Los Angeles-based Cadiz, Inc.’s intense round of lobbying featuring the filtering of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the region’s politicians appears to have achieved paydirt as the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors is surrendering any prospect that it will contest what Cadiz, Inc.’s opponents maintain are spurious water rights claims.
For four decades, succeeding corporate officers with the entity variously known as the Cadiz Land Company, Cadiz, Inc. and the Cadiz Water Company have had designs on the East Mojave Desert’s underground water supply, hoping they can, without having to pay for it or replenish it, divert trillions of gallons of desert water to a water district in Orange County at a tremendous profit.
The plan, first conceived in 1984, has undergone multiple permutations and was effectively opposed in virtually all of its forms previously by a coalition of environmentalists, East Mojave residents and landowners, employees of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and key politicians in San Bernardino, Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
The atmosphere has changed significantly, however, with the 2023 death of Dianne Feinstein and the defections of both current and former officeholders who were committed project opponents of the Cadiz Water Company camp, based primarily on money being provided to them in the form of hefty political donations or employment opportunities.
In the mid-1980s, Ted Dutton, who was fresh off a major coup of having pulled off, with George Voight, a 45-day day double escrow of the former Ontario Motor Speedway to realize an $8 million profit, began talking about suspending the work he was engaged in at that time relating to a series of commercial developments in Rancho Cucamonga and trying his hand at being a farmer in the desert. He intended, Dutton said, to establish one of the world’s largest organic tomato, citrus, grape, melon, pepper and squash farms within a 3,500-acre spread he had tied up in the Cadiz Valley.
In actuality, Dutton’s venture was not horticultural but a ruse he had formulated with two others – Keith Brackpool and Mark Liggett – to secure water rights in a remote area of the Mojave. Brackpool, an Englishman who had left Great Britain in 1983 after he had been convicted of stock fraud and dealing in securities without a license in his native country, that same year came to the United States, seeking to parlay the money he had managed to take with him when he left England into a fortune in America. Brackpool was attracted to Dutton after learning of how the older man had been able to take control of the speedway property without actually owning it to engineer a sale to a buyer at tremendous profit, with the only actual investment being having to cover a few weeks of the interest payments on the loan which he arranged to make the acquisition. The speedway sale was just the sort of deal, one in which the “initial investor” started with virtually no money of his own to generate a fortune out of circumstance, that Brackpool was looking to effectuate himself.
Using satellite images, Brackpool and Liggett, a geologist, convinced Dutton that there was a huge underground lake in the East Mojave Desert – the Cadiz Valley/Fenner Gap Aquifer – that could be tapped simply through obtaining ownership of some of the land overlying it.
Thus, the Cadiz Land Company was created, the ostensible purpose for which had little to do with water beyond the single well Dutton and Brackpool sunk in the Cadiz Valley to irrigate what they said was a 400-acre farming operation. In actuality, the expanse upon which they were producing tomatoes, peppers, melons, grapes and citrus never expanded beyond 46 acres, all of which was irrigated by that single well. Though their actual water usage never actually exceeded more than 500 acre-feet per year, over the years they drilled eight more wells. For forty years, the Cadiz Land Company’s agricultural operation has never – not even once – operated at a profit. Nevertheless, the company has been able to make an assertion, based upon the irrigation of the crops at the Cadiz farm, to water rights from the Cadiz/Fenner aquifer.
The Cadiz Land Company in the late 1990s sought to interest the Metropolitan Water District in a proposal to convey up to 1.5 million acre-feet of what was referenced as “surplus” Colorado River water to the Cadiz Valley and “store” that water by pumping it into the water table and then extracting the water and conveying it to Greater Los Angeles during “dry years.” Ultimately, however, the Metropolitan Water District in 2002 rejected that proposal.
All along, the Cadiz Land Company’s agenda had been to get control of – i.e., obtain the rights to – a massive amount of water for marketing within Southern California.
