The Politicians Are LITERALLY Depriving Americans of WATER!

Allysia Finley writing in the WSJ

*  *  *

Although El Niño has increased the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, the Golden State’s historic drought isn’t over. Yet the Obama administration has decided to block a privately financed project that could supply water to 400,000 Californians, even though the project has been approved by an alphabet soup of state and local agencies.

(*MIGRAINE HEADACHE*)

The result will be to trap vast amounts of a precious resource beneath the Mojave Desert.

* IDIOT!

This tale of political and regulatory obstructionism begins in 1998, when Cadiz Inc., a Los Angeles-based company, developed plans for a groundwater bank and well-field on 70 square miles of private land overlying the base of the Mojave’s massive Fenner Valley and Orange Blossom Wash watersheds. Over centuries the aquifers there have amassed as much as 34 million acre feet of water, enough to sustain all of California’s households for several years. However, tens of thousands of acre feet percolate into salty dry lakes and evaporate each year.

Cadiz proposed capturing and exporting the groundwater to Southern California residents.

* SOUNDS REASONABLE!

The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project could also help store occasional excess flows from the Colorado River that would otherwise drain to the Pacific Ocean.

* AGAIN... SOUNDS REASONABLE!

Water experts such as those at the Public Policy Institute of California have recommended using groundwater banks to recharge aquifers during wet years and expand the state’s storage capacity. Relative to dams, storing water underground reduces evaporation and environmental harm.

* DUH!

Reviews by hydrogeologists confirm that the nearest spring — located 11 miles away and 1,000 feet above the aquifer — would not be affected.

Nor would fauna, which don’t rely on groundwater.   

After an exhaustive review, the U.S. Interior Department approved the project in 2002, but none of this mattered to various green lobbies and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who complained that the water project would deplete mountain springs and harm wildlife. Sen. Feinstein maintained her opposition.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Cadiz sought to assuage Feinstein in 2008 by reducing the planned annual water exports to 50,000 acre-feet from 150,000. It also negotiated to use the Arizona & California Railroad’s (ARZC) right of way to build a 43-mile underground pipeline to the Colorado River Aqueduct (which feeds water to Southern California). But a few days after Cadiz announced its agreement with ARZC, Ms. Feinstein launched another attack, demanding that the Interior Department “conduct a detailed analysis” of “permissible uses” of railroad rights of way.

* WHY WON'T THIS WOMAN JUST... DIE? SERIOUSLY?! SCALIA DIES... YET FEINSTEIN LIVES? IT'S JUST... WRONG.

The department’s long-standing policy allowed railroads without federal permitting to run power, telephone and fiber optic lines on their rights of way, streamlining environmental review for public works, including wind and solar farms. But in 2011, Interior revised its policy to limit railroad rights of way that were granted in 1875 — such as ARZC’s — to “activities that derive from or further a railroad purpose.”

Curiously, the new rules apply only to projects like the Cadiz pipeline.

(Telephone wires and fiber optic lines, maintenance yards and “related improvements,” could be permitted “on a case-by-case basis” if they helped the railroad operate.)

Cadiz would go on to spend $12 million on capital improvements to benefit the railroad, such as a maintenance access road, turbines to power safety equipment and information systems, as well as state-of-the-art automated fire suppression. No matter. Last October the Bureau of Land Management ruled that the Cadiz pipeline “does not derive from or further a railroad purpose.”

The BLM added that its ruling cannot be appealed because “it is not a final agency decision.”

(A final decision would require a formal regulatory review. But Ms. Feinstein has attached riders to every Interior Department spending bill since 2008 that bar the agency from reviewing Cadiz.)

* FOLKS... SERIOUSLY... IMAGINE WHAT A PRESIDENT TRUMP WOULD DO! (AND AS YOU IMAGINE THAT... QUESTION WHY WHEN THE SENATE IS NOW CONTROLLED BY - AT LEAST SUPPOSEDLY BY - REPUBLICANS THIS NONSENSE IS ALLOWED TO CONTINUE EVEN ABSENT A PRESIDENT TRUMP!)

So the water storage project, long overdue, remains stuck in regulatory purgatory.

* EVEN AS MITCH MCCONNELL IS SENATOR MAJORITY LEADER AND PAUL RYAN IS SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE...

(*SMIRK*)

* FOLKS... NOTICE HOW IT'S ME MENTIONING THIS... NOT MS. FINLEY... NOT THE WSJ.