koods said:

Stonehenge said:

Good point, maka. You can build all the dams you wish as long as you don't block or divert a river from its natural flow downstream. I'm glad a few people see through zappa's smoke screen.

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A dam by definition does this.

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Duh for the duhmies.

makaveli8x8 said:

as i suspected, pictures would tell the story, blatently obvious this guy wasn't collecting rain water, not only was he collecting, he was taking it to an extreeme, im not sure what a bunch of ponds do to land values, but i imagine that they went down most likely around him as well

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Stonehenge said:

zap
>It wasn't water that fell on his property.  It was a creek that passed through his property and carried water that had fallen on other people's property.

Evidence that it was a creek?

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Quote:

>There is nothing in this case that says he has no right to the rain that falls on his property.

If you had done the least bit of research or had any sense you would realize the state claims ownership of all water.

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Quote:

>You copy pasted those same journalistic scribllings without attribution.

Do you ever stop lying? I posted the name of the source. I don't have to give a link for the morons.

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Quote:

shpongle
>Do your own research.  The dude had 13 million gallons of water

So? How long did it take to collect that water? He owned over 100 acres, and no evidence has been shown to indicate a creek, river, or recognized tributary crossed his land. If it comes out that there was a river he damned, then that's wrong but so far all I see is rantings on the subject by the usual suspect.

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Stonehenge said:

Do you ever stop lying? I posted the name of the source. I don't have to give a link for the morons.

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Quote:

(CNSNews.com) – A rural Oregon man was sentenced Wednesday to 30 days in jail and over $1,500 in fines because he had three reservoirs on his property to collect and use rainwater.

Gary Harrington of Eagle Point, Ore., says he plans to appeal his conviction in Jackson County (Ore.) Circuit Court on nine misdemeanor charges under a 1925 law for having what state water managers called “three illegal reservoirs” on his property – and for filling the reservoirs with rainwater and snow runoff.

“The government is bullying,” Harrington told CNSNews.com in an interview Thursday.

“They’ve just gotten to be big bullies and if you just lay over and die and give up, that just makes them bigger bullies. So, we as Americans, we need to stand on our constitutional rights, on our rights as citizens and hang tough. This is a good country, we’ll prevail,” he said.

The court has given Harrington two weeks to report to the Jackson County Jail to begin serving his sentence.



Harrington said the case first began in 2002, when state water managers told him there were complaints about the three “reservoirs” – ponds – on his more than 170 acres of land.

According to Oregon water laws, all water is publicly owned. Therefore, anyone who wants to store any type of water on their property must first obtain a permit from state water managers.

Harrington said he applied for three permits to legally house reservoirs for storm and snow water runoff on his property. One of the “reservoirs” had been on his property for 37 years, he said.

Though the state Water Resources Department initially approved his permits in 2003, the state – and a state court -- ultimately reversed the decision.

“They issued me my permits. I had my permits in hand and they retracted them just arbitrarily, basically. They took them back and said ‘No, you can’t have them,’ so I’ve been fighting it ever since,” Harrington told CNSNews.com.

The case, he said, is centered on a 1925 law which states that the city of Medford holds exclusive rights to “all core sources of water” in the Big Butte Creek watershed and its tributaries.

“Way back in 1925 the city of Medford got a unique withdrawal that withdrew all -- supposedly all -- the water out of a single basin and supposedly for the benefit of the city of Medford,” Harrington told CNSNews.com.

Harrington told CNSNews.com, however, that the 1925 law doesn’t mention anything about colleting rainwater or snow melt -- and he believes that he has been falsely accused.

“The withdrawal said the stream and its tributaries. It didn’t mention anything about rainwater and it didn’t mention anything about snow melt and it didn’t mention anything about diffused water, but yet now, they’re trying to expand that to include that rain water and they’re using me as the goat to do it,” Harrington

But Tom Paul, administrator of the Oregon Water Resources Department, claims that Harrington has been violating the state’s water use law by diverting water from streams running into the Big Butte River.

“The law that he is actually violating is not the 1925 provision, but it’s Oregon law that says all of the water in the state of Oregon is public water and if you want to use that water, either to divert it or to store it, you have to acquire a water right from the state of Oregon before doing that activity,” Paul told CNSNews.com.

