-WiscoDave
Monday, August 09, 2021
California may curtail pre-1914 water rights
California's State Water Resources Control Board has signaled it may soon approve a drought emergency regulation curtailing diversions within the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region for landowners with pre-1914 water rights -- the most senior of rights in the state.
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I'm wondering what else California can do to fuck that place up more.
ReplyDeletePatience my friend. We haven't even hit Autumn yet.
DeleteI get to hold the beer.
DeleteCalifornia water resources have been traditionally very poorly managed but what has happened over the past two years is criminal malfeasance on a massive scale. Oroville was at 98% of capacity and 118% of its historical average in June 2019 and nine out of twelve of the other major reservoirs in the state were at 92% capacity or better. What should have been a 7 year supply has been wasted. This is a carefully manufactured water emergency and the State Water Board should be in prison. The human cost alone demands it but the financial cost can't even be calculated yet.
ReplyDeleteLocal Pravda publication this morning had an article about the state going after a local farm, now surrounded by the city and struggling to stay in biz, for not filing for water rights and demanding they go through the procedure now and\or buy Gov water. This of course would be the final straw and put them out of biz, allowing more hamster homes to be built.
ReplyDeleteThe farm has been in existence since 1872, the well dates to 1900 or earlier, predating the 1917 State water code.
Appears his father never applied for the rights and not sure why the existing uses were not grand-fathered in or what bs process they used, probably lost the paperwork. Apparently the current owner filed in 2009, but that has been on hold at the Dept of Ecology, he was repeatedly told "It's in process" and led to believe it would be granted.
They want him to do a study which a water consultant said was virtually impossible to achieve, kind of like some of our BS requirements that structures and land drain as well as it did before statehood (Not sure what numbers they would use for the baseline since doubtful any data about how the drainage worked before!!)
The ironic thing is while there used to be several more farms in the area all using wells, pretty much none of them exist anymore.
In Stanislaus County California where I came from, there's a lot of German Baptists and most of them own farms around Modesto. Back in the 80s during the first big housing boom, developers bought up a bunch of farmland at rock bottom prices, except for one family, the Rumbles, that refused to sell, so the developers tried to make their life miserable by building suburbs all around the family farm.
DeleteThe Rumbles didn't give a fuck, they kept farming and the builders kept building. They had their own wells, so they weren't dependent on the City of Modesto for anything.
They held out for years until they finally sold their 40 acre farm for several million dollars, laughing all the way to the bank.