Don’t be fooled by water compact
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Editor,
Don’t be fooled; they’re stealing your water rights. Nearly all of the articles, speeches and letters about the water use compact get sidetracked with irrelevant issues and miss the point that is most urgent to us all. Don’t be fooled. They are stealing your water rights.
Many good and reasonable people are being fooled by an effective campaign of disinformation, twisted facts, and out-and-out lies. You are being told this is a $55 million update of the water system and water use management. It’s not. If you look past all of the camouflage and disinformation, the basis of all of this is transferring water rights, and whose rights are they really? Fact: this deal literally steals water rights from private individuals, transfers them to the tribal authority just long enough for them to trade away those rights for $6.5 billion. It is stealing because they are taking lifelong water rights essential to the value of the land without any due process or compensation. Judge McNeil’s ruling made the issue crystal clear. He ruled they do not have “any authority … to enter into an agreement which provides for the assignment of the irrigators’ water rights to the tribes without just compensation for their valuable water rights in violation of the Montana Constitution.” In any and all cases of eminent domain, taking property from private individuals must be done through due process and with reasonable compensation. Instead, this is just theft. So, please do not be fooled by all of the rest of the noise surrounding this compact. Tribal members are being fooled, too. You are having your water rights stolen in this scheme just like in Wyoming. There, tribal members had to sue their own tribal government because they traded away their water rights in a similar maneuver.
For more than 100 years, the system we currently have has worked, and without court battles, but greed is driving some to steal from others, and it is not right. If all our good and honest neighbors knew the facts, we would all be in agreement that this has to be stopped.
Scott Biggs
Polson
