This morning I woke up, looked out the window, and the sky was bright red and orange. Jesus said that this sign of the weather meant that there would be rain. But in recent decades, this weather sign cannot be dependable; it is more likely smoke from wildfires.
When I first came here in 1985, we
were greeted with a banner on sixth and seventh streets: “It’s the climate.” The same sign greeted me in 1999 when I came
home from Arizona. But as two decades of
dryness, heat and growing wildfire passed, the banners became a joke and disappeared. The climate is not so nice anymore.
It was not so nice when Grants Pass
burned in 1905 or 1906, and the town was rebuilt with bricks. My son-in-law has been working for a man who
is building fire-proof houses in the counties for rich people, while other
builders use wood. Their customers can’t
get insured against fire in the counties, but with a fire-proof house, they
won’t need fire coverage.
The burning of Grants Pass was the
reason that we built a water plant and distribution system, so every house and
business would be able to keep their property fire-safe with green plants and
wet ground. The price of using water was
kept as low as possible by separating “the overhead,” infrastructure and other
expenses that were slow to change, from the “unit cost,” which varies greatly
with seasonal irrigation added to household use.
Every city in the country was doing the same thing:
selling water cheap or even free to keep their city from burning.
Overhead is 99% of the cost of utilities, while their
product is 1%. The base rate for water
and sewer varies upward with the size of the pipes, so bills can be paid, monthly
or bi-monthly. Water unit costs were a single unit rate for everyone. Sewage was all base rate, because sewage
cannot be directly measured.
It was an exceedingly fair and affordable
system. What we have now is unfair and
unaffordable for the majority. You
can bring the old system back.
8-19-2026, 3-minute speech to the
Grants Pass City Council published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.
To be posted on Facebook, Nextdoor
and X.com
Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener rycke@gardener.com 541-955-9040
