Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 16, 2008
5. Agencies, Programs, People –
Water district president's dual roles raise concerns: Garcia also a political consultant
San Gabriel Valley
U.S.
Long Beach
A New Water Paradigm: Questions for Ken Weinberg
Voice of
Quenching
The Equation: No water, no growth : To spur development, Las Vegas Nevada ’s ancestry — its ranchers and Utah
Flood ordinance may be headed back to Calaveras' drawing board
The
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Water district president's dual roles raise concerns: Garcia also a political consultant
San Gabriel Valley
By Jennifer McLain, Staff Writer
As a political consultant, Leon Garcia earns $133,000 a year from Central and West Basin Municipal Water Districts and
Garcia, the CEO and sole employee of Southwest Management Consultants, is also president of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, a post for which he is paid nearly $25,000 a year.
Experts and observers say that while there's no clear legal conflict of interest, the dual roles certainly create the potential for it.
Garcia says he's sensitive to such concerns and careful to keep his roles separate.
"I'm not a rich man, but I would be willing to give up my contracts if there was a conflict," Garcia said. "When I was appointed, I asked the attorney, and he said there is no conflict."
A review of Garcia's expense records and financial statements shows that ratepayers have been charged for meals, mileage and meetings between Garcia and his consulting clients.
That's troubling to experts, such as Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies.
"I would be very careful if I were using water funds and mixing it up with private business," Stern said.
Stern also expressed concern over whether Garcia votes on issues related to his clients.
Garcia has voted on contracts for clients and has donated to the political campaigns of their top officials, including a $10,000 loan to Central Basin Director Bob Apodaca.
"It is difficult because I have two hats," Garcia said. "But I keep my work as a director separate from my work as a consultant."
Elected office
Garcia has owned Southwest Management, which is operated out of
The contracts he has with
Garcia's water district meeting and travel expense records show that he regularly wines and dines constituents, some of whom are personal clients.
Over the past three years, Garcia has charged ratepayers nearly $800 in mileage costs and more than $1,000 for meals related to more than 60 meetings with clients.
No other director has recorded such expenses.
In two of those years, Garcia spent $34,213 in travel and meeting expenses. The next highest spender was Director William Robinson, who spent $16,239.
Fellow Director Alfonso Contreras questions whether Garcia should be charging ratepayers for meetings with his clients.
"The number of paid meetings is not justified, considering the limited interaction that (Upper water) district has with those agencies," Contreras said.
Such expenditures are legal so long as they are in the district's interest, Stern said.
"He can't be billing his own agency for lunches if he is wining and dining and dealing with them as a client," Stern said.
Garcia said all of the meetings were related to district business.
"I've lost clients since joining the water district," Garcia said. "I am not using my position to try to get more work."
Garcia's spending was among the highest in a review of 12 area water districts and prompted his district to review its travel and expense policy.
Over a two-year period, Garcia spent $82,769 on meetings, meals, mileage and conferences.
Fellow directors spent an average of $45,765.
Contreras believes Garcia may be taking advantage of the district and its ratepayers.
"It is questionable," Contreras said of Garcia's consultant contracts. "He has a potential conflict of interest, and yet he carries on as if he doesn't."
Overlapping responsibilities?
Garcia was appointed to the water district in 2005 and elected in 2006. Since joining the board, records show he has received $186,000 from Rio Hondo, $75,000 from
As a consultant, Garcia represents the water boards and college district with local government officials.
Upper San Gabriel Valley records show Garcia charged taxpayers for mileage with representatives outside the district's coverage area - which extends south to Hacienda Heights, west to South Pasadena, north to Duarte and east to Glendora - but inside the coverage area of clients.
Central Basin Municipal Water District, for example, serves more than 2 million people in 24 cities, including
A number of meetings Garcia attended and for which
On July 25, 2007, Garcia met with South Gate Mayor Bill DeWitt.
On Sept. 8, 2007, Garcia met with Assemblyman Kevin De Leon, D-
On Oct. 10, 2007, Garcia met with Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, D-Norwalk.