The Colorado River water storage project had been the first stage of a plan to finagle ownership of the huge underground lake of pristine water that had been accumulating beneath the East Mojave Desert for hundreds of thousands of years. The idea was that while the Cadiz Land Company was storing the river water in the East Mojave for the Metropolitan Water District, mixing it with the water already in the aquifer, it would simultaneously be able to tap into the water table to extract water which it could sell to other entities in San Bernardino County, Riverside County, Los Angeles County and Orange County in need of the elixir of life. When the Colorado River water storage project failed, The Cadiz Land Company had to take a different, more direct approach.
That effort would be dubbed the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery & Storage Project. The concept this time was to sink deep wells into the East Mojave and tap into the vast reservoir of unused water there and send it westward for sale to water companies and water districts. To the immediate reactions of those who said that what the Cadiz Land Company was proposing to do was stealing the desert’s water for use along the coast and that the undertaking would threaten the desert environment, Dutton and Brackpool insisted nothing could be further from the truth. What they were proposing was, they said, just what the name they had given the project implied. It was aimed at conserving water, not misusing it. What they were aiming at was capturing the desert’s water quickly while it was on the surface and at the top of the aquifer, where it was vulnerable to evaporation. The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery & Storage Project would be merely recovering that water before it evaporated, they insisted. In this way, the project would help the environment, not hinder it.
Along the way, the Cadiz Land Company rebranded itself as Cadiz, Inc. In the same timeframe, the company made some adjustments to its lobbying approach. Previously, the company had adhered to advice provided by former Congressman-turned-lobbyist Tony Coelho, who was given a position on the Cadiz board. Coelho’s approach tilted toward vectoring money to influential statewide politicians or those with pull in Sacramento or at the regional level in the greater Los Angeles area where the water was to be marketed, such as Governor Gray Davis and Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa. When that did not produce the desired result, the company began plying politicians in San Bernardino County, particularly those representing its vast desert outback, with money, in most cases in quantities they did not receive from their normal stable of donors.
In 2012, Brad Mitzelfelt was San Bernardino County’s First District supervisor. At that time, the Cadiz Valley and all of the Mojave Desert was contained within the First District. Mitzelfelt was also engaged that year in making a run for Congress. Cadiz, Inc, provided Mitzelfelt with $48,100 in political donations to finesse him into allowing the board of directors of the Santa Margarita Water District in Orange County, located 217 miles from the Cadiz Valley, to carry out the environmental certification and approval of a controversial water extraction project in the East Mojave.
Cadiz, Inc. contrived to have the Santa Margarita Water District, which serves the affluent Orange County communities of Rancho Santa Margarita, Mission Viejo, Coto de Caza, Las Flores, Ladera Ranch and Talega, oversee the environmental impact report for the project. Cadiz, Inc.’s hope was that money it had provided Mitzelfelt would prevent him from dwelling on the consideration that the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District’s directors had a conflict of interest in that their water district was to be the largest consumer of the 75,000 acre feet of water the company was proposing to draft annually from the project’s 34 wells which were to be sunk in the Cadiz and Fenner valleys. Moreover, Cadiz, Inc. calculated that Mitzelfelt, as the San Bernardino County elected official overseeing the East Mojave, would be able to persuade his board colleagues to go along with the scheme.
The unorthodox approval process for the plan to draft trillions of gallons of water from the East Mojave Desert’s pristine aquifer for use in Los Angeles and Orange counties, utilizing a governmental entity more than 200 miles removed from the property to be impacted which simultaneously had a financial and operational interest in the project to oversee the project’s environmental certification, fueled questions about the integrity and legitimacy of the governmental regulation of the effort. A number of politicians over the years, at least for a time, championed San Bernardino County and the East Mojave in the struggle to keep the plan from succeeding. Despite, or perhaps because of, the money Mitzelfelt received from Cadiz, he suffered defeat in 2012 when he vied to replace outgoing Congressman Jerry Lewis, by seeking election in California’s redrawn 8th Congressional district, which included the Cadiz Valley.
