The “M Opinion” should avoid California incest

Defending his department after the release of “Chinatown,” a Los Angeles Department of Water & Power executive is said to have protested, “There was never any incest!” That was 1974. As yesterday the final environmental impact report for the Cadiz, Inc groundwater mining project proposed for the Mojave Desert was issued, this much is known: Incest is a given.

Except this time there’s no part for Faye Dunaway. The incest is political. Much has been written about Cadiz generosity to politicians. Public servants who have been on the Cadiz payroll and/or recipients of notable donations include Los Angeles Mayor Antoino Villaraigosa, former California Governor Gray Davis, Susan Kennedy — chief of staff of former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former California state assemblyman Richard Katz and San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt. For background on Cadiz and its political largesse, this compendium is a start. Latterly, much cash has

The common purse: Las Posas / Cadiz

A previous post, Rancho Santa Margarita, Meet Calleguas, hit a hornet’s nest. The decision to write it was little more than an instinct. “Poke there.”  The post referred to something called the “Las Posas Basin Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project,” described by the Los Angeles Times during the project’s inception in the 1990s as “the largest reservoir in Ventura County, ensuring a reliable water supply in cities from Simi Valley to Oxnard in the event of drought or earthquake.”

Las Posas wasn’t big. It was bigger. “The $47-million project near Moorpark will hold more water than Lake Casitas and nearly four times what Lake Piru holds,” reported the Times.

Until it didn’t. When last month the Ventura County Reporter recounted that the capacity proved to not be the much-celebrated 300,000 acre feet, but instead 50,000 acre feet, no villain was named. Who needs a villain when, as

Rancho Santa Margarita, meet Calleguas

UPDATED 5/11/2012: As the board of the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District wades through the Draft Environmental Impact Report produced for them by their partners at Cadiz, Inc in the bid to involve the Orange County municipal water company in a water mining scheme in the Mojave Desert, let us pause to look at some bona fides of a lead Cadiz consultant. Cadiz engineer Terry Foreman would have Rancho Santa Margarita believe that “using 50,000 acre-feet per year is optimal for conservation” from a basin with recharge that is perhaps one tenth of that, and that mining groundwater poses “no long-term impacts to the desert environment.”

Believe that and you’ll believe in chocolate cake diets, so it seems unlikely that anyone involved in the project really cares about the Mojave. Yet when it comes to cost, the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District board of directors

Just say ‘no’ to Cadiz stock tease

Cadiz, Inc today announced that it has optioned use of a derelict gas line to ship northern Californian water to the Mojave Desert for long-term storage by southern Californian cities. Personally, I’m waiting for the announcement that it will be helicoptering in melting icebergs whose freshwater might otherwise be lost to salty seas. For more than a decade, Cadiz has styled its proposal to pump from 50,000 to 80,000 acre feet of water a year from a Mojave dry valley as a “conservation” project on the grounds that in addition to pulling water it could also conceivably bank surplus water from the Colorado River. 

Art, water and money

This detail from a 1922 drawing in the Los Angeles Times shows how nesting massive reservoirs in the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains might check floods and impound water for Southern California. Nothing near the project depicted was realized. The graphic artist wasn’t a seismologist, never mind hydrologist. He drew what was described to him.

Nearly a century has passed but graphics depicting new water projects for Southern California remain almost as antique in their wishfulness. Last week, the Orange County Register produced a beautiful drawing showing how pumps might be placed in the Cadiz Valley in such a way that water supposedly “lost” to evaporation might be captured by sinking wells hundreds of feet below the floor of the Mojave Desert. 

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