I came to Grants
Pass in the fall of 1984. I left it in
the fall of ‘86. Our utility bill was about
$25: $20 for water and $5 for sewer. It
got up to $26 with summer watering. It seemed
like we had thundershowers every weekend of that summer.
In the spring of ’86, we were told
we were in drought; don’t water lawns or wash cars. We had 100 days without rain that summer.
‘86 was the year that I kept hearing
two new memes all through the media: global warming; and conserve fresh water. I bought them both at the time.
I returned to Grants Pass in ‘99 and became a professional gardener. My utility bill was about $35 in winter and
up to $75 in summer. The base rate for
water was only $12; sewer was $20; water units were the rest.
In 2006, Grants Pass started tiered water pricing with an $8 base rate
and much higher unit rates. My water
bill nearly doubled. My city customers
started to let part of their properties go dry. In ‘08, Staff told the City
Council that they needed to raise the base rate from $9 to $12 to pay the
overhead and “stabilize the rates,” because people had cut back so much on watering. The Council did, but rates did not stabilize,
because people were cutting back more.
High unit rates do that.
In 2013, I did a study of summer temperature and rainfall in Grants
Pass over the previous 30 years. It
showed that Grants Pass had lost almost an inch of summer rain per decade. In the ‘80s, we had bigger rain events in July
and August, the middle of the irrigation season, than in June and September. That reversed in the ‘90s and reversed further
in the '00s, when we got tiered rates. Monthly
maximum temperatures took a slight dip in the ‘90s but climbed in the ‘00s.
I began to see the conjoined conspiracies around global warming and rate-rationed water. Memes didn’t spread that
easily before the Internet, but these two ideas were suddenly everywhere. That took a lot of money and clout in ‘86. The movement to tax carbon was noisy and
controversial; imposing water-rationing rates was quiet and rarely noticed. Water rationing provided the proof of “global
warming,” which became “climate change” after 2000, because dryness creates weather
extremes, fires, and floods.
Some very rich investor wanted to rev up wind and solar power and started the ball rolling in 1986.
Speech to the Josephine County Commissioners, 8-11-2021, and the
Grants Pass City Council, 8-18-2021
published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com
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Rycke
Brown, Natural Gardener 541-955-9040 rycke@gardener.com
