Polis tries to reframe and blame discrimination to coverup the mess his Universal PreK rollout has become. Let's start talking about The Closed Basin project in the San Luis Valley.
Fact Checks and Lawsuits over Polis' Universal Pre-K
Man, the news has come hard and fast about Polis' struggling Pre-K program.
I thought a compendium might be in order. Seeing everything gathered all at once makes for a pretty striking picture.
Let's go chronologically.
It started back in July and continued til now:
First a preschool Chafee County sued over the program's requirements re. hiring. That's the first link.
Then later in July, the state starts to "backpedal" (wording taken from the second link) on its promise of how it would pay for students and how much.
Then in early August we find that the state has to pull back on funding another group of kids due to insufficient funding. That's the third link.
Then a couple Catholic parishes in Denver sue over the state's requirements and their First Amendment rights. That's the fourth link.
Whew, let me catch my breath for a sec ... okay, pressing on.
Now a group of school districts, superintendents, and special ed directors sued too over the cluster that this program has become. That's link #5 below.
I am tempted to glory and revel in Polis' shaming, but a couple of things temper that.
One, in any new program, no matter who runs it or where it is, there will be problems.
Two, if you believe that access to Pre-K would be helpful to young ones, then the mess that this is doesn't just hurt Polis, it hurts those same young ones.
Polis for his part released a statement re. the latest lawsuit. I attached a screenshot from link #5 so you could see it in all its glory.
Yes, Polis is just out there doing the will of the people and we should all just ignore the manifold problems with this program and focus on how some people are bigoted.
While Polis may not be fully responsible for every single problem, he is the state's chief executive officer. Add to that the fact that he certainly made lots and lots (AND LOTS) of political hay about this.
He needs to do better than his usual bobbing and weaving around problems. He needs to do better than the typical Democrat playbook of blaming problems on racism or homophobia.
In that spirit, I wanted to leave you with one more link. It's the last and perhaps best one. An article fact checking the various claims Polis has made about the problems and the Pre-K rollout. Not exhaustive, but a good start.
https://www.cpr.org/2023/07/14/christian-pre-school-sues-colorado-hiring-practices-lgbtq-rights-religious-freedom/
https://coloradosun.com/2023/07/26/colorado-universal-preschool-funding-changes/
https://coloradosun.com/2023/07/26/colorado-universal-preschool-funding-changes/
https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/archdiocese-of-denver-two-parishes-say-universal-pre-k-provider-requirements-violate-first-amendment-rights
https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/17/lawsuit-filed-against-gov-jared-polis-and-state-education-leaders-over-rollout-of-universal-preschool-program/
https://co.chalkbeat.org/2023/8/15/23833774/fact-check-polis-colorado-universal-preschool-full-day
The Closed Basin Project
You've made it out of Remedial Water 1A and now it's time to start the real coursework on water. We're going to start with looking at something that struck me as an interesting story to share.
I want you to take a look at the Reagan quote above because it was something that the reader who put me onto this story told me and I think it pretty well sums up about half of the story that I'm going to tell.
Half the story will be the inertia and blind continuance of a Federal program set in motion a long time ago. A program that held the promise of fixing a difficult problem; one that, on its face and absent the changes we'll talk about, strikes me as a pretty creative one.
The other half of the story is about changes to the way that farmers irrigate and what has become lately a case of "the tragedy of the commons" (see the first link below which was chosen because it does actually touch on groundwater).
I want you to understand, too, that a lot of what you'll read will be my own grasp of a story that I am seeing from far away. I don't live in the San Luis Valley and didn't grow up there. I have talked to several people who did and tried my best to synthesize what they told me in a way that was fair to all viewpoints, but it is inevitable that some of my own perspective and thinking snuck in here. I will include sources as much as I can so the interested reader can follow up. I encourage you to do so you can better form your own conclusions on the matter.
I also invite others who have lived there or who have some history with regard to the Closed Basin Project to speak up in the comments. Please add, correct, amplify in a way that would help others understand how you see things.
This is a big story to tell and I'll be a few posts in doing so.
Let's start with what the closed basin is and how it looked prior to the start of the Closed Basin Project in the San Luis Valley.
