Water is not precious; it is vital

 Grants Pass City Water Treatment Plant is 88 years old but was neglected in the first decade of water rationing by rates.  Replacing it will cost well over 100 million dollars.

         In the summer of ‘85 and before, we had thunderstorms nearly every weekend, because most people watered only on weekends.  Summer rain was clearly tied to the amount of water our sprinklers put into the air.

When drought was declared in the summers of ‘86 and ‘87, we were told to not water our lawns or wash our cars.  We had 103 days in ‘86 and 98 days in ‘87 of no rain. 

In ‘86 we started hearing about fossil fuels causing global warming and, separately, that fresh water is only two percent of the water on Earth and must be conserved. 

This was the beginning of the most widespread and destructive hoax ever conceived.  “Conserving” water has caused untold misery for millions of people and animals around the world who have lost their homes because of overpriced water rates, jacked up higher and higher to pay the overhead as more people use less and less. Water is not precious; it is vital.

Every city with a water plant controls its own water rates.  You, our Council, are responsible for the price of our water.  Break with the past thirty years and bring back the rate system that kept our city clean, green, beautiful, and safe from wildfire by putting our proposed Charter Amendment, “Utility Bills, Rate Setting, and Contingency Funds,” on our ballot.  Grants Pass voters will start the Ratepayers Revolt.

 

3-18-26, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040              rycke@gardener.com

Cities ration water by rates

The Grants Pass City Water Treatment Plant is being replaced, because of neglect in the first two decades of water rationing by rates.

 @AGPamBondi Of all our utilities, water is the most dangerous to ration by rates, but the vast majority of cities in the U.S. are doing just that, over the last 40 years. It is done by dropping the base rate and hiking unit rates by labeling much of the overhead as unit costs, ignoring normal pricing accounting.

The idea is to make people cut back on water use. Every city does this in their own way, but they all start with decreasing the base rates and increasing the cost of units. It makes cities depend on high unit prices to pay overhead, but high unit prices make people cut back on use. Cities raise the unit rates higher and higher; eventually the base rates are increased as well, creating a vicious pricing spiral that can't be stopped until we can't cut back anymore.

Electric and natural gas utilities also have rationing rates, but they at least compete with each other. Water and sewer are city monopolies. But rationing rates are bad for utilities, government, and ratepayers. They are literally a crime: wasted water running to the ocean instead of watering land first; fraudulent science; and abuse of ratepayers.

I started the Ratepayers Revolt in Grants Pass, OR with water and sewer, which has even higher rates than water, with the introduction of sewer unit rates, based on winter water use. I am currently giving 2-minute speeches on water to our City Council. They are becoming receptive to the idea of putting my proposed Charter Amendment on the ballot to bring our rate system back to the days when water was cheap to use and sewer was all base rates.

https://gardengrantspass.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-proposed-charter-amendment-utility.html

3-18-26, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040              rycke@gardener.com

Beware of Consultants Hired by City Managers

 

Grants Pass' water plant.  Over 35-40 years of rationing water rates, our river has never run too low for this plant to water our city.

Kudos to the Daily Courier and writer Vickie Aldous for exposing the consultant hired by our City Manager regarding pay raises for himself and other non-union staff. The consultant was asked to create mid-size raises and delivered high raises. 

This reminds me of water and sewer rate consultants FCS Group, hired in 2005 by then City Manager David Frasher.  In 2008, our Public Works Director couldn’t pay the overhead and asked the Council to raise the base rate by $3 to fix the problem.  It didn’t, because they didn’t lower unit rates, which were most of the bill. 

FCS eventually hiked our water rates every year 5.28% above inflation to pay the overhead and Councils rubber stamped it. 

In April 2020, I sent a memo to city staff about changing the rate system back to putting all overhead costs in the base rate and charging only unit costs to unit rates, the way it was when our city was clean, green, beautiful, and far from wildfires.  

FCS sent me a memo, admitting on the first page that aligning “fixed costs” (overhead) with base rates would make revenue more stable and “water usage” cost less per unit, encouraging watering in the growing season. FCS never said what is wrong with watering. 

Ninety-nine percent of the cost of any utility is overhead; usage costs are tiny in comparison and vary greatly by season.  Paying for all plant overhead with base rates pays the bills every month, even when the plant goes down, and spreads the cost most evenly among ratepayers.  Our Budget Committee can do the yearly math to set rates.

 

3-4-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Making oil and natural gas providers pay for wildfires?

 

Paradise lost

There is a movement among some states to make our oil and natural gas providers pay for wildfires, when cities have dried themselves out over the last 40 years, starting in 1986.  

Cities, states, and the EPA bought into a conjoined hoax that started in ‘86: the idea that “Fresh water is a scarce and precious resource that must be conserved!” ignoring both the water cycle and normal cost accounting.

 That same year, we heard about global warming.  I think the financier started the hoax but needed proof.  He started the “scarce and precious” water scare.  What could go wrong? 