Also vying in the race for that Congressional seat was then-Assemblyman Paul Cook. Cook, taking stock of the way Mitzelfelt was intent on diverting the desert’s water to Orange County, created a plank in his campaign platform in opposition to the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery & Storage Project, which was referred to as the Cadiz Water Project for short. At the height of the campaign, Cook dashed off a letter to then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, stating, “The Cadiz Project, as it currently stands, is likely to impact San Bernardino County’s water resources, harming ranchers, rural communities, East Mojave landowners, and the National Chloride Company of America’s brine mining operation on Bristol Dry Lake. Moreover, the aggressive project pumping could harm the springs of the Mojave National Preserve and regional air quality, while exporting precious water resources out of San Bernardino County to ratepayers in Los Angeles and Orange counties. In order to ensure this project won’t adversely affect my district, I respectfully request the Cadiz Project be subject to a National Environmental Policy Act review. Additionally, I request that the United States Geologic Survey conduct an updated analysis of the hydrologic features of the project area and that any new or revised Cadiz Project proposals adhere to the principle of sustainable yield, meaning no more water would be pumped out of the aquifer than would be replaced through natural recharge as determined by the United States Geologic Survey. Professional independent reviews have called into question the 32,500 acre-feet per year recharge rate Cadiz Inc. claims will naturally occur. These independent scientists concluded that the actual recharge rate is between 2,000 and 10,000 acre-feet per year. There are serious doubts about the validity of the previous environmental studies, specifically the draft environmental impact statement.”
Cook trounced Mitzelfelt in the primary and was elected to Congress in November 2012.
In order to run for Congress in 2012, Mitzelfelt had to forego running for reelection as First District San Bernardino County supervisor. Robert Lovingood was one of seven candidates who vied for the opportunity to replace Mitzelfelt. During that campaign, Lovingood was critical of the county’s failure to wrest the role of lead agency from the Santa Margarita Water District in considering the environmental impact report for the project. Just as the desert’s voters had responded positively to Cook’s proclaimed effort to protect the region’s water supply, so too did they support Lovingood, who was elected supervisor in November 2012.
Similarly, then-San Bernardino County Third District Supervisor Neil Derry went on record against the concept of removing water from the East Mojave for use in communities closer to the coast.
The most ardent office-holding opponent to Cadiz, Inc. and its designs on the desert’s water was also the most powerful: Senator Diane Feinstein, the author of the California Desert Protection Act. Feinstein proved an indefatigable foe to the efforts to draft the desert’s water and convey it out of the region. Time and again, she took action which blocked the project.
While Feinstein worked at the federal level, two members of the California legislature, State Senator Richard Roth and Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, undertook efforts in Sacramento which stymied the project.
The Santa Margarita Water District Board of Directors in 2012 ratified the environmental impact report for the project, using its authority to give the company clearance to construct another 25 wells throughout the Cadiz and Fenner Valleys, which lie more than 200 miles from the district’s furthest east-lying border. Questions about the propriety of that action led to the filing of no fewer than eleven lawsuits, which kept Cadiz, Inc. tied up in court for years.
In devising their strategy to obtain clearance for the Cadiz Water Project, Dutton and Brackpool had retained Scott Slater, a water rights attorney with the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. It was Slater who quarterbacked, from the serenity of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck’s Los Angeles office, how undertaking what is termed “beneficial use” of some of the East Mojave region’s vast underground water resources could provide the basis for staking a claim to the recurrent use of tens of thousands of acre-feet of water per year. Slater recommended that Cadiz, In. come at it gradually, at first extracting a couple dozen acre-feet of water per year to grow fruits and vegetables on land scattered over a 46-acre plot of ground and then gradually increasing that use to a couple hundred acre-feet to a thousand acre-feet of water to irrigate farms covering some 400 acres.
An acre-foot is the amount of water that would cover an acre-of ground to a depth of one foot, 43,600 cubic feet of water, or just under 325,851.43 gallons. In addition to coordinating with the Metropolitan Water District’s lawyers in working out the terms of the never-actuated Colorado River Water Storage Project, the terms of acquisition for property slated for both agricultural use and pipeline right-of-way, as well as the licensing and sharing arrangements for the infrastructure – pipes and aqueducts both existing and proposed – to convey the water to its end-use points, Slater formulated the approach the company would take in either getting the region’s existing governmental authorities to adjudicate local water rights in the Cadiz and Fenner Valleys or creating agencies or authorities that did not exist to assume control of that adjudicative process. That would entail stacking the boards and staff of such an agency or agencies with individuals primed to grant the Cadiz Land Company’s corporate successor, Cadiz, Inc., with the rights to far more water than was actually being used.
