Trump’s Cadiz relies on complicit Democrats

Projects don’t come any more suspect than water-from-the-desert-schemes. So why are two of California's most ambitious Democrats backing Trump's Cadiz?

Forget it, Jake. It’s Cadiz

In May, an appellate court ruled that a bid by an Orange County water company to export desert water for sale to So Cal cities qualifies as “conservation.”

Cadiz campaign donations likely impacted San Bernardino County groundwater ordinance

A look at how Cadiz Inc has greased political wheels since 1997 to the point that supervisors in San Bernardino County, California are preparing to waive a Mojave ordinance to let the private company export desert groundwater to Orange and Los Angeles County suburbs.

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. 

Cadiz update

The Santa Margarita Water District has announced notice of preparation of a draft Environmental Impact Report of what is now being styled as the “Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project,” a formerly discredited Mojave Desert groundwater mining scheme rejected by the Metropolitan Water District in 2002. Its resurrection, this time with a clutch of small water companies fronting it, has much the same players in the background, not least of them Keith Brackpool, the brazen good time boy of the Manhattan Beach Country Club, horse racing aficionado and close friend/former employer of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. For the history of a plan to extract 50,000 acre feet of water a year from the Mojave Desert and then to use public facilities to wheel the water to public agencies at cost to public lands and public purse, click here.

For the former environmental review, which describes the

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