Western States Tell Washington To Get Off Their Lawns

Editorial
Investors Business Daily

Energy: Lawmakers in resource-rich Western states have had enough of Washington's meddling and are moving to take the federal grip off their lands. Their actions could positively impact gasoline prices.

It seems a new Sagebrush Rebellion is brewing. Last week, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed legislation that demands the federal government return 30 million acres to the state by 2014. National parks, military installations and Indian lands would not be part of the return.

Utah is out in front, but it is not alone. Lawmakers in the Arizona Senate have passed a bill similar to Utah's while the legislatures in Colorado, Idaho, Montana and New Mexico are reportedly following Salt Lake City's lead.

The movement is particularly relevant because in President Obama's feeble attempt to deflect blame for rising gasoline prices, he has repeatedly claimed that oil production has increased during his term. But what he has failed to mention is that the expansion has been on private lands. Production on federal land has fallen since he took office, due to his restrictive policies.

With Washington out of the way, the oil-rich states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Montana can unlock their resources that have been trapped by Washington, which itself is captive to radical environmental interests.

The most recent Sagebrush Rebellion began in the 1970s when Western states tried to break Washington's tight control over public lands within their borders. While running for the White House in 1980, Ronald Reagan told supporters at a stop in Salt Lake City to "count me in as a rebel."

The rebels had a legitimate grievance. But the movement didn't net much. Washington still owns wide swaths of the West. (See map.) Among the Western states, only in Montana (29.9%) does the federal government own less than 30% of the land.

Today's rebellion through legislation might not fare much better, as Washington will likely ignore the Utah law as well as any others that might be passed and signed. At least until the courts order it to comply.

As unlikely as it seems, the Western states might have a case. Washington owns only small pieces of states east of the Rockies, while it owns big chunks of those to the west, and it has broken its promise to return land to the Western states as it has the others. The federal government has clearly discriminated against the Western states.

Even if the federal government only partially lost its land-baron status in the West, the states would ramp up their energy production on the tracts that would be back under their stewardship. That would mean economic growth, a spike in jobs and increased government revenue in those states.

It would mean relief at the pump, as well, as the markets would respond by lowering prices in anticipation of a growing supply.

Of course the bulk of the relief would be a few years away. But there are steps the administration could take now that would lower gasoline prices before summer.

The White House is handcuffed, however, just like most of the political class, by the always irrational environmentalist lobby.

State allows pumping of groundwater from rural Nevada

By Henry Brean
Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has something to put in its pipeline once again.

Nevada's top water regulator on Thursday granted the authority permission to pump up to 84,000 acre-feet of groundwater a year from four rural valleys in Lincoln and White Pine counties.

That is about two-thirds as much water as authority officials were seeking, but it's 5,200 acre-feet more than they got the last time around.

The decision from State Engineer Jason King comes roughly two years after the state Supreme Court struck down two previous rulings that granted the authority almost 79,000 acre-feet a year from Spring, Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys.

Las Vegas water officials originally applied for almost 126,000 acre-feet of unappropriated water in the four valleys as part of a larger plan to siphon groundwater from across eastern Nevada.

They hope to deliver the water to the Las Vegas Valley someday through a multibillion-dollar network of pumps and pipelines stretching more than 300 miles.

One acre-foot of water can supply two average Las Vegas homes for one year. When stretched through reuse, the 83,988 acre-feet awarded Thursday is enough for roughly 286,000 households annually.

Only some of the water will be available right away. King wants the water rights in Spring Valley to be developed in stages so potential environmental impacts can be measured and curbed.

SCIENCE AND THE LAW

Water authority officials were still reviewing the ruling Thursday afternoon, but deputy general manager John Entsminger offered praise for what he had read so far.

"We think the state engineer has grounded his decision in science and the law," he said.

The fact that the authority was granted more this time around "verifies that the water is there for appropriation and can be withdrawn in an environmentally sustainable manner," Entsminger said.

But opponents insist there is nothing sustainable about the project.

In a statement, the Center for Biological Diversity called King's ruling a disaster for rural communities, native plants and animals and all people who care about them.

"The winner in today's ruling is mindless Las Vegas growth, while biodiversity, rural residents and future generations are the clear losers," said Rob Mrowka, a Nevada-based ecologist with the Arizona-based environmental group.

White Pine County Commissioner Gary Perea said King granted far too much water to the authority, and he vowed to appeal the decision.

DEPENDENT ON RIVER

Water authority officials insist they have not committed to building the pipeline. They simply want to be ready should the need arise.

The project dates back almost 25 years to when Southern Nevada water officials filed for water rights across rural Nevada.

Back then, the pipeline was meant to supply growth in the Las Vegas Valley. Now it is being touted as a backup supply for a community that gets 90 percent of its water from an overtaxed Colorado River and a shrinking Lake Mead.

King acknowledged the need in his ruling, stating that it would "not be advisable" for the state's largest community to continue to depend on a river that is "over-appropriated, highly susceptible to drought and shortage, and almost certain to provide significantly less water to Southern Nevada in the future."

But the state engineer stopped short of giving the authority everything it asked for.

The 61,127 acre-feet of water rights he granted in Spring Valley can only be developed gradually to ensure the pumping doesn't affect existing water rights.

The authority will be allowed to pump up to 38,000 acre-feet of groundwater a year for the first eight years of the project.

After that, the annual withdrawal increases to as much as 50,000 acre-feet for the next eight years and then to the full 61,127 acre-feet a year after that.

PUMP AND SEE

King also called for at least two years of scientific data collection before any water is exported from Spring Valley or the other basins.

Also, he ordered the authority to develop state-approved groundwater flow models and a monitoring and mitigation plan to protect against harmful effects on other water users and the environment.

But rancher Hank Vogler said no amount of safeguards can protect rural Nevada once the pipeline is built and the water starts flowing south.

"I don't think there's anyone with a big enough checkbook to stop it then," said the 63-year-old Vogler, who has lived and worked in Spring Valley for almost half his life.

"No one is going to have the appetite to say, 'Oh, shucks, we made a $15 billion mistake. Let's shut it down.' "

If anything, Vogler said, the authority's pipeline network will only spread to other parts of the state as more water is needed to feed the growth that many expect to return to Las Vegas.

"I'm what I've been calling myself all along: nothing more than collateral damage," Vogler said.

According to Entsminger, drought protection remains the key reason for the pipeline, but even if Lake Mead completely refills, he said the project will still be needed for the day when Southern Nevada inevitably outgrows its current water supply.

The authority already has spent tens of millions of dollars on studies, preliminary designs and legal work. The project itself carries an uncertain and much-debated price tag ranging from $2 billion to as much as $15 billion, depending on whom you ask.

Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources spokesman Bob Conrad said King would not comment on his decision because rulings from the state engineer speak for themselves.

King spent the past four months reviewing everything he read and heard during a marathon state hearing last fall that involved six weeks of testimony, 82 witnesses and tens of thousands of pages of documents.

He also waded through more than 20,000 public comments, most of them in opposition to the pipeline project, and several voluminous draft rulings penned by the authority and other major players in last year's hearing.

CRITICISM KEEPS FLOWING

The project has drawn opposition from a broad coalition of rural residents, ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, hunters and fishing enthusiasts.

They warn that large-scale groundwater pumping in an already arid landscape will destroy wildlife and the livelihoods of residents as far north as Great Basin National Park, more than 300 miles from Las Vegas.

And their fight is far from over.

Opponents have 30 days to challenge King's decision in state court. Members of the Great Basin Water Network, the chief voice of opposition during last year's hearing, already have promised to appeal.

"Holding on to these water rights for 25 to 50 years without putting them to beneficial use not only flouts the prohibition against speculation in Nevada water law, but it unfairly inhibits opportunities for future growth and development in the affected basins in Lincoln and White Pine counties," said Baker businesswoman and water network member Denys Koyle in a written statement.

Federal environmental litigation may not be far behind, either.

A federal review is under way of the entire pipeline project, which could include more than 300 miles of buried pipeline, 325 miles of overhead power lines, seven electrical substations, five pumping stations, a water treatment plant and an underground storage reservoir.

Most of those facilities would be built on public land.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is conducting the review, now in its seventh year. A final draft is expected later this year, with a decision on whether to grant the authority a federal right of way for the project.

In June 2010, the Nevada Supreme Court found that the state engineer's office broke the law by failing to act within one year on dozens of water rights applications filed in 1989 by the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

The justices tossed out the water rights awarded to the authority in 2007 and 2008 and ordered the state engineer to hear the matter again.

Sadly for pipeline opponents, very little changed the second time around.

"It is especially heartbreaking that we learned of this decision on World Water Day, a day that is supposed to be about human needs and the environment," said Ann Brauer of Indian Springs, a Great Basin Water Network member.

"Instead, this decision, if it stands, gives a green light to SNWA to defoliate the Great Basin, destroy Native American communities, dismantle conservation programs, plant water-hungry turf, encourage unneeded development and stick the ratepayers of Clark County with a $15 billion bill."

Needles Officials Refuse To Endorse Cadiz Water Project

San Bernardino County Sentinel

NEEDLES—The Needles City Council has unanimously rejected making an endorsement of the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project.

Cadiz Inc., also known as the Cadiz Land Company, is proposing to pump an average of 50,000 acre feet of water out of the aquifer in the east Mojave Desert per year and sell it to five water purveyors serving consumers in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.

Cadiz Inc., which operates a 500 acre citrus, table grape, tomato and melon growing agricultural operation in the Cadiz Valley, pursued and abandoned a plan a decade ago to extract water from the water table underlying the Cadiz Valley and pipe it to the Los Angeles metropolitan area for use there. That original plan was forsaken after questions about the ecological impact of the strategy were raised by environmentalists and the entity Cadiz intended to partner with to carry out the undertaking, the Metropolitan Water Agency. That plan called for taking water from the desert aquifer in what weredeemed “wet” years and pumping water from the Colorado River into the desert aquifer during “dry” years.

Four years ago, Cadiz Inc., revived the water plan, renaming it the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. Cadiz is working with Orange County-based Santa Margarita Water District, which services an area that is more than 200 miles from the Cadiz Valley, to obtain approval for the project. The Santa Margarita Water District is currently serving as the lead agency for the project and is charged with overseeing the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review process for the undertaking.

Through an arrangement with the Cadiz Land Company, the Santa Margarita Water District will, if the project is approved, receive the lion’s share of the water. In addition, Cadiz, Inc. has entered into agreements with Three Valleys Water District, which provides water to the Pomona Valley, Walnut Valley, and Eastern San Gabriel Valley; the Golden State Water Company, which serves several communities in Southern California, including Claremont; Suburban Water Systems, which serves Covina, West Covina and La Mirada; and the Jurupa Community Services District, which serves Mira Loma in Riverside County.

