Once again the Santa Fe City Council is asking voters to give it a blank check, this time to implement an inchoate plan to divert water from the Rio Grande.

There is already a shortage of water in the Rio Grande to meet current needs but the SFCC evidently believes that by spending well over $100 million, additional water will miraculously surface.

The SFCC has failed to provide any reliable estimate of how much water it could divert from the Rio Grande. It has not explained how any additional water would be available, faced with the fact that the river is allowed to run dry south of Albuquerque every year in violation of the Federal mandate to protect the endangered silvery minnow (protecting the minnow means protecting the Rio Grande from becoming a ditch like the Santa Fe River).

Nor has the SFCC evidently taken into account the fact that the city of Albuquerque plans to use its water rights to substitute Rio Grande water for that it is now taking from its rapidly depleting reservoir, or the fact that not all native American tribes have yet asserted their Rio Grande water rights but will inevitably do so.

The SFCC threatens voters with massive water rate increases if they fail to support the tax increase this Tuesday. However the SFCC knows that voters would excoriate it for proposing unaffordable water rate increases and that councilor's chances of being re-elected would evaporate.

This realization by the SFCC is the only restraint that residents of Santa Fe would have on preventing it from going ahead with another boondoggle like the purchase of the Sangre de Cristo water company in 1995 or the unscrupulous and ill-conceived Estancia water piracy that recently was submerged because of a voter revolt.

If the tax rate increase passes, the SFCC would avoid another voter revolt over proposed drastic water rate hikes that would alternately be necessary to fund its unintelligible scheme to spend tens of $million to divert water from the Rio Grande. And the tax increase, by providing a hollow promise of a huge new source of water, would open the floodgates to more uncontrolled growth in and around Santa Fe.

Santa Feans should neither accept higher water rate hikes or approve a tax increase until the SFCC formulates a detailed believable plan for increasing and conserving Santa Fe's water supply and structuring the city's growth in a way that serves the best interests of the current population.

William J. Salman