West Basin Municipal Water District, based in
On Jan. 21, 2008, Garcia met with
According to Garcia's 2007 scope of workcontract with for
District records show that Garcia charged taxpayers for mileage with representatives outside of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Water Ddistrict's coverage area, which extends as far south as Hacienda Heights, as far west as South Pasadena, as far north as Duarte and as far east as Glendora.
On July 25, 2007, Garcia met with South Gate Mayor Bill DeWitt. On Sept. 8, 2007, Garcia met with Assemblyman Kevin De Leon, D-
Each of these meetings were district related, Garcia said.
In an interview, Garcia declined to provide details the business purpose of specific meetings.
in the business that he had in these meetings, although he said that all meetings are district related.
Contreras said there should be no reason for Garcia to meet with representatives with whom the district does no business and who represent cities and water agencies outside the district's coverage area.
"If anybody should pay him, it should be
Potential conflicts
Garcia first got the contract with Rio Hondo in 2002. This year, Rio Hondo increased its payment to Garcia to $66,000 from $60,000 in 2007, records show.
At
While Garcia received raises from Rio Hondo and
"We mutually agreed that my services weren't needed," Garcia said.
Art Aguilar, general manager at
Garcia held a contract with
"We felt that it was a conflict because of the work that we do with Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District," Aguilar said.
Records show that Garcia, his wife, and Pacifica Services donated more than $25,000 in campaign contributions to
"We have a long term relationship with Bob and wanted to see him get re-elected," Garcia said.
Aguilar, who was the general manager of both West and
Aguilar said that he was especially concerned because Kwan, a director at
"She is voting on his contract and he is voting on her's," Aguilar said. "Whether that it is legal or not, that is not for me to determine. But you have the appearance of impropriety."
Neither board felt it was inappropriate, and the
Over the past three years, Kwan and Garcia have called for votes to extend the other's personal contracts with their boards.
In 2007,
Kwan voted to extend and increase Garcia's contract from $25,000 a year to $60,000 a year on Nov. 27, 2007.
On March 4, 2008, Garcia's district approved an $80,195 consulting contract with Kwan and her company, Media Marketing Services.
She was hired to organize Water Fest, a one-day festival that will be held at
Stern said the votes between Kwan and Garcia do not violate conflict of interest laws, but it does look bad.
"It looks like they are patting themselves on the back," Stern said. "It seems to me that it they are a little too cozy."
Garcia said that he has been careful to avoid any conflict, but may reconsider his voting habits.
"In the future, I will consider recusing myself from these votes to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest," Garcia said.#
http://www.sgvtribune.com/ci_9591423
U.S.
Long Beach
By Brenda Duran, Staff Writer
The former governor of
Kempthorne stressed the critical role of water-supply reliability while applauding
The project developed by the Long Beach Water Department involves turning seawater into drinking water and has been found to be about 30 percent more energy efficient than standard methods, according to officials.
Kempthorne also noted the consequences of the current conditions in the state if they do not change.
"
Kempthorne said his department has found that up to one-third of the nation's crops may be lost due to drought issues.
Kempthorne added his office is also working on a five-year plan for oil and gas by approving more acres of exploration areas that could potentially add two billion barrels of oil.
When discussing energy shortages, Kempthorne said, possible new sources that have been discussed include solar, wind and nuclear.
He noted there are also 173 new pending applications on file for wind energy.
Ryan Alsop, director of government and public affairs for the Long Beach Water Department said he found Kempthorne's speech to be "poignant."
"We were pleased with his support of our desalination project," said Alsop.
After his address, Alsop and other water officials took Kempthorne on a tour of the desalination facility in
http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_9583024
A New Water Paradigm: Questions for Ken Weinberg
Voice of
By Rob Davis
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BLINKLISTSaturday, June 14, 2008 | Ken Weinberg serves as director of water resources for the San Diego County Water Authority, the agency that delivers water to the city of San Diego and 23 other member agencies throughout San Diego. If you’re drinking tap water, the authority had a hand in getting it here. Weinberg oversees the authority’s long-range planning, conservation programs, environmental compliance and demand forecasting. "All of those things that seem to be the topics of discussion," he says.
