May 6th, 2026

Had enough of the Ridgecrest City Council and the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority yet?

Public participation in the Ridgecrest City Council meeting reached a crescendo last Wednesday. The proposed RB Inyokern Data Center was strongly opposed by nearly every speaker, along with the ongoing controversy surrounding License Plate Readers, while Measures B and C had their opposition too.

The previous week saw the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority host a townhall in the council chambers. Over 45 attendees listened to a presentation by the GA’s “water manager”, Steve Johnson of Stetson Engineers, and two hydrogeology experts who gave presentations explaining the science of estimating the recharge and groundwater in storage as well as the modeling of the IWV groundwater basin.

Look for a separate post covering the townhall sometime next week, including a report on the monthly meetings of both the Indian Wells Valley Water District and the Groundwater Authority. The Phase Two portion of the Comprehensive Adjudication of the IWV Groundwater Basin begins on June 1st.

Prediction: The Inyokern Data Center Fails with NO Community Support

There are no tangible benefits to locating a water-guzzling energy-sucking data center in downtown Inyokern. Property values will crash, people will move and Inyokern will lose its small-town character forever. Besides, who thinks it’s a good idea to use AI to surveil and control every aspect of our existence while destroying millions of jobs in the process? Anyone that supports these projects has a death-wish not only for Inyokern but society in general. Congress needs to act to control the accelerationist model of Technocracy before it’s too late.

The video of the city council meeting is below, timestamped to begin at the public comments which lasted over an hour.

Prediction: Measure B and Measure C will FAIL

The only reason that the Ridgecrest City Council is trying to change the current term limit law is to accommodate Councilman Kyle Blades‘ desire to stay on the Council for 12 years. If the measure fails, Blades will have to step down from his position in less than two years.

Blades wants to push through the AVEK pipeline project, along with former city manager and current city “water consultant” Ron Strand, who is rumored to be planning a run for city council. These are the same guys, along with former mayor Eric Bruen, who brought you the license plate readers and Placer.ai, remember?

Blades and Strand were the ones who did business behind closed doors while Blades lied to the committees in Sacramento, testifying that Ridgecrest supported AB 1413. This was not the case. The city council never debated the legislation in either open or closed session.

They’re also the ones who went on a wild spending spree after Covid, blowing through $7 million of Covid Relief Act money, half of it on 8 police cruisers (with a $750K Bearcat on the side), along with pushing through two sales tax measures that raised the permanent sales tax to 9.25%, while enticing you with the promise of a $9 million community pool that will cost $20 million. Ridgecrest’s police don’t need LPR’s, Bearcats or drones to do their jobs effectively and keep you safe. Measure “P” for pool barely passed.

They’re the ones that are promising you a $200 million imported water pipeline project that will be paid for by “the government”, and “replenishment fees” that will add up to $50 million so they can buy “Table A” water to foster “growth and prosperity” in Ridgecrest. The IWVWD hired a firm which estimates the pipeline “all in” cost will be $400 million and the water will cost $10,000 per acre foot!

You voted for them, and this is what you’ll get:

• License Plate Readers to watch your every move around town 365 days a year.
• A pool that 90% of you will never put your foot in that’s useable only 6 months out of the year.
• A $400 million AVEK water pipeline that will import 3,000-5,000 acre feet of water per year (from Sacramento).
• The most expensive water in the history of mankind.

Phase Two of the IWV Comprehensive Adjudication trial begins June 1st

SGMA was written as a one-size fits all law in order to restrict extraction of groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley. The damages caused by SGMA are only just beginning to be felt, and a study out of UC Berkeley estimated that 20% of the farmland in the San Joaquin Valley, approximately 1,000,000 acres, will have to be fallowed.

The words “consolidation” and “repurposing” are now in use. The big farmers are eating the small farmers (consolidation), fallowed farmland will be repurposed with vast solar farms, and Silicon Valley will build data centers that use water formerly meant to serve the farmers. Farm prices have reportedly collapsed by 50%. SGMA is an economic and human disaster in the making.

The Indian Wells Valley groundwater basin is unique.

The Indian Wells Valley groundwater basin is unique when it comes to the geology and the hydrogeologic science. The valley’s location, along the Eastern Sierra watershed, is one of the most studied in terms of geology, and it’s highly likely that the IWV Technical Working Group will soon be able to prove that the IWV basin has accumulated enough groundwater to sustain current pumping levels for a thousand years or more.

With all the controversy surrounding water, and the fact that California has mismanaged its plentiful water resources for decades, the economic and human costs associated with fallowing one-fifth of the San Joaquin Valley’s farmlands far outweigh the undesirable results of the over-pumping that SGMA was intended to address.

Undesirable Results are primarily categorized as subsidence and wells running dry. The Indian Wells Valley is a closed basin, meaning that most of the water that flows into the basin stays in the basin. There is no evidence of any subsidence due to over-pumping in the IWV, and the number of wells that have failed solely due to lower groundwater tables due to over-pumping is zero. Shallow wells that are over 50 years old don’t count, they will fail regardless of the level of the water table. It can be said that in the IWV, SGMA is a hammer looking for a nail.

The only reason the IWV was designated to be in “Critical Overdraft” under SGMA was because the numbers were rigged from the beginning. More on this coming up in a later Post.

The IWV’s Groundwater Sustainability Plan should never have been approved by the Department of Water Resources, and the AVEK imported water pipeline is unnecessary, infeasible and unfundable.

As State Senator Melissa Hurtado stated during last year’s hearing on AB 1413, “SGMA is a failed experiment, it picks winners and losers”, and California’s Department of Water Resources will have to own up to it. Will somebody please sue the State of California and SGMA?

Sierra Club? Realtors? California Farm Bureau Federation?

Feel free to send any corrections or comments on this post to publisher@Roadrunner395.com

Timestamped to begin at Public Comments (26:13)

IWV Groundwater Authority Town Hall