Imagine Chaffee County as a beautiful and delicate shoe. The shoe doesn’t fit everyone, but can be admired nonetheless.
Imagine a huge, powerful entity, Nestle, who wants to wear that shoe, refusing to accept that it is not a good fit. The shoe is grasped, and after much time and effort, by piecing, gluing, stapling, and finally breaking the “back” of the shoe by lengthening it, a perceived fit is achieved. You might say, forcing a fit.
The beauty is gone, but those desiring to be favored by the new most powerful entity in the valley would never point out the deformities of the altered shoe, but instead would applaud the feat of forcing the shoe to fit.
It is to be expected that those few who benefit financially from this altered shoe would ignore the deformities. Can the rest of us ignore the surprising efforts of the county commissioners to make it fit by adding and piecing together 44 conditions to the Nestle permit application to mine and export raw water for profit from our high desert? As a statewide concern, is this a wise use of over allocated water resources?
Or is this the next chapter of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?
Jane Browning
Howard, CO
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