Both Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District maintain the project is an environmentally responsible one that should not alarm environmentalists or local landowners. It will rely on a wellfield of 34 wells to “capture and conserve” the water resources in the East Mojave Desert using “safe, established groundwater management techniques to ensure the project is operated without causing harm to the local environment,” according to the Santa Margarita Water District.

In recent months, however, numerous critics of the plan have come forward, asserting that pumping from the aquifer 35,000 acre-feet to 65,000 acre-feet of water yearly as Cadiz Inc. proposes to do would cause a continuous drop in the desert water table that would dry up springs, deplete the local area of a water source crucial to life and future development of the area, create dust storms on nearby dry lake beds, adversely impact air quality, alter the flow of groundwater beneath the Mojave Desert by drawing water away from neighboring aquifers and have a devastating effect on bighorn sheep and other indigenous wildlife.

Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District have stepped up their lobbying efforts on behalf of the project, seeking to gain endorsements of the project from local governmental entities and other influential bodies in the desert to counter the efforts by local landowners and environmentalists to have the Santa Margarita Water District displaced as the lead agency overseeing the environmental certification and approval of the project. In seeking those endorsements, the project advocates maintain that the project is one that is aimed at “conservation” of water otherwise lost to evaporation. A major selling point is that the $536.25 million project will represent a $138 million boon to the East Mojave’s economy that will directly or indirectly create 2,090 jobs for four years, involving $53 million in wages or salaries to workers or proprietorships involved in building the pipeline and other elements of the project.

One such group that Cadiz Inc. made headway with was the Needles Chamber of Commerce, which last month went on record with a letter of support saying it was in favor of the project. Chamber board president Jeff Williams said the project will not only provide employment for many Needles residents but will also result in greater patronage of existing businesses in Needles.
The Needles City Council, however, expressed opposition to the project with a greater intensity than which the chamber supported it.

Based on statements by city manager David Brownlee and municipal water department director Jerry Porter, both of whom evaluated the project, the city council on February 28 unanimously refused a request by Cadiz, Inc. to support the project. Cadiz Inc. founder and vice president Ted Dutton was in attendance at the February 28 meeting.

In a letter dated March 1, 2012 to Environmental Science Associates, the Los Angeles-based consulting company hired by Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District to do the environmental evaluation of the project, Needles Mayor Ed Paget wrote, “The city of Needles cannot endorse a project that will take 50,000 acre-feet of ground water annually from an extremely fragile ecosystem with no concrete plan for the replenishment of the aquifer. Natural recharge is estimated to be 14,000 acre-feet per annum. Taking the other 36,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River, the most over-subscribed waterway in America is unacceptable.”

Brownlee told the council that he was highly skeptical of the claim the aquifer could be recharged in the aftermath of the extraction of 50,000 acre-feet of water per year over a 20-year period.

Brownlee said the water the project will capture is a critical part of the desert ecosystem. “What is the definition of lost?” Brownlee asked. “Evaporation comes back as precipitation. It is a critical part of the natural cycle. It also sustains the desert vegetation and critters. I find it hard to believe that as much as 50,000 acre-feet (1.6 billion gallons) are ‘lost.’”
An acre-foot is equal to the amount of water that would cover an acre to the depth of one foot, i.e., 43,560 cubic feet, or 325,851.43 gallons, approximately the amount of water used by a typical household comprised of four people in a metropolitan area over the course of a year.

Brownlee said he did not think it proper to be drawing water from the desert for use near the coast. “There isn’t even a pretense of a water conservation ethos,” Brownlee said.

Brownlee said he thought it “highly unlikely” that the second phase of the project, involving drawing water from the Colorado River to recharge the desert aquifer near Cadiz, will actually come to fruition, “given that the Colorado River is the most over drafted and litigated upon river in the world. It serves 17 million people in Southern California. There isn’t a drop to spare and the Bureau of Reclamation endeavors to measure every one of those drops.”

Brownlee said he felt it to be highly inappropriate for the Santa Margarita Water District, given its distance from the Cadiz Valley and its direct interest in the project, to be serving as the lead agency in the environmental certification process for the undertaking.

“The jurisdiction in which the potential environmental impacts are anticipated to occur should be and usually is the lead agency,” Brownlee said. “How can an entity that stands to benefit from a favorable environmental impact report finding be the responsible jurisdiction? Is that not a prima facie conflict?”

Desert Water Plan Gains Pipe Options And Foes

East Mojave property owners charter local water district formation

Seedless grapes along with other produce are grown on the Cadiz property located in the East Mojave. The Santa Margarita Water District in Orange County wants to buy ground water from Cadiz Inc., a company that holds the rights to much of the aquifer and farms 1,600 acres of vineyards and citrus orchards in the valley.

San Bernardino County
Sentinel

Cadiz Inc. is looking toward using idle natural gas pipelines to transport water it is proposing to pump out of the aquifer in the east Mojave Desert to consumers in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.

Cadiz Inc., which is also known as the Cadiz Land Company, pursued and abandoned a plan a decade ago to extract water from the water table underlying the Cadiz Valley and transport it to the Los Angeles metropolitan area for use there. That original plan was forsaken after questions about the ecological impact of the strategy were raised by environmentalists and the entity Cadiz intended to partner with to carry out the undertaking, the Metropolitan Water Agency. That plan called for taking water from the desert aquifer in what were deemed “wet” years and pumping water from the Colorado River into the desert aquifer during “dry” years.

Four years ago, Cadiz Inc., which operates a 500-acre organic citrus, grape, tomato and melon farm in the Cadiz Valley, revived the water plan, renaming it the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. Cadiz is working with Orange County-based
Santa Margarita Water District, which services an area that is more than 200 miles from the Cadiz Valley, to obtain approval for the project. The Santa Margarita Water District, is currently serving as the lead agency for the project, and is charged with overseeing the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review process for the undertaking.

Through an arrangement with the Cadiz Land Company, the Santa Margarita Water District will receive the lion’s share of the water. In addition, Cadiz, Inc. has entered into agreements with Three Valleys Water District, which provides water to the Pomona Valley, Walnut Valley, and Eastern San Gabriel Valley; the Golden State Water Company, which serves several communities in Southern California, including Claremont; Suburban Water Systems, which serves Covina, West Covina and La Mirada; and the Jurupa Community Services District, which serves Mira Loma in Riverside County.

Both Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District maintain the project is an environmentally responsible one that should not alarm environmentalists or local landowners. It is one that will consist of a wellfield of 34 wells to “capture and conserve” the water resources in the East Mojave Desert using “safe, established groundwater management techniques to ensure the project is operated without causing harm to the local environment,” according to the Santa Margarita Water District.

In recent months, however, numerous critics of the plan have come forward, asserting that pumping from the aquifer 65,000 acre-feet of water yearly as Cadiz Inc. proposes to do would cause a continuous drop in the desert water table that would dry up springs, deplete the local area of a water source crucial to life and future development of the area, create dust storms on nearby dry lake beds, adversely impact air quality, alter the flow of groundwater beneath the Mojave Desert by drawing water away from neighboring aquifers and have a devastating effect on bighorn sheep and other indigenous wildlife.

In recent days there have been indications that Cadiz Inc. is seeking to reduce its costs in pursuing the project by eliminating its earlier declared intention of constructing a 43-mile pipeline to carry water to the Colorado River Aqueduct maintained by the Metropolitan Water District for distribution to the population centers of Riverside, Orange and Los Angeles counties. Instead, the company has secured options toward the purchase of unused natural gas pipelines which would instead function to move the water westward.

Under consideration is Cadiz Inc.’s purchase of a portion of a 220-mile span of 30-inch pipeline owned by El Paso Natural Gas which runs from the Bakersfield area to the Cadiz Valley. Last week, Cadiz Inc. paid El Paso Natural Gas $1 million to extend until March 2012 a previously unannounced option the company had obtained to purchase the gas line for $40 million.

Hydrologists retained by Cadiz Inc. believe El Paso’s gas line can be converted to carry as much as 30,000 acre-feet of water per year. Last week, the company paid the line owner $1 million to continue an option agreement until March 2013. Cadiz also has also secured an option to acquire for $10 million a smaller gas line owned by Questar Corporation which runs from near Palm Springs to Long Beach.

Cadiz maintains the water can be transported in the natural gas lines without damage to the integrity of the pipes and without serious impact upon the quality, purity, safety or drinkability of the water.

Rancho Santa Margarita Mayor Anthony Beall has gone on record as being in favor of the project. Nevertheless, there are residents of Rancho Santa Margarita who are opposed to the project. One of those is Craig Innis, who objected to the Santa Margarita Water District serving as the lead agency on the project and what he said was “the lack of opportunity for the citizenry to be most affected by this project to make oral statements and comments. The Santa Margarita Water District held its meetings here, imposing an undue hardship for the citizenry of the Eastern Mojave Desert to have equal access and the ability to comment, having to travel 200 to 300 miles or more roundtrip to do so.”

Innis suggested that Cadiz Inc. is in “dire financial straits” after losing millions of dollars consistently for the last dozen years on its Cadiz Valley operations and he suggested that the company was actually seeking to commandeer water rights under the guise of water conservation.
“There is no surplus Colorado River water to recharge the aquifer as Cadiz asserts it wants to do in Phase II of its plan,” Innis said. “The lower basin Colorado River water, according to the evidence, simply does not have the capacity or the capability of recharging the Cadiz aquifer. Cadiz’s Phase I would drain the aquifer and surrounding wells. This is comparable to what happened to Owens Valley. The Metropolitan Water District pulled out because they knew that fact too, and could not deliver on recharging the aquifer.”

Dr. Karen Tracy, a retired dentist who has lived and worked in Joshua Tree for 26 years, told the Sentinel, “I dissent in the strongest terms to the Cadiz water project and in particular to our county supervisors’ implicit participation in this vaguely disguised water theft.”
Tracy decried the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors’ acquiescence in allowing an Orange County water district with a vested interest in utilizing the water to be derived from the project to oversee the evaluation of its environmental impacts. “Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt’s bought-and-paid-for involvement has been amply documented,” Tracy said, referencing Cadiz Inc.’s political contributions to Mitzelfelt.

Since 2007, the Cadiz Land Company has been one of Mitzlefelt’s major political backers, having contributed a total of $48,100 to his campaign fund. All of the Cadiz Valley and much of the Eastern Mojave lies within the county’s First District, which Mitzelfelt represents at the county seat.

