Day: June 24, 2026

My million-dollar hometown!? + Warmest water year + Trump guts more public land protections — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Downtown Durango in the mid-1970s, when housing prices were about 1/100 of the current median price.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

June 23, 2026

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

What in the holy gentrification hell is this news?! The median price for a single-family in-town home in Durango, Colorado, surpassed $1 million this month. Yes, a million buckaroos.

Sure, Aspen and Jackson and Park City and Telluride surpassed that revolting number long ago. But this is the town where I was born, grew up, ran around in the streets, and played in the river. It’s where we messed around among the old workings of the power plant and climbed on the splintery railroad freight cars on the siding behind Kroegers, where we fished and waded in the shadow of the massive uranium tailings pile at the base of Smelter Mountain, and where we had sword battles and BMX rallies up at the Test Trax. It was a tourist town, sure, and kind of a regional hub for doctors and lawyers, but it was also a ski-bum town and a working-class town and an agricultural town and a college town and one-time mining-service town on the edge of the gas patch.

It was a place where my parents — a freelance writer and a freelance artist without any independent wealth — could afford to buy a historic home in a lovely neighborhood just across the swinging bridge from downtown. They were not an anomaly. Our neighbors were working folks, too, from a chef to a bank teller to a sanitation worker to a day-care operator to a retired coal miner.

The house needed some work, I suppose, but I didn’t notice. I was too busy running around in the big yard, or climbing the old apricot tree that we outfitted with a treehouse, or sitting on the low-angled roof on the addition in the back that needed to be shoveled during big snowstorms. There was room for a garden and even an old garage that was a pretty nice clubhouse, black widows and all. The big maple in the front yard served as a good base for epic block-wide hide-and-seek contests on long, summer evenings, and the side streets were perfect for soccer games or setting up bike jumps.

I realize I’m romanticizing a bit, but Durango, especially that neighborhood, was a great place to be a kid. I’m sure it still is, and may even be better now: Today’s young Durangotangs don’t have to worry about radon-emanating uranium dust blowing across town, they can ride their bikes all the way through town without ever encountering a car — stopping by the beautiful library and the rec center in the process, and the river water has less metal loading than it did back then.

But those amenities come with an ever-increasing price tag. In the mid-eighties, after they split up, my parents sold the house for something like $10,000. About a decade later, it sold for $122,500, and the new owner pretty much gutted, rebuilt, and added on to it. According to Realtor.com, the same house would sell today for about $1 million (it’s not on the market). There are seven single-family houses in that neighborhood listed for sale on Zillow. They range in price from $850,000 to $3.2 million; a townhome six blocks away from our former house is going for $635,000.

Clearly, these kinds of prices are far out of reach of most wage earners. Even if you could come up with a 10% down payment for the townhome, your monthly payment would still be almost $3,500, which is considered affordable for someone making about $200,000 or more per year. There are just three in-town homes on the market for under $300,000: Two single-wide mobiles with $800-$1,100 monthly lot rents, and a small 80s-era condo. Even these would be a tough haul for someone making the local median wage of about $45,000. Paying rent in Durango isn’t much better, with advertised long-term monthly rates ranging from about $1,100 for a studio, to upwards of $4,000 for a big house.

Obviously, Durango’s not alone. The entire nation is grappling with a housing unaffordability crisis. But Durango and the public lands gateway towns/amenity economies in the West are among the worst, because not only are housing prices rising more dramatically (the statewide Colorado median sales price is about $560,000), but wages are not increasing proportionately.

The reason prices are so high is simply because Durango’s a desirable place to live, not because it is a high-paying job hot spot. And this kind of desire is bottomless, limited only by the amount people are willing to pay to own a piece of the place. And, it seems, a certain percentage of the population has virtually unlimited funds for investing in real estate, whether it’s a primary residence, a second home, or a short-term rental income property.

To be clear, this is not a critique of folks buying or selling real estate, or of the people brokering the deals. I don’t blame people for wanting to live in Durango or for paying market rates to do so, nor do I fault anyone for selling out while prices are high. Real estate agents, meanwhile, are just doing one of the few locally based jobs that can support a life in Durango; they don’t set the prices, the market does. And because their income is derived from the community, they are more likely to invest back in that community via philanthropy, volunteering, or running for public office.

People who are attracted to Durango’s unique amenities and spend big bucks to be here are also more likely to support improvements, whether it’s pushing for better sidewalks and services and more trails and recreational infrastructure, spending money on better restaurants, or donating to the arts and charity and nonprofits. Maybe they’ll bring in money from outside to start up new businesses, creating jobs while also adding to the pool of amenities, thereby potentially improving all residents’ quality of life.

I don’t think I’m stretching when I say that this phenomenon is exactly what a lot of forward-thinking locals, including my parents, were going for back in the 1970s and 1980s. The extractive industries that had built the town — and polluted it — were on their way out. Tourism, alone, couldn’t fill the resulting void. So they planned on banking on quality of life, or the not-yet-named amenities economy, to attract new, cleaner industries and the people to run them.

