When someone is trying to show you why you should agree with him, have you ever noticed how difficult it is to see what you are not being shown? Or to hear what is not being said?

The developer’s arguments for the Zia Station project offer many examples of this. So much so, in fact, that an entire college course could be based upon a study of the Zia Station submittal documents, which were provided to the city planning office just before Thanksgiving and fully approved by the City Council on April 28. The submittal is a masterwork of rhetorical presentation, in which every image and paragraph is chosen to distract you from what you should be asking.

Water is, in my view, the single, most skillfully presented example of this in the Zia Station filing. That is saying a lot when you realize the filing includes hundreds of pages in 11 documents.

In the submittal, document No. 7 is titled “Water Budgets.” Open this document to find an entirely reasonable analysis of the projected usage per rental unit in both phases of the development plan. The budget includes everything you would expect to find in a thorough and rational projection of the water demand the development would create. The budget has a nice touch, too, for those who might not be fully convinced of the adequacy of the water information it includes: a 9.8 percent contingency amount to acknowledge that the demand projections could be too conservative and to proactively add an amount to provide for that possibility.

But what is not said about water anywhere in the massive filing? No information is given about the source of the water that makes up the “capital” on which the budget is implicitly based. That is to say, where is the water for this development going to come from? And the brilliance of this document, and the entire filing of which it is a part, is that it leads you to forget to ask the question and to demand an answer.

And what is the answer? In both the Planning Commission hearings and the council hearings conducted to approve the Zia Station development, I raised this question. I challenged the city to publish a statement of where the water rights for Zia Station would be coming from. The question was not answered in any of these “quasi-judicial” proceedings, and by “quasi-judicial,” I mean exactly what the City Attorney’s Office has told me it means: “based on facts of the matter and the statutes of the city.” What are, then, the facts of the matter with regard to the sources of water for the Zia Station proposal?

Let me take a guess: I would speculate that while some water rights for Zia Station may have been purchased from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District or a similar source, some water rights also are coming directly from the city’s “water bank,” which is “funded” in part by estimates of the amount of water conserved by the city’s residents. I would guess the water we have saved is being sold to the Zia Station developer to make the development possible.

Did I guess correctly, Mayor Alan Webber and councilors? Is that where the “water” for Zia Station will be found?

No information is given about the source of the water that makes up the “capital” on which the budget is implicitly based.