“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.
Why is well sharing illegal?
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.
Also because it’s highest cost due to less populated area
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".
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.
These people should not be living off the grid without securing water rights. This has been the system in the west since before statehood.
They probably pay more for their water than the people with metered service.
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.
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.
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.
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.