Entitlement and Greed!

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PBR

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Entitlement and Greed!

I am fairly uneducated to how the water laws work but I have been watching the outflow of water for a while and I have come up with a theory. I am sure everyone here will have a comment and a correction to my statement but please think about what I am saying because I believe it is true. The reason Lake Powell will never be full again in our lifetimes is because of the entitlement of the people that use the energy it creates and the greed of the Bureau of Reclamation/power companies. I do not believe it has to do with the agriculture or the golf courses or even the domestic use. I run a HVAC company in a very ritzy resort town and in the last 8 years the dynamic of my clients have changed. Everybody wants bigger, better, faster, more and NOW! I was honestly standing in the living room of one of my clients houses getting yelled at because her air conditioning system would not keep her house at 65 degrees. This is a $35,000,000.00, 15 thousand square foot house. It has 12' tall windows that face South and 2 gas fireplaces running when it is 85 degrees out side. If that is not the definition of ENTITLEMENT I do not know what is. Now with that in mind if you look at the water data, Monday-Friday the out flow is between 14,661-16,323 cfs. Saturday-Sunday it is only 11,397-11,531 cfs. In my opinion the difference between the weekdays and the weekends has to do with the fact that most everyone is sitting in an airconditioned office or shop or whatever it is, working. On the weekends they are out doing stuff with their families or maybe even fishing at Lake Powell, the AC is shut off. The upper basin is only required to send 7,500,000 acre feet of water to the lower basin yet it has been giving them 9,000,000 for years and years. This is because of the GREED of the BOR and power companies. They want to squeeze every last drop of energy thru those turbines as possible, more money, more money, more money! It would be extremely interesting to see what would happen to the outflow if everyone turned their thermostats up from 70 degrees to 72 degrees for one day.
 
I have to agree with the dynamic of clients changing. People used to be grateful for the help or service we provided in the service industry. I too have an HVAC division and it is sad to see how people have changed. That’s all I will say but I feel your pain.
 
The releases from Glen Canyon dam are pursuant to a tangled web of regulations and contractual agreements among the 7 states, scores of water users, and electric utilities sharing the power output. The releases by USBR are never arbitrary. We may not agree with their water operations, but a deal's a deal. I'm so glad we had the opportunity to explore the far reaches of the lake in 83 and 84 when it was full and near full. Going to full pool was really a "mistake" as the tremendous late spring storms caught the USBR off guard and an emergency and down stream flooding occurred. Barring another miscalculation like that, Powell will never fill, but muliple wet years are inevitable sometime and Powell and Mead will return to their glory years. Time is running out for me to see that, but I'm confident my kids will see that again (they remember 83 at ages 1 and 3!).
 
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