with the East Valley mafia's "alt fuels" scandal of the early 2000s and the big blowup with the Ponzi scheme of the housing bubble.

The relatively new racket, on a trajectory for crisis, concerns water. . . this entire area is seeing the ground water in its meager aquifers diminish as more people move in. 
http://www.roguecolumnist.com/rogue_columnist/2017/10
Earlier this month, the Republic's Dustin Gardiner reported a fascinating story about Pinal County's complex but unsettling water situation:

So far, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, 15 proposed projects in the Pinal County area have received letters from the state notifying them that groundwater necessary for their projects could be in short supply.

It's likely the first time the state has sent such letters, but state officials say there is no reason to panic.

 This momentous news likely passes by most Phoenix residents who, thanks to the mighty acts of earlier generations and copious amounts of federal funding, can turn on their tap, flush their toilet, and take a dip in the swimming pool without ever giving a thought to where the water comes from. America is incapable of such feats today. All we can do is move money around and pick the carcass of national wealth that it took more than a century to create. And Arizona lacks even this get-up-and-go.
BLOGGER NOTE: Rogue Columnist Jon Talton has this to say About Pinal County where the City of Mesa and the expansion of The Mormon Corridor have plans to annex more land:
Pinal County has been an unsustainable water mess for decades. This has been because of ground-water pumping, first for agriculture and then for sprawl. So bad is the problem that subsidence, land sinking into drying aquifers, is common. The subdivisions never should have been allowed — certainly not in the incoherent mess they assumed, and with no infrastructure or impact fees. But the marginal taxes developers paid to local government greased the way. Never was the question adequately answered: If groundwater irrigation is unsustainable there, how can tract houses, swimming pools, and championship golf be sustainable? . . .

This is a red alert not only for the metropolitan and exurban expansions made possible by the CAP, but even for the Salt River Valley proper, that most rare place on the planet. a "wet desert" where four rivers converge. It was this unique circumstance that made possible the Hohokam civilization and the American Eden that was old Phoenix.The consistent message: Shut up about water.
Arizona's water situation is indeed complex, not so simple as "we're running out of water." But the Real Estate Industrial Complex and its elected and "think tank" stooges use that complexity to hide the truth