A Less Perfect Union by Adam Freedman

Author:Adam Freedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Democracy, for a Change

For the people of Tombstone, Arizona, democracy means the right to choose whether to die of thirst or burn to death as the town’s reservoir runs dry. Well, actually, if Tombstone’s residents had a say in the matter, they wouldn’t have to do either. They would vote to take advantage of the twenty-five freshwater springs in the nearby Huachuca Mountains that the city owns outright. But the federal government has assumed the power to decide when, if ever, Tombstone will get its water, and the residents have no control over that decision.

Tombstone’s problems began in June 2011, when a fire in the mountains, followed by monsoons, damaged the town’s water pipeline, shutting off the flow from the mountain springs. The city was forced to rely on its 1.2-million-gallon reservoir, which, by August, was running dry. Governor Jan Brewer declared an emergency and freed up some state money to repair the pipeline. Tombstone officials got permits from all the necessary government agencies—except the United States Forest Service, which had to sign off because much of the work would have to take place in a federally protected wilderness.1

Eventually, city officials got tired of waiting for the Forest Service to act, so they sent workers with an excavator up to Miller Canyon and started to clear out a reservoir. That’s when they found out that the Forest Service wasn’t merely being slow to approve the repairs; to the contrary, the service actively opposed the repairs. Federal rangers threatened to have them arrested if they did not immediately remove the excavator. According to the rangers, the Wilderness Act of 1964 prohibits the use of “mechanized” equipment in the protected area—and they were not about to make an exception to save one measly town. One of the rangers told Tombstone’s mayor, Jack Henderson, that if he didn’t agree with the Forest Service, “I suggest you call Barack Obama.” As Henderson later told CNN, “That’s when I began to get a sense of the smugness we were dealing with.”

So city workers put away the excavator and came back with a wheelbarrow. Again the rangers turned them back, arguing that even a wheelbarrow constitutes forbidden “mechanized” equipment—because it has a wheel.

Then the town sent people up the mountain with picks and shovels—no wheels. They managed to get a makeshift pipeline working with water from two of the town’s twenty-five springs. A few more months and Tombstone might have secured its water supply with a durable pipeline. But then the Forest Service blocked the work again, saying that even manual labor might disturb the nests of Mexican spotted owls, some of which had been sighted in the mountains above the pipeline.

In the meantime, Tombstone had sued the federal government for the right—which shouldn’t be controversial—to fix its own springs, pipeline, and reservoirs in the name of self-preservation. Tombstone’s legal argument was based on the Tenth Amendment—namely, that its ability to preserve the lives and property of its residents by repairing its municipal water supply is a traditional government function reserved to the states, even when it involves federal land.

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