Beware the pennies on your eyes

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:03:04 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 30, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Beware the pennies on your eyes

Back in 1997, the state Legislature authorized the Southern Nevada Water Authority to start assessing well owners in the Las Vegas valley a $30 annual fee to partially fund a groundwater management program. (The fee is supposed to help fund efforts to recharge the valley's long-overdrawn desert aquifer.)

In order to assess the fee, the water authority used state well records as well as field inspections of area homes to compile a list of 10,000 remaining private well owners.

Now, the private Nevada Well Owners Association is trying to contact those well owners, in order to organize them against what Association Vice President Robert Tretiak contends is a government plan to pressure the well owners into giving up their wells and hooking up with the municipal water system.

The water authority has refused to provide the owners association with the list. The authority says it mailed out post cards, asking well owners to give their permission if they wanted their names released to the private association, but that only about 10 percent have responded in the affirmative. Mr. Tretiak responds that the postcard failed to adequately describe the association's advocacy role, and that the list is a public record, anyway, subject to open records laws. That's why the association has now filed suit to force release of the list, Mr. Tretiak explains.

"We're going to defend their privacy," vows water authority spokesman Jesse. Davis.

Too late.

The initial problem was that $30 fee, of course. Are they planning to charge 30 bucks to anyone who sinks a hole for a fencepost down near the Las Vegas Wash and and strikes mud? How about kids digging in the back yard? If these clowns can now tax private wells in the desert, how long will it be before they start charging a "breathing tax" to fund government efforts to supposedly clean up the valley's air? This is dangerous nonsense.

Besides, it's the municipal water systems which have done most of the drawing down of the valley's water table over the decades -- if anything, the government should be paying private well owners for the degradation of their water rights, not the other way around.

At any rate, the authority's insistence on now violating open records laws in order to keep their assessment list secret does indeed lend credence to suspicions that the fee -- isn't it interesting how they always start out so small and unobtrusive? -- was indeed a guise for gathering information which the authority doesn't want anyone else to have. Can it be long now before the authority claims to have "jurisdiction" over these wells, finally insisting it actually "owns" them?

(Just ask the Clark County cattle ranchers who agreed back in the 1930s and '40s to pay a small "fee" to the Bureau of Land Management to settle up some property line disputes and help finance a few water tanks, never dreaming that 60 years later the BLM would claim to "own" those lands, eventually putting the ranchers -- all but diehard Cliven Bundy out on the Mesquite allotment -- out of business, by cancelling what gradually came to be referred to as the ranchers' "leases.")

"Privacy" is preserved when the citizens are kept safe from having government snoops gather information on them. If the authority had ever really held well-owners' "privacy" rights in high regard, it would have refused to send out those "field agents" to sneak around counting wells in the first place.

People who pay any other kind of property tax have their names -- and the assessed valuations of their property -- listed where the public can find them. True "privacy" would indeed be preferable, and I look forward to the elimination of all local property taxes -- including this absurd new tax on wells -- as soon as privacy champions like Mr. Davis and company find the time.

Till then, the list of those taxed is clearly a public document, covered by Nevada's open records laws, and the water authority should stop frittering away ratepayers' funds on a doomed legal holding action to keep this assessment list secret for a few more weeks.


Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (subscribe by calling Ned at 612-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.


Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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