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I can't speak to this particular county but the vibe I get from friends of mine who live in this part of Colorado is that the municipalities/counties will do an

I can't speak to this particular county but the vibe I get from friends of mine who live in this part of Colorado is that the municipalities/counties will do anything/everything they can to stick it to the off grid crowd who are seen as poor and trashy in the best case and evil dangerous sov-cits, anarchists or other anti-government types in the worst case when in reality many/most of them simply wanted to live in BFE and it's not a money or ideological thing and they just want to do whatever works. They buy water from someone who trucks it in no different and with no more thought than they buy propane or pay for their septic to be pumped and trucked out. Like every small town/county, I bet if you follow the trail of financial and ideological interests of the parties involved you'll find that the personalities involved are motivated by more than just whatever their oath of office is. Seeing as there's only one water hauler I'd look into who he pissed off.

munchler 1y ago
BFE = Butt f!ck Egypt, which means “in the middle of nowhere”. I had to google it.
- Bender 1y ago
  Bum not butt. [1] I know, it seems like it's the same but it really isn't [1] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    What's the difference?
    - Bender 1y ago
      Slang history. In the US BFE is well established as Bum-Fuck-Egypt to mean in the middle of nowhere. Explicitly stating Butt-Fuck-Egypt leans towards sexual imagery and is not part of the slang. I completely understand the confusion as bum is commonly used in the UK to mean butt. Someone on the linked site even got it wrong. As an example of communication differences, in the US it is not uncommon for someone to say "Pardon me" when they are getting the way whereas people in England might assume they farted. Or another example where communications go wrong, someone in the US or the UK might give a thumbs-up when they agree with results or an idea but in some parts of Africa that is a death threat.
      - dpoloncsak 1y ago
        FYIW, Tri-state area born-and-raised here. We all said 'Bumble-fuck nowhere'
        Bender 1y ago
        I like it.
      - pavel_lishin 1y ago
        For what it's worth, growing up in Texas in the 90s, it was absolutely "butt-fucking Egypt" or "butt-fuck nowhere". I don't think I'd ever heard anyone use the "bum" variant.
- euroderf 1y ago
  Where I come from it was called East Bumf!ck (but never "EBF").
ethagnawl 1y ago
Oh, this is absolutely true and covered in detail in the excellent book: _Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge_.
HankStallone 1y ago
The bit that jumped out at me was "a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda." Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement. So you get sneaky tricks like sneaking things into the agenda at the last minute, or outright lies like accusing citizens of threats when they were just asking questions.
- chomp 1y ago
  I don’t think you can put pump breakage on an agenda. Sometimes emergencies require emergency action.
  - jaredklewis 1y ago
    The pump broke in June, the meeting was in August. Does it take more than a full calendar month to update an agenda?
- lotharcable 1y ago
  Water rights is a huge deal in Colorado. It is in the state constitution and there has been a lot of government corruption around the issue. It is common for people to buy up land just for the water rights, then transfer that water rights to other property. So if you search for land in Colorado it isn't unusually to find one plot of land in the millions and then another one a few miles away that is almost free in comparison. This is often due to the water rights associated with that property. The expensive land can be used commercially for things like farming, the other cannot. And there have been cases of governments using tax money to buy up property just so they can use the water rights to help out private ventures, like building suburbs or golf courses without the knowledge or consent of tax payers. Also it is pretty normal anywhere in the country that local governments react poorly from aggressive demands from people, especially when they are not voters. All in all it is a nasty business and making sure you know exactly where your water is coming from, how you are going to pay for it, and what your rights are to it, and what you are allowed to use it for all need to be factored in heavily when moving out to the desert there.
dlcarrier 1y ago
Same where I live, in California. One of my coworkers wanted to get a permit for a well, and the county's policy was to make the permit as expensive as running a water main to the property, making it always cheaper to subsidise their water infrastructure than to build your own. Keep in mind that I'm in the part of the state that is extremely wet, where aquifers fill faster than agriculture can use it, and residential use is a literal drop in the bucket, compared to agriculture use. Most of Californias resevuoirs are built for flood control, with power generation as an added benefit, and shipping water off to the drier parts of the state as an afterthought. In rural areas, people often directly support each other to get buy, and the urbanites absolutely can't stand it when they aren't relying on the urban fifedom. Just like the area in Colorado that the article discusses, it's illegal here to share well water. They've also made it illegal to pool your trash together for a dump run. Until the state stepped in, it used to be illegal to collect your own rain water, too. The same for inlaw quarters, which are really common in rural areas. (My county once spent nearly half a million, to unsucsessfully sue a group of people for a fraction of that amount, because one of them sold his land to the others, who each custom built their own houses, instead of having a county-approved developer build all of them.) Even a few decades ago, California used to be the place for antiestablishment types, even in the urban areas, and its sudden changeover to forced top-down management has created a somewhat splintered government that alternates between extreme limits and strong reforms.
- joshuaissac 1y ago
  Are these rules decided at the county level? And can municipalities override them? I am wondering if the rural folk can incorporate to free themselves from these absurd restrictions.
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    Those are county rules, but every county has the same ones. I don't know if a cities could make leaner rules, because I've only ever seen them make them stricter. It's crazy that picking up garbage is so universally a government enforced monopoly that every county seems to have independently required it. The county runs the dump, but anyone could transport garage with minimal capital, so the garbage company doesn't have the same monopoly excuse that other utilities have, yet I can chose from three cellular phone providers but legally only one garbage pickup service can serve my address. Not only that, but if the property is occupied and service is available, I'm legally required to pay for service, whether I use it or not, and if I don't pay for it, even if I'm not using it, it'll be added to my property tax bill, and if I don't pay it there, the county will auction off my house to pay for it. I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved, but I don't see how it's spread to every county in the west coast.

munchler 1y ago

BFE = Butt f!ck Egypt, which means “in the middle of nowhere”. I had to google it.