We sat down to talk with him about
The supplies are tight, and Weinberg and other officials are calling for the region to make long-term changes in its behavior to save water. Here's why.
On a scale of 1-10 (1 being ideal and 10 being bad), how bad is our water supply situation right now?
This year I’d put us around a 7 moving to an 8.
Why?
As you look at how the conditions are setting themselves up, clearly we will be able to get through this year. But because we’re looking at dry conditions again this year, we’re looking at the restrictions on pumping, we’re looking at this being a multiyear event. We’ve got storage supplies that are being drawn down. We may not feel the immediate effects, but we’re clearly in a serious situation.
Can you break down the components of that? What has pushed us up the scale?
It’s really years in the making. You can bring it back to 1982 and the referendum on the
To a large extent, you could bring that back to the Supreme Court case
And you have all the attention on the delta. We knew there was a problem. We spent the last 10 or 15 years talking about it, and it didn’t get solved, and finally the whole ecosystem started to collapse. Now we’re faced with a diminishing supply on the
We know the future. We know where we need to go. But it’s going to take time, and we’re vulnerable now.
In the 1987-1992 drought, we were saved from mandatory rationing by miracle rains. Is there any hope that there’s something possible like that this time? Or are we dealing with a new paradigm?
We’re dealing with a new paradigm. The problem now is that you have restrictions (on the delta to protect endangered fish). Even if you get the weather to cooperate, you’re not going to get as much water. The essence of the problem is that a lot of the supply planning on Metropolitan’s part was to use reservoirs as a way to get through periodic dry years.
You were going to be able to put water in those reservoirs seven out of 10 years, statistically. Now, with Judge Wanger’s ruling, it’s three out of 10 years. And that’s the problem. You can’t rely on storage for extended dry periods. The quickest way to protect that storage is to reduce demand for water. And that will get us through until there’s a structural plumbing fix that will allow us to get more out of the delta when the weather cooperates.
What’s the significance to you of the governor’s drought declaration?
It’s an acknowledgement that this is a serious issue statewide, and that action needs to be taken on a statewide basis. Because we’re all sharing these critical water supplies. It’s pretty significant. It’s good to see the state stepping in.
This weekend, you’re taking a walk on the beach. And there’s a little lamp there. You rub it, and a genie comes out and says: Ken! I’ll give you three wishes about the world of water in
Let’s see. A peripheral canal-type of solution in the delta. Large-scale seawater desalination. And efficient irrigation. Those are the three things, the key pieces to getting some certainty in long-term reliability in our supply in
How far does Poseidon’s plant in
It’s a big piece of the future supply. There’s nowhere we can go and get 56,000 acre feet of water. It’s significant just in terms of the amount of water you can get. But that in and of itself isn’t the answer. We have to change the way we use water. And that really means being efficient in landscaping -- people just coming at this from a whole different perspective in the plants they choose.
We’ve talked about that a lot, the idea of outdoor water conservation. It has clearly been identified. And the solution is there. How do you get people to make that long-term behavioral change?
You have to make it easier for them to do it, you have to show them how and have the help out there. Those are the pieces we’re trying to put in place. We’ve been successful in indoor water conservation -- toilets, showerheads, washing machines. To make landscape conservation work, people need to know you can do things that still are aesthetically pleasing and have low water use. There’s a regulatory component we want to work on with land-use agencies so developments are doing things in an efficient way.
Do you see the need here to take the same steps that have been taken in places like
I don’t think we need to be exactly where they are. But we need to take some steps to ensure that when new homes are going in that they are balancing their landscaping and meeting some efficiency standards. And we need to reduce the amount of turf. We’re trying to do that through incentivizing people.
Almost a year ago, the water authority called on residents to save 20 gallons of water a day. Have they?
It depends on the month we look at. It’s really tough. When we looked at January, February, we were saving water. But we also had cool, wet weather. What we saw in March and April, the temperatures started to climb, and we started to eat into that amount we were saving. The rubber is going to hit the road in July, August, September. That’s when we’re going to know whether people are stepping up and using less water.
