Beating Vegas

By Doug Page | Thursday, July 3, 2008, 11:22 AM

Hang on to your OSU cap, Bucky.

Ohio, particularly the Miami Valley, may be a national leader in something positive. There’s a shocker.

After being near the top of the list for foreclosures, bankruptcies, manufacturing job loses, obesity and sweat index, it appears we’ve got something people want.

Water.

Las Vegas, for instance, was growing like a young pig in a corn crib. Home prices were going only one way, up. Folks were taking their gambling out of the casinos and into the housing market.

Census figures put the median price of a home at $137,300 in 2000. Six years later, it’s $309,800.

Now the bottom has fallen out of the housing market, especially in Lost Wages. Good thing, too.

Earlier this year, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego calculated there was a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead would run dry in six years and a 50 percent probability it will be gone by 2021.

Lake Mead, a Colorado River impoundment, provides 90 percent of Vegas’ water. Its water level is dropping about as fast as Vegas home prices.

Home prices will go back up. The lake’s water level, not so sure.

And once those home prices start going back up, developers will start throwing up more. And the lemmings will buy them. Then the water runs out.

We here in flat-growth, flyover country don’t have that problem.

In the Miami Valley, we are sitting on 1.5 trillion — 1,500,000,000,000 — gallons of water. That’s about the same amount in Lake Mead.

Our water is in the Miami Valley Buried Aquifer. It’s been there since the glaciers receded. And, if we have any kind of smarts, it will be there for generations to come.

Places such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and any other dry-land oasis all have water authorities. They dole out the water. Agriculture gets so much. Industry gets so much. And houses and swimming pools get so much.

The Colorado River once flowed all the way to the Gulf of California. Now it peters out as California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and others suck it dry.

Here in the Valley, we really don’t have anything like a water czar. We do have the Miami Conservancy District, our only real regional agency.

The district keeps a weather eye on the health of the aquifer.

The district also keeps watch on its levees and dams.

Ask our friends in Iowa and Missouri how important that is.

At some point in the near future, some really smart folks are gonna figure out that living where water is getting scarcer and scarcer — no matter how gentle the winter climate — isn’t the best long-term investment.

They are gonna start looking for a place with water.

But not so much that every rain fills the basement.

Industry is already figuring that out.

So come on over to the Miami Valley where we have water to drink and levees that don’t break.

And as an added incentive, we may even put in a couple casinos for you Las Vegas refugees.

Worried about the winter weather?

We never said it was the Garden of Eden.

Just a whole lot better than where you live.

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