“The Mojave Desert is a well-known and highly trafficked holiday destination,” Tracy said. “The county is standing mute while others are going forward on a pumping/monitoring plan that shuts out the best available experts and trusts the pumpers as environmental custodians. United States Geologic Survey (USGS) analysis is needed to review the pumping models and groundwater drawdown; the hydrology model in use by the pumpers is mysterious at best and suspect while the work of John Izbicki and Peter Martin, USGS hydrology experts, is above reproach. I am personally familiar with them and their modeling procedures. This desert is their territory. Why has their evaluation not been solicited? Are the assurances about salt chemistry and immunity from dust storms contained in the draft environmental impact report true? What about the assurances that this aquifer is a “closed system” and delicate ecologic niches will not be affected? I’ve read the draft environmental report posted to the Santa Margarita Water District website and the pumpers just do not have the science to say that. To give perspective to the pumpers’ enterprise, they propose pumping 50,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water per year out of the desert to the coast. I have long been a volunteer for the Joshua Basin Water District, which is not the smallest water district in the Morongo Basin in square miles, nor number of connections, nor gallons pumped. We deliver 1,500 acre-feet per year.”

According to Tracy, “The immense scope of this project demands a much larger big-picture view. The National Park Service must become part of this process because of the potential impact to natural resources on adjacent federal lands packed with the natural wonders that bring those tourists out here. Inclusion of federal lands requires a far more comprehensive environmental impact statement, precisely what the pumpers dread most. The folly of this project cannot stand up to the scrutiny of macrocosmic and verifiable science in an environmental impact statement.”

A collection of desert residents and environmentalists in February successfully pushed to have the public input deadline with regard to the environmental impact report Cadiz Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District had drafted for the project as part of the environmental certification process extended from February 13 to March 14. That group is currently seeking to have the Santa Margarita Water District removed as the lead agency overseeing the environmental certification and approval of the project in favor of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.

Meanwhile, East Mojave property owners have chartered a local water district formation committee and installed Chris Brown as chairman. The group is next scheduled to meet at the Goffs School House and Museum, located at 37198 Lanfair Road in Goffs on March 18 at 2 p.m.
Goffs is located off old Route 66 between Barstow and Needles and can be most safely accessed by way of Exit 107 for Goffs Road from the west, or the US 95 exit from the east.

Vandalism at Providence Mountains Could Have Been Avoided

by Chris Clarke
KCET.org

The author at the Providence Mountains SRA visitor center, November 2008 (Annette Rojas photo)

Lovers of California's desert State Parks were dismayed last month when the LA Times' Louis Sahagun reported a spate of serious vandalism at the Providence Mountains State Recreation Area (SRA). At least four times in recent months, vandals broke into the isolated park -- one of six desert State Parks slated for indefinite closure by Governor Jerry Brown -- and stole equipment, smashed windows and display cases left in the SRA's Visitor's Center, and stripped copper wiring from conduits running from service buildings to the lighting system in the celebrated Mitchell Caverns.

The SRA, shuttered for some months before the release of the parks closure list due to deferred maintenance and the retirement of two rangers, is one of the most remote holdings in the State Parks inventory. Surrounded by the Mojave National Preserve, fifteen and a half miles off Interstate 40 at the end of Essex Road, the 5,900-acre SRA is the kind of place you don't go unless you mean to.

The SRA and the Providence Mountains that contain it are a classic desert "sky island," an oasis of diverse plant life made possible by the relatively cooler temperatures and greater moisture atop many desert mountain ranges. The range's summit, Edgar Peak, tops out at 7,162 feet above sea level -- high enough above the searing desert floor to support live oaks and manzanitas. Below the summit, a veritable botanic garden of Mojave upland plants thrives, from barrel cactus and Mojave yucca to pinyon and juniper.

But most of the visitors the SRA hosted before its closure came for the caves. The MItchell Caverns, so-named for erstwhile owner-promoter Jack Mitchell, are a set of three solution caves in the Providence Mountains' abundant limestone. One cave, Winding Stair Cavern, is challenging even for advanced spelunkers, but the El Pakiva and Tecopa caves have been open to the general run of tourists since around 1934, when Jack Mitchell first started leading tours. The Mitchells sold the land to the State Parks in the mid-1950s, and park rangers have led tours since then. Before the SRA closed in 2011, a few groups of tourists a day would follow guides up and down metal staircases through the caverns on tours lasting about an hour and a half. It was a popular tour, and a respite from the summer desert heat.

It may be a very long time before the public can enjoy the caves again, or the small but impossibly scenic campground nearby. On February 5, San Bernardino sheriff's deputies arrested Christopher Alvarado, 48, of Azusa and Trisha Sutton, 36, of Covina at a desert campsite near the SRA after responding to a call that trespassers were on the SRA grounds. Officers reported the pair had stolen property and burglary tools in their campsite. The two were booked on suspicion of burglary and related charges, as well as possession of illegal drugs. Whether it was Alvarado and Sutton who vandalized the SRA or someone else, at least $100,000 in repairs will be necessary to restore the park's facilities to the point where they were before the vandalism. At that point the state would still need to budget for a new water supply and continued staffing before reopening the SRA.

Most people who frequent the California State Parks have one or two parks that they hold dearest, and though it's hard to choose Providence Mountains may well be mine. I've spent many hours there hiking, staying in the small campground, and following gamely along on cave tours. There are few better places in the Mojave for watching sunsets.

I had one of the oddest experiences in my life at the Providence Mountains Visitor Center, in fact. I was visiting in 2008 with my now-fianceé, looking at the exhibits whose display cases have since been trashed by the vandals, and she let out a sudden gasp. Then so did I. By way of explaining what prompted our gasps a few facts will be helpful:

• The caves were used as shelter by large, now extinct mammals such as the Shasta ground sloth, the remains of which have been found there.
• My friend Carl Buell, a talented paleontological illustrator, once painted a scene which included a Shasta ground sloth, my late dog Zeke, and myself looking out over the Pleistocene Mojave Desert.
• That image comes up high in most Google searches for "Shasta Ground Sloth."

So it isn't all that surprising that a State Park Ranger looking for available images of Shasta ground sloths to include in interpretive displays might find Carl's painting, and as that painting includes a human being painted to scale it makes sense that that ranger might include it to give a sense of how big the sloths were.

Still, the oddness of looking at a display of paleontological exhibits and finding yourself included there can hardly be exaggerated.

Whether inside the Visitor Center or outside, no one is going to have unusual experiences at the Providence Mountains SRA for the foreseeable future, as the State Department of Parks and Recreation struggles even just to step up security at the gate, let alone commit to repairing the damage done by vandals and by the ravages of time. Even just assessing the scale of the vandalism is a daunting task. Though State Parks staff told the LA Times' Louis Sahagun that they haven't seen damage to the caverns themselves, a thorough damage count will likely need to wait until the caves' lighting system can be rewired.

An obvious route forward might be for the National Parks Service to assume responsibility for the SRA, as the Mojave National Preserve completely surrounds the property. Supporters of other parks on the closure list have been working out similar arrangements, either with NPS or with other agencies or NGOs. The Mojave National Preserve's Chief of Interpretation Linda Slater tells me that for their part, Preserve rangers have tried to keep a closer eye on the SRA since the break-in. "We've got 1.6 million acres of our own to look after, and we don't have enough rangers to cover our own land the way we really want to. But we're doing what we can." Slater points out that taking on management of the Providence Mountains would add a significant amount to the Preserve's operating expenses, and that money would have to come from somewhere.

In the meantime, the closure has effectively cut off access to some of the most attractive hiking areas in the Preserve: the SRA was the trailhead of choice for hikers wanting to get to the high peaks in the Providence Mountains.

As it turns out, all this could have been avoided if not for political grandstanding by Representative Jerry Lewis (R-San Bernardino). In the years following the establishment of the Mojave Preserve by the California Desert Protection Act of 1994 (CDPA), The NPS and California's Division of Parks and Recreation were actually in negotiation to transfer the SRA to Preserve management. Lewis, whose currently sprawling district includes the Preserve, was an opponent of the CDPA due to wilderness provisions in the bill, and due to perceived threats to the lifestyles of people living in the newly created Preserve.

In 1996 Lewis inserted language into that year's House Appropriations Bill cutting the Preserve's annual budget to $1.00, a move that briefly made him a conservative icon. The exuberantly right-wing 104th Congress was only too happy to approve his amendment. Strapped for cash, the Preserve was unable to continue pursuit of a land transfer to the NPS, and the Providence Mountains SRA stayed in State hands.

Lewis's district has changed considerably in the last year, being redrawn in the last round of redistricting with a more heavily urban, potentially liberal electoral base. In January of this year, likely as a result of the greater likelihood of losing his seat, Lewis announced his retirement from Congress.

Many factors contributed to the closing and subsequent vandalism of the Providence Mountains SRA, from the outrageous culpability of the vandals to the sweeping anti-tax sentiment among voters on initiatives over the last 40 years, to the park's general remoteness and lack of support among Californians. But if you're looking for one person to blame for the whole mess, Jerry Lewis is as good a person as any to pick. After 33 years in Congress you might hope for a legacy more inspiring than making sure the only limestone cave in the State Parks system is closed to the public for as long as a generation.

Chris Clarke is an environmental writer of two decades standing. Author of Walking With Zeke, he writes regularly at his acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing and comments on desert issues here every week. He lives in Palm Springs.

Free the American West

Get the federal government off public lands that are of no national importance

Opinion
By Robert H. Nelson
Los Angeles Times

Like much else in government, U.S. public land policy is a vestige of the past, established in 1910 when America's population was just 92.2 million and a Western state such as Nevada had only 81,000 residents.

Today our needs are much different and much greater. The United States can no longer afford to keep tens of millions of acres of "public" land locked up and out of service. Some of these lands have great commercial value; others are environmental treasures. We need policies capable of distinguishing between the two.

Few Easterners realize the immense magnitude of the public lands. The federal government's holdings include about 58 million acres in Nevada, or 83% of the state's total land mass; 45 million acres in California (45% of the state); 34 million acres in Utah (65%); 33 million acres in Idaho (63%); and more than a fourth of all the land in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming.

Most public land decisions are made by two federal agencies, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and involve matters such as the number of cows that will be allowed to graze, the areas available to off-road recreational vehicles, the prevention and fighting of forest fires, the building of local roads, the amount of timber harvesting, the leasing of land for oil and gas drilling, mineral rights and other such details. Outside the rural West, most such decisions are made by private landowners or by state and local governments. In the West, Washington acts as if it knows best.

