Dear Editor:
The Keystone Heights City Council must act now to protect all the airport lands and the water that sustains our community.
Before an industrial park, artificial-intelligence data center or so-called “green” hydrogen facility moves forward at Keystone Heights Airport, the council should adopt an ordinance protecting all airport property from water-intensive industrial development.
The council has both the authority and the responsibility to protect area lakes, the aquifer, Black Creek, residential shallow wells and the city’s drinking-water supply from the predictable effects of massive industrial withdrawals when alternatives are available.
The city should not simply rely on future permitting decisions by water-management districts that have already allowed withdrawals while lakes, springs, rivers and aquifer levels remain under stress. A permit may authorize a withdrawal, but it cannot guarantee that the withdrawal will not lower lakes, reduce spring flows, damage residential wells or undermine the Black Creek public restoration project.
The need for the publicly funded Black Creek Project says it all. The project represents a deeper crisis: decades of excessive water allocation by regional utilities and water-management districts. Because millions of public dollars are being spent to restore recharge, support the aquifer and help recover the Keystone Heights lakes, the project must first accomplish its public purpose. It must not become a water subsidy for new industrial development that could harm the project, current users or connected waters such as Lake Santa Fe.
Public money should not be used to repair an aquifer while new private withdrawals are approved to draw it back down. We cannot engineer our way out of a water deficit while continuing to permit water-intensive growth.
The council should act before applications, permits and development agreements make the decision effectively irreversible.
Protecting the airport lands is not anti-business. It is responsible government. Keystone Heights can pursue economic development without sacrificing the water supply, lakes, wetlands and rivers that make this community livable.
The council should adopt the ordinance now before the next large withdrawal is approved, before another lake declines, while recovery is still possible, and before the Black Creek Project is turned from a $118 million public recovery effort into a taxpayer-funded pipeline for private profit at the public’s expense.
Terry Brant
Lake resident
