I went on the Albuquerque Journal website and read the article.I hope that Mr. Smith prevails on this one. I don’t know about the Corps of Engineers, but I’ve known for sometime that the Federal EPA has too much power. The Environmental Protection Act of 1970 was a good, and much needed, law; and the Agency which it established was a good agency to implement it; but the monstrocity of a bureaucracy that has developed at central headquarters in Washington and the regions and all the state agencies which exist to do the will of the EPA are too much. No private company or landowner can live, and breathe, and even exist on private lands utilizing natural resources because of immense over regulation. Necessary regulation is good as long as it is kept reasonable, and it does not affect private property rights. I suppose that the real problem that Mr. Smith has is his inability to satisfy all of the two-bit bureaucrats in the Corps of Engineers who have lost their reason for being, and there are lots of them in the Federal Government.

On a personal note, if Mr. Smith does not prevail, I don’t suppose that my Dad today could dam the creek that ran across his pasture in order to irrigate his corn crop because the creek does have water in it the year around, and it eventually drains into a national waterway–Coal Fire Creek and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway–as he did twice in the Fifties. How can farmers be expected to feed an increasing world population of three billion and climbing with such idiocy in our government at all levels? With creeks dammed at will to irrigate thirsty crops, there is no telling how many snail darters and other natural varments that might face extinction while untold millions of people face starvation. In the meantime, our proberty rights are gone. The answer is the constant oversight for reasonableness in government.