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Silliness knows no national or continetal boundaries

Submitted by ubetchaiam on Thu, 08/02/2012 - 8:33pm
Departments: 
Department of They Got Mirrors Where You're From?
Tags: 
justice
government
judicial
Boondoggle
silliness

Italy outlaws 'you don't have the balls'
"It took a trial and two appeals. But now Italians know where they stand.

They may think it. They may mutter it. But, on pain of a hefty fine, they must not say it."

Oregon man sentenced to jail for collecting rain water
"Gary Harrington, an Oregon man, will be spending a month in jail, after being convicted on nine misdemeanor charges. His crime? "Illegally" collecting rain water on his own property. "

As the song says "Take you a glass of water
Make it against the law.
See how good the water tastes
When you can`t have any at all."

Comments

Submitted by hipparchia on

has a slightly different version of that story:

Judgment Addresses 11 Years of Illegal Water Use
On Wednesday July 11, 2012, a Jackson County Circuit Court Jury convicted Eagle Point resident Gary A. Harrington on nine counts, each related to the unauthorized use of water. Under Oregon law, all water is publicly owned, and those who wish to use it for their own purposes must obtain a water right permit issued by the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD). State law grants various exceptions to this requirement, including an exception for collecting precipitation water that gathers on an artificial impervious surface, such as a rooftop or parking lot; in rain barrels, for example.

so a state that has low precipitation at the best of times, regulates who can [can't] hoard water. and let's be clear, he wasn't filling a few rain barrels for his garden:

Harrington stored and used water illegally by placing dams across channels on his property and preventing the flow of water out of these artificial reservoirs without obtaining a water right permit. The height of each dam varies; two dams stand about ten feet tall and the third stands about 20 feet tall. The total amount of water collected behind these dams totals about 40 acre feet; enough to fill almost 20 Olympic?sized swimming pools. These man?made reservoirs feature boat docks, boats, and were stocked by Harrington with trout and Bluegill for recreational fishing.

Submitted by ubetchaiam on

What I find missing from both reports is whether the - "Harrington stored and used water illegally by placing dams across channels on his property"- channels led to or from the referenced creek.
If they did, then he's on a sandy foundation; if they don't, he's right about the state 'bullying'.
Wonder what happened to all the fish he stocked in the 'reservoirs' when they lert the water out; one big fish fry or?

Submitted by hipparchia on

i don't know actually know what happens to the fish; swim away to whatever body of water the opened channel(s) would flow to, maybe.

What I find missing from both reports is whether the - "Harrington stored and used water illegally by placing dams across channels on his property"- channels led to or from the referenced creek.

it's not quite that simple. creeks themselves can be dry channels part of the time and full of flowing water only part of the time, and still be recognized as named creeks:

In the United States, an intermittent or seasonal stream is one that only flows for part of the year and is marked on topographic maps with a line of blue dashes and dots.

if you go to the epa my waters mapper, select the topography option, and type in "crowfoot rd, eagle point, oregon" (where harrington lives) in the address box, you get a topo map showing that crowfoot creek, and indeed almost all the creeks in that area, are dashed lines (intermittent streams).

but crowfoot creek and all the unnamed channels aside, this is the important point:

Under Oregon law, all water is publicly owned. With some exceptions, cities, farmers, factory owners and other users must obtain a permit or water right from the Water Resources Department to use water from any source— whether it is underground, or from lakes or streams. Landowners with water flowing past, through, or under their property do not automatically have the right to use that water without a permit from the Department.

that's just the introductory paragraph on the oregon.gov water resource dept's water law page(s). you can follow the link and read about oregon water laws to your heart's content. :)

going back to the topo map for a moment, if you study the area around crowfoot rd, you can see it's pretty hilly. if harrington is damming up channels, he's almost certainly damming up water that otherwise would have flowed past or through his property.

this is just one of the aspects of managing a watershed (or aquifer, or water supplies in general), especially in a changing-climate world, where areas with a lot of rain/snowfall are predicted to get even more, and areas with not much now are predicted to have even less in the future.

Submitted by jawbone on

protect us all from superficial judegments.

Thank you, Hipp!

But, my question stands, sort of: If beavers were to build a dam which led to the formation of a pond or lake (or larger one than prior to the damming), would the landowner be required to break down that dam? Or, do beavers get a pass because they're, well, nautrally dam builders? And are their dams protected in some areas, at least? Beavers gotta build to live, right?

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

That's an incredibly interesting data point. That screams out for study in the context of devising a legal framework (perhaps a parallel shed-based system of nested jurisdictions (managed via IVCS)) to counter the depredations of the extractive economy. I'd be very interested to see how the permitting system is handled e.g.

Submitted by hipparchia on

did obama's big-money donors [his real base] vet him over the internet? i don't think so. politics, from hand-picked presidents to mass movements, happens in person.

I'd be very interested to see how the permitting system is handled e.g.

which permitting system? oregon? one devised by ivcs? ... ?

That's an incredibly interesting data point.

water is one of those resources everybody needs, but the laws governing its use and ownership vary, in part because its abundance and forms [lakes, rivers, creeks, bays, bayous, oceans, rain, snow, etc] and all their uses vary. so, in the west, where water is scarce, you get laws [and cases] like oregon, about hoarding; in the east you get laws governing public access to [presumably permanent] bodies of water [and the ocean] and pollution of water supplies [but please don't regulate us too much!].

That screams out for study in the context of devising a legal framework

closer to home, for you, might be long creek watershed restoration [and something i haven't yet read up on: "collective permit" p13-14].

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

... that's the voting system. Nothing precludes "retail politics" in that scenario.

But I think that water is increasingly "scarce" everywhere (like any resource in any extractive economy) and so maybe Oregon is leading the way on this.

Submitted by hipparchia on

from the descriptions i read [admittedly some time ago] it appeared to be an organizing system.

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

Here:

The result of using IVCS will be voting blocs of various sizes, and influence. People will use the application to formulate policy agendas and then create self-organizing voting blocs and political parties around those agendas. They can use the application’s search/data mining tool to locate others whose policy agendas are most like their own, and join with them.

and here. You're right; I've mentally extrapolated my own idea, which is to make it a completely parallel structure with new jurisdictional lines.

Incidentally, Maine is a big state. I don't see IVCS substituting for personal contact, but it could supplement it.

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

... not public ownership.

I wonder if a public trust doctrine would be a unifying thread across resource extraction resistance efforts generally.

Submitted by hipparchia on

That's basically utlitities... not public ownership.

a state with a small population, not much in the way of polluting industries, and a huge amount of water might not think that public ownership of the water is all that important. of course, if the population is growing, and the pollution is growing, and the water supply is shrinking, that state might need to rethink it's legislative priorities. ;)

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

.... and its open space is being targeted by landfill operations. As is our water, in fact, by Poland Springs.

The nice thing about water is that it goes everywhere and carries everything. So treating water as a public good or public trust might be a unifying force among otherwise scattered activist communities. I mean, we actually get river organizations saying "landfills aren't our issue." Well, so wait twenty years when the liners fail, and it will be. But by then, too late.