Yet Paul admitted the 1925 law does apply because, he said, Harrington constructed dams to block a tributary to the Big Butte, which Medford uses for its water supply.

“There are dams across channels, water channels where the water would normally flow if it were not for the dam and so those dams are stopping the water from flowing in the channel and storing it- holding it so it cannot flow downstream,” Paul told CNSNews.com.

Harrington, however, argued in court that that he is not diverting water from Big Butte Creek, but the dams capturing the rainwater and snow runoff – or “diffused water” – are on his own property and that therefore the runoff does not fall under the jurisdiction of the state water managers, nor does it not violate the 1925 act.

In 2007, a Jackson County Circuit Court judge denied Harrington’s permits and found that he had illegally “withdrawn the water at issue from appropriation other than for the City of Medford.”

According to Paul, Harrington entered a guilty plea at the time, received three years probation and was ordered to open up the water gates.

“A very short period of time following the expiration of his probation, he once again closed the gates and re-filled the reservoirs,” Paul told CNSNews.com. “So, this has been going on for some time and I think frankly the court felt that Mr. Harrington was not getting the message and decided that they’d already given him probation once and required him to open the gates and he refilled his reservoirs and it was business as usual for him, so I think the court wanted -- it felt it needed -- to give a stiffer penalty to get Mr. Harrington’s attention.”

In two weeks, if unsuccessful in his appeals, Harrington told CNSNews.com that he will report to the Jackson County Jail to serve his sentence.

“I follow the rules. If I’m mandated to report, I’m going to report. Of course, I’m going to do what it takes in the meantime to prevent that, but if I’m not successful, I’ll be there,” Harrington said.

But Harrington also said that he will never stop fighting the government on this issue.

“When something is wrong, you just, as an American citizen, you have to put your foot down and say, ‘This is wrong; you just can’t take away anymore of my rights and from here on in, I’m going to fight it.”

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Stonehenge said:

>It is in the article that you plagiarized

No it isn't liar or you would have copy pasted it. The name of the source of the article was in caps at the beginning of the article I copied. Only a complete retard would try to call that plagiarism.

Your source is a facebook page

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>I posted the riparian rights principle

We are talking about the laws of a certain state.

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>I didn't see any link and had to google a sentence to find the article that you cropped.

I just went to counter current news and nothing was cropped. You have been caught lying so many times you are just shameless.

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>No evidence except his testimony under oath to the fact that it was.

He used the word dam, he did not say or admit to damming a river or stream. You can build a dam in the middle of the desert with no water within miles. Do I have to explain every little thing to you?

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You are a comedy act and I like it.  I don't think there would be a trial if he built a random dam in a desert.

Quote:

If it turns out there was an actual river running through his land then he was wrong as I've said several times now. Zappa just likes to be an...  it starts with "a" and ends with hole.

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Stonehenge said:

Did you think we wouldn't notice that was from cnsnews and the article I posted was from counter current news? As I said in my first post in this thread.

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Stonehenge said:

>Your source is a facebook page

http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/04/man-gets-prison-sentence-for-collecting-rainwater-on-his-own-property/

See, no facebook page. How about an apology for lying to us all?

>I don't think there would be a trial if he built a random dam in a desert.

I don't care what you think or what they would have done. This is big govt bullying the little guy which you always are in favor of. You would love it in cuba, or Russia, just your kind of place.

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zappaisgod said:

Stonehenge said:

Did you think we wouldn't notice that was from cnsnews and the article I posted was from counter current news? As I said in my first post in this thread.

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Do you have a disease that prevents you from swiping a link and posting it?  Is it a twitch?

The link I posted was almost verbatim from your pals' facebook page.  Do you have an antilink disease or are you like Hillary?

Which is a total distraction from the fact that your hero is an asshole and violating well established legal doctrine regarding water use.

zappaisgod said:

Stonehenge said:

Did you think we wouldn't notice that was from cnsnews and the article I posted was from counter current news? As I said in my first post in this thread.

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Do you have a disease that prevents you from swiping a link and posting it?  Is it a twitch?

The link I posted was almost verbatim from your pals' facebook page.  Do you have an antilink disease or are you like Hillary?

Which is a total distraction from the fact that your hero is an asshole and violating well established legal doctrine regarding water use.

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