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Straight Talk on Defending Michigan's Water

Sat, 07/03/2010 - 23:53 — Dave Dempsey

Becky Baack: Far Light House

Becky Baack: Far Light House ~Enlarge

In this timely and urgently needed commentary in the Muskegon Chronicle, Michigan State Rep. Mary Valentine takes on directly the misinformation spread about a bill she is co-sponsoring to protect the public interest in Michigan's water.

For months, special interests who stand to benefit from exploiting groundwater, lakes and streams and the Great Lakes themselves for private profit have unrolled a carpet of untruths to stop tht legislation.  This is not the place to dignify the falsehoods by repeating them.

The key points of Rep. Valentine's commentary:

Don’t tax my water! That’s where I stand and that’s why I introduced legislation to ban the taxing of water by state and local governments. House Bill 6050 is short, sweet and to the point:

The state or a local unit of government shall not impose any taxes or fees on water withdrawals from water wells on residential property.

I also supported HB 5319, the legislation to put our ground water in the public trust. Surface water has been in the public trust for many years (without anyone taxing it, I might add). But we now realize surface and ground water are connected; it is useless to protect surface water without also protecting our ground water. This is good, common sense legislation.

HB 5319 clarifies that the water in our state does not belong to a privileged few. This is a bill every property owner should be promoting for quick passage. The sooner we assure your water supply will remain right where it is, the better for all of us.

Join me in the fight to protect our water from out-of-state profiteers by supporting HB 5319. Call your senators and representatives now and ask them to push for passage of HB 6050 and HB 5319. Together, we can keep water in our wells, trout in our streams and the government out of our pockets.

The well water it saves could be your own.

» About author Dave Dempsey

Comments

Defending Water and Land

Submitted by Ernest Martinson on Sun, 07/04/2010 - 17:31.

Since Rep. Valentine supported legislation to put our ground water in public trust, how dare she then demand that it is her water that is not to be taxed? It would follow just as surely as water runs downhill that it is our water that is not to be taxed.

Rep. Valentine is to be commended on realizing that surface water is connected to ground water. I would suggest that surface and ground waters are also connected to the land, indeed, are embedded in a land matrix. If so, then land might also be added to the public trust.

Land and water would then be a commons belonging to us all. But not all of us can occupy the land in farming, or run over it in polluting vehicles such as ATVs and snowmobiles, or imbibe water needed to slacken the thirst of industries such as pop and beer bottlers. So how do we assert our ownership to this land and water commons that is to be held in public trust?

We could urge user and polluter pays, realistic water and sewer rates, realistic royalties on minerals beneath the waters and in the land, and rents on the land-- all to be collected by government. Some (perhaps most) of this rent could then be recovered by each of us in the form of a land and water dividend, and some could be retained by the government for doing only what government can do, such as raping foreign lands of embedded minerals.

Unfortunately, Rep. Valentine states that surface water has not been taxed and ground water will not be taxed. To go along with what may be a bias against recovering the rental value of the commons for the common person, I presume she would also resist reforming the property tax into a land tax only.