I wish Boone County success in its effort to create an advanced manufacturing park (LEAP). But the state had no business spending almost half a billion TAX dollars to buy 9,000 acres of land, rebuild I-65, install infrastructure, etc when it knew that Boone County didn’t have a drop of water to spare for these water-hungry industries like an Eli Lilly and semiconductor chip plant. The no-longer-secret plan is to build a 45-mile pipeline to Tippecanoe County and suck away up to 3 billion gallons per month. They weren't going to tell us their plan, much less ask our permission. They won't be paying for the water, but we get to pay the infrastructure bill. They won’t be returning any of the water to our watershed, but that might be OK, because they don't want to clean their waste water.

I’ve been working with both local bipartisan grassroots groups to repel the invasion. But the politicians and businessmen tell us that if we want to protect ourselves from this piracy, now and in the future, we need to send new people to the state house, because when there’s this much money being spent house leaders get bought, those who would speak up get bullied, and some are just bamboozled–like our state rep Chris Campbell, who told us she didn't know about the LEAP project much less the pipeline that would drain us dry. If you want to be our state rep you need to be our eyes and ears in the capital for schemes that could destroy us. I’m a former soldier and government reporter–I won’t be bought, bullied, or bamboozled.