Welcome to the Wild West, 2012 style. The Feds to Tombstone: “If you want to fix your water line, better lawyer up and talk to President Obama.” The left is attacking Mitt Romney as “out of touch.” But the left’s own champion, President Obama, is truly the out of touch candidate. The U.S. Forest Service — of which the president is ultimate boss — is preventing, on the flimsiest of excuses, Tombstone Arizona from rebuilding its water pipeline. Obama, conniving, is putting Tombstone, a fixture of American history, in mortal danger. Tombstone was the site of the “Showdown at the OK Corral.” It was a silver mining boomtown and very Wild West: over a dozen saloons, 6 gambling halls, a very cosmopolitan city. Today Tombstone is a cultural attraction with 1500 residents and tens of thousands of visitors. But now the U.S. Forest Service is building a tomb for Tombstone. A massive forest fire in 2011 wiped out the vegetation in Coronado National Park, wherein lies Tombstone’s waterworks — which were destroyed by the following torrential rains. The ensuing monsoon damage was severe but readily fixable. Except that Tombstone’s water sources are surrounded by a designated wilderness area. ...the U.S. Forest service takes the position that Tombstone needs its permission to bring in tractors and bulldozers to clear the rubble throttling its water supplies. Tombstone cannot survive long on the tiny wells located in town or on the small amount of water it temporarily was able to hand patch through its water main. It needs to use regular earth-moving equipment to repair its lines. As Sosa explains, “you have boulders the size of motorcycles breaking your pipeline, and other boulders and uprooted trees mangling it… the water is buried by 6 to 15 feet of boulders, trees, rocks.” Coronado is not an exceptionally delicate ecology. Fire and monsoons have had far more impact than would a few tractors and bulldozers. And yet, the Forest Service forbids Tombstone to bring in crews with earth-moving machinery...
Forbes
Folks continue to berate the Forest Service, but this is nothing more than the Wilderness Act at work.
2 comments:
If Tombstone has a water right granted by the State of Az then the conveyance of that water goes with the water right. Just like the Acequias system. What does the Special Use Permit from the Forest Service to the City of Tombstone say? It should have some items about the maintenance of the pipeline.
thanks for recognizing that it is not usDA/FS but the Wilderness Act. We could have an activist burueaucracy that interprets the law to its own agenda (and it does do that, no doubt). Many times bueraucrats find themselves interpreting bad or vague laws or following the law explicitly to the letter. Since accountability of the bureaucracy in our political system is through elected official, thanks for finally putting the blame where it belongs.
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