WaterFuture.tv

[Boomer3791]

Has anyone been to WaterFuture.tv? Yesterday there was a full page ad in the Journal Record for it and last night on the news there was an ad as well.

I spent some time on the site this morning and thought the videos were well-produced but lacking in any real information about the issues at hand. Does anyone know what state's position is on this matter?

From what I found on the website and in the ad, the tribes seem to be trying to explain why they've filed a lawsuit against the state to defend their water rights. But it also appears that some of the bodies of water in question (specifially man-made lakes in SE Oklahoma) were built to provide water for OKC & other large metropolitan areas.

The tribes seem to be saying that unless the levels of those lakes and streams are maintained, the local economies in those areas will suffer. But weren't those lakes built to be water-supplies first and recreational areas second?

I'm sure there is a lot more to all of this than I'm aware of, especially given the huge amount of money that the tribes appear to be spending on this PR campaign. Which is why I'd love someone here to explain the facts, without all the spin.

[Midtowner]

The tribes are launching PR campaigns because they are politically and legally not going to win much if anything in the adjudication of the state's water resources in the federal courts. For the most part, this fight is about the water in Sardis Lake--a lake built by the Army Corps of Engineers to supply water to the OKC metro. The tribes waited until the pipeline was about to start being built and started pitching a fit about the water somehow being theirs.

Their legal basis is a 19-ought-something case which said that tribes in Arizona had an implicit right to however much water they needed to irrigate all of the irrigable land in their reservations. Trouble is, in eastern OK, they don't need water for irrigation. They get as much as they need from rain. They're also pinning a lot of hope on the unspecified claims by Drew Edmondson in the Illinois litigation with Arkansas that the Cherokees had significant rights in that watershed and therefore had standing to enter the case (I seem to recall they were denied standing).

As much as the tribes want to say this is about cooperation, that's bull. If one side of this conflict wins, the other side loses. It's simple as that. It's a zero-sum game.

[Dubya61]

Midtowner / Boomer: The television commercials that the tribes are running lately are fear-mongering, at best. What do you think they are advertising for? What is the hopeful value of their advertising dollars?

[kevinpate]

Probably much to the lament of the tribes and the car sales megalords, God/Science/Etc. gave us DVR. Not sure exactly what the tribes are trying to say in their ads, but the production values must be high as they still appear quite pretty as they go speeding across the screen at U-verse 3 & 4 arrow FF