Just so we're clear: All you Republicans in Madison cheering for John Thune and Kristi Noem only have yourselves to blame for not getting the Lewis and Clark Regional Water hookup. Just like the Lake Area Improvement Corporation, Madison has poured lots of money into this watery hope for economic development, only to get nothing.
Mayor Gene Hexom frets to that Sioux Falls paper that without Lewis and Clark, Madison won't be able to support any large development projects that with significant water demand:
Madison will be the second-to-last town to hook into the system. And though Hexom said the town's water needs basically are flat, the city has been cautious with water use. For instance, it has imposing year-round watering restrictions. At current rates of use, the city is in good shape, city engineer Chad Comes said. Still, the lack of additional capacity keeps industry away.
"Can we take on economic development contracts that need lots of water?" Hexom said. "Probably not" [Cody Winchester, "Pipeline: Budget Crunch Means No End to Water Woes," that Sioux Falls paper, 2011.02.27].
Now brace yourselves: I see the LAIC already formulating its excuse for Dwaine Chapel's $100K salary: Oh, we did everything right with the Forward Madison program. It was that darn Congress cutting off earmarks for Lewis and Clark that kept us from growing. It's not our fault! It's not our fault!
Then again, it appears fom the city's own water report that we have perhaps 127 million gallons of additional annual water capacity that we are currently wasting. If we diverted our financial support for Lewis and Clark to tightening up our local water pipes, we could suddenly find ourselves with 20 or 30 percent more water for residential and commercial development.
But the same Republicans who run our community and the LAIC need to face the ugly fact: behind Kristi Noem's pretty face is a party determined (at both the federal and state level) to slash our investment in vital public infrastructure and services. At the federal level, this cutthroat attitude is made all the more grievous by the Republican leadership's misguided focus on cutting around the edges on earmarks and important programs like women's clinics and public broadcasting while refusing to address the biggest drains on the budget: Social Security, Medicare, and unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's your party, Republicans. You can cry if you want to. But keep those tears handy: we can recycle them for the local water supply.
Anyone considering catchment or drilling holes to capture the Spring flooding, cutting ice from the rivers and burying it?
Cory,
The other alternative is for entities along L & C to put up the money themselves through rate hikes which probably should have been done in the first place.We in South Dakota make it a frequent practice to expect others to fund projects we aren't willing to do ourselves but in the same breath prolong a myth that we are against government spending. Again, the frustration is whose ox gets gored. I'm still waiting for Noem/ Thune to propose cutting subsidies for crop inurance.
Social Security is not a drain on the budget. It gets lumped together with Medicare, which is a budget problem, in order to scare people into gutting Social Security.
However, Social Security is not part of the budget; it is a separate, self-funding program. Further, it can pay 100% of benefits until approximately year 2047 with no changes to the current program. After that, it would pay 80% of current benefits--again, without any tweaks or changes whatsoever to the current system.
Point well taken!