“All wealth flows from the land”

The word for the day is “Detritus”

June 8, 2025 (Originally published)

By Miguel T. Tonnis

Publisher’s note: I would respectfully suggest that the good people of the Indian Wells Valley, including the residents of the City of Ridgecrest, use this post and tomorrow’s post as a big hammer, share it with your friends, and beat the “Bad Guys” over and over on their tiny little heads until they figure it out. Otherwise, you’ll have nothing left to own.

Please send any comments or corrections to publisher@roadrunner395.com

Prologue – What in the hell were they thinking?!

Someday far off into the future, in the year 2525, archeologists and geohydrologists in space suits will uncover a large pipeline buried under the rocks and sand of the scenic eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range, running along an old, abandoned Highway called 395, and they’ll determine it was called the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Like a 200 mile-long 8 foot diameter straw, it was used to suck all of the water out of a place called Inyo County, and it became dry and dusty at Owen’s Lake.

The humongous pipelines, there are 2 of them, transported over 100,000 acre feet of water per year to the south in order to feed the growth of a city called Los Angeles, which was submerged by the Pacific Ocean during Al Gore’s nefarious climate change scheme, which melted the Earth’s icecaps. As we now know, Gore planned to rule the world with his creation called the “internet”, which was known to Hollywood as AI-satan and Agenda 2030.

The archeologists and geohydrologists will also discover a tiny, itsy bitsy 12″ pipeline carrying water to the north to a place called China Lake and Ridgecrest, high up in the high Mojave Desert. China Lake was a navy base, and you’ll have to figure out why the U.S. Navy would build a navy base in the desert right next door to Death Valley.

The tiny-weenie itsy-bitsy pipeline ran roughly parallel to the big humongous 8′ diameter pipelines carring water to the south, it was like a two-lane highway but with lots of water going one way and a few drops going the other.

They’ll also discover that the little pipeline was connected to a huge catacomb-like labyrinth of reservoirs and canals over 500 miles long on the western side of the Sierras, running all the way through the San Joaquin Valley from Northern California, and it was called the California State Water Project, and the scientists in archeology and hydrogeology wearing space suits exclaimed, wait for it, “What in the hell were they thinking?!“.

Welcome to “The Great Indian Wells Valley Water War” in the year 2025

Let’s get kinda serious. I’ve been following and reporting on “water wars” since 2010, well before the passage of SGMA, California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The new law was passed under Governor Jerry Brown in 2014, and as a reference, I go back in my memory bank to 1965, when the 2nd Los Angeles Aqueduct was constructed.

This story is an extension of the famous water wars of the early 1900’s and William J. Mulholland, who died a broken man.

William Mulholland (September 11, 1855 – July 22, 1935) was an Irish American self-taught civil engineer who was responsible for building the infrastructure to provide a water supply that allowed Los Angeles to grow into the largest city in California. As the head of a predecessor to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Mulholland designed and supervised the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile-long (375 km) system to move water from Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley. The creation and operation of the aqueduct led to the disputes known as the California Water Wars. In March 1928, Mulholland’s career came to an end when the St. Francis Dam failed just over 12 hours after his assistant and he gave it a safety inspection. – Wikipedia

Full Disclosure: the Author of this Post is Extremely Biased and has no financial interest in California

I’ve witnessed the construction of the 2nd Los Angeles Aqueduct in the 1960’s, and regularly flew my hang glider from the upper, newer aqueduct down to the older acqueduct in the early 1970’s, and I’ve watched Los Angeles grow from 2 million to 20 million residents.

I’ve also experienced firsthand the rapid growth of Phoenix Arizona over a period of 30 years. When I moved to Phoenix from California in 1980, just as the Central Arizona Project canal system was being constructed, the Phoenix metropolitan area was roughly 450,000. Today the population has grown to 4 million.

All told, I have nearly 60 years of research and first-hand awareness about water projects, including watching my father dig a well in the Indian Wells Valley when I was a young lad. How amazing it was to see water coming up from the depths beneath the desert floor. We had plenty of water back then, and we still do if a group of qualified groundwater professionals called the “Technical Working Group” are correct, as I believe they are.

This is a good guys versus bad guys story, or more like David versus a platoon of Goliaths.

These are the bad guys (A cast of characters and their attorneys):

• Ridgecrest, a dusty desert town formerly called Crumsville (“Freemasons!! – you can’t make this up!”).
• The US Navy (“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”)
• The Department of Justice (“The Department of Injustice”)
• The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (“The Cadillac Desert”)
• California’s Department of Water Resources (“Save the Smelts”)
• Inyo County (“The Dead Zone”)
• Kern County (“Freemasons too!”)
• San Bernardino County (“Zombie Apocalypse”)
• China Lake (shhh!“The Secret City”)

The good guys? A tiny water district overseen by five very honorable elected public officials (“Remember the Alamo”)  

Bad Guys, please read the above paragraph twice so it will absorb fully in your tiny little brains, and don’t feel insulted Bad Guys, I had to read it five times and I don’t care about no Bad Guy’s feelings!