Hemorrhaging money on legal fees that was threatening the viability of the Cadiz Land Company altogether, Dutton and Brackpool passed control of Cadiz, Inc. into the hands of Slater, who maintained his shareholder position at Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck, partially out of a belief that by doing so, Slater would be able reduce the company’s astronomical legal costs. Slater was appointed president of Cadiz in 2011 and named CEO in 2013, at which point Brackpool became chairman of the board.
Throughout that time, Slater was devoted to defending the company against the 11 lawsuits brought against the company. Though the company was able to prevail in most of those suits, which it succeeded in having removed to and consolidated in Orange County Superior Court, appeals on several of those suits were filed. The combination of those legal challenges and the efforts at the state and federal legislative levels hamstrung the company.
Simultaneously, Slater was waging a battle to establish a key component to the project: the means of conveying the water to the Metropolitan Water District’s pipeline originally created to bring Colorado River Water to Los Angeles. That effort was thwarted because the company could not get clearance to construct the pipeline on multiple grounds, the primary one being environmental. Slater came up with a gimmick as a workaround to this dilemma. Environmental objections to a newly constructed pipeline would not apply to land within an existing railroad right-of-way, but the regulation of railroad right-of-way fell under the authority of the federal government, where Feinstein held tremendous sway. Of a sudden, Slater and Cadiz, Inc. grew nostalgic, proposing that the company build a shrine to the desert as it was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cadiz, Inc. would operate a steam-powered excursion train on the Arizona & California Railroad line through the Mojave Desert between Cadiz, California and Parker, Arizona, Slater announced. The Arizona & California Railroad had been a corporate subdivision of the Santa Fe Pacific Railroad built in 1910. Cadiz, Inc. would revive it with what the company dubbed the Cadiz Southeastern Railway.
“The steam train is an original fixture of the Cadiz area – an important historical asset intimately connected to the local culture – and offers a rewarding way to invest locally and promote the unique desert environment,” said Slater in announcing the move. “As a 30-year member of the Mojave Desert community, we have long appreciated the area’s majesty and appeal and are proud to diversify our business with this exciting new venture.”
The Cadiz Southeastern Railway was to operate, the company said, on existing tracks along an 85-mile portion of the historic Arizona & California Railroad line between Parker, Arizona and Cadiz with water stops in the desert locales of Milligan, Chubbuck, Rice and Vidal. It would further feature a museum and cultural center at the Cadiz Ranch property dedicated to the promotion of local desert and railroad history.
In seeking the permitting for the historical tributes including the excursions, Slater said, Cadiz, Inc. would obtain permission to build the facilities needed so the Cadiz Southeastern Railway would be powered by water from the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery & Storage Project.
In this way, Cadiz, Inc. was constructing a water pipeline for a railroad purpose along the railroad right-of-way, it claimed. That the pipeline would also convey water from the East Mojave to the Metropolitan Water District Colorado Aqueduct was incidental.
Under the Donald Trump Administration, which included Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and a career Interior Department employee, Tim Spisak, promoted into the position of deputy assistant director for energy, minerals and realty management in 2017, Cadiz was able to achieve some degree of traction by getting the federal government to go on record that the existing federal railroad right-of-way could be used to construct the crucial 34-miles of pipeline to deliver the water mined from the desert well field to the existing Colorado River Aqueduct and thus make delivery to the Greater Los Angeles area. That development represented a leap forward for the project, but other obstructions prevented the project from proceeding.
Senator Feinstein remained as a Cadiz, Inc.’s primary nemesis, as at both the legislative and sub-legislative levels she barred the Department of the Interior from assisting the company with its designs on the East Mojave Desert’s water, using on multiple occasions the parliamentary ploy of using riders on bills important to politicians on both sides of the aisle that prevented the Bureau of Land Management from expending money on anything that would facilitate the groundwater transferring project, including completing what she felt would be environmental reviews of the proposal during the Trump Administration she believed would be favorable to the concept of depleting the desert of water.