The authority’s call for savings through that 20-Gallon Challenge was somewhat a polite, neighborly call: Hey, it’d be nice if you did this. The new billboards (part of a $1.8 million water conservation advertising campaign) have a cow’s skull on them. Is there a conscious push to be more strict and more threatening?
Yeah, I think that’s a good observation. Clearly, the call for conservation and the intensity evolves as the situation does. A year ago, we were on the front end. We knew we were facing some potential constraints. As the situation deteriorates, you get more concerned, and I think you’re seeing that now. 2008 was another dry year. Looking out at 2009, if this continues, and we’re not getting the savings we need, it’ll have to be mandatory. Because the consequences of failure will impact the economy. We’ll have to take actions that affect different segments of the economy -- and the preference is to wring out the waste first.
Sitting here in June 2008, how likely is mandatory rationing?
If we get another dry year in 2009, there’s a good likelihood of rationing, just to protect storage. Because you don’t know when the end is in sight.
If the writing has been on the wall about our water supply, and yet we’re still experiencing this vulnerability here, is that a failing of the authority? Could you have seen this coming and prepared for it more than you have?
In 1991, because we faced more severe ramifications in Met’s service area, the message hit us really hard. Whether it was building more storage, the [Imperial Irrigation District water] transfers or the canal lining. We’ve done as much or more than anybody in the state on conservation. We got it. Part of it is that it certainly takes a long time. We operate in a very regulated environment, you have to have a lot of stakeholder involvement. It takes a long time to move a project. Everybody in water knew there was a problem on the delta. But the solution eluded everyone. That’s the issue. That inaction has put us where we are -- in crisis. And out of crisis, you hope that action takes place.
What would the situation be like today if after the 1987-1992 drought the authority had said: Whew, glad that’s over with. And just gone back to business as usual.
I think some parts of the state did that. We’ve invested billions. Metropolitan has invested billions, and
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2008/06/14/news/weinberg061408.txt
Quenching
The Equation: No water, no growth : To spur development, Las Vegas Nevada ’s ancestry — its ranchers and Utah
The congressman from
The
Bugsy Siegel?
“My sense of curiosity is raised in the fact that
“Well,” Harry Reid replied, “the entrepreneur was Brigham Young.”
“Oh, I thought it was a Jewish fellow that started the first casino ...” The congressman pressed on, struggling to understand the
It seemed incomprehensible to the House Resources Committee in 1997 that Reid and the other members of the
Not one member of the House Resources Committee seemed to appreciate how the federal government had come to own much of
The answer was water, more specifically the lack of it.
But the bill that Senator Reid and then-Congressman John Ensign presented to the House of Representatives had a formula to change that.
Embedded in it was a shadow plan to get more water.
• • •
Reid was right. Brigham Young was
He promptly dispatched his followers to colonize it.
When the ultimate borders were drawn,
Binding this new yin and yang was water, or lack of it. No railroad promotions, no federal farm act could change the fact that both
Water was so short that in 1880, fledgling
More than a century later, Nevada was every bit as dry except for the fast-diminishing 300,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water delivered to Las Vegas every year compliments of Uncle Sam.
The beauty of this water was that, when asked its cost, a Southern Nevada Water Authority information officer shrugged and said, “Basically free.”
And so as Reid put before Congress a bill that proposed “orderly disposition” of federal land for yet more growth in what was the fastest-growing city in
The bill envisioned a way to get that, too.
Advising the
Back in Nevada, the team was completed by Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and her mentor, Richard Bunker, gaming lobbyist, civic leader, Mormon bishop and head of the Colorado River Commission.
Their plan: Persuade the federal government to sell land and use 10 percent of the proceeds for new pipes and such.
To fill the new pipes, the group was lobbying hard elsewhere to get Southern Nevada more of that federally subsidized, “basically free” water from the
If that failed, the group was also sitting on an incendiary scheme to pump the
That water would not be free.