This is the reason why AB 1413 and AB 1466 were written and produced by the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority and Capitol Core. I can’t prove it, but that’s my thinking. The GA is literally trying to perform an “end-around” the science and force an infeasible 50 mile long pipeline down your throats and calling it “the AVEK imported water project”. I’ll bet Phil Hall a dinner at Texas Roadhouse that I’m right about this if he’s game.

The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) requires local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) in the state’s high and medium priority basins to develop and implement Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs) or Alternatives to GSPs. These GSPs and Alternatives provide roadmaps for how groundwater basins will reach long-term sustainability. – Department of Water Resources

This is a fact: The City of Ridgecrest isn’t running low on water and the Indian Wells Valley doesn’t need to import water via the State Water Project in a puny 50 mile long $300 million dollar pipeline. There are other solutions, one of which is a win-win-win, and we’ll blame Kern County in large part for letting the Indian Wells Valley get into this mess.

Who can we blame for the pistachio farming?

You can imagine how horrified and upset I was when I returned to the Indian Wells Valley in 2010 and saw over 3,000 1,600 acres (Mohave Pistachios owns 3,000 acres of land planted with 1600 acres of pistachios) of pistachios planted along the base of the Eastern Sierra along Highway 395. It was awful, how could the Kern County Department of Planning and Natural Resources let this happen?

Dear Kern County Planning and Natural Resources Department, please take note: The Mojave Desert has become an environmental disaster, and you (and the BLM) are allowing the destruction of thousands of acres of natural desert habitat, including the homes of the Desert Tortoise.

Not only did Kern County let this happen, they previously promoted the desert as a place for San Joaquin Valley farmers to grow pistachios. This was before SGMA came along in 2014.

Kern County also promotes the Mojave Desert an ideal location for “clean, sustainable” energy companies to plant windmills and scrape the desert for solar farms, and California City has become a mecca for huge warehouse pot farms in addition to a space port.

Everyone must be high at Kern County’s Department of Planning and Natural Resources.

All wealth flows from the land – “federal reserve water rights”

Truer words have never been spoken. In Ridgecrest’s case, growth is neither feasible nor desirable, and it’s not made possible by importing water using an itsy bitsy $300 million pipeline with water running from Northern California. What should Ridgecrest do?

The answer is an old adage used by the real estate industry, which opposes AB 1413 and AB 1466. The AVEK pipeline won’t fix the sustainability or overdraft problem, it will just make it worse.

The Navy is claiming it has “federal reserve water rights” equal to the entire natural recharge or flow of water into the Indian Wells Valley. An attorney representing Searles Valley Minerals has called Navy’s claim “laughable”.

I agree, it’s not only laughable, it’s wrong in both the application of the Doctrine and the need for the military to establish that it has “federal reserve water rights” superior to the property owners in the Indian Wells Valley or beneficial use rights typically awarded to government agencies such as the City of Ridgecrest and Kern County.

The Navy’s 4,000 civilian workforce gets their water from the Indian Wells Valley Water District, as do all of the households in the City of Ridgecrest. The Navy is in no way impacted whether they have “beneficial use” water rights or “federal reserve water rights”.

Either way, they’ll get the water they need to support their mission and their employees who live in the Indian Wells Valley. There’s plenty of water in the Indian Wells Valley groundwater basin, enough to last a thousand or more years at the current rate of “overpumping” sans Mojave Pistachios,

The Navy currently uses approximately 1,500 acre feet of water in support of base operations. That’s all, just 1,500 acre feet. Anyone that knows anything about water in California knows that not only is this less than a drop in the bucket, it’s more like a piddle pool floating on the Pacific Ocean.

The federal government has historically stayed out of the states and their various laws concerning water rights. With SGMA, the federal government has, in effect, interfered in California’s water laws by asserting “federal reserve water rights”. Prior to the passage of SGMA, attorneys at the Navy Region Southwest executed a strategy to prevent encroachment and secure water and energy for all military installations in the southwestern United States.

As the Naval shore installation management headquarters for the Southwest region (California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico), Navy Region Southwest provides coordination of base operating support functions for operating forces throughout the region. This includes providing expertise in areas such as housing, environmental, security, family services, port services, air services, bachelor quarters, supply, medical and logistical concerns for the hundreds of thousands of active-duty, reserve and retired military members in the area. 

In the precedent setting creation of the GA, the Navy was assisted by former Kern County Supervisor Mick Gleason, himself a former Commanding Officer at NAWS China Lake. Someone inserted a clause in SGMA under section 10720.3 that says DOD’s “federal reserve water rights shall be respected”. This is legal gobbledygook and meaningless.

So when the Navy asserts a Doctrine, using it to “claim” the rights to your water (recharge), the Navy is sucking the wealth from your land, literally and figuratively. A pipeline won’t fix this problem, only a court will. That’s the end of this story.

