Hacker News Reader

Same where I live, in California. One of my coworkers wanted to get a permit for a well, and the county's policy was to make the permit as expensive as running a water main to the property, making it always cheaper to subsidise their water infrastructure than to build your own.

Keep in mind that I'm in the part of the state that is extremely wet, where aquifers fill faster than agriculture can use it, and residential use is a literal drop in the bucket, compared to agriculture use. Most of Californias resevuoirs are built for flood control, with power generation as an added benefit, and shipping water off to the drier parts of the state as an afterthought.

In rural areas, people often directly support each other to get buy, and the urbanites absolutely can't stand it when they aren't relying on the urban fifedom. Just like the area in Colorado that the article discusses, it's illegal here to share well water. They've also made it illegal to pool your trash together for a dump run. Until the state stepped in, it used to be illegal to collect your own rain water, too. The same for inlaw quarters, which are really common in rural areas. (My county once spent nearly half a million, to unsucsessfully sue a group of people for a fraction of that amount, because one of them sold his land to the others, who each custom built their own houses, instead of having a county-approved developer build all of them.)

Even a few decades ago, California used to be the place for antiestablishment types, even in the urban areas, and its sudden changeover to forced top-down management has created a somewhat splintered government that alternates between extreme limits and strong reforms.

Are these rules decided at the county level? And can municipalities override them? I am wondering if the rural folk can incorporate to free themselves from these absurd restrictions.

Those are county rules, but every county has the same ones. I don't know if a cities could make leaner rules, because I've only ever seen them make them stricter.

It's crazy that picking up garbage is so universally a government enforced monopoly that every county seems to have independently required it. The county runs the dump, but anyone could transport garage with minimal capital, so the garbage company doesn't have the same monopoly excuse that other utilities have, yet I can chose from three cellular phone providers but legally only one garbage pickup service can serve my address. Not only that, but if the property is occupied and service is available, I'm legally required to pay for service, whether I use it or not, and if I don't pay for it, even if I'm not using it, it'll be added to my property tax bill, and if I don't pay it there, the county will auction off my house to pay for it.

I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved, but I don't see how it's spread to every county in the west coast.

> I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved

I'm in a fairly densely-populated part of the east coast and we have lots of options for trash hauling, and none of them are "official" or provided by the city.

... I do wonder about the wear-n-tear on the neighborhood roads from having like 5+x as many trash truck trips on them per week versus a municipal solution, given how fast road wear scales with axel weight. I bet it's enough to matter, which means we're all paying a hidden cost for being able to choose among trash companies. It also seems like the base costs would have to be significantly higher, given far more trucks required and way fewer pick-ups per mile driven.

The bit that jumped out at me was "a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda." Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement. So you get sneaky tricks like sneaking things into the agenda at the last minute, or outright lies like accusing citizens of threats when they were just asking questions.

I don’t think you can put pump breakage on an agenda. Sometimes emergencies require emergency action.

The pump broke in June, the meeting was in August. Does it take more than a full calendar month to update an agenda?

Water rights is a huge deal in Colorado. It is in the state constitution and there has been a lot of government corruption around the issue.

It is common for people to buy up land just for the water rights, then transfer that water rights to other property. So if you search for land in Colorado it isn't unusually to find one plot of land in the millions and then another one a few miles away that is almost free in comparison. This is often due to the water rights associated with that property. The expensive land can be used commercially for things like farming, the other cannot.

And there have been cases of governments using tax money to buy up property just so they can use the water rights to help out private ventures, like building suburbs or golf courses without the knowledge or consent of tax payers.

Also it is pretty normal anywhere in the country that local governments react poorly from aggressive demands from people, especially when they are not voters.

All in all it is a nasty business and making sure you know exactly where your water is coming from, how you are going to pay for it, and what your rights are to it, and what you are allowed to use it for all need to be factored in heavily when moving out to the desert there.

I hate to be the out-of-state guy that tries to summarily come up with a solution, but in AZ they have two separate regulation on well drilling. Low-flow household consumption is "exempt" meaning if it is drilled using the approved techniques and far enough away from septic systems etc it is virtually guaranteed to be approved. If you DIY your own "exempt" well you do not even need a well driller's license and can do it with a "one-time" DIY permit so theoretically you could just buy some percussion rig for a couple grand off ali-express and go ham. Household consumption is also pretty trivial compared to agricultural and commercial use, so it doesn't have much meaningful negative impact on the the 'water rights' of commercial users.

As far as I know there is no way to sell the right away to drill an 'exempt' well. I hope CO looks into something similar.

It's hilarious how opposite of the east this is. Water is a massive liability. You can't (legally) even put up a garden shed within 100ft of "wetlands" (yes, that seasonal wet spot in the forest qualifies, better tip your surveyor generously lest it show up on a map, because once it shows up it never goes away) without state officials crawling up your ass in a manner befitting large industrial developments. Whereas if you've got water in the west you land is incredibly valuable.

> Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement.

Caveat that there are very different factors in play in more populated areas.

As a thankfully-former Florida resident, there's also a current of hitherto politically unengaged (and still democratically uneducated) citizens showing up at meetings and deciding that if they yell the loudest they should get their way.

Some of the shit grown-ass adults did at Florida school board meetings was just mind-blowingly ignorant.

It also made me realize how low the bar of civic education is in the US.

Real democratic change comes from organizing, coalition building, compromise, and engagement with stakeholders. Not knee-jerk emotional outbursts.

Oh, this is absolutely true and covered in detail in the excellent book: _Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge_.

BFE = Butt f!ck Egypt, which means “in the middle of nowhere”. I had to google it.

Bum not butt. [1] I know, it seems like it's the same but it really isn't

[1] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE

What's the difference?

Slang history. In the US BFE is well established as Bum-Fuck-Egypt to mean in the middle of nowhere. Explicitly stating Butt-Fuck-Egypt leans towards sexual imagery and is not part of the slang. I completely understand the confusion as bum is commonly used in the UK to mean butt. Someone on the linked site even got it wrong.

As an example of communication differences, in the US it is not uncommon for someone to say "Pardon me" when they are getting the way whereas people in England might assume they farted. Or another example where communications go wrong, someone in the US or the UK might give a thumbs-up when they agree with results or an idea but in some parts of Africa that is a death threat.

FYIW, Tri-state area born-and-raised here. We all said 'Bumble-fuck nowhere'

I like it.

For what it's worth, growing up in Texas in the 90s, it was absolutely "butt-fucking Egypt" or "butt-fuck nowhere". I don't think I'd ever heard anyone use the "bum" variant.

Where I come from it was called East Bumf!ck (but never "EBF").