Editor,
I was pleased to read Amy K. Coplen's letter in Tuesday's Daily Lobo. The scam run by the packaged water industry selling our municipality supplied water back to us at outrageous markups is indeed egregious.
On one significant point, though, I differ with Coplen - I think water should be a commodity. Only when treated as oil, grain, precious metals and other commodities deemed essential to industrialized life will water be treated with the importance so many of us disregard.
Who would use a running hose to wash their car, spray off their walkways, attempt to re-create the English countryside in the desert or any other wasteful practice with something that was trading on the stock exchange at $60.00 per gallon? Or even 60 cents?
According to the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority Web site, we pay a bit less than four-tenths of a cent per gallon. That's why we can take 10-minute showers and let our lawn sprinklers leak and run too long. Water should be priced with other public commodities such as natural gas, electricity and telephone rates. And if water were trading at a reasonable commodity rate, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle would at least be paying a reasonable fee for what they were bottling and selling to us.
Maybe then, a $1 bottle of water may actually be worth $1. I can tell you that water-rich regions of the country would start to become like oil-rich regions of the world when Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Albuquerque cry out for more water.
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Gov. Bill Richardson's plan to pipe water from the Great Lakes may actually be not only economically practical but a major revenue source for those Midwestern states. The water-gluttonous cities of the desert Southwest may have to rethink how water gets used and wasted.
Jeff Thompson
Daily Lobo reader