Pictures 1 and 2 come from the second link below. They're oldish (picture 2 is from 2009), but they're decent photos showing both the contours of the land and also highlighting the agricultural activity in the valley. In particular, if you look at picture 2, you'll see lots of dots. Those are irrigated fields with centerpoint irrigation and are about a half mile in diameter. The Great Sand Dunes (GSD) is on the right and you can see the very beginnings of the Rio Grand River.
Now that you've oriented yourself, let's talk about what the closed basin is and where it is.
When you think closed basin, I want you to think "water gets in and it can't get out". It's really not any more complicated than that. As we talked about in earlier posts, remember that water runs on the surface, but it can also run UNDER the surface. So rivers have water in the alluvium surrounding them, and even seeming low spots on the surface can still drain away underground as that water flows downhill.
A closed basin is a geological formation such that it is a "true" low spot. Like the drain in a bathtub, surface water may flow in, but it can't get back out once it percolates down. Well, let's put it this way, it can't get back out quickly You can lose some small amount to surface evaporation and or evaporation up through the plants that are there (plants pull water up out of their roots and "exhale" it through pores in their leaves, a process called evapotranspiration). But water that comes in from the surface or by some underground channel cannot quickly drain out. I found a graphic online and attached as picture 3.
Such a formation exists in the San Luis Valley. At the north end, above the Rio Grand River, there is a closed basin where water flows in from the surrounding mountains and does not readily make it out. I found a picture online that shows you a rough outline of the closed basin in the valley. It's attached as picture 4. I highlighted the Great Sand Dunes (GSD) to help you orient yourself. I will explain what the purple vertical line is soon.
If you look at picture 5 attached, that is a rough cross section of the valley as best as I understand it. Yes. It is childish and skips a lot of detail, but provides a schematic idea of what goes on with regard to groundwater in this basin. It is roughly oriented along a North-South line and would be about where that purple line is in picture 4.
I hope the cross section helps you visualize the dynamic here. Runoff from the surrounding mountains comes in to the closed basin area but is prevented from making it South to eventually drain out through the Rio Grande River by a bank of clay. This bank of clay prevents water in the closed basin from being able to affect the Rio Grande River either at the surface or by pushing up on the saturated alluvium underneath the river.
Further, underneath this closed basin is an impermeable layer that caps a deeper aquifer.** This deep aquifer is able to be accessed by deep wells from those that live South of the Rio Grande River in the valley.
I drew in a deep well in what would be the Southern end of the valley and a shallower one in the closed basin. It is, if memory serves, possible to drill into the confined aquifer in the Northern end of the valley, but why would you? Drilling costs money by the foot of depth and if water's right here, just use it.
So, that's a quick and dirty tour of the San Luis Valley's closed basin. I like to think of it like a bowl that water can come into but not readily get out of. This will figure largely in our next installment because it is the receptacle for tons of water that the state was putting in there and not getting out to the Rio Grande causing the other states in the compact to howl for decades about being shorted.
One last little interesting bit of trivia. Take a look at screenshot 6.
It's a reworking of picture 2 but I highlighted San Luis Lake in red, the Rio Grande in green, and the closed basin in blue. A story was relayed to me from an old well digger in the area. Apparently there are underground channels in the closed basin that can at least partially drain it to San Luis Lake (symbolized here with blue arrows--don't quote me on where or direction, but just to give you a a sense of flow).
Not really germane to later, just an example of the weird behavior of water underground and the idea that just because we can't see it, it really can have an effect on things.
**Should you follow up and read more on the topic, you may come across the words "confined aquifer" and "unconfined aquifer". Quick vocab note: an aquifer is anything that holds water underground. They can be shallow or deep. A confined aquifer is one that cannot migrate up or down very well. That is, it has a layer of rock above or below it that keeps it confined. An unconfined aquifer is one that can move up or down some. So, the closed basin is a unconfined aquifer (it can migrate up or down and has done so in the past), but remember that there is a deeper, confined aquifer below it.
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/tragedy-of-the-commons-impact-on-sustainability-issues
http://www.geospectra.net/san_luis/san_luis.htm