City: Christians can't give water to thirsty

Phoenix officials have until next Friday to apologize for the actions of a code enforcement officer after he stopped Christians from giving out water bottles to city festival participants on a day that reached 112 degrees.

A legal team that fights for religious and civil rights is also demanding a commitment that the city will no longer interfere with the Christian group’s acts of charity.

According to a letter to the city from the Rutherford Institute, the case developed in July during a “First Friday” festival when Dana Crow-Smith was giving “free bottles of cold water to passersby” on the public sidewalk “as a means of exercising her Christian beliefs.”

She “was moved” to offer the refreshment “to people at the festival who were braving the desert’s scorching 112-degree heat,” said the letter to city attorney Gary Verburg.

“According to Ms. Crow-Smith, her group was approached by Neighborhood Preservation Inspector Dwayne Grierson, who told them that they were violating the Phoenix City Code by giving away water without a vendor’s permit,” the letter explains. In fact, Grierson insisted that giving water away was “prohibited.”

The ban, however, violates several significant precedents, such as the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Arizona’s Freedom of Religious Exercise Act, Rutherford officials wrote.

A woman in the city attorney’s office declined to respond to WND’s questions, and phone calls requesting comment from the city’s public information office were not returned at the time of this report.

Doesn't matter how you wrap the water, it's what your legal rights are to it and what privileges have been extended to your claim of ownership of that particular water.

Did you catch that part where you need a water use permit to stock an existing catchment or flow area with fish?

In the Eastern states the concern would be with the species of the fish ~ and in Arizona the issue is the safety of the water.

Now that's a mindblowing difference! (Note that's state law ~ the federales get into the species preservation thing).

You might want to take a good look at that definition of "SURFACE WATER" ~ that includes "“Waters of all sources, ....." ALL means ALL. That was the debate in Oregon ~ people here were astounded a state would claim ALL the water, even rain in the sky!

So does Arizona. I like they way they cushion it for the Easterners though ~ they go into the streams, canyons, caverns, dirt, all sorts of things ~ that's just window dressing. That pretty well covers bottled water in crates.

Finally, that code states:

"The Public Water Code provides that beneficial use shall be the basis, measure and limit to the use of water within the state, A.R.S. § 45-141(B). Per A.R.S. § 45-151(A) beneficial uses are: domestic (which includes the watering of gardens and lawns not exceeding one-half acre), municipal, irrigation, stockwatering, water power, recreation, wildlife including fish, nonrecoverable water storage, and mining uses."

I take that to mean that if you have a permit for a specific beneficial use, e.g. "SELL BOTTLED WATER" you could conceivably get in trouble for giving it away!

Look, I didn't do a lot of study in Western Water Rights but I did do enough to know what it's about. So far I"ve never gone wrong in first assuming the government asserts rights over water which it has succeeded in getting enforced in court, and that there's a water rights owner somewhere who has an interest in what you are doing with that water, and he can get the courts to enforce his rights at your expense.

I have a couple of old family land grants where some hornswaggler may have stolen the surface rights to the dirt, and the gold, but he probably didn't get the water rights. Angelinos drink that water ~ and I think it's mine!

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