Like other grand designs of the "progressive" era, public land policy has failed the test of time. Public lands have not been managed efficiently to maximize national benefits but instead in response to political pressures.

Past mismanagement has turned many national forests into flammable tinderboxes where intense crown fires reaching to the top of the trees — once a rarity — consume entire forests.

Rural Westerners receive significant financial benefits when the federal government pays for many of their local roads and conservation services and provides many high-paying local federal jobs. Increasingly, however, they are questioning the trade-offs involved.

Daniel Kemmis, the former Democratic speaker and minority leader of the Montana House and onetime mayor of Missoula, the state's second-largest city, has lamented that "our public lands … are burdened by a steadily more outdated regulatory and governing framework," which he describes as a "frustrating, alienating bureaucratic paternalism."

Professor Sally Fairfax of UC Berkeley observed that the creation of the national forests established "a relationship between the national government and the Western states that is usefully described as colonial." Little has changed, even as the federal system has become more and more dysfunctional.

The fact is that probably no more than 20% of the tens of millions of acres of public lands are nationally important, requiring federal oversight and protection. This includes 45 million acres of Forest Service and BLM lands in the national wilderness system and other environmentally special areas such as BLM's Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

An additional 60%, perhaps, are ordinary lands, used principally for recreational purposes, such as hiking, hunting, fishing and off-road-vehicle use. Most of the remaining public lands are useful primarily for commercial purposes, such as the timber-rich forests in the Pacific Northwest.

A rational public lands policy more suited to current and future needs would put the nationally important lands into a newly reorganized federal environmental protection system. Ordinary recreational lands would be managed at the state and local level, perhaps by transferring them to local counties. What better steward of a local recreation area than the people who live in the area?

The commercially most valuable lands, meanwhile, would be transferred to new ownership or put under long-term federal leases. Lands that have real commercial value could produce a double benefit: revenue from leases and land sales, and additional revenue from the jobs, minerals, oil, gas, lumber and other commodities the freed-up lands would produce.

It is time to end outdated federal land policies that are draining our country's wealth, tying up valuable resources in red tape and bureaucracy, and harming the environment. The transition to a new system would take time, but it might reasonably be completed over a 10-year period, the same time frame Washington is using for deficit-reduction planning.

Robert H. Nelson, who worked on public land issues in the office of the secretary of the Interior from 1975 to 1993, is a professor of environmental policy at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland. This essay is adapted from a longer article in the current issue of Policy Review.

Complaint lodged against Cadiz project

By JENNIFER DENEVAN
Needles Desert Star

SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY - Independent environmentalist Ruth Musser-Lopez of Needles recently reported she has lodged a complaint in regards to the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project with San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael A. Ramos' Public Integrity Unit and the California Attorney General.

She alleges the conduct of the Santa Margarita Water District is in violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act, better known as the open meeting law. In her complaint, she alleges the water district threatens to violate the Brown Act and the constitutional rights of San Bernardino County citizens by holding a ruse California Environmental Quality Act hearing in Joshua Tree located outside of the district's jurisdiction.

The project would extract 50,000 to 75,000 acre feet of the east Mojave groundwater in San Bernardino County. It would be diverted west to Orange County via the Colorado River aqueduct. A potential customer for the water is the Santa Margarita Water District. Musser-Lopez' complaint alleges the district wrongfully identified itself as the “lead agency” on the CEQA review for the project. Musser-Lopez asserts San Bernardino County citizens didn't elect Santa Margarita Water District officials nor have a say in the formation of the Orange County District. By representing themselves as having authority over CEQA documents pertaining to projects within the jurisdictional limits of San Bernardino County, Orange County water district is engaging in a violation of the Brown Act, according to Musser-Lopez' complaint.

Her complaint also explores how SMWD and its board of directors, along with their attorneys, acted willfully, purporting to be authorized to schedule Draft Environmental Impact Review hearings at locations not easily accessible to the east Mojave communities that will be most affected by the project. By holding the meetings in Joshua Tree, Calif., east Mojave citizens would need to drive 300 miles round trip, creating an undue hardship and an injustice to the disabled and elderly, according to Musser-Lopez.

She claims the meetings are discriminatory and inflict undue hardship, handicaps and discourage the expression of the citizens to participate by oral statements and comments and violate government codes and certain protections and prohibitions contained in section 202 of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Musser-Lopez claims all of these allegations have caused irreparable harm to her and San Bernardino County citizens. “We can't control SMWD because we didn't create it and they don't belong here,” she said in a prepared statement.

Jeff Williams, board president for the Needles Chamber of Commerce, said the board opted to formally support the project because of what it could mean economically for Needles. It could translate to several jobs and certainly means Cadiz project workers would come into town for food and lodging - both of which would help generate revenue for the city.

Courtney Degener, of Cadiz Inc., said she hasn't seen the complaint but disagrees with all the allegations being made in a press release about Musser-Lopez' action. She claims Cadiz has gone through the proper processes and has abided by all the California Environmental Quality Act requirements.

She said Cadiz has followed all CEQA laws including selection of the lead agency and not selecting San Bernardino County as that lead agency. Cadiz will also work with San Bernardino County through all the permitting processes and keep them in the loop about the project, Degener said.

Regarding meeting places, Degener said it's difficult to select a meeting location anywhere in these areas because it's a long drive for anyone coming or going. “It's just the vastness of the area,” she said.

While there aren't any meetings or open houses planned for the Needles area, Cadiz is encouraging all residents to submit any comments or concerns, Degener said. The CEQA process ensures all written comments are given as much consideration as comments made at meetings, she continued. The comment portion of the process has been extended to March 14.

Written comments, including a return address and contact name, may be sent: c/o Tom Barnes, ESA, 626 Wilshire Boulevard, Ste. 100, Los Angeles, CA 90017; telephone 213-599-4300, Fax: 213-599-4301, or by email to: cadizproject@esassoc.com

Shuttered California state parks may be vulnerable to vandalism

Damage to the visitors center and other structures at Mitchell Caverns in the Mojave Desert has officials working to improve plans to protect as many as 70 other California parks scheduled to close in July because of budget cuts.

Kevin Forrester, a superintendent with the California Department of Parks and Recreation, walks inside Mitchell Caverns at Providence Mountains State Recreation Area. Since the remote park's closure, intruders have cut fences, kicked doors off of hinges and shattered windows and display cases at the visitors center. Critics say it might be a harbinger of what's to come when 70 more state parks are closed because of budget cuts. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / February 22, 2012)

By Louis Sahagun
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Providence Mountains State Recreation Area, Calif. -- California parks officials closed a gem of the state park system last spring, sadly shuttering Mitchell Caverns, a natural wonder that for eight decades had drawn visitors to this remote spot in the Mojave Desert.

Workers hauled away the precious Native American artifacts and historical documents and locked the gates, assuming the area would sit undisturbed until the state could afford to reopen it.

But several times in the last four months, vandals traveled 16 desolate miles north from Interstate 40 to plunder and damage the park's isolated structures. Their actions left advocates for the caverns angry at the state and have officials working to improve plans to protect as many as 70 other California parks scheduled to close in July because of budget cuts.

The worst damage was to the 78-year-old rock-and-mortar visitors center at Mitchell Caverns, the main attraction of the 5,900-acre Providence Mountains State Recreation Area.

Intruders cut fences, kicked doors off of hinges and shattered windows and display cases. They stole metal signs and survival gear, including hand-held radios, flashlights and binoculars. They also stole diesel-powered generators and ripped out thousands of feet of electrical wire used to illuminate the only natural limestone caverns in the state park system, San Bernardino County sheriff's investigators said.

"What happened at the visitors center is devastating and heartbreaking," said Kathy Weatherman, superintendent of the California Parks and Recreation Department's Tehachapi District. She said the caverns themselves were not damaged. The state is taking steps to try to prevent more destruction, including searching for a full-time caretaker, Weatherman said.

The attacks have heightened concerns about possible vandalism at other state parks scheduled for closure. Those 70 parks are among the least used in the state. They represent one-quarter of the 278 that exist across California but tally just 8% of total visits. Many are in remote areas where they are particularly vulnerable.

Officials are seeking anyone with the clout and funds to keep them from being left unguarded after they are closed. "Now, amid budget constraints, we're looking for ways to get caretakers, guardians, local law enforcement and volunteers to protect these precious places," said Roy Stearns, a spokesman for the California Department of Parks and Recreation.

As with so many cuts in California government spending these days, the hope is that once the budget improves, the state will restore services and amenities that have long made the state a rich place to live. But there are no guarantees, especially because just 13 of the state parks and beaches are financially self-sustaining. Fans of many of the parks scheduled for closure are scrambling to try to find some combination of private funds and volunteerism to keep the gates open, fearing that if they ever close it could be for good.

The Mitchell Caverns visitors center, 220 miles east of Los Angeles, had been the home of the caverns' original owners, Los Angeles businessman Jack Mitchell and his wife, Ida. The couple moved to the desert to open the caverns as a tourist attraction in the 1930s and sold them to the state in 1954. A memorial plaque says the Mitchells wanted the state to preserve the area and the caverns "for future generations to appreciate."

Sue Ellen Patrick, 71, granddaughter of Jack and Ida Mitchell, said of the destruction: "My family feels betrayed because the state didn't do what it promised us, which is protect the caves and the heritage."

State Parks and Recreation Department officials decided to mothball the area last May because of two unrelated events. The park's two rangers retired and the state found serious problems with the water system, said Linda Slater, resource interpreter at the nearby Mojave National Preserve. The state couldn't afford the repairs needed to keep the park open.

After valuables were removed, the property was left unguarded, parks officials said.

"The state locked up the place and then walked away, leaving it wide open to troublemakers," said Dennis Casebier, executive director of the nonprofit Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Assn.

Said cattle rancher Rob Blair, 54, who lives within view of Mitchell Caverns: "It's disgusting what's going on out there. These intruders were pretty bold to cut the locks off a state park gate, then tear everything up and steal big-ticket items."

Park officials estimate the damage at $100,000.

Responding to a trespassing call on Feb. 5, sheriff's deputies arrested Christopher Alvarado, 48, of Azusa and Trisha Sutton, 36, of Covina. Deputies said they found stolen items at the couple's campsite near Mitchell Caverns. Alvarado and Sutton were booked on suspicion of burglary, receiving stolen property, possession of a controlled substance and possession of burglary tools, Sheriff's Lt. Ross Tarangle said.

The investigation continues, with police trying to determine whether other people were involved.