They didn’t seem to anticipate that the resulting feedback loop rotates in both directions. As the place becomes more desirable, it drives up home prices. Higher prices dampen entrepreneurship and innovation and imperil economic class diversity. The working class is pushed out to the only slightly more affordable surrounding communities, increasing traffic and pollution and making the roads even more unsafe. Businesses have a harder and harder time finding employees. And, eventually, quality of life will begin to suffer, and the Durango that folks bought into for a million bucks won’t be so desirable anymore.

Durango’s not near the breaking point, yet. There are still plenty of locals, young and old, who have been around since long before the market went berserk, and who are committed to the community. There are a lot of established businesses and, somehow, a handful of new, innovative ones have managed to get going and even thrive. And the place still attracts enough new, full-time residents, even ones who can’t really afford to live there, to keep it dynamic and vibrant.

There are also inklings of efforts to ease the housing crisis. The local school district has raised teachers’ starting salary to just above $50,000, which is still way less than they deserve, but it’s significantly higher than a decade ago. And it purchased a 35-unit apartment building for workforce housing; Fort Lewis College also owns an apartment building for staff housing. The city has several affordable housing projects in various phases of development, and a number of non-profits and other organizations have their own workforce/affordable housing initiatives in place.

Whether these efforts will be enough to keep Durango whole amid the rapidly escalating prices isn’t clear. I just hope Durango’s kids of the future, regardless of economic class, will be able to derive as much joy from the place as I did a half-century ago.

“Shaping an urban area” in the rural West — Jonathan P. Thompson

On the housing supply-side theory — Jonathan P. Thompson

A pumpjack in the Aneth Oil Field during a rain storm. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🐓 Regulatory Capture Chronicles 🦊

THE NEWS: The Trump administration moved yesterday to roll back Biden-era oil and gas leasing reforms for public lands, and to do away with the Bureau of Land Management’s oil and gas waste prevention rule. The two-pronged assault continues the administration’s relentless evisceration of regulations aimed at protecting the land, air, water, climate, and American taxpayers from oil and gas drilling. The administration claims the rollback is to clear the way for its “energy dominance” agenda, which is code for helping petroleum corporations to rake in even more obscene profits (which are already high thanks to Trump’s war on Iran).

THE CONTEXT: The environmental movement gave Joe Biden a lot of grief for failing to shut down oil and gas drilling on federal land, for permitting big projects like Willow in Alaska, and for handing out quite a few drilling permits.

But throughout his term, the administration was doing important work to reform oil and gas leasing and to try to get a handle on pollution from oil and gas wells on federal lands. These new or revised rules included:

  • The oil and gas waste prevention rule: required oil and gas operators on federal lands to find and repair leaks in their infrastructure and to phase out flaring and venting of methane — a.k.a. natural gas. The rules complement the EPA’s similar regulations. 

    Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, having about 86 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over the near-term. Oil drillers tend to vent or flare it and other associated gases, since it isn’t as profitable as oil. Between 2010 and 2020, oil and gas operations on federal and tribal land vented and flared an average of 44.2 billion cubic feet of methane annually. That’s as bad for the climate as burning around 9 million tons of coal. And since operators don’t pay royalties on gas they throw away, that cost American taxpayers some $166 million in lost revenue over a decade. 

    The rules aimed to rein that in by gradually decreasing the maximum amount of methane that can be flared or vented and charging royalties on the gases that are wasted. It was expected to slash greenhouse gas emissions and result in about $50 million annually in added royalty revenue.
  • Revisions to the BLM’s oil and gas leasing rules: Included raising the reclamation bonding rate from $10,000 to a minimum of $150,000 per lease, and $500,000 for all of a company’s wells in one state. This acts as an insurance policy to ensure the company pays at least some of the cost of plugging and reclaiming a well once it’s done producing, taking some of the burden off taxpayers. 

    The changes also increased minimum bids, ended non-competitive lease sales, and raised the 12.5% royalty rate to 16.67% to give taxpayers a slightly better return on their oil and gas.

Those are not onerous changes, by any means. They really are incremental ones, that don’t go nearly far enough: A statewide reclamation bond of $500,000 is a mere drop in the bucket for a major oil and gas company, yet it will only fund the cleanup of a handful of wells (whereas a company can have dozens to hundreds of wells in a single state).

Nevertheless, the Trump administration has decided that the rules are “being weaponized to penalize energy development,” which can be translated as: They are marginally reducing petroleum corporations’ obscenely high profits.

And so, the administration is:

  • Reducing the statewide reclamation bond amount to just $25,000, which might cover one-third of the cost of reclaiming a single well, potentially leaving you and me and other U.S. taxpayers to pick up the millions of dollars remaining on a single company’s cleanup tab.
  • Bringing back non-competitive leasing.
  • Shortening public comment periods on proposed leases from 90 days to just 10 days, effectively cutting the public out of the process altogether.
  • Reducing filing fees, and more.
  • And gutting the waste-prevention rule by eliminating waste minimization plan requirements and otherwise opening the door to more venting and flaring.
  • The “Big Beautiful Bill” already slashed the royalty rates back to the 100-year-old 12.5% rate.

