We have just completed an El Paso County Colonia Comprehensive Planning Project. The project document will serve as a blueprint for us to begin to mitigate some of these terrible conditions. It will help us prioritize our efforts and help us frame this enormous undertaking within a cost and benefit framework. This is a staggering cost. Human decency and our own well being suggest that we can not.
Water is precious in the desert.
We can not let these third world conditions contaminate one of our most precious and scarce assets. We can not continue to pay the human and economic costs of treating easily avoidable diseases. These are diseases that are synonymous with the contamination that follows devastating natural disasters. They should not be synonymous with every day life in any community in our country. Without H.B 325 we are destined to continue to repeat this cycle at even higher future costs.