Community being torn apart
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Editor,
For those who weren’t paying attention, we just watched the definition of insanity played out in real life on Sept. 13 at a special irrigation meeting in Arlee for the Jocko and Mission Irrigation Districts. If you didn’t attend, you missed a real opportunity to witness the adage of doing the same thing twice while expecting a different outcome. It was spectacular. The bits and pieces you will see on the news will not do it justice.
The death knell has been rung. If you have other plans for your future, it would be good to not put them off any longer; pack your bags. Me, this is my plan for the future. Fifty hard years of my life are now invested here and I’m staying put. It’s a sad state of affairs to watch a community be torn apart, but torn it is.
The real pity is the myopic (looks good from my yard) view that well-meaning neighbors have adopted for the rest of us. You know, neighbors who derive their irrigation water from deep water ag wells and believe they are not and will not be affected by any future litigation for water rights because they will now have “certainty” for their future. Ask the irrigators in the Klamath, today. The only certainty they have now is that they certainly have no water and their stock are dying.
Now that the two districts have followed the law with respect to Montana open meeting decorum and voted themselves out of the FJBC (in 90 days), effectively dissolving the organization and any strength in numbers that it might have provided, it should be quite entertaining to watch the outcome. I believe there is a deer in the headlights event coming and I don’t want to miss it. Ask the folks who were told their share of administrative costs is being increased by $9 per acre to pay attorney fees.
No sense recording it, for historical (or hysterical) reasons; nobody pays any attention to history anymore and this will be but a footnote, at best.
Michael Gale
Ronan
