Last spring I posted an item about Vermont declaring its ground water to be a public trust, and requiring anyone who pumps more than 57,600 gallons per day to obtain a permit. The law does not take effect until 2010.
Enter Daniel Antonovich, a businessman who wants to bottle 250,000 gallons per day from the town of East Montpelier's signature spring, which sits on his land. But last March the town of East Montpelier instituted a three-year moratorium on bottling water.
So it appears that all the ground water issues in the Green Mountain State have not disappeared. Felicity Barringer wrote about Vermont's ground water in the 20 August 2008 edition of the New York Times.
While some residents of East Montpelier worry that their wells may suffer if Mr. Antonovich’s firm, the Montpelier Springs Water Company, opens for business, Mr. Antonovich said that he had had the aquifer mapped and that there was more than enough water for all.
Mr. Antonovich, a furrier in the New York area who has been vacationing in Vermont for half a century, said he did not plan to contest the three-year moratorium.
But what about the new law?
The new law notwithstanding, there are still few restrictions on using groundwater, but the new system is designed to help map it, measure it and apportion it. It puts home and farm uses of water at the front of the line in case of shortages and makes large-scale withdrawals, like those envisioned by Mr. Antonovich, who owns the land where the spring emerges, subject to new permits and monitoring.
Barringer continues:
With the growing recognition that groundwater is not limitless, more states and localities are looking for ways to protect it. Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan and New Hampshire are at the forefront of this trend, and Vermont is now making its move.
“It’s no longer an under-the-radar issue,” said Jon Groveman, the general counsel of the Vermont Natural Resources Council. “There is now a sense that groundwater is finite and needs to be protected.”
It is interesting to see the Eastern USA take more of an interest in ground water, often the stepchild of water resources management, especially in wet regions with seemingly ample surface water.
Surface water in streams, lakes and rivers, has been legally managed for hundreds of years. But groundwater, until recent years, was often treated as something separate, hydrologically and legally. Both distinctions are now breaking down.
An interesting observation:
“Public policy makers are wrestling with legal systems designed in an era of abundance,” said Andy Buchsbaum, director of the Great Lakes office of the National Wildlife Federation. “They were not designed to address shortages.”
Buchsbaum continues, bringing the USA West into focus:
Mr. Buchsbaum said he believed that the Vermont law could produce fairer and more comprehensive results when done before a crisis, or “we’ll be trying to change our water laws in the context that the West is now.”
“There is no water and they’re trying to apportion droplets,” he said of the West. “They’re in the terrible position of trying to judge between needs that are all critical with not enough resources.”
“We have the chance to get ahead of it,” Mr. Buchsbaum said.
Let's hope Vermont gets it right.
There is a great analogy in the article: Vermont State Geologist Laurence R. Becker compares mapping flow in Vermont's fractured-rock aquifers akin to tracing a Jackson Pollock painting. Amen!
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell
I think there should be a limit on what people can take. There's other in this world too. We all need good drinking water.
Posted by: Kim Potter | Friday, 12 September 2008 at 10:01 PM