It would require a multibillion-dollar pipeline running hundreds of miles north, through Clark, Nye,
Moreover, the danger of that plan was that it would drain the life out of Brigham Young’s old empire.
• • •
Few men understand old Deseret and new
The Senate majority leader was born in 1939 to an alcoholic hard rock miner, also named Harry Reid, in a Mojave mining camp roughly 60 miles south of
His mother worked as a laundress for the brothels serving Reclamation men working south of Hoover Dam. Reid was not yet a Mormon. There were no churches in Searchlight,
Once Reid began hitchhiking to high school in
After he transferred to
Few passages in Reid’s new biography, “The Good Fight,” are as touching as those recounting their elopement.
As she worked to put him through college and they started a family, the couple were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
When Reid got into law school in
And when Reid returned to Nevada to take the bar exam, his old high school coach — now head of Nevada’s Department of Human Services — met him at the Reno airport and pressed a crisp $50 bill into his hand to help with food and lodging. In 1970, O’Callaghan ran for governor and Reid, just 30, ran for lieutenant governor.
Both men won, but as O’Callaghan went on to become one of the most beloved governors in
After watching Muhammad Ali train at
His mother was on the phone.
“Your pop shot himself,” she said.
A bid for the Senate failed, as did another for mayor of
O’Callaghan later described it as the most important appointment of his governorship, saying, “Harry led the commission through its most challenging time.”
Reid describes himself as having “wandered into some terrible fun house.”
Modern profilers of Reid invariably stop at star-struck mentions that he was the model for “Mr. Cleanface,” Dick Smothers’ character in the film “Casino,” Martin Scorsese’s comic opera about the last gasp of mob Vegas.
Reid claims to not have seen the film, though he proudly takes credit for having signed in 1978 the exclusion order banning the real-life model for the movie’s rapturous killer, Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, from entering a Nevada casino.
Bomb threats became so commonplace, Reid says he lost count. But in 1979, the unsealing of FBI tapes in which a mobster claimed to have a “Mr. Cleanface” in his pocket put the Mormon gaming commissioner under suspicion.
Reid wanted to quit.
“Listen and listen close,” O’Callaghan told him. “You quit this job and you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
When another prominent Mormon, former Clark County Manager Richard Bunker, was appointed head of the Gaming Control Board that same year, one of his first jobs was to investigate and clear Reid.
Then, in 1980, it fell to both Mormon crime-busters to rehabilitate Frank Sinatra, and
Back in 1963, Sinatra had lost his
The Strip needed Frank back. Harry Reid and Richard Bunker saw that it got him.
The stint revived Reid’s political fortunes and he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982. By the time he’d risen to the Senate in 1987, there was a new political reality to go with the at-least-notionally new, clean Vegas. As historian Michael Green puts it, whatever Reid’s faith might dictate about gambling (Mormonism eschews it), “representing gaming is as basic to being a senator from
Reid and Bunker had
In
Two years later, as President Clinton considered a 4 percent tax on gross gambling receipts to fund a child welfare program, Reid stood on the White House lawn and proclaimed that if
• • •
No state, not even
As Reid gained leadership of the
A placeholder of a state was about to become a real state.
But nothing about the push would have been possible without
A large, slightly palsied and professionally discreet man, Faust ended his on-the-record interviews with the media shortly after Reid’s bill passed in 1998. But as Faust’s visibility decreased, his influence intensified.
If you want water, or land, or to keep conservation development-friendly in the West, you become his client.
“He’s a genius,” says client George Caan of
He drafts bills, teaches clients how to testify at hearings, shows up and bolsters them as they do it. He generally knows their political representatives better than the clients themselves, and although those politicians come and go in
Almost two decades earlier, when Reid was still holding gaming license hearings, Faust had drafted the blueprint for the Southern Nevada Public Management Land Act.
It was the Santini-Burton Act of 1980 and it provided a prototype in which proceeds from sales of marginal federal land around
The bill’s originator, Representative James Santini, recalls it was a win-win for
Although cash from the sales went north and to both
By 1997, Santini was long gone from office (defeated by Reid). A new, proud and politically connected
Again Faust was on hand to assist with the drafting.