The project stalled out and in 2020, when Donald Trump was voted of office, ending whatever favorable federal government regulatory atmosphere existed that might have allowed the project to move ahead.
Over the years, the Cadiz Land Company and then Cadiz, Inc., through extensive promotion, was at times able to generate extensive investor confidence, thereby drawing in money from existing and new shareholders and using that capital to grease the skids politically. At various times, based on pronouncements made by Dutton, Brackpool, other corporate officers and later Slater that the project was on the verge of springing forward , there would be huge purchases of Cadiz stock, pushing its value into the stratosphere. In 2001, while it looked as if the company was going to close its deal with the Metropolitan Water District to store Colorado River Water, the value of Cadiz stock jumped to over $200 a share. It fell precipitously after Metropolitan walked away from the deal, but at various times since then, Dutton, Brackpool and Slater were able to revive stock speculators’ interest in the company by claiming it was on the brink of yet another breakthrough, such as with the vote by the Santa Margarita Water District Board of Directors. At just such junctures, they would exploit the situation, selling off their own shares and engaging in profit taking. As of today, Cadiz stock is selling at $3.32 a share.
The infusions of investor capital have been used in other ways to advance the company’s prospects, or so its corporate officers have hoped. Scouting the political landscape, Cadiz, Inc. and its lobbyists have identified the elected officials who are in positions to either harm or help the company in achieving its goals. It then made massive donations to their political war chests.
One of those was Paul Cook. Another was Robert Lovingood.
After Cadiz, Inc. and several of its investors surfaced as major contributors to Cook’s congressional reelection campaign, in 2014 the Congressman flip-flopped and publicly stated that he was in favor of the project proceeding. Of note, working for Cook in 2014 as a member of his Congressional staff was Dawn Rowe. In 2018, when James Ramos, who succeeded Derry as Third District Supervisor, was elected to the California Assembly, the board of supervisors appointed Rowe to replace Ramos during his two remaining years as supervisor. Thereafter, Rowe was elected Third District supervisor in her own right in 2020, and was then reelected this year, in March. In 2020, Cook left Congress to successfully run for the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors representing the First District, which yet extends into a portion of the East Mojave. Because of the district boundary redrafting that takes place every decade, part of the East Mojave now lies within San Bernardino County’s Third District.
Cadiz, Inc. emerged over the years as a major donor to the campaigns of San Bernardino County supervisors Robert Lovingood, James Ramos, Janice Rutherford, Curt Hagman, Dawn Rowe and Paul Cook. Lovingood, Ramos and Rutherford are no longer on the board of supervisors, while Hagman, Rowe and Cook are. Cadiz, Inc. has continued to support Ramos since he made the transition to the California Assembly. The company has made substantial political donations over the years, totaling at least $1.086 million.
In 2010, Cadiz, Inc. worked behind the scenes to create the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Company. In 2014, it further orchestrated the creation of the Fenner Valley Water Authority, a joint powers authority comprised of Fenner Gap Mutual Water Company, the Santa Margarita Water District and San Bernardino County.
Derry, who as a member of the board of supervisors had taken a stand against the Cadiz, Inc. water importation project, was defeated for reelection in 2012 by Ramos. Shortly thereafter, he went to work for Desmond & Louis Communications as the senior vice president of public affairs. In the run-up toward the formation of the Fenner Valley Water Authority in 2014, which carried with it the implication that San Bernardino County’s entire governmental structure was going to endorse the Cadiz, Inc. water transfer to Orange County, Cadiz, Inc. retained Desmond & Louis to represent it. At that point, Derry found himself promoting the Cadiz Water project and remaining silent on the formation of the Fenner Valley Water Authority.
The Board of Supervisors in 2014, at that time consisting of Gary Ovitt, Josie Gonzales, Janice Rutherford, Robert Lovingood and James Ramos, voted to form the Fenner Valley Water Authority, in so doing surrendering roughly one third of the authority over the groundwater supply in the Cadiz and Fenner valleys to the Orange County-based board of directors of the Santa Margarita Water District and one third of the authority over the groundwater in the Cadiz and Fenner Valleