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Blog Commentary: More on the Sandridge/Mojave Water Agency water rights sale

Posted by: Maven on December 3, 2009 at 8:15 am

The On the Public Record blog gets into the Sandridge sale of water rights to Mojave Water Agency, responding to a comment posted at the OTPR blog (original post here):

In the comments, Mr. Kurtz asked:

” I don’t get the outrage over the Sandridge deal. Dudley Ridge is a SWP contractor. No General Fund money ever went into the SWP. It is paid for entirely by the users. The growers have been paying for water, and paying off the bonded indebtedness since the project was installed. Now high water costs and marginal returns made it uneconomic for Voinovitch to continue farming that orchard. So I see three choices: a) walk away from his investment, b) continue to consume water at a loss or c) sell the water to another user who values it more highly. What would you do? Or maybe there’s another choice I am missing.

I have a number of reasons for my outrage; most of them can be sourced to different conceptions of what Sandridge (all water users) was really given back at the beginning. If you think that the ag SWP contractors were being given the use of water to make the desert bloom (actually to ‘reclaim’ the dank and desolate annual marsh of the SJV), then selling the water and pocketing the money violates that expectation. This plays out in a bunch of ways. … “

Read more from the On the Public Record blog by clicking here.

The blog follows up with a another post praising Seth Nidever’s coverage of this issue at the Hanford Sentinel. If you think abstract thoughts about “urban will pay ag and then water markets will take care of everything”, the stories in the Hanford Sentinel will tell you more precisely how that is all going down, says OTPR.

Read the full text of this post at the On the Public Record blog by clicking here.

RELATED: Hanford Sentinel Story Dec. 1

December 3, 2009 · Filed Under Water Rights

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