So how do the irresponsible developers in South Orange County plan to supply water to their new housing tracts, when there is now water available? The worst idea possible of course – desalination.
The Municipal Water District of Orange County (MWDOC) and the project participants of South Coast Water District, Moulton Niguel Water District, Laguna Beach County Water District, the City of San Juan Capistrano and the City of San Clemente, are hosting an Open House at the South Orange Coastal Ocean Desalination (SOCOD) Pilot Plant on August 9, 2013, from 12:20 pm to 3 pm. Click here to register. Contact: Tiffany Baca, Municipal Water District of Orange County at (714) 593-5013, tbaca@mwdoc.com.
Please don’t expect these people to tell you the truth about desalination: Ocean water desalination harms marine ecosystems, promotes unsound coastal zone management, wastes energy, and impacts human health.
Click here to learn about the disaster that is desalination.
There are viable solutions to Orange County’s water problems:
- Stop building new homes that we cannot sustain
- Fill in the fake lakes in South Orange County. They waste water and are not needed.
- Replace water-chugging landscaping and promote native plants that are drought tolerant
- Build more reservoirs to collect and store rainwater
- Discourage the construction of more outdoor pools and water fountains
The reality is that we live in a semi-arid desert here in Southern California yet developers and architects pretend otherwise. They need to get with the program! Desalination will have terrible negative consequences just as the ill-fated San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station did. Do we never learn?
Greetings, I thought it might be helpful to clarify how totally corrupt, and criminal, the entity is, that will build the South Orange Coast Desalination Project, the Department of Interior. Listed in Title 43 of the United States Code,(link below), followed by a summation of how corrupt and criminal the DOI is by the CATO Institute.
43 U.S.C.
United States Code, 2011 Edition
Title 43 – PUBLIC LANDS
CHAPTER 12 – RECLAMATION AND IRRIGATION OF LANDS BY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
From the U.S. Government Printing Office, http://www.gpo.gov
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title43/html/USCODE-2011-title43-chap12.htm
CHAPTER 12—RECLAMATION AND IRRIGATION OF LANDS BY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
373.
General authority of Secretary of the Interior.
390h–12j.
Orange County Regional Water Reclamation Project.
_____________________________________________________________
CATO INSTITUTE
Department of the Interior Timeline of Growth –
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline
1849: Congress creates the Department of the Interior. The Senate vote in favor is fairly narrow because of opposition from members who fear federal encroachment on state affairs. Once created, Interior becomes known as the “department of everything else” for its many disparate activities. – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
1862: The Pacific Railroad Act provides land grants and low-interest loans to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific companies to build a railroad connecting the eastern states to the West Coast. Congress grants 128 million acres of land to railroad companies between 1862 and 1871.13 The process, which is overseen by Interior, is hit by the Credit Mobilier scandal in 1872.14 Credit Mobilier—a construction company that is financially controlled by leaders of the Union Pacific Railroad—makes large profits at the taxpayers’ expense. – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
(note) the Credit Mobilier became the Commodity Credit Corporation
1873: Congress transfers oversight of U.S. overseas territories from the State Department to Interior. Over time, Interior becomes responsible for the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa. 1875: Interior Secretary, Columbus Delano, resigns from office in the face of various corruption scandals. An official history of Interior notes that “corruption in the Indian Service rose to new heights” under Delano.15 He apparently secures favors for his son, takes bribes for land grants, and oversees a department that has an array of bogus clerks and agents on the payroll. – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
1880s: The Bureau of Indian Affairs expands to more than 2,000 employees who oversee the federal relationship with Indians living on reservations. The federal approach is to “civilize” the Indian, which “meant transforming him into a Christian farmer embracing the values of 19th-century white America.”16 That misguided policy was combined with a federal Indian bureaucracy that was totally inept. During this era, “the Indian Bureau operated under constant and often well-founded criticism of corruption and inefficiency in its handling of the millions of dollars in supplies purchased each year for the reservations,” notes an official history.17 – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
1902: The Reclamation Act passes with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt and after years of lobbying by special interest groups such as the railroads. The Act creates a Reclamation Service—later the Bureau of Reclamation—to construct dams and other infrastructure to bring water to arid western lands. Reclamation projects are distributed across the states based on political factors, and with little regard to choosing the projects with the highest returns. The Reclamation Act requires the full repayment of project costs by water users—generally farmers—but only a small fraction of the costs are ever repaid.21 – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
1922: News of the Teapot Dome bribery scandal breaks. The Teapot Dome is a federal oil reserve in Wyoming. Investigations reveal that Interior Secretary Albert Fall has secretly leased the Teapot Dome reserve and California’s Elk Hills reserve to particular oil executives and received a $409,000 payoff in return. Fall is convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.24 1928: Congress authorizes the building of Boulder Dam, later named Hoover Dam. Originally, the beneficiaries of western dam projects were supposed to pay back the Bureau of Reclamation’s costs of construction. With the approval of Hoover Dam, however, “large appropriations began to flow to Reclamation from the general funds of the United States.”25 – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
1968: Congress authorizes the massive Central Arizona Project to channel water with huge pumps and aqueducts from the Colorado River to Phoenix, Tucson, and surrounding areas. The project is one of numerous large Bureau of Reclamation projects that don’t make much sense from an economic or an environmental perspective.31 – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
1977: President Jimmy Carter tries to end funding for a “hit list” of 19 water projects being pursued by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. Carter examines the environmental and economic effects of the projects, and he concludes—probably rightly—that they are boondoggles. However, Carter misplays the politics of the issue, and his proposed spending cuts go nowhere in Congress.38 – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
2006: Scandals at Interior lead the department’s Inspector General, Earl Devaney, to declare that it suffers from “a culture of managerial irresponsibility,” including cronyism and widespread ethical failures.45 Devaney charges that “short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of Interior.”46 2006: Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to various crimes relating to his lobbying activities, including his efforts to gain favors from officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Abramoff had been on President George W. Bush’s transition team for Interior, and he had become friends with the department’s deputy secretary, Steven Griles.47 Abramoff’s lobbying goal was to use his BIA contacts to secure favors for Indian clients related to tribal recognition and tribal gaming. Both Abramoff and Griles were sentenced to jail for their respective roles in the scandal. 2008: Government ethics reports condemn leaders at Interior’s Minerals Management Service for various conflicts of interest.48 Interior’s Inspector General reports that MMS employees have close relationships with, and have received gifts from, employees of the energy firms they were supposed to be regulating.49 MMS failures become even more evident in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf
2009: President Barack Obama approves a $3.4 billion class action settlement for more than 300,000 Indian trust fund claims after a long-running dispute.50Cobell v. Salazar had charged the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) with decades of mismanagement of Indian trust funds.51 The 1887 Dawes Act was supposed to set up trust funds to receive royalty and lease payments for the use of Indian lands, but the government’s handling of these funds was a shambles from the beginning. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, who was overseeing the case, concluded that BIA management was “fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.”52 He said that the BIA “has served as a gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century.”53 2011: The Government Accountability Office reports that Interior has between $13.5 billion and $19.9 billion of deferred maintenance costs.54 There are frequent complaints that the national parks and other Interior lands and facilities suffer from deterioration and neglect. The problem is that Interior agencies have accumulated far more assets than they can manage efficiently. – See more at: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior/timeline#sthash.AUglY0jy.dpuf