The Closed Basin Project fixed the Rio Grande Compact problems, until it didn't. As CPR has it, do credit scores harm the "disadvantaged"? And, Fall is coming ...
The Closed Basin was a clever solution to water woes ... until it wasn't. And it wasn't before they even drilled a hole.
This is the next in the water series I've been working on. We talked in the last installment about what a closed basin was and a bit about the closed basin that exists in the Northern part of the San Luis Valley.
**A quick and important note about the previous installment. I had a reader email me and tell me that my schematic cross section was wrong. The Rio Grande River initially ran much farther and deposited sand, gravel, and clay as it migrated South across the valley. Thus, the "clay bank" I drew should be further South of the river and not North of it. Additionally, and this is more addition than correction, water gets into the confined and unconfined aquifer gets there via several routes, not just runoff. Some mountain streams, cracks in the rock, volcanic tubes, allow flow directly into the confined and unconfined aquifer without ever needing to go into the valley.
In this installment I want to tell you about a clever idea the Closed Basin Project. In future installments, we'll talk about how a combination of delays and changes in the way farmers do things made it not so clever. We'll also touch on how, despite the fact that it wasn't such a good idea, the Feds pushed on (remember that Reagan quote from last time).
First, let's define a couple things in case you weren't familiar. The two types of irrigation I am going to mention are flood and center pivot. Pictures 1 and 2 are examples of flood and pivot respectively. Seeing the picture of the flood irrigation sure brings back memories from when I was a kid. I forget where or how exactly, but I have a picture in my mind of those "S" tubes and watching someone put them out.
Okay, flash back to the late 30's in Colorado. As I'd written in an earlier post, Colorado signed a compact with New Mexico and Texas over how we would all share the Rio Grande River. This compact delineated how much water Colorado had to send down the river for the downstream states.
Well, Colorado was fudging this agreement. You see, Colorado was delivering water to its farmers in the valley through a series of ditches and dams. Farmers used the ditch water to irrigate their fields via flood irrigation when water was plentiful and some would switch to well water later in the year to irrigate (as water and run off began to run low). Up until this point in time, center pivot irrigation was just a twinkle in its inventor's eyes. It wouldn't come on the scene til the 60's and wouldn't really take off in the valley til the 70's.
The thing is, this flood irrigation was happening over top of the closed basin and so a large quantity of water was ... you guessed it, not making it to the Rio Grande River and downstream to the other compact states.** As you might imagine this didn't go over well. NM and TX are due that water and complained about its loss. All told one million acre-feet of compact water, water that should have gone downstream, was lost to the closed basin.
At that point, someone had a wonderfully clever idea.
If water is piling up in the closed basin and not making it downstream, why not stick a straw in that river, suck out the water, and put it back in the Rio Grande. No more flooding in that basin (I've had tales relayed to me about farmers in the closed basin who hoped year after year that some of their soggy land might dry out enough to be planted), no more complaints, everyone's happy.
So a proposal was put forward. The Feds got the ball rolling through through the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 60's and then Colorado followed up with an engineering report on the impact of the project later in the 60's.
I was given a copy of the 1967 engineering report on tapping the closed basin and I linked to it first below in case you want a fuller look.
Some of the motivations and political back-and-forth involved are hinted at in the introduction which I excerpted to screenshots 3 through 5. Clearly none of the states in the compact were too happy and TX and NM were getting ready to go to court. The Feds were stepping in with what they thought was a really clever idea to solve the problem before things got to a head. I want you to note that last bit in screenshot 5. Other solutions were possible here, but they pushed forward on the Closed Basin Project (here capitalized and I will stick the convention of not capitalizing the geologic thing itself while capitalizing the project undertaken in the San Luis Valley) because it was doable in the here and now and a solution to stop the problem among the states was wanted in the here and now.
Thus the report's authors endorsed that Colorado get behind this project (and my guess is that this helped ease its passage through the Federal legislature--remember this is a Federal project not a state one).
One word I heard over and over in talking to people about the Closed Basin Project was the notion that what the Feds and others hoped to do was to merely take out what they called the "salvage water" from the closed basin. If you're following along in the engineering report, you'll see their discussion of same starting on about page 17.
Clearly, among those that supported this project, the idea was that they were not taking anything out of the region that wasn't salvage, that wasn't a leftover. What came out wouldn't have any effect on wildlife, farmers, or others. It was extra and no one would miss it. Well, maybe the water table might come down a little and plants might lose some water that they could give up to the atmosphere through their leaves, but neither water tables nor plants vote (and environmentalists were a lot less vocal back then). See screenshot 6 attached.
Skipping tremendous amounts of detail (which you can follow up with in the technical document linked second below), what eventually shook out of this program was a series of wells drilled into the closed basin which then pump water up and out to a clay-lined ditch running to the Rio Grande River.
That is, the Closed Basin Project takes water out of the ground from the North part of the San Luis Valley and puts it into the river to help quiet those downstream. I attached a detailed map as picture #7. The wells and the connecting lines are shown. To help you orient yourself, the Sand Dunes are on the right hand side about midway down.
Note, too, that not all the wells were drilled at the same time. This project was phased in.
In the next installment, we'll look at a timeline and how it is that a clever idea soured like old milk.
