Using multiple independent analytical methods, those analyses consistently converge on the same conclusion: the Basin’s safe yield is substantially greater than 7,650 AFY—conservatively no less than 14,300 AFY and approximately 15,400 AFY. – Indian Wells Valley Technical Working Group

The word for the day is “corruption”.

June 3rd, 2026

Updated June 6th, 2026

Ridgecrest California.

The Indian Wells Valley’s Comprehensive Adjudication Phase 2 trial begins on June 8th, 2026. The trial will be held at the Superior Court in Orange County, Judge William D. Claster presiding.

The trial is expected to last for 3 weeks so bookmark https://Roadrunner395.com for regular updates during the entire month of June.

Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense that is undertaken by a person or an organization that is entrusted in a position of authority to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one’s gain. Corruption may involve activities like bribery, influence peddling, embezzlement, and fraud as well as practices that are legal in many countries, such as lobbying. Political corruption occurs when an officeholder or other governmental employee acts in an official capacity for personal gain. (Wikipedia.com)

SGMA is Corruption Writ LARGE.

SGMA is essentially a license to commit fraud. The entire structure of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority is founded on corruption. As State Senator Melissa Hurtado said last year, “SGMA is a failed experiment, it picks winners and losers”. She is correct. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is corrupt at its core as it undermines the private property rights of every property owner in the state. If you live in the Indian Wells Valley, pay the Groundwater Authority’s “Replenishment Fee” or own real estate, you are among the many losers picked by SGMA.

As most of you know by now, the City of Ridgecrest operates largely behind closed doors. The defendant in Mojave Pistachios vs. Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority is, for all intents and purposes, the City of Ridgecrest.

The “Safe Yield” Coverup and AB 1413

Before reading any further, please see this post for context and information on “Safe Yield” if you haven’t already done so.

We’ll explain how the city, led by city manager Ron Strand and city attorney Keith Lemieux, used Councilman Kyle Blades and Councilman Scott Hayman in an elaborate scheme to coverup the lack of scientific evidence and validation in determining the all-important “Safe Yield” of the Indian Wells Valley’s groundwater basin.

The corruption and fraud became evident when the city clerk, Ricca Charlon, prepared a fraudulent letter that was hand-carried to a committee in Sacramento in order to give false testimony that the city approved legislation called AB 1413. Had AB 1413 passed and been signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, the Phase 2 trial that begins next week would have never happened. The safe yield would remain 7,650 acre-feet per year, and the GA would have continued unabated while building an unnecessary $400 million pipeline in order to import water from the San Joaquin Valley.

Coverup occurs when Councilman Kyle Blades tells Councilman Skip Gorman that he “feels pretty good” about squashing Gorman’s attempt to place AB 1413 on the City’s agenda (because it was never approved by the city in the first place) and Ricca Charlon tells the council that a consensus of three members of the council are required to place an item on the agenda.

Now we know why the Groundwater Authority was so desperate to bypass the judge in the comprehensive adjudication Phase 2 trial. The “Safe Yield” was rigged from the beginning, and the DRI 2-D model allegedly used to determine the safe yield has “vanished”!

The AVEK pipeline relies on a low “Safe Yield”

Here’s the bottom line, from page 15 of the trial brief submitted to the court by the Technical Working Group:

Using multiple independent analytical methods, those analyses consistently converge on the same conclusion: the Basin’s safe yield is substantially greater than 7,650 AFY—conservatively no less than 14,300 AFY and approximately 15,400 AFY.

Why do you think city manager Ron Strand, together with Councilmen Kyle Blades and Scott Hayman, snuck up to Sacramento to testify in favor of AB 1413 last year? Answer: because AB 1413 would have taken the due process of determining “Safe Yield” in a comprehensive adjudication out of the hands of the judge, and in the case of the Indian Wells Valley Water District vs. the Groundwater Authority, the Phase 2 “Safe Yield” trial we’re about to witness.

