exempt wells

Larry, you're a real techy. Dick, this is great, now we need more than the three of us on this thing or it'll getting boring, no offense. On the exempt well situation, I feel there should still be some exemption for livestock and I really get squeamish to talk volume, but it appears likely we'll have one set due to the dairy and feedlot needs. There's a tremendous difference between a few thousand gpd and a few million gpd when you talk of competetion on an aquifer. There is case law that points to the need for DOE to manage groundwater, we can agree, but when they get to looking at every drop from livestock watering it really is quite small. The other day when I said we should define categories of use was to try to find a place where we can protect the smaller withdrawals under exemption with the feedlot and dairy industries still be able to have water available to them. Obviously when we get to talking aquifers we try to come up with a recharge rate vs. a withdrawal rate that can maintain itself. There's plenty of places in the state that know how to battle over surface water but the groundwater issue hasn't been so widespread, so it's something we're asked to trust DOE on. That's probably the crux of the problem: trusting DOE.