Bender 1y ago
Bum not butt. [1] I know, it seems like it's the same but it really isn't [1] - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFE
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  What's the difference?
  - Bender 1y ago
    Slang history. In the US BFE is well established as Bum-Fuck-Egypt to mean in the middle of nowhere. Explicitly stating Butt-Fuck-Egypt leans towards sexual imagery and is not part of the slang. I completely understand the confusion as bum is commonly used in the UK to mean butt. Someone on the linked site even got it wrong. As an example of communication differences, in the US it is not uncommon for someone to say "Pardon me" when they are getting the way whereas people in England might assume they farted. Or another example where communications go wrong, someone in the US or the UK might give a thumbs-up when they agree with results or an idea but in some parts of Africa that is a death threat.
    - dpoloncsak 1y ago
      FYIW, Tri-state area born-and-raised here. We all said 'Bumble-fuck nowhere'
      - Bender 1y ago
        I like it.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      For what it's worth, growing up in Texas in the 90s, it was absolutely "butt-fucking Egypt" or "butt-fuck nowhere". I don't think I'd ever heard anyone use the "bum" variant.
euroderf 1y ago
Where I come from it was called East Bumf!ck (but never "EBF").

ethagnawl 1y ago

Oh, this is absolutely true and covered in detail in the excellent book: _Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge_.

HankStallone 1y ago

The bit that jumped out at me was "a 3-2 vote that wasn’t even on its meeting agenda." Seems like we're seeing an increasing number of cases where small-time officials who used to work largely unseen because no one went to meetings of things like the local water board, are getting resentful because now they're on video or citizens are starting to show up and ask questions, and they're not responding well to all the democratic involvement. So you get sneaky tricks like sneaking things into the agenda at the last minute, or outright lies like accusing citizens of threats when they were just asking questions.

chomp 1y ago
I don’t think you can put pump breakage on an agenda. Sometimes emergencies require emergency action.
- jaredklewis 1y ago
  The pump broke in June, the meeting was in August. Does it take more than a full calendar month to update an agenda?
lotharcable 1y ago
Water rights is a huge deal in Colorado. It is in the state constitution and there has been a lot of government corruption around the issue. It is common for people to buy up land just for the water rights, then transfer that water rights to other property. So if you search for land in Colorado it isn't unusually to find one plot of land in the millions and then another one a few miles away that is almost free in comparison. This is often due to the water rights associated with that property. The expensive land can be used commercially for things like farming, the other cannot. And there have been cases of governments using tax money to buy up property just so they can use the water rights to help out private ventures, like building suburbs or golf courses without the knowledge or consent of tax payers. Also it is pretty normal anywhere in the country that local governments react poorly from aggressive demands from people, especially when they are not voters. All in all it is a nasty business and making sure you know exactly where your water is coming from, how you are going to pay for it, and what your rights are to it, and what you are allowed to use it for all need to be factored in heavily when moving out to the desert there.

dlcarrier 1y ago

Same where I live, in California. One of my coworkers wanted to get a permit for a well, and the county's policy was to make the permit as expensive as running a water main to the property, making it always cheaper to subsidise their water infrastructure than to build your own. Keep in mind that I'm in the part of the state that is extremely wet, where aquifers fill faster than agriculture can use it, and residential use is a literal drop in the bucket, compared to agriculture use. Most of Californias resevuoirs are built for flood control, with power generation as an added benefit, and shipping water off to the drier parts of the state as an afterthought. In rural areas, people often directly support each other to get buy, and the urbanites absolutely can't stand it when they aren't relying on the urban fifedom. Just like the area in Colorado that the article discusses, it's illegal here to share well water. They've also made it illegal to pool your trash together for a dump run. Until the state stepped in, it used to be illegal to collect your own rain water, too. The same for inlaw quarters, which are really common in rural areas. (My county once spent nearly half a million, to unsucsessfully sue a group of people for a fraction of that amount, because one of them sold his land to the others, who each custom built their own houses, instead of having a county-approved developer build all of them.) Even a few decades ago, California used to be the place for antiestablishment types, even in the urban areas, and its sudden changeover to forced top-down management has created a somewhat splintered government that alternates between extreme limits and strong reforms.

joshuaissac 1y ago
Are these rules decided at the county level? And can municipalities override them? I am wondering if the rural folk can incorporate to free themselves from these absurd restrictions.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  Those are county rules, but every county has the same ones. I don't know if a cities could make leaner rules, because I've only ever seen them make them stricter. It's crazy that picking up garbage is so universally a government enforced monopoly that every county seems to have independently required it. The county runs the dump, but anyone could transport garage with minimal capital, so the garbage company doesn't have the same monopoly excuse that other utilities have, yet I can chose from three cellular phone providers but legally only one garbage pickup service can serve my address. Not only that, but if the property is occupied and service is available, I'm legally required to pay for service, whether I use it or not, and if I don't pay for it, even if I'm not using it, it'll be added to my property tax bill, and if I don't pay it there, the county will auction off my house to pay for it. I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved, but I don't see how it's spread to every county in the west coast.