AB 1413 was an amendment to SGMA, and it would have given Groundwater Sustainability Agencies near dictatorial control in establishing the safe yield in over 160 groundwater basins in the state. The three stooges from Ridgecrest were literally desperate to avoid the discovery of facts that are about to be exposed in the courtroom beginning next week.

The numbers were rigged from the beginning, and the GA and the City of Ridgecrest have been caught red-handed.

For more information, please see:

By underestimating the “Safe Yield” and “Groundwater in Storage” in the basin, and overestimating the extraction or pumping of groundwater from the basin, the political power players in Ridgecrest have used SGMA as an opportunity to build a pipeline so that Ridgecrest can “grow and prosper”.

The DRI 2-D Model was not produced, it vanished, and the none of the experts that will testify in the Phase 2 trial had the opportunity to test the model that was the basis for the Safe Yield estimate in the first place.

Here, the existence—or nonexistence—of the groundwater model is material because it provides the analytical basis for the 7,650 AFY recharge value relied upon by the IWVGA and U.S. The consequence of the failure to produce the model is straightforward: California law does not permit expert testimony to rest on such an unexamined foundation. (Pg. 3, TWG Brief)

Not only that, but any interpretations the GA’s experts may present to support the Safe Yield figure of 7,650 are meaningless without a thorough analytical review of the missing DRI 2-D Model.

“the Court is being asked to accept a numerical conclusion without a reviewable analytical process. This is not a dispute over competing interpretations of evidence; it is the absence of admissible evidence altogether.“

We’re coming up to the point where you might be asking the question; If the Safe Yield figure of 7,650 produced by the Groundwater Authority is scientifically unsupportable and inadmissible in court, then what’s the judge going to say when the experts from the GA and the U.S. tell him they haven’t had the opportunity to examine or evaluate the scientific model that was the foundation for the Safe Yield estimate in the first place:

The problem is more fundamental: the IWVGA and U.S. ask this Court to adopt a safe yield figure derived from a scientific model that no party has been permitted to examine and no expert in this case has independently evaluated—not even the
experts for the IWVGA (Dr. Todd Kincaid) and the U.S. (Dr. Sean McKenna). The absence of the DRI 2-D Model deprives the Court of any meaningful ability to determine whether the 7,650 AFY figure rests on reliable hydrogeologic analysis or merely reflects assumptions embedded within an inaccessible and untestable modeling framework.

It should be clear now that there was never any intention by the GA to study the basin using the best science while accounting for all sources of recharge and accurately estimating the actual level of pumping throughout the basin.

Why was the Safe Yield set in concrete by the GA from the moment the agency was formed? By rigging the numbers, on both Safe Yield and Groundwater in Storage, it would make the case designating the basin in “Critical Overdraft” and for building a pipeline to import water.

Because the missing model is the foundation of the IWVGA’s and U.S.’s safe yield opinions, the resulting expert testimony lacks the transparency, reliability, and foundational support required under California law.

You didn’t have a vote on any of this.

From the very beginning of the creation of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority, the City of Ridgecrest’s political leadership has been hellbent on growth. From the annexation of land on Highway 395 to building a 50-mile-long pipeline from California City to the Indian Wells Valley, it’s all about growth. Ron Strand and the former mayors Peggy Breeden and Eric Bruen have an insatiable growth fetish. Egomaniacs can’t be cured or convinced that they’re wrong.

Meanwhile, customers of the IWV Water District have paid nearly $20 million in “Replenishment Fees” to the GA, while the GA has spent more than $15 million on pipeline design and consultants. None of the board members are elected for their positions. The “Authority” has no employees, just independent contractors, attorneys, lobbyists, engineering firms and PR consultants feeding at the trough.

Case Closed.

We suggest you read through the Index of the Technical Working Group brief later in order to get the big picture. You can download all of the briefs below. All of the exhibits and the briefs can be found on the IWV Water District’s website: https://www.iwvwd.com/basin-adjudication-important-documents

Briefs have been filed in advance of the Phase 2 trial. There are four briefs:

IWV Technical Working Group (IWV Water District):

IWV Groundwater Authority and City of Ridgecrest:

United States (DOJ-Navy)

State of California