Although police reports indicate that a person interviewed at the site said vandals found a key to the cavern gates and destroyed natural features inside, Tarangle said those reports have yet to be confirmed, and parks officials insist they have no evidence the caverns were damaged.

From a distance, the entrance to the caverns resembles two large eyes on a massive rock. Their earliest inhabitants included a Pleistocene ground sloth that stumbled into the darkness 15,000 years ago and left claw marks on a wall. Later, the caverns were blackened with smoke from the fires of Chemehuevi Indians who used them for shelter, storage and ceremonial purposes for at least 500 years.

This week, Kevin Forrester, sector superintendent for the parks department, recalled memories of better times as he walked along a path to the visitors center.

"Look at it now," Forrester said with a sigh. "We've had to board up the windows and weld the doors shut.

"It's going to take a lot of money to bring this place back to life."

Mojave solar-power project sacrifices the desert for the Earth

Industrial-scale solar development is well under way in California's Mojave Desert, where more than 3,500 acres of public land are being covered with BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar-power project. In the fight against climate change, the Mojave is about to take one for the team.

BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar-power-plant construction site is bathed with the light from sunrise as cranes loom over the Mojave Desert and crews work to build one of facility's giant "power towers." (MARK BOSTER / MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS)

By Julie Cart
Los Angeles Times

IVANPAH VALLEY, Calif. — Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.

Clustered nearby are hangar-size assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 public acres. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors — each the size of a garage door — are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar-power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater-processing facility and a gas-fired power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert tortoises, a move some experts say could kill up to one-third of the reptiles.

Despite its behemoth footprint, the Ivanpah project has slipped easily into place, unencumbered by lasting legal opposition or public outcry from California's environmental community.

The public got its chance to comment at scores of open houses, but the real political horse trading took place in meetings involving solar developers, federal regulators and leaders of some of the nation's top environmental organizations.

Away from public scrutiny, they crafted a united front in favor of utility-scale solar development, often making difficult compromises.

"I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection," said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I am now helping facilitate an activity on public lands that will have very significant environmental impacts. We are doing it because of the threat of climate change. It's not an accommodation; it's a change I had to make to respond to climate."

That unusual collaboration — along with generous federal subsidies and allotments of public land — has sparked a wholesale remodeling of the American desert.

Industrial-scale solar development is well under way in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished more public property to this cause than it has for oil and gas exploration in the past decade: 21 million acres, more than the area of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties put together.

If only a few of the proposed projects are built, hundreds of square miles of wild land will be scraped clear. Several thousand miles of power-transmission corridors will be created.

The desert will be scarred, and no amount of mitigation will repair it, according to scores of federal and state environmental reviews.

"The scale of impacts that we are facing, collectively across the desert, is phenomenal," said Dennis Schramm, former superintendent at neighboring Mojave National Preserve. "The reality of the Ivanpah project is that what it will look like on the ground is worse than any of the analyses predicted."

In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team.

Not cheap energy

For decades, America's Western deserts have been dusty storehouses for government scrap, a lode for minerals, a staging ground for tanks and military maneuvers.

But the thrum of industry is afoot, bringing Space Age technology and a sense of urgency.

The BrightSource solar plant stands as an exclamation point in the desert.

The $2 billion plant is an amalgam of gadgetry designed to wring the maximum energy from the sun. Computers continually focus the field of mirrors to a center tower filled with water, which will heat to more than 1,000 degrees. The resulting steam drives an array of turbines capable of generating 370 megawatts, enough to power roughly 140,000 homes during peak hours.

Capturing a free and clean source of energy is not cheap. Solar is the Cadillac of energy, with capital costs and other market factors making it three times more expensive than natural gas or coal.

Ratepayers' bills will be up to 50 percent higher for renewable energy, according to an analysis from the consumer advocate branch of the state Public Utilities Commission.

What has opened the way for such a costly source of energy is the dramatic turn in federal policy. As early as 2005, the Bush administration established generous programs to reward renewable-energy developers. The Obama administration sweetened the pot, offering $45 billion in federal tax credits, guaranteed loans and grants.

On the state level, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger freed large solar plants from property taxes and handed out $90 million in exemptions from sales and use taxes. Under Gov. Jerry Brown, the state invested more than $70 million in clean-energy research last year, paid for by a ratepayer surcharge.

The money has sparked a land rush echoing the speculative booms in mining, railroad construction and oil and gas on Western federal land.

One of the first firms out of the gate was Oakland-based BrightSource Energy, which received $1.6 billion in federally guaranteed loans in addition to hundreds of millions in private investment.

By taking advantage of the available government subsidies, shrewd solar developers can get taxpayers to cover close to 80 percent of a multibillion-dollar project. The rest comes from investors, attracted by what amounts to a tax shelter.

Federal and state officials have used job creation to partly justify their subsidy of solar companies. During the two to three years of a solar plant's construction, most new jobs will go to union tradesmen. But after a plant is built, employment opportunities are limited.

BrightSource's Ivanpah facility is expected to employ 1,000 workers at the height of construction, but that will shrink to 86 full-time maintenance and facility workers once it is up and running.

"What troubles me is that the public has bought the whole solar expansion hook, line and sinker because it's 'renewable,' " Schramm said. "The public would be up in arms if someone was building Disneyland next to a national park."

The environmental cost

Larry LaPre, the Bureau of Land Management's wildlife biologist for much of the Mojave, said some aspects of the project have been carefully considered and painstakingly done. Other approaches, however, are "complete nonsense," among them BrightSource's experimental approach of shearing the tops of desert plants so they fit under elevated solar mirrors. The company calls it "gentle mowing."

"To get another barrel cactus, even a small one, takes 100 years," he said, driving around the Ivanpah construction site. LaPre peered through the windshield and ticked off what living things might be left after the developers finish.

"The birds are already gone. They're outta there," he said. The site "will have plants, short plants, and it will have mice and kangaroo rats and some lizards. That's it. Maybe some more common birds. The insects are an unknown, because you could have massive losses of pollinators because you have all these insects getting burned in the mirrors."

Mainstream environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have been largely mute, having traded the picket line for a seat at the table when development plans were drawn.

The Center for Biological Diversity, one of the nation's most aggressively litigious environmental groups, has not challenged the Ivanpah project. It signed a confidential agreement not to oppose the project in exchange for concessions for the desert tortoise, mandating that BrightSource buy land elsewhere for conservation.

Some 24 environmental groups signed statements largely supporting the aims of solar developers.

Federal officials, solar companies and environmental groups argue that the urgency brought on by climate change has forced difficult trade-offs.

"We did the best we could," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

Land speculators see silver lining in solar projects

Remote, inhospitable desert land gains new value as developers seek sites for renewable energy. Industry observers caution that not every owner is going to make a fortune.

Land Ownership in the Mojave Desert Region

By Julie Cart
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Ripley, Calif.— For Sale: 3,400 acres in the desert.

• No paved roads. Check.
• Isolated. Ideal.
• Land not suitable for farming. Perfect.
• Blistering sunshine. Jackpot.
• Asking price: $34 million. Deal.

As large-scale solar development has spooled out into Southwestern deserts, the modern-day gold rush is about more than renewable energy. Solar companies and land speculators are gobbling up scarce private land in the California deserts, driving prices up 10- to 20-fold, or even higher.

Desolate acreage that a few years ago might have sold for less than $500 an acre can now fetch as much as $20,000 an acre, according to land brokers in the region. Farmers are also getting in on the action. Alfalfa and cotton fields are being converted to solar and wind farms as the industry's big players put together mega-deals.

"It's mind-boggling what's happening," said Jean Laborde of Bakersfield, a former farmer who has been selling agricultural land in the Mojave and adjacent Colorado deserts for 45 years.

Laborde has made a killing lately. About 10 years ago, one of his clients listed 750 barren acres near the town of Mojave, but Laborde couldn't sell it. He finally bought the land himself for $350 an acre. "There's no water, the wind blows all the time," he said. "Everyone said this was a Godforsaken place."

Laborde held on to the property, then sold it a few years ago to someone who intended to build a solar power plant. Laborde won't disclose what the developer paid, but the price today would be $10,000 an acre, he said. "Turned out to be the best deal I ever made."

Real estate specialists warn that not all desert landowners will enjoy a similar payday, but try telling that to old-timers who hear about deals that have turned farmers into millionaires. A recent example is the family of alfalfa growers in Gila Bend, Ariz., who sold 3,000 acres of cropland to a consortium of investors, who then sold the land to Spanish solar giant Abengoa for $45 million.

Earlier this year Ari Swiller, who heads a Los Angeles-based renewable energy company, quietly gathered up 11,000 acres near Blythe — the largest aggregation of separate parcels the Riverside County assessor's office has seen in 15 years. Although the property hasn't been resold, Riverside County Assessor Larry W. Ward said land in the area that typically sells in "the low hundreds" per acre is now going for $2,000 to $3,000 an acre.

That part of the state offers what solar developers require: mostly flat land near transmission lines, and reliable sunshine. Depending on the size of the plant, companies may need a few hundred or a few thousand acres.

Most of the utility-scale solar farms sprouting in the desert are on federal land, which companies lease for a nominal yearly rate. But some developers prefer private property, even at high prices, because public land carries a thick sediment of bureaucracy: a snarl of federal and state environmental laws that requires time-consuming and expensive analysis before the first shovel of dirt is turned.

Private land carries few similar impediments. As long as the parcel holds no cultural resources or protected species, a solar developer can move quickly and avoid costly construction delays.

Solar companies covet private land for another reason. If a renewable energy project on public or private property compromises habitat for endangered species, the developer must buy biologically suitable private land to account for that loss. The Ivanpah Solar Project, for example, requires that Oakland-based developer BrightSource buy 7,000 acres to replace habitat for the threatened desert tortoise.

Solar companies are reluctant to speak publicly about land prices, partly out of fear that they will inflame an already overheated market. Developers try to fly beneath the real estate radar, often buying contiguous parcels under different names or through third parties to avoid igniting a land rush.

Most hire brokers or land scouts who bump along dirt roads trolling for cheap land. They, too, operate quietly and seldom disclose whom they represent.

John Reeder, a land broker with Sperry Van Ness in Ontario, said the market has spawned speculators, "investors who have purchased or control options on land, whose only plan was to sell to a solar company."

The high-priced sales have longtime landowners salivating. But despite the talk of a land rush, most are still waiting to score.

In 1948, Russ Roberts' great-grandfather bought 565 acres of desert scrub near Baker. Roberts said his ancestor was convinced that with the growth of Las Vegas, land along the highway from Los Angeles would become prized.