The Doctrine of “federal reserve water rights” was developed as a result of years of litigation concerning the establishment of water rights for Indian reservations and the surface flows of rivers between states or through national forests. Never has the doctrine been used to establish groundwater rights for the military. It’s an unprecedented use of a doctrine that has no basis in prior case law. SGMA codified and effectively laid the groundwork for the Navy’s use of the doctrine.

Attorneys at Navy Region Southwest worked in conjunction with Supervisor Gleason to create the Groundwater Authority and they proceeded to use the Navy’s models to establish the framework for determination of such things as safe yield, overdraft and recharge in the groundwater basin.

By asserting “federal reserve water rights”, the Navy is using a doctrine that has no basis in fact or precedent. It’s an attempt by the military to establish water rights on BLM public lands have been withdrawn from public use for military reservations throughout the western United States.

The Navy’s assertion will impact private property rights in many cities and towns that surround military reservations which total approximately 16 million acres of BLM public lands, status withdrawn by the military.

The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority says that the valley has only 7,650 acre feet of recharge and 10 or 11 million acre feet of water underground, and well levels are declining because over 20,000 acre feet is being pumped from the underground aquifer. This is called “overdraft”.

Because of SGMA, the private property owners in the Indian Wells Valley, the one’s who own the water rights under the land, are now confronted with a “taking” by the federal government. The Navy and the DOJ are involved in an adjudication lawsuit brought by the Indian Wells Valley Water District, and the district represents the property owners in their district, including the residents living in the City of Ridgecrest.

“The City Owns Its Water” says LADWP on its website

Pictured above is water being pumped from the ground into a trench up by Bishop California. This is land owned by LADWP, and it’s just a small representation of the dirt canals and pipes that are used to transport the water via the Owen’s river to the Haiwee reservoir where it enters the LA Aqueduct pipelines going to Los Angeles. It’s very wasteful and inefficient, and there are hundreds of wells throughout the region. After decades of lawsuits, water is now spread on Owens (mostly dry) lake to keep the dust down. LADWP is currently completing construction for additional storage at Haiwee.

“It is not the economic theory of municipal ownership and administration of public utilities which concerns us; we are confronted with a condition and not a theory. The city owns its water, and our experience should convince us of…the farsighted wisdom of our Spanish and Mexican predecessors in holding on to the rights of the waters of Los Angeles with a grip of iron.” Board of Water Commissioners, First Annual Report, 1902

Inyo County is a player and ground zero in the long history of California’s water wars. The county has had its lifeblood of water sucked dry by LADWP for over 100 years. It’s the “Cadillac Desert”. (Hint to the GA: The LADWP could use some good PR right about now.)

The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city’s growth. 

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.

As in all wars, there are the good guys and the bad guys. In order to win this war, we (the good guys) are reminded by Shakespear’s famous line in Act IV, Scene II of Henry VI, Part 2. The actual quote is: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.

Politicians and satirists occasionally use the phrase to make light of legal or political situations. Its humorous undertone allows it to be employed without promoting violence but rather as a commentary on the complexities of legal systems.

https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/lets-kill-all-the-lawyers

Finally, a personal note to Mr. Phillip Hall, Kern County’s attorney at the Groundwater Authority:

Dear Phil, thanks for the heads-up on the LA Times story. I don’t mind being scooped, and I’ve reviewed many of the legal documents filed in the Superior Court and the adjudication lawsuit brought by the water district. I don’t know how mere mortals can make sense out of any of it and I don’t know how anyone can take the City of Ridgecrest seriously. It’s why nobody attends their meetings and that’s the way they like it. All the serious business is done behind closed doors and the meetings are simply performative politics. (Watch the timestamped video of the 5/7/25 meeting)

There are some alternative solutions that are win-win-win-win-win.

I know you’re an excellent water attorney, and I respect your opinions, but could you at least use some of your valuable time working on an alternative project solution for the GSP that involves Inyo County and LADWP? I believe there’s a win-win-win there, and you’re the man that can pull it together. Perhaps one day we can meet, twist one and have a few good laughs. In the meantime, I’m going fishing in the cool mountains of Arizona. And please tell the LA Times to put this in their pipe and smoke it. Very respectfully, Miguel T. Tonnis

To everyone else:

Before the LA Times scoops me, allow me tell you about the latest controversy in the never-ending cycle of orchestration by City officials and political corruption at the City of Ridgecrest. It’s true, Ridgecrest has its own Deep State and a Freemason monument at the entrance to City Hall to boot. You think I’m kidding? Wanna bet?

EDIT: Maybe I’ll post an article at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning, June 9th, 2025 titled something like this:

I’ve also included a video by Victor Davis Hanson describing California’s amazing reservoir and canal water systems and what California’s environmentalists are telling you to do about your sustainability and water. Apologies for the imagery, it’s a representation of an actual quote by scholar and historian Victor Davis Hanson himself.