State buys district water

APRIL 4 | For a second year, the state of Nebraska has bought a large chunk of water from Frenchman Valley Irrigation District in the southwest part of the state, largely to help it meet its water obligations to Kansas.
Those rights cover the year 2006, and were sold for $400,000 - about $43 an acre.
The state also is in negotiations to buy water rights from the Riverside Irrigation Company, which similarly is based in Culbertson.
Nebraska owes Kansas a substantial water flow following legal action over use of interstate flows. [see the Kansas City Star, March 30]

TX • Allegations of fraud blow up water talks

APRIL 22 | A massive water agreement reached in late March may have been sundered in mid-April when a water district official asked a city council - the two entities are parties to the agreement - " did the city enter into the contract in a fraudulent manner?”
The deal involves purchase of as much as 5.5 billion gallons (over the next two decades) by the city of Sugar from the Fort Bend County Water Control and Improvement District No. 1.
District board member Leon Anhaiser said the city is quietly challenging the district's rights to the water, and said the city is planning to ask the Texas Legislature for a measure which would allow it to annex and dissolve the water district.
City council members later said that they did have in mind the dissolution of the district, and felt compelled to negotiate with it. However, one said he understood that if the district were dissolved, the water rights would return to the state of Texas. [see Fort Bend Now, April 22.]

TAKING ON THE MEXICO CITY FORUM A guest opinion in the Cook County News Herald of Grand Marais, Minnesota, blasted the approach taken at the March Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City which equated water rights with human rights.
"After the first day of the meeting, however, it became clear that the government and corporate agents were only interested in turning water management into a business opportunity, whereupon the NGOs and activists established an alternative forum intent on identifying access to clean water as a fundamental right . . . If we accept the position that water is a common good, and an inalienable right shared by all people, does that mean that folks in China or France have as much right to Lake Superior’s water as we do?
Perhaps we would be better served if we didn’t use the concept of human rights to justify our control of Lake Superior’s water, but rather, focused on Cibber’s observation that possession is eleven points in the law."