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FlashReport: Buried Treasure in the Mojave – Water

Cadiz Inc.

Our column on the Cadiz project was one of the top items today on FlashReport, a popular California news aggregator website.  Here’s the lead:

One would think that if a huge underground lake existed less than 100 miles from Southern California water users who live continually on the edge of a water supply crisis, there would be a rush to get that water into Southern California’s water system. One would also think, since this is California, that an extraordinarily challenging level of environmental review would be required before a single drop of that water could head toward users, and that a round of lawsuits would challenge the environmental review’s conclusions.

As it turns out, there is an aquifer holding as much water as Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir, at Cadiz in the Mojave Desert, about 100 miles from Southern California’s population centers. There also has been a rigorous environmental review of Cadiz, Inc.’s proposal to move 50,000 acre feet of that water (enough for 100,000 families) each year to water users from Ventura County to Imperial County. And, of course, there are lawsuits aplenty that ultimately should verify the thoroughness and correctness of the approvals the project has received.

But sadly, there seems to be no rush to use this water intelligently to increase the Southland’s water supply reliability.

Instead, there’s a new environmentalist-spurred idea that the project, already approved under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) – the toughest such law in the nation – should undergo a federal review under the less stringent National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). To do this, they are attacking a deal between Cadiz and the Arizona & California Railroad Co. that would allow Cadiz to put its water pipeline in the railroad’s right-of-way.

That may seem a little arcane, but a more descriptive term for it is Machiavellian.

Read the whole post here.

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