The new bill had survived its first, largely unpopular year in Congress under the stewardship of John Ensign. In 1997, Reid assumed political custody and began shaking the problems out of it.
As it evolved under Reid, it mandated that recipients of funding include habitat restoration on the
To see the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act heralded as a source of parks, trails and shooting ranges for the people of
For the version in which it’s the first of a series of federal giveaways to Reid cronies and Faust clients, go to the Western Lands Project, The Los Angeles Times or The New York Times.
To hear how it checkerboards wilderness with development in a way that will strand and destroy wildlife, go to Defenders of Wildlife.
No bill divides
“At first, Interior hated it,” says the water authority’s Mulroy.
As it happened, Mulroy hated early drafts, too. Before she would support the bill, she had a condition. If
“Look,” she’d say to the
Mulroy was also a Faust client.
A clause was inserted into the bill. Ten percent of proceeds of the land sales would go to Mulroy’s water authority.
To see what difference a clause can make after 10 years and the sales of 47,000 acres of land, go to the Bureau of Land Management’s bookkeepers. According to their tables, as of March 31, at $285 million and counting, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has received a cool $135 million more than the next-best-funded recipient, the State Education Fund.
Because Reid, Faust and Bunker are prominent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act became law in 1998 — and in 2002, 2004 and 2006 led to a series of bills targeting land in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties — jokes started circulating around Washington.
The team that banned the mob from Vegas had replaced it with the “Mormon mafia.”
Except its crucible of power now lay as strongly in
• • •
Cash from sales of marginal scrubland could buy new pipes. There remained the question of getting the water to put in them.
The obvious choice was more of the “basically free” water from the
By 2004, they’d succeeded and
When the first bad year on the
The next year, 2000, was also bad on the
“We’d had cyclical high- or low-flow years before,” Mulroy says. “Those three years were nothing out of the ordinary.”
In 2002, the
Still, Mulroy didn’t panic.
By 2003, with total water storage on the
They could ride out another bad year.
But in August 2003, an oceanographer at the California Institute of Technology issued a white paper commissioned by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
The “El Niño” storms that had flushed the
Judging from ocean currents, he predicted there would be drought in the
And the year after that.
And the year after that.
The
The upshot for
Mulroy today may regret the news release calling the Metropolitan Water District a “rogue agency” and, shortly afterward, accusing the Caltech scientist of having accepted a bribe, but as experts began seconding his predictions, there was no time to wallow.
By February 2004, Mulroy was back before her board asking for more millions to murder more lawn.
It was a stopgap at best. That September, Mulroy was in
She rolled out her dilemma before Congress: She had killed more than 33 million square feet of ornamental turf, so much that she had driven down total water consumption in Las Vegas while the population kept ballooning at a rate of 6,000 or so a month.
There were now 1.6 million people living in greater
Plan A on the
Plan B — to take ground water from rural
Mulroy needed another clause dropped into another land bill, this one aimed at federal land releases and protections in
This time she needed Congress to instruct the Interior Department to clear passage for
• • •
Before Reid became a senator,
Others had tried during the previous 60 years, none harder than passionate park advocate Senator Alan Bible. “Alan Bible represented
The most logical setting for a park was
In good years, Wheeler’s snowmelt is so generous that a hardworking cattle rancher can get in four crops of alfalfa before frost. During summer, cattle herds could forage across hundreds upon hundreds of miles of Interior-owned land.
In 1985, Reid took up the cause for a park. The Sierra Club backed it. So did urban romantics. But as Reid got to
“I didn’t know the intensity that people had,” Reid recalls. “It was like it was some kind of a plot, you know, like putting fluoride in water.”
Local support grew for the idea after the closure of Kennecott Copper Mine drained
Moreover, Green notes admiringly, Reid negotiated the kind of park that allowed grazing.
