Ben Nelson Quotes
Some decisions, like opening a fire hydrant to put out a fire, are easy to make. Other decisions, like deciding how to best distribute a drought-limited water supply among urban, rural and recreational uses, require careful deliberation.
Nelson, Ben. "Water Management in Drought Years." Press Release, Office of U.S. Senator Ben Nelson, 14 May 2004.
There are many American communities where this is the case. However there are others where there is not enough water (especially in drought conditions) for the large agricultural use and a growing population. In Denver, they have enough water, but not a sufficient infrastructure to distribute the water to all.
Agriculture, in most of the country, uses much more water than the human population does for personal drinking and hygiene, but in a number of places there is just not enough water to support all the uses in our growing nation. Agriculture has been organized and has been willing to spend large amounts of money to bribe and/or lobby legislators to block many efforts to develop water supplies for cities large and small under the theory that the more water that went to cities, the less there would be for agriculture.
The Rio Grande River flows through New Mexico on its way to Texas. However, for many reasons the river flow is diminishing and only a little water makes it to Texas. Some Texas politicians wanted the New Mexican farmers, who were miles from the river and have paid to drill wells which they use to pump water for their irrigation, to limit their water pumping. They argued that the pumping was diminishing the water in the underground aquifer, and this was causing some of the water flowing down the river to flow into the New Mexico aquifer thereby diminishing the river flow. The New Mexican farmers argue that they paid a great deal for that land because it came with water rights under the ground and the water is theirs. This was one of the many intractable problems of agricultural water allocation in the West where farmers plant many crops that would not normally survive in that part of the country without artificial irrigation.
Even before the drought the California (and other Western States’) water distribution system has been unfair, inefficient, wasteful, and irrational. There is only so much to go around and the demand it greater. Farmers sometimes pay only 1 percent of the cost the state incurs for the water they us. And far less than poor city or suburban dwellers. Few California farmers use the efficient drip irrigation system developed in Israel. Some farmers get most of the water they want while others get nothing. The taxpayers in the rest of the country pay for the California cheap water while they themselves pay many times the cost of the water. Ironically, Conservatives who almost always want market based solutions oppose it in the case of water as then the large corporate farms would not have the huge water subsidy that they have now.
The nest year California Governor Jerry Brown imposed a form of water rationing.
Earl Benjamin Nelson is an American politician, businessman and lawyer who served as the 37th governor of Nebraska from 1991 to 1999 and as a United States Senator from Nebraska from 2001 to 2013. He is a member of the Democratic Party.
