High Country News is running a series they call “Tapped Out: Power and water justice in the rural West”. Yesterday I posted about an article in HCN covering Klamath Basin water management that originally appeared in The Counter. Here’s an article in HCN from Columbia Insight about water banking. (I had not heard of Hood River-based Columbia Insight, its worth a look.) Water banking is being touted as a key tool for solving water management issues in the Deschutes Basin. It has been used effectively in some areas to move water from low-value uses to higher-value ones, but is increasingly being seen as an investment opportunity for financiers hoping to profit from buying and then reselling water at higher prices. Clearly, this is extremely problematic and yet another example of how our political leaders are failing us – we need to get in front of this issue with proper regulations to allow water banking to work for us in the beneficial way that it can.