The gamble hasn't really paid off for Roberts' family, although now, with renewable energy developers calling, they have hope. The family is asking $7,000 an acre.

"We get a lot of tire-kickers," Roberts said. "Calls from big companies in Germany. Nothing solid yet, though."

Bobby Miller handled the $45-million transaction in Gila Bend, a farming outpost in the Sonoran Desert southwest of Phoenix. But he is dismissive of the idea that everyone with a few acres of dusty ground is going to get rich selling to big solar.

"The sale gave everyone the hope that their parcels would be like this," said Miller, who has trademarked the nickname "Dr. Dirt" and has the seen-it-all weariness of someone who has surfed dozens of boom and bust cycles. "I think they are dreaming. I can sell you lots of bulk acreage at $800 an acre."

Other real estate specialists warn that many sales collapse at the last minute as solar developers find that their projects don't pencil out, often because government incentives or power purchase agreements don't come through.

To meet the exceptionally high front-end costs, solar developers are dependent on federal loan guarantees, tax rebates and other subsidies to finance construction of multibillion-dollar solar plants. Renewable energy subsidies have been accelerated by the Obama administration, and the land-buying frenzy is in part caused by the approaching end of some federal incentives.

The complexities involved in solar projects have made for an uncertain market. Larry Cullinane, who has been selling land near Hesperia since 1975, estimated that 90% of all solar land deals fall apart in the first year, leaving the seller to start over with little more than a deposit.

"One of my clients has had close to $200 million fall out of solar contracts for various reasons," he said. "In most cases it's a financial scenario. Some of the owners get fed up with dealing with the solar developers."

Buyers, too, have reason for skepticism. As California homeowners know from painful experience, runaway real estate prices carry a risk. Prices have risen so sharply and sales have been so spotty that establishing the true value of raw desert land is difficult.

Cullinane said two of his clients, brothers in their 80s, own 640 acres they have farmed and grazed since 1940. The men bought the property for $10,000, and are today asking $3.5 million.

The plot is good for solar, but it is 21/2 miles from the nearest transmission line. Cullinane thinks the price is about double its true value — although a naive buyer or a speculator might think otherwise.

Cullinane and some of his peers in the Mojave have also spotted a niche in the solar market: desert tortoise mitigation land. Cullinane now judges land according to how suitable it would be to relocate the tortoise. Class 1 mitigation land goes for $1,200 an acre, he said, while the best-quality habitat might bring $3,000 to $5,000 an acre.

"Just in the Mojave, I've got 20,000 acres, and in Kern County I've got about 15,000 acres for potential mitigation property," Cullinane said.

If large-scale solar projects continue to proliferate in the heart of the tortoise habitat, and with companies required to find two to three acres of habitat for each acre they displace, a reasonable question becomes whether enough private land exists in the Southern California desert to cover the loss.

Less than 17% of the Mojave's 20 million acres is private property.

Janine Blaeloch, director of the Western Lands Project, calls this the elephant in the room of the tortoise mitigation program.

"Just take a look — there just isn't enough land for them to find and buy," she said. "It's the fatal flaw."

O.C. agency revives failed desert water plan

By PAT BRENNAN
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

A plan to boost water supplies using a Mojave desert aquifer is being floated by an Orange County water agency -- nearly 10 years after a similar plan for the same aquifer failed to gain approval, in part because of stiff opposition from a U.S. senator and environmental activists.

The Santa Margarita Water District says its $225 million plan for the Cadiz Valley aquifer is different from a Metropolitan Water District plan scuttled in 2002, and is designed to reduce potential environmental concerns.

The Santa Margarita Water District says its $225 million plan for the Cadiz Valley aquifer is different from a Metropolitan Water District plan scuttled in 2002, and is designed to reduce potential environmental concerns.

But already, opposition to the new project is stirring. And U.S. Sen Dianne Feinstein, who strongly opposed the previous effort, says the new plan might pose "similar risks."

The new Cadiz project would not begin with injection of water into the aquifer for storage, as proposed in the old plan.

Instead, it would use wells to harvest water flowing beneath dry lake beds that would otherwise evaporate into the atmosphere.

A later phase of the project could involve storing water as well, but that is not part of the initial plan, said Dan Ferons, chief engineer and director of operations at the Santa Margarita Water District.

"This project steps back away from that, and puts that as a second phase," Ferons said. "The first phase of this project really looks at the concept of conserving water that would otherwise evaporate through the dry lakes -- and how much water can you pump to balance that, and not affect the environment out there."

The agency's environmental analysis, opened to public comment for an additional 30 days Friday, shows that collection wells for the groundwater could be dug deep enough to avoid disturbing natural springs fed by surface water, and to avoid the root zones of plants.

The idea is to increase water supply options for the district, which, unlike water agencies in northern and central Orange County, has no deep-water aquifer to draw from.

"We propose it to be a 50-year project, so we have the ability to increase the reliability of the water supply without causing environmental impacts," Ferons said. "For us it means we can reduce dependence on the Bay Delta and the Colorado. This basin is independent of the Colorado River."

Another worry for environmental activists in the earlier Cadiz project was the digging of a pipeline across undisturbed federal desert lands.

The new project's pipeline would be built along an existing railroad right-of-way to avoid that concern as well.

But even with the environmental concessions and the emphasis on capturing water, not storing it, the proposal is provoking new environmental concerns.

Former Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook, who has taken a strong stand on many environmental issues, says the new project is "worse" than the old, which would have diverted water from the Colorado River for storage in the Cadiz aquifer.

The Metropolitan Water District board voted down the project in 2002, citing likely reductions in supply from the Colorado that could make the storage plan untenable.

Some board members also expressed concern about the financial condition of the aquifer's owner, Cadiz Inc.

"This one is only about removing water," Cook said. "To me it's just mind-boggling anyone would propose something like this. It's like pulling money out of the bank and never putting any money in. It's like eating your seed corn."

She is also concerned that, though the water evaporating off the dry lakes does not pool at the surface, the moisture itself could have an ecological role that would be disrupted by drawing the groundwater away.

Similar concerns were expressed by Seth Shteir of the National Parks Conservation Association, who also opposes the project, known as the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project.

"It's a bit ironic that the word 'conservation' is in the title of the project, because conservation implies saving something for future generations," Shteir said. "But what this project really is, is an aggressive groundwater mining scheme."

Shteir said he hired an independent hydrologist, who is concerned that both the water district's estimate of groundwater flowing into the aquifer from nearby mountains and its estimate of how much the basin will discharge above the dry lakes could be exaggerated.

And he says he is concerned about potential effects on the nearby Mojave National Preserve.

Scott Slater, president of Cadiz Inc., the owner of the aquifer, said the estimates of water flow into the aquifer, known as recharge, were performed by top firms, and were modeled for far lower amounts than expected so potential environmental effects could be gauged.

"The draft environmental impact report concludes that even if the recharge is only 5,000 acre feet, off by 85 percent, there is still not a single, not one, significant impact associated with the project," Slater said.

A statement from Feinstein, D-Calif., in response to questions about the project did not say she was opposed, but it did strike a note uncertainty.

"When the Cadiz project was first considered in 2001, I felt the groundwater extraction plan threatened the Mojave National Preserve and the surrounding desert," the statement said. "I remain concerned about this newest proposal and that it poses similar risks. I will reserve judgment until I have the chance to fully review the proposal, but I remain skeptical.”

Santa Margarita spokeswoman Michele Miller said the state's environmental review process will further assess potential environmental effects, and could bring further modifications if needed.

"We're doing this to see if it's a viable project," she said.

Opposition Forms Against Sending Desert Water To The OC

Cadiz Valley water project geographic footprint. (ESA)

Mark Gutglueck
San Bernardino County Sentinel

Belated opposition is hurriedly forming to a plan that would pump an average of 50,000 acre-feet of water per year out of the aquifer in San Bernardino County’s eastern Mojave Desert and convey it in a pipeline to Riverside, Orange and Los Angeles counties to replenish the water supply there.

The Santa Margarita Water District, which services an area that is more than 200 miles from the Cadiz Valley, is the lead agency for what is called The Cadiz Valley Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. As the lead agency, the Santa Margarita Water District, the second largest water district in Orange County, will oversee the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review process for the project.

Santa Margarita will work with the Cadiz Land Company in the proposed undertaking, which is a modified version of the Cadiz Water Project floated by Cadiz Land and the Metropolitan Water District more than a decade ago. The original project called for the Cadiz Land Company pumping water from the Colorado River during wet years, storing it in an underground aquifer beneath the Cadiz Valley, and selling as much as 60,000 acre-feet of the native groundwater and Colorado River water mix to the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) in Los Angeles during dry years. That proposal was ultimately rejected by the Metropolitan Water District’s board of directors after conservationists raised concerns over possible environmental damage. The MWD’s rejection of the project led to expensive litigation between the Cadiz Land Company and the MWD.

The concept lay dormant for six years but in 2008, the Cadiz Land Company, also known as Cadiz, Inc., revived the plan in modified form, emphasizing less the drawing of water from the Colorado River and instead proposing to obtain much of the water from sources feeding the area’s dry lakes that are subject to evaporation. The revived project was given a tentative budget of $536.25 million and is to entail the sinking of 34 wells into the desert and construction of a 44-mile pipeline along a railroad right-of-way until it meets up with the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to the Los Angeles and Orange County metropolitan areas.

Through the arrangement with the Cadiz Land Company, the Santa Margarita Water District will receive the lion’s share of the water. In addition, Cadiz, Inc. has entered into agreements with Three Valleys Water District, which provides water to the Pomona Valley, Walnut Valley, and Eastern San Gabriel Valley; the Golden State Water Company, which serves several communities in Southern California, including Claremont; Suburban Water Systems, which serves Covina, West Covina and La Mirada; and the Jurupa Community Services District, which serves Mira Loma in Riverside County.

The Cadiz Valley is located just south of the Marble Mountains and northeast of the Sheep Hole Mountains near the National Trails Highway. Cadiz is home to a former railroad stop along the Santa Fe line, 17 miles east of Amboy and 70 miles from Needles.

The public hearings related to the Cadiz Valley Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project were held in Yucca Valley, which is 85 miles from Cadiz, and in Rancho Santa Margarita, which is 217 miles from Cadiz. Many of those directly impacted by the project, including the Bolo Station Water Company, which serves the Cadiz Valley and the property immediately adjoining that of the Cadiz Land Company, was not provided notice of the hearings.