Oy.

⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

The May data are in and it’s now official: The first eight months of the 2026 water year were the warmest on record for the Southwest and much of the Northern Rockies. This isn’t all that surprising, given that it was also the warmest meteorological autumn, winter, and spring for the same areas. 

This explains why the snowpack was so weak, and streamflows are now so dismal, even though precipitation accumulation has been closer to — but still below — normal so far this water year. June appears to be on pace to set another record average high temperature for the region, and forecasts are calling for a warmer-than-average July and August, as well. El Niño-driven monsoons could cool things off a bit, however, and soothe drought conditions.

That monsoon can’t come too soon. Several large fires are now burning in the Interior West, with the highest concentration in western Utah. Active blazes include:

Colorado must have made a deal with the Devil? It’s surrounded by fires on three sides, yet has avoided any catastrophic blazes — so far. Source: Watch Duty.
  • The 10,000-acre Cottonwood Fire near Beaver, Utah, which just blew up on June 22. By the time you read this it likely will be far larger. 
  • The 3,800-acre Sawmill Fire, just east of the Nevada-Utah line. 
  • The 24,000-acre Iron Fire four miles from Eureka, Utah.
  • The 20,000-acre Hastings Fire south of the Great Salt Lake. 
  • The 566-acre Bonneville Fire on the foothills in northeast Salt Lake City. This one is scary because of its proximity to neighborhoods, but it was 43% contained as of Tuesday morning and no evacuations were in place. 
  • The Kane Springs and Grapevine fires in eastern Nevada, each at about 15,000 acres. 
  • There are also a number of blazes in Arizona.

#Colorado’s rivers and streams are expected to flow at only a quarter of normal levels during June and July, 2026, following what the NRCS referred to as an “unusual volatile winter” — #Aspen Times

Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Times website (Ali Longwell):

Colorado’s rivers and streams are expected to flow at only a quarter of normal levels during June and July, following what the Natural Resources Conservation Service referred to as an “unusual volatile winter” in its June water supply outlook. On the Western Slope, the outlook is even more grim, with the Colorado River headwaters basin expected to see streamflows 21% of normal and the Yampa-White-Little Snake basin 19% of normal during these two months.  This year, Colorado’s snowpack accumulation was the lowest on record, affirmed Nagam Bell, a hydrologist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in the state, at the June 16 Colorado Water Conservation Board’s water conditions monitoring meeting. In March, a heat wave spurred an early meltoff of the snowpack, causing streamflows to rise ahead of schedule. Bell reported that March streamflow was 140% of normal, “typically because we don’t have runoff that early.” While this depleted nearly half of the snowpack, the Natural Resources Conservation Service reported that cooler conditions and late-season snowfall [helped]…In mid-May, Colorado’s streams saw a second rise and peak that’s not uncommon to see that time of year, Bell said. The May peak, however, is normally the first — not the last — of the season…

Statewide, observed streamflows from March through May were 50% of normal, Bell reported. April and May alone saw streamflows at 41% of normal due to the March runoff skewing the agency’s seasonal comparison. Meltoff this year was 36 days ahead of schedule, Bell said. By June 1, owing to this early and accelerated melt, the Natural Resources Conservation Service reported that 91% of its SNOTEL stations were fully melted out — compared to the normal 56% for that date. Within the Colorado River headwaters, only 3% of normal snowpack for this date remained. The Yampa, White and Little Snake basin was the highest in the state, sitting at 30% of normal on June 1…Statewide snowpack was 100% melted by June 10.

The #ColoradoRiver is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird: “The Law of the River is based on math that just doesn’t add up” — Jake Bittle (Grist.org) #COriver #aridification

Hite Marina and boat ramp on what once was the northern end of Lake Powell. Jonathan P. Thompson photo via The Land Desk.

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Jake Bittle):

June 23, 2026

Desalination. Pipelines. Cloud seeding. Those are just a few ideas for how the Trump administration should save the desiccated waterway.

The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse [ed. allowed and caused by the “Law of the River”] has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse. 

The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.

This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the Upper Basin states, led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico), and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.

Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of projects that could increase supply — a reversal of President Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.

Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river.

“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”

During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators in both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.

The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of Joe Biden’s administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry. 

The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.

Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.

Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant
The Claude “Bud” Lewis Desalination Plant in Carlsbad, California. Photo by Robert Marcos

Desalination

As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015 and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to the Interior Department requests as much as $6 billion to build one across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.

The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.

But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost. 

Taming tech and power

Nevada uses less water than any state on the river and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but they dominate usage in the Silver State.  

The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.

A cloud seeding generator is located in Grand Mesa. The Colorado Water Conservation Board administers the state’s weather modification program, which permits cloud seeding operations. Colorado Water Conservation Board/Courtesy photo

Squeezing rain from the clouds

Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it. 

These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington, D.C. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding — spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain — has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent. 

In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.

Mining a hoard of desert groundwater

The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.

This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.

The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.

“This isn’t a competition; it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent the Interior Department.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0