**Remember that in a normal situation, even water that is soaked into the soil can migrate downhill and, if only by filling up the alluvium around the river and putting pressure up on the river, cause its flow to go back up.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nz-tMUYB6FBU5rH7FeXvmgbWUqhY1VwN/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LzhJKoDE3VZI9bSzXZylp0nyzTh3LUYf/view?usp=sharing
Related:
Bring back flood irrigation?
The picture in the post above comes from the blog post below.
I wanted to include the post as related because of its interesting topic: that we should bring back flood irrigation.
Quoting:
"The attraction for Colson and others is that flood irrigation, with its leaky canals and standing water, helps recharge shrinking aquifers and provides migratory birds with a stopover on their annual pilgrimages between the Arctic and points south."
And from later:
"But the pursuit of efficiency [from center pivot sprinklers] has had unintended consequences. Migratory wading birds feed in flood-irrigated fields, which have provided an artificial alternative to the natural marshes lost to river damming. And Western aquifer levels have dropped in correlation with the disappearance of flood irrigation — historically a major source of incidental aquifer recharge."
Interesting assertion. I don't know enough to know whether this claim is accurate or not, but it does give food for thought.
As the blog itself indicates, there is a place for both center pivot and flood irrigation, but I see their point that it might be especially helpful in areas where dams have lead to aquifers not getting replenished.
https://coyotegulch.blog/2016/11/25/movement-seeks-to-bring-back-flood-irrigation-in-some-areas-capital-press/
Do credit scores, as CPR has it, harm the “disadvantaged”?
What are we supposed to take away from the interview below?
When I read things on issues related to equity/inclusion/diversity there are two questions I would love to ask (and for this you'll have to imagine that I'm posing this to my hypothetical interlocutor because I've never actually yet had the chance to ask someone in person--on the list, just hasn't happened yet):
"Imagine you have a magic wand, you can change anything you want about policy or anything and it will immediately happen. Given that, what specific things would you change?"
"How do we know that we have achieved full equity or fairness (by whatever metric you use to define these terms)? What does that look like?"
The reason questions like these come up for me is because I keep getting the sense that what I see is the (as a reader once put it) very foremost whiskers of a camel's nose coming under the tent.
That is, I keep getting the feeling that we can't yet talk about specifics because they might fall well outside what most centrists would think reasonable. So, we're going to talk "around" it. They're going to say things are inequitable. They'll hint that things need to change, but wont say in what way and they won't define the endpoint in concrete, specific terms.
The article linked below is an example. It details how the credit score system perpetuates "inequality". To be fair, there is some minor information included on how you can boost your score, but most of it is about the inequality of the system.
To quote, "But while credit scores seem like objective measurements, traditional scoring models are based almost entirely on someone’s credit history, which penalizes people from disadvantaged communities and unnecessarily perpetuates societal inequities."
I'll leave it to you to read the article if you want, but I do want to touch on my own story as a way to illustrate what I mean when I say the "camel's nose under the tent" above.
I am not from any background that anyone would likely count as "disadvantaged". I'm also not someone that I would consider "advantaged" either. I'm not rich, I'm not an heir to a vast fortune. I am lucky enough to have had both parents at home, a roof over my head, and no worries about whether I'd eat on any given day, however.
I knew even from a young age that I didn't want to burden myself with debt. So, I saved. I lived within my means. For decades. Expenses came up and I paid them out of savings. I also rented for decades partly because I wanted to wait til I had a wife to move in my house before I bought one.
Getting a wife, and consequently a house, happened in my late 30's. The problem was, I had no credit history. NONE. I had a debit card attached to my checking account, but no credit cards.
No one would give me a mortgage. And not for lack of trying. The broker I was working with was trying every trick in the book but no one wanted to lend to me.
The fix was ... wait for it ... time and work. I got a secured credit card with a pitifully low limit (because I had to give the card people money to secure what they'd lend). I got another. I bought one small(ish) thing a month with both and paid the bill in full.
A full year of this got me a mortgage. It was time and careful money management, not any unearned advantage. I had no disadvantage that kept me out of a mortgage. I was just an unknown and my guess is so is anyone else with no history.
No. Credit scores do not always tell you who can pay back a loan or be trusted. But no credit score is as bad as a bad one because no lender knows you and they (rightfully) don't lend to people they don't know or can't assess.
Does (quoting) "traditional credit scoring punish people from disadvantaged backgrounds?" I don't see it. I got punished and am not disadvantaged. Plus, the door to getting a credit score (and/or getting a good one) is open to all and the path is the same for all.
The thing is, stories like mine are not told. I can't help but think there's a reason they're left out while all too often the sad stories of helpless victims to the system are left in.
When I say I feel like they're hiding the ball, this is what I mean. We start from a disparity, a difference in outcomes. We then point to that disparity and label it as something bad or wrong with the system. On top of that we do not consider other ways the disparity could play out.
At that point, it's time to hint or ask for a change to a rule or a policy.
Do I think it would be automatically bad to consider other things besides credit history for a credit score? Say, we'd look at (and this is mentioned in the interview) the amount of savings someone has? No. I don't think it's a problem to consider an alternative, equally-predictive (or that have the potential to be equally predictive) measure that levels everyone.
What I'm not okay with, and what I keep wondering if what we're heading toward, is different rules for different people depending on some classification of "disadvantaged" instead of equal opportunity and the same rules for all.
https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/21/credit-score-inequality/
Fall is coming, my plants have told me so.
You wouldn't know it from the temps we've had (at least out on the Plains), but it's coming.
The Liatris and Blazing Poker are blooming and that's a sure sign.