Cities overcharge their ratepayers for their use of water and undercharge them for overhead, a system designed to jack up the price of water use.  In Grants Pass, water unit rates carry 40% of overhead and increase 5.28% over inflation every year.  It’s the only way they can pay the overhead. 

Mankind has changed weather three times, and it always involves water:

 

·       killing beavers, who kept water in the land.  This caused country and cities to burn and turned most of the West into desert. 

 

·       cities built water plants to keep cities from burning, by piping water into every occupied building.  People gardened. The water was cheap to use.

 

·       sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw! This is not waste; it feeds the water cycle, making rain.  Rain returned to cities and their surroundings.  The ‘80’s was a wet decade. 

In 1986, cities began to buy into rationing water by rates. They ration clean water with high unit rates, causing many ratepayers to eliminate their greatest use of water: Property maintenance.  These people lose their best insurance against wildfire: a green, watered yard.

 

2-4-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, and X.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Coal is the only fossil fuel

 Coal is the only fossil fuel.  It was formed only in the Carbonaceous Era, when trees didn’t rot because fungi could not use lignin.  Trees died, fell, and piled up.  As dirt covered them, they formed charcoal and slowly fossilized into coal.  The Carbonaceous Era ended when fungi evolved to use lignin.

Oil and natural gas are not fossil fuels; they come, not from ancient land animals, but from organic mud that builds up on oceanic plates that eventually slide under continental plates, the mud lubricating the process, and is refined in the upper layers of the mantle from the churning of magma, heat and pressure.  

I figured this out over a decade ago.  Last year, I found an article in Live Science, “North America is dripping down into Earth’s mantle,” by Sasha Pare, April 2, 2025.  The mud on top of the plate below the center of the continent is refined into: water; salt; oil; and natural gas.  Being lighter than melted rock, they are pushed toward the surface.  

Springs of fresh and mineral water are common and keep rivers running.  Salt gathers in caverns near the surface.  The carbonaceous portion, oil, and natural gas sometimes find cracks that reach the surface, which is how mankind discovered tar pits and used tar to seal Moses’ basket and ships.  In 1859, oil was brought to the surface in Pennsylvania and refined into kerosene.  Being cheaper and brighter burning than whale oil, it saved sperm whales from extinction.

 2-4-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and X

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com 

 

Many Poor and Middle Class Can’t Grow Food

    

My backyard garden, 9-4-2014

In 1985 people grew food without thinking about the price of water.
Paying the full water plant overhead monthly with base rates left only pennies on the dollar for unit rates.  Utilities did not depend on use to pay the overhead.  We thought of water as “free from the tap.”  We grew so much food that it was hard to give it away, except to our Food Bank. 

Rationing of water by price in Grants Pass grew slowly from sometime in the 1990s to 2005, when a new city manager hired a rate consultant to set our rates, and my water bill doubled.  Soon water was so costly that our Food Bank bought farmland outside our city to grow food, using volunteers to do the work. 

Such water rationing has cost us a generation of gardeners willing to garden other peoples’ yards, because they never learned how.  It has made the poor and lower middle class poorer every year, as unit rates increase 5.28% above inflation to pay the overhead.  Forty percent of our overhead is paid from water use, which decreases as unit rates increase.  Many people have lost their homes to high utility rates.  

Electricity and Natural gas are also rationed by price, but water and sewer are local monopolies.  Water is not precious; it is vital to health and wealth.  Overpricing use of any utility is not good for utilities or people.  It is theft based on fraud, the idea that these are “scarce and precious” resources.

 1-21-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council 

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Anonymous Prophets of Drought

 

When people can't afford to water their yards, they often neglect to cut their weeds.  Grants Pass depends on citizens to report property neglect, but few do so.  We had two decades of drought until the eruption of Hunga Tonga, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, blew its top on January 15th, 2022, sending 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere, though the flooding of California and other places started in September of that year, and continued through winter and spring.  Fall to late spring rain and flooding around the globe are expected to continue for another two years.

In 1986 in Grants Pass, we were told that we would be in drought that year, so “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  We had 103 days without rain that year, 97 days the next.

 In 1986, we first started hearing a new meme in the media: “Fresh water is a scarce and precious resource!  Only 2 percent of the water on earth is fresh water, and it must be conserved!”

 Interestingly, no one stepped up to write a book about it like Bill McKibben did about carbon dioxide and global warming.  This was because the movement to ration our water by rates, the way electricity and natural gas have been rate-rationed for over 50 years, required rationing of water to provide evidence for global warming.  

Water vapor is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas, but it also cools and thus moderates temperatures.  Their push to tax carbon dioxide has always been noisy; rate-rationing of water has been very quiet.

Building water treatment plants allowed cities to bring clean water to every building and fire hydrant, protecting both the cities and the surrounding countryside from wildfires, using irrigation and evaporation. 

But rate-rationing of city water has stopped our rain, because not enough people are watering.  Please bring back the rate system that will give us cheap water to use again.

                                            1-7-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and X

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com