Watermaster Continues Playing Politics
Continues To Fail Minimal Producers
Continues To Avoid Reality
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Posted: April 12, 2015
Watermaster
What is wrong with these people!!!
Can't the Watermaster see that we are in an long-term 'Exceptional Drought.'
Desert farming of water intensive crops during a drought is lunacy.
The Watermaster, comprising of the Mojave Water Agency's Board of Directors,
voted March 25, 2015 on the adoption of their recommended water plan to be presented before
Riverside County's Superior Court Judge, Gloria Connor Trask. Playing their usual special
interest game of politics, the board once again failed to follow their own staff's leading
recommendation of an additional rampdown of 20-percent; optioning instead to suggest 5-percent.
Coming off of a disasterous 5-year, annual 2.5-percent rampdown, that the
board sold the judge on five years ago, that did little but benefit the farmers, the continued
overdrafting for a half decade apparently led to the staff's first recommendation of a make-up
correction of 20-percent.
The adjudication has been going on for 19-years.
This has been as much a failure of the MWA Board of Directors (the Watermaster)
as it has been for the judges who have largely followed the 'expert' recommendations
of the inept Watermaster. The Stipulation behind the adjudication REQUIRES
under Exhibit "H" that each year that the basin continues to be overdrafted,
that a 5-percent further rampdown is MANDATORY. This isn't descretionary.
This is the law of the matter. The Watermaster, under political concern for the
wealthy farmers, has lobbied the judges' repeated support to violate the binding
Stipulation agreement.
Do the math. 19 years at 5-percent should have us at a rampdown
of only 5-percent being pumped. We are so far off target that there is little wonder that the
serious overdrafting continues at the grievous loss to the victims, the minimal producers who
the MWA Board continues their failure to responsibly represent.
Kimberly Cox, a Watermaster director, after the March 25th meeting,
stated how wonderful it is that the Baja community came together to support the plan
that she and the other Watermaster directors adopted. She has not listened to the public,
only the staff of the Baja Areawide Sustainability Plan that the MWA, under criticism from the
court, was forced to hurriedly organize. Cox's fantasy on cohesiveness is delusional and
couldn't be further from the truth. Her support for the adopted plan only draws out the
continued failures of the Watermaster to tackle an extremely serious problem of Baja groundwater
mismanagement.
This is the same mismanagement that is now seriously threatening portions
of the upper Mojave River area where residential developments have been allowed to be built based
upon future water supply projections for water that doesn't exist. Should the drought
continue with further cutbacks in the state's water from the California Aqueduct, the MWA's
mismanagement will be acutely felt throughout its controlled areas.
The city of Adelanto is drooling at a residential/commercial/industrial
27-square mile
plan
involving as many as 25,000 new homes. The city of Hesperia is considering the
Tapestry Project
of Terra Verde Group's proposed 19,000-plus new homes near the headwaters of the Mojave River.
Through conservation the promoters claim that there is sufficient water for everyone.
City planners claim that they must build for future population growth. With more population
taking the historical water flow of the Baja Basin before it gets there, the situation for Baja
isn't good. The Mojave Water Agency is failing to control the spiraling water
depletion problem.
With Judge Trask dropping the hammer on the MWA last June (2014) for
coming before her court without a detailed Baja Subarea plan with data that she was expecting,
the MWA immediately buckled down in preparating for this year's court appearance with the Baja
Areawide Sustainability Plan. The key plan developer that they acquired to develop the
plan however is the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the keymost supporter of farming and thereby
supporter of continued heavy pumping by farmers. The plan is designed to be as gentle as
possible on the farmers and thereby extend out a prolonged gradual rampdown.
The farmers' overdrafting is a cancer upon the community.
Instead of cutting it out; the plan continues the 19-year past therapy of keeping the cancer
alive.
No minimal producer should find the Watermaster's current plan acceptable
as it only prolongs the wealthy farmers' pumping of the aquifer dry. The farmers'
continued theft of minimal producers groundwater is no longer tolerable.
God has given us a wonderful desert area that had ample water for
residents to draw upon conservatively for thousands of years. As good stewards of the
land, we should have protected that resource. Unfortunately, a dozen greedy
farmers have lined their pockets by stealing that natural groundwater resource for
generations to come.
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