Among those at the forefront of the movement to oppose the Cadiz Valley Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project is former Needles city councilwoman Ruth Musser-Lopez, who was previously employed as a Bureau of Land Management Archaeologist assigned to the California Desert District and was active in opposing the Cadiz Water Project in its first incarnation.

Musser-Lopez decried the project as one that would confiscate a vital and rare resource from the desert region. She said the Cadiz Land Company and the Santa Margarita Water District had formed an unholy alliance of a rapacious corporation and a quasi-governmental agency that was abusing the approval and environmental certification processes to violate the rights of the region’s residents, and depriving future generations of desert dwellers of access to water.

Both the Santa Margarita Water District and the Cadiz Land Company have represented the project as one that is aimed at “conservation” of water otherwise lost to evaporation. A major selling point is that the project will represent a $138 million boon to the East Mojave’s economy that will directly or indirectly create 2,090 jobs for four years, involving $53 million in wages or salaries to workers or proprietorships involved in building the pipeline and other elements of the project.

Musser-Lopez, however, charged that “the Cadiz Land Company and the Santa Margarita Water District are promising the residents of the desert a short term gain in the form of temporary construction jobs in exchange for this huge long term detriment. What this project is about is having water taken from San Bernardino County’s desert to be used in Orange County. Why should we allow a small company to utilize that water resource elsewhere?”

Musser-Lopez found particular fault with the manner in which the public hearing process for the project was conducted. She said those with the greatest stake in the region’s water supply were practically excluded from participation in the approval process when the hearings were conducted in Joshua Tree and in Santa Margarita at locations far removed from the Cadiz Valley and its residents and land owners.

She further suggested that utilizing the Santa Margarita Water District as the lead agency on the project was a violation of both the California Constitution, the California Code of Regulations and the California Environmental Equality Act. In particular, she cited 14 CCR § 15051 (b) of the California Administrative Code which states, “If the project is to be carried out by a nongovernmental person or entity, the lead agency shall be the public agency with the greatest responsibility for supervising or approving the project as a whole. The lead agency will normally be the agency with general governmental powers, such as a city or county, rather than an agency with a single or limited purpose such as an air pollution control district or a district which will provide a public service or public utility to the project.”

Musser-Lopez told the Sentinel, “This law is binding. I believe this is grounds for an injunction.”

Accordingly, Musser-Lopez lodged a complaint with the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office’s public integrity unit as well as with the San Bernardino County grand jury, alleging “the public was misled to believe that they would get a real hearing with regard to the content of the environmental impact report as the California Environmental Quality Act provides for,”according to a draft of the grand jury complaint acquired by the Sentinel. In that complaint, Musser-Lopez makes much of the consideration that the logical and legal lead agency on the project, San Bernardino County, had been bypassed.

At a hearing for the project held in Joshua Tree on February 1, 2012, Lopez-Musser notes in the draft grand jury complaint, the Santa Margarita Water District’s “chief engineer who was running the meeting made a statement on the record that San Bernardino County authorized the Santa Margarita Water District to be the lead on the California Environmental Quality Act document. If this is true, I did not see this stated in the environmental impact report. There are many people who would like to know when the supervisors made this decision and in what forum.”

Musser-Lopez cited “the unreasonable burden of travel expense to attend meetings 200 and 85 miles from the project site” in her complaint to the district attorney’s office’s public integrity unit.

Moreover, Musser-Lopez alleged, allowing the Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD), the jurisdiction of which does not include the Cadiz Valley nor any portion of San Bernardino County, to serve as the lead agency and oversee the compliance of the project with the California Environmental Quality Act, including processing and accepting the environmental impact statements and reports with regard to the project, is improper and a conflict of interest that was an outright corruption of the process.

“Since its jurisdiction is in Orange County, the SMWD inappropriately misidentified itself as the ‘lead agency’ on the project when the lead agency is obviously San Bernardino County, since our own elected county supervisors have the most authority to approve or disapprove a project which is totally encompassed within the county of San Bernardino,” Lopez-Musser said. “How does being a potential customer of Cadiz Water make SMWD a ‘participant’ in the Cadiz Corporation Project which would justify an Orange County water district being in a position to certify an EIR [environmental impact report] in San Bernardino County? There are lots of potential customers, including San Bernardino County water districts. Interestingly, the Metropolitan Water District, which was originally involved in the project, is not identified as a participant in the project and their Colorado River canal absolutely is a necessary component of the project, making the MWD a key agency on this project. Citizens of San Bernardino did not elect the SMWD board or vote on the formation of their district. SMWD has no right to come up here and try to shove this project down our throats after we already defeated it once.”

Furthermore, Musser-Lopez charged, “They are withholding evidence from the EIR. They are saying the desert’s aquifers are not a complex hydrological system and that the water table is not connected to the springs up above and that the water tables are not connected. There is no evidence to back that. The water tables are connected and there are fissures in the bedrock and granite separating them. What is done to one aquifer impacts the adjacent water tables. It is rightfully San Bernardino County who should be the lead agency and the county planning department should be the lead in the preparation of the environmental impact report.”

Musser-Lopez was highly critical of supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, in whose First District the Cadiz Valley is located.

“He completely abrogated his responsibility as our county’s representative,” she said. “It was absolutely shameful. At those hearings there was no one from San Bernardino County representing us. They left it entirely up to water district officials from Orange County to run the show and dictate how our water is going to be used and where.”

Mitzelfelt has not dwelled on the environmental aspect of the project. His only public pronouncement with regard to the plan was to hail it as one that would provide “an immediate infusion of economic stimulus" to the Eastern Mojave.

Since Mitzelfelt was appointed to the board of supervisors in 2007, the Cadiz Land Company has been one of his major political backers, having contributed a total of $48,100 to his campaign fund.

• On March 13, 2007, the Cadiz Land Company gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $10,000.
• On June 30, 2007 the Cadiz Land Company gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $12,500.
• On November 20, 2007 Cadiz, Inc. gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $5,000.
• On June 18, 2008 the Cadiz Land Company gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $5,000.
• On October 30, 2008, Cadiz, Inc. gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $5,000.
• On May 14, 2009 the Cadiz Land Company gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $4,000.
• On July 30, 2009 Cadiz, Inc. gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $1,000.
• On April 12, 2010, the Cadiz Land Company gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $1,600.
• On October 6, 2010 Cadiz, Inc. gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $1,500.
• On December 10, 2010 the Cadiz Land Company gave the Committee to Elect Brad Mitzelfelt $2,500.

The Cadiz Land Company’s heavy political activity appears aimed at propounding its water resource and water rights accumulation agenda. Ostensibly, the company has represented itself as an agricultural concern, for which the accumulation of water rights was an ancillary aspect. But the company has not been able to sustain itself as an agricultural operation for well over a decade. Beginning in 1986, the company established vineyards, growing organic table grapes exclusively. In 1989, the vineyards were augmented with an organic citrus grove. Seasonal crops, including melons, peppers, squash, asparagus and beans are grown on the Cadiz ranch. The Cadiz Land Company owns, or has options on, 45,000 acres, which, according to the company’s website, are “underlain by high quality groundwater resources.” Roughly 9,600 acres of that property is zoned for agricultural use. In the environmental impact report for the the water plan, reference is made to “approximately 1,600 acres of active agricultural lands” serviced by “seven groundwater production wells located in the central portion of the Cadiz Property that supply irrigation water for the existing agricultural operation.” According to the company’s website, however, the farming concern has yet to grow beyond the 500-acre footprint that was established more than two decades ago.

Despite the fact that since 1993 the company has been celebrating the Cadiz Ranch as “the largest agricultural operation in San Bernardino County,” it has not had a profitable year at least since 1999, and sustained losses exceeding $50 million since 2007. The company’s lenders have propped it up through regular periodic infusions of cash.

In 2008, when the company publicly announced that it was looking to revive the water conservation project, it lost $16 million. At that point, the company’s operating capital had dwindled to $4.3 million. The following year, the company again turned to its longtime lender, L.C. Capital Master Fund, Ltd., for an additional $10 million in operating capital. L.C. Capital agreed to provide that money, and another $5 million the following year.

In 2010, the company continued to operate at a considerable loss, although the company continued to issue stock, and stockholders recouped an annual 4 percent return. Nevertheless, the company courted controversy when its board of directors voted to increase chief executive officer Keith Brackpool’s compensation by 210 percent for fiscal year 2010 and chief financial officer Timothy Shaheen’s compensation by 149 percent.

On June 2, 2011, a majority of the company’s shareholders expressed their disapproval, voting against the company’s 2010 CEO and top executive compensation increases.

In July 2011, San Diego-based Robbins Umeda LLP, a shareholder rights litigation firm, commenced an investigation into possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of the law by certain officers and directors at Cadiz, Inc.

The outcome of that investigation has not been publicly revealed, though it appears that L.C. Capital Master Fund, Ltd. may have lost faith in the company. More recently, Altima Partners, a privately held hedge fund company in England, has emerged as a major investor, having zoomed to being the third largest shareholder in Cadiz, just behind Water Asset Management, which lists as the second largest stockholder in Cadiz. Two months ago, Cadiz saw yet another $11 million infusion of funds, as Water Asset Management provided Cadiz with $5 million and Altima Partners put up another $6 million.

These investors have been brought in, and have so far stayed the course, not because of a belief in the company’s potential as an agricultural concern, but because of representations that the company is on the cusp of transforming itself into a major producer and purveyor of water. Company officials and Santa Margarita Water District officials have openly maintained that they will have unfettered access to the Cadiz Valley’s groundwater and have hinted that they will eventually obtain access to Colorado River Water at Lake Mead.

Questions exist, however, as to whether the company has the right to draft the water it is looking to market to the Santa Margarita Water District, Three Valleys Water District, Golden State Water Company, Suburban Water Systems, and the Jurupa Community Services District as participants in the Cadiz Valley Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project, let alone draft water in the quantities some of the company’s investors have been led to believe the company will secure in the future.

Under the auspices of the Cadiz Valley Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project, Cadiz Land is projecting pumping 50,000 acre-feet of water from the aquifer in wet years.

An acre-foot is equal to the amount of water that would cover an acre to the depth of one foot, i.e., 43,560 cubic feet, or 325,851.43 gallons, approximately the amount of water used by a typical household comprised of four people in a metropolitan area over the course of a year.

While water rights have yet to be adjudicated in that portion of the East Mojave, the Cadiz Land Company under the law pertaining to water use in the state of California would not be able to assert a right to pump any more water than it has established a pattern of using over a several year period in all of its operations. Information on the amount of water being used at the Cadiz Ranch is not publicly available. Agricultural experts, however, have told the Sentinel that under the climactic conditions prevailing in the Cadiz Valley for the type of farming operation there, a 500-acre ranch is not likely to use more than 2,000 acre-feet of water per year on average.

