I grew up in that irrigation district, and my father was (and is) active in the management of the district (he was even the ditch rider for one or two years).

What the irrigation district is trying to do is set up a neighborhood improvement district (or something to that effect) to finance getting the district piped and pressurized. What this means is they want to allow everyone who lives in the district, which starts at the south east corner of Morris Hill Cemetery (near the Synagogue’s new home) and runs north-west to Orchard and Irving (more or less), to vote on a temporary addition to their property taxes in order pay for the project. If the council allows the vote, it will take a simple majority (50% + 1) of property owners for the tax to go through and everybody would have to pay the extra tax, even if they voted against or don’t even have water rights. I believe the city council gets to determine exactly where the boundaries of the temporary district will lie. I can’t remember off hand what the estimate for the project is, nor the size of the proposed increase.

Most of the city parcels in that area come with water rights, for which the property owner pays an annual fee, somewhere in the neighborhood of $45. The trouble is, many people either don’t know about their water rights or don’t want to mess with irrigation (despite the fact that it 45 bucks a year for all the water your lawn could want; try getting that deal from United Water) or don’t understand that the irrigation district does indeed have the power to levy that fee, and you must pay it even if you choose not use your water. I am uncertain if there is a process to permanently relinquish your water rights.

The problem with that is, it makes it hard to maintain the ditches and canals in the district, which is what the fees are for (that and paying the ditch rider’s salary, a whopping $200.00 a year) Some the older ditches are pushing 100 years old, and are starting to fall apart badly. If they’re left to deteriorate, peoples homes could be badly flooded. Also, Lindsey Lateral has an obligation to irrigation districts further down the line to ensure that unused water makes it to their district; in a technical sense, all the water flowing flowing through Lindsey Lateral “belongs” to the district at the end of the line, which I think is the Meridian Irrigation District. Lindsey Lateral has experimented with liens against people who are seriously delinquent in paying their fees, but from what I understand that’s generally more trouble than it’s worth, and everybody involved with the district is a neighbor of someone who isn’t, and they don’t want to be asses like that.

The crumbling ditches could be repaired, but eventually, every foot of every ditch (and there are a several miles total, I think) would need to be fixed, which is something the irrigation district simply can not afford to do, and someone will eventually get flooded out. The benefits of pressurization are that houses with water rights could hook their ditch water up to an automatic sprinkler system and no longer have to mess with switching gates or flood irrigation, people with ditches running through their property would have that land reclaimed for lawns or flowers or something, the district will save money in the long run on repairs, and they wouldn’t have to bother with ditch burning every spring.

I can understand homeowners not wanting to pay more taxes, especially if you don’t have or don’t use their water rights, and it would definitely suck to have this tax imposed on you by your neighbors if you vote against it, but it is for a definite, needed improvement in the immediate neighborhood, and it’s only temporary. Sometimes, that’s the price for living in a democracy. I take comfort in the fact that the vote would happen extremely close to those who would have to pay the tax, and that the money would be spent literally, on your block; it’s not like people in the North End are voting to raise your property taxes.

Another example is in this in contacting Dave Muir; funny he appeared to me to understand the difference of manners and customer service just fine. So maybe I also “misunderstood”.

shakes head

t

I laughed so hard at this, I almost had my own accident!

One more comment on your fireworks comments to the mayor….we too are glad that the city is doing the fireworks. With that said we have friends that live on Crescent Rim above your condos. In the River Fest days Crescent Rim was blocked at both ends due to the EXTREMELY unsafe combination of fast cars and small children.

This year the east end of Crescent Rim was not blocked off and IT WAS VERY VERY UNSAFE!! Several children came very close to being hit.

We, like you were sworn at several times when we tried to get cars to slow down. Several cars specifically showed up and tried to stop in the street to watch the fireworks and there was nothing to stop them.

We were told that the city was told of the concern and they refused to employ the old solutions.

The city learned over the River Fest years…why did they change what worked so well. If they would go back to controlling the very unsafe east end of Crescent Rim that might solve some of your problems too.