With the formation of the
• • •
After the passage of the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act in 1998, a succession of land bills introduced by Reid and the Nevada delegation churned through Congress every two years or so. With the passage of each, land deemed marginal or necessary for development was released while choice parcels of wilderness were selected for protected status: 440,000 acres in
The bills also cleared the way for a
As hope of new Colorado River water for
The people who stood to lose their livelihoods were the very ranchers whom Reid had persuaded many years before to back him in creating the park.
Reid’s early mentor, Mike O’Callaghan, who was now editor of the
Six days before he died in March 2004, one of his last “Where I Stand” columns noted with disgust that the pipeline “isn’t a new idea ... Big bucks and the drought have dragged it out of hiding again.”
O’Callaghan then reprised his original stinging condemnation from 1990. “We shouldn’t allow our greed ... to destroy the families who are descendants of men and women who made this a great state. People who have carved out a living in this dry climate deserve better treatment.”
• • •
Reid choked back tears at O’Callaghan’s funeral as he said, “If you were right and fighting for it, Mike was by your side.”
Seven months later, the senator born in a Mojave shack with no running water backed Mulroy, not the ranchers championed by O’Callaghan.
Mulroy got her pipeline clause inserted into Reid’s land bill that year.
But just before the vote, Utah Senator Bob Bennett saw the need for another clause.
The valley east of Wheeler Peak, a key pipeline target, is shared with
Bennett phoned the
When the Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation and Development Act of 2004 passed, Mulroy got congressional clearance for her pipeline.
But thanks to Bennett’s clause, the act also stipulated that before
The Mormon mafia — the Nevada Mormons — had just heard from the fatherland.#
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/15/equation-no-water-no-growth/
Flood ordinance may be headed back to Calaveras' drawing board
The
By
SAN ANDREAS - After homes along Cosgrove Creek in Valley Springs flooded two winters ago,
That same year, the
Now, county officials, nudged on by federal and state regulators, are going a step further and proposing revisions to the county's flood damage prevention ordinance that would require any new homes in flood danger areas to have their lowest floor at least two feet above high water. In some cases, existing homes undergoing substantial renovation would also have to raise their floors.
The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors will consider the ordinance revisions when it meets Tuesday.
Calaveras County Community Development Director Stephanie Moreno said she didn't know why the county years ago failed to adopt an ordinance to keep people from building living rooms below flood level.
She said federal agencies give incentives for counties to adopt such rules. Passing the revisions to the flood ordinance will reduce the flood insurance rates set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Thus, even owners of existing homes below flood level will benefit from moves to prevent flood damage in new construction.
The proposed ordinance would not force owners of existing homes to upgrade unless they do substantial improvements costing at least half the market value of the home. The ordinance also grants exemptions from the proposed requirement for home improvements needed for health or safety reasons.
Jeff Davidson is a builder and a member of the Calaveras County Water District board of directors who represents the Valley Springs area. Davidson has been one of the area's most prominent advocates for aggressive county action to reduce the risk of flooding in Valley Springs.
"I never understood how those houses were allowed to be built, like on Grouse (Drive)," Davidson said, referring to a street near Cosgrove Creek in the La Contenta development.
County officials admit that elevating homes two feet above high water level would add to the cost of construction. Such homes are elevated on either posts or berms and are common in
Davidson said the two-foot rule seems "reasonable," but it won't solve the threat flooding presents to hundreds of existing homes in Valley Springs. For that, his hope is that county and federal officials move ahead promptly with a $10 million flood control project that would hold the waters of Cosgrove Creek in detention basins and thus reduce the peak level of floods.
That project is still in its early stages, said Dave Killam, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers office in
Meanwhile, more immediate efforts to clean sediment, brush and debris from Cosgrove Creek have been hung up for more than a year. The Army Corps has not yet issued a permit to the county for the cleanup because county officials have not yet provided additional information the corps is requiring on wildlife habitat in the area.
A biologist who tried last fall to complete a needed study was run out of the area by a property owner accompanied by a large dog. Once winter rains began, the season for such studies ended. Now county officials are aiming to complete the work before winter 2009.#
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080616/A_NEWS/806160316/-1/A_NEWS
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