According to charts, formulas and calculation provided to the Sentinel by Dr. Charles Burt of the Irrigation Training and Research Center with the Agricultural Department at California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obisbo, a 500-acre farming operation in the East Mojave combining equal parts of grapes, melons, tomatoes squash and peppers would consume 1,965.2 acre-feet of water per year if sprinkler irrigation were used.

“It depends on the crops you grow, but for what you are talking about that would be a ballpark figure,” Burt said.

Cadiz Land Company officials have privately said they are utilizing closer to 5,000 acre-feet of water per year.

According to the company, the project will proceed.

“The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project is designed to capture and conserve billions of gallons of renewable native groundwater flowing beneath our property in California’s Mojave Desert that is currently being lost to evaporation and salt contamination at nearby dry lakes. Through the active management of the aquifer system and a state-of-the-art groundwater protection program, the project will reduce the loss of groundwater to evaporation from the dry lakes, put this water to beneficial use and create a reliable water supply without adversely impacting the aquifer system or the desert environment,” according to a company statement. “The total quantity of groundwater to be recovered and conveyed to project participants will not exceed a long-term annual average of 50,000 acre-feet per year.”

According to Cadiz, Inc., the project is an environmentally responsible one that should not alarm environmentalists or local land owners.

“The water project will be implemented in two phases,” the company stated. “As part of the first phase of the project, wells would be constructed on our Cadiz Valley property to actively manage the aquifer system and minimize loss of groundwater. The project wellfield will capture and conserve water that is naturally flowing into the system every year and recover water that is moving toward the dry lakes and would otherwise be lost to salt contamination and eventual evaporation. The wellfield will change the hydraulic gradient by pulling water back from its natural downward flow. Safe, established groundwater management techniques will be employed by the project operators to ensure the project is operated without causing harm to the local environment.

“The recovered groundwater would be conveyed to participating water providers from the water project area via a 43-mile pipeline to the Colorado River Aqueduct for delivery throughout the region,” the company statement continues. “The pipeline will be buried underground within an active railroad right-of-way that crosses the project area and the aqueduct. Participating water providers will also have the option to decrease or forego their water delivery in certain years, such as wet years, and carry it over to future years when it may be needed. This carry-over water would be stored in the aquifer system at the project area.”

The company statement hinted at Cadiz, Inc.’s future intention of securing drafting rights from the Colorado River.

“A second phase of the water project would make available up to one million acre-feet of groundwater storage space in the aquifer system for water imported to the project area,” according to the corporate statement. “Under the imported water storage component, water from the Colorado River or potentially the State Water Project could be conveyed to recharge basins on our property in wet years to percolate into the aquifer system, where it would be held in storage. In dry years, previously stored water would be returned to the Colorado River Aqueduct via the conveyance pipeline.”

The corporate statement makes no mention of the possibility of directing Colorado River Water stored in the Cadiz aquifer to the Los Angeles County and Orange County metropolitan area.

In its references to the water project, the Santa Margarita Water District referred to it as one that will draw upon “a potential new water source from a large, renewable aquifer located in the eastern Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County. If implemented, the Cadiz Project would diversify SMWD’s water portfolio and help drought-proof the district to ensure its water demands are met regardless of the state’s supply.”

Both Cadiz, Inc. and the Santa Margarita Water District have succeeded in having the public input period relating to the project closed down as of February 13. As more of those to be impacted by the project have become aware of it, they are seeking, like Musser-Lopez, to revamp the terms of the approval and CEQA processes, and removing Santa Margarita Water District as the lead agency on the project.

“I'm one of over 1,100 property owners in the Fenner watershed that has never been directly informed that the Cadiz project could impact my groundwater,” said Chris Ervin. “I have a well on my Round Valley property, as do many of my neighbors. The purpose of Cadiz's pumping is to induce water from the high country--where our properties are located--to flow downhill to refill the Cadiz Dry Lake aquifer. We are therefore concerned the Cadiz water project may affect the quantity and/or quality of our groundwater upon which we depend in the desert.”

Leigh Adams, who maintains a residence in the Los Angeles County community of Altadena but is also a desert landowner with property in Rimrock above Pioneertown, considers herself a desert stakeholder. She harvests storm water on both her desert property and her Altadena area property.

“I am vehemently opposed to the Cadiz project,” she told the Sentinel. “It is water piracy, a vile theft from desert wildlife and human beings. The concept of water evaporating being “wasted water” is simply ludicrous! This is a lousy idea. Orange County has lush lawns and swimming pools that are thirsty for water. Let Santa Margarita use the money they propose for this project for education of home and business owners around the topic of conservation. Fifty percent of the water in our communities is used for watering lawns. We buy water from other areas to replace the water we’ve allowed to run off into storm drains and gutters. When those areas, the Sacramento Delta, the Colorado River, Owens Valley, run out of water, we propose to steal it from somewhere else. Reprehensible!”

David Fick, of Joshua Tree, said that he was highly skeptical of the project in its present form. “Going back ten to 12 years ago, it was a water banking scheme to put water in and out of the aquifer and this time they are just going to be taking water out. The proponents of the project say there is 32,000 acre-feet of natural recharge into the basin, but they have not proven that and I do not think that is the case.”

Fick said removing that much water from an already parched environment was not a good idea.
“The desert flora depend on the humidity in the air,” Fick said. “The vast majority of moisture in the desert comes from the dew point, which becomes available to the plants as condensation. When the night temperature drops the air’s moisture-holding capabilities, down comes the life-giving water and it is that cycle which waters the plant life. Removing 50,000 acre-feet of water will have a devastating effect on the Joshua Trees and the desert ecosystem altogether.”

Paul Collett, who with his brother owns 40 acres with a well near Bolo Station, which is west of Cadiz and overlies the same aquifer, called the project “a down and out illegal use of our water. This is a violation of our water rights. The Cadiz Company has an entitlement to some of that water but it belongs to all of us out here, including the Bureau of Land Management. To take that water and sell it to somebody that far away is more than a violation of the law. It’s an abomination. The supervisors should know better than to allow Cadiz Land to draw water from everybody and sell it to Orange County for their profit. It is astounding that it has gone this far. Nobody that I know of along the National Trails Highway – Route 66 – was notified of any meetings or the intent to take our water. All of a sudden, we do not have any assurance that the water table we use and which the landowners along this highway depend on for their livelihoods will have water in the future. Something is drastically wrong here.”

Seth Shteir of Joshua Tree is the field representative for the California desert office of the National Parks Conservation Association. He said he had “concerns about the potential impact of this project on ground water resources, air quality, the desert’s ecosystems and the future of the Mojave National Reserve. There are shortcomings in the EIR. It is a document almost 3,000 pages long that raises more questions than it answers. What will the long term effects of this project be on federally designated wilderness areas and what will it be on the Mojave Preserve? How will this project impact regional ground water resources? What will be the effects on air quality? The association raised funds and hired our own hydrologist to look into and examine the Cadiz Company’s claims because we believe their EIR modeling is flawed. Cadiz is claiming the recharge into the Cadiz Valley is 32,500 acre-feet annually, which is greater than the combined recharge in the stream flow of the Big Pine-to Bishop area in the Eastern Sierra Nevadas. Our hydrologist has looked at that issue and thinks the recharge is more around 14,000 acre-feet per year in terms of the closed basin’s desert watershed. Because the modeling is flawed, it is difficult to assess the impacts of the project. It is also difficult to assess those impacts because of the scope and magnitude of the project.

The opposition to the project includes one of Orange County’s leading citizens, former Huntington Beach mayor Debbie Cook.

“This is one of the most outrageous proposals I have seen in my 25 years as an environmental activist,” Cook said. “That in this day and age a private developer would come in and extract groundwater from an ecologically sensitive desert aquifer without any kind of recharge is unbelievable. That a water agency from the coastal area is going that far inland to take water out of the desert, as if the desert has no need for the water, makes no sense. What entitles them to pull that water out of the ground and sell it elsewhere?”

“The EIR has numerous flaws,” Cook continued. “Their recent statements at the hearing in Joshua Tree make it clear they have no intent to do recharge. The EIR makes it clear they will not do recharge and that they are interested only in pulling water out of the aquifer and will never achieve phase two, which they have left for some future unknown entity to do.”

Musser-Lopez said, ““What entitles one small, barely break-even farm, Cadiz, currently using only 2,000 to 5,000 acre-feet of water per year for their operations, the right to sell 50,000 to 75,000 acre-feet per year of San Bernardino County’s water at a fluctuating price of $300 to $700 per acre-foot, for a potential profit of $15 million to $50 million per year? Cadiz claims that they are entitled to this massive amount of groundwater based on the harebrained idea that a small amount of water evaporating on a desert dry lake, after a seldom rain, is a waste of water, and that this small amount of evaporation justifies Cadiz Corporation to take all the groundwater before it has a chance to reach a spot where it might evaporate. Demonstrating the unsound reasoning behind this scheme, Cadiz also proposes to reclaim excess water during wet years by putting it back in the very place they say water is being wasted by evaporation.”

Ervin, Adams, Fick, Collett, Shteir, Cook and Musser-Lopez said they are resolved to a complete reexamination of the project under different terms. “We want to move the hearing process out from under an Orange County quasi-governmental entity to before the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors,” Musser-Lopez said. “We want individuals who represent us and who are answerable to us as part of the elective process to make this decision. We want to ensure an environmental review process that will not exclude data relevant to the conservation of the desert’s most precious resource and we want to have included in the environmental impact report by reference all of the data that was presented with regard to this project ten years ago, when it was rejected.”

Collectively, the project opponents are requesting a 90-day extension of the deadline for public input on the project.

Judie Panneton, a spokeswoman with the California Water Control Board in Sacramento, told the Sentinel, “Regarding the groundwater component of the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery, and Storage project, based on the staff’s initial review, it does not appear that it is subject to the permitting authority of the State Water Board, Division of Water Rights. According to current law, the State Water Board does not have authority to issue permits for diversion of percolating groundwater. In certain areas when groundwater is pumped, it may be subject to regulation by a local entity, like the county or a groundwater management district, even if you do not need a water right permit. The law does require that anyone annually extracting more than 25 acre-feet of groundwater within the counties of San Bernardino, Ventura, Riverside, or Los Angeles to file an annual report of their extraction with either the State Water Board or a local groundwater agency.”