Water Deal Bad for Oklahoma
May 13th, 2010
Hello again everyone! Two weeks are left in the session and, once again, a proposal to take a resource from rural Oklahoma is raising concerns at the State Capitol.
Our opposition to the proposed sale of Sardis Lake to Oklahoma City is hardly a case of “parochial interests trumping all,” as some suggest. This is about protecting long-term economic interests of our region and the entire state.
Supporters of the dastardly deal say it is the only way to pay the state’s debt to the federal government for the construction of Sardis Lake. This is a manufactured crisis. The situation did not need to reach this point, and other solutions are available – solutions those who would prosper from this deal conveniently choose to ignore.
Such a huge water transfer should concern every Oklahoman because the comprehensive statewide water plan is unfinished. The state initiated that study to determine Oklahoma’s water resources and needs in the decades ahead. Any transfer before the study is complete makes a mockery of the science behind it and a waste of the taxpayer dollars that funded it.
Southeastern Oklahoma purposely has been excluded from the negotiations. The deal was concocted in the proverbial “smoke-filled room,” the very personification of the back-room deals Oklahomans find so distasteful.
Southeastern Oklahoma gets nothing from this transfer. This dreadful deal precludes any investment in our area infrastructure and provides no means by which we can grow our economy. We would lose one of the most valuable resources imaginable and get nothing in return.
We in southern Oklahoma have been down this road before. Seven years ago, several wealthy suburbs west of Oklahoma City tried to snatch water from the Arbuckle-Simpson Aquifer.
The Legislature rightly stopped that transfer until the aquifer could be scientifically studied. That study was completed last summer and showed the aquifer could not have supported the proposed pumping. Now, the metro area is making another play for rural Oklahoma resources without the necessary scientific study to determine if the deal is even “doable.”
Let’s put this into perspective for us. What would happen if Oklahoma City had a resource we in southern Oklahoma had the power to seize through some shady back-room deal? Would the good people of central Oklahoma sit idly by while an enormous transfer of potential wealth is wrested from them? Of course, they would not.
This misguided deal would establish two classes of Oklahomans. On one side are rural Oklahomans who, through choice or Providence, live near amazing natural resources. On the other are metro residents, leaders of whom feel entitled to pillage resources – without engaging those who have it, without studying the impact of taking the resource, and without providing adequate compensation to the region for that resource.
To use the vernacular of many of us in rural Oklahoma, “That dog won’t hunt.”
Thanks for reading this week’s “Senate Minute.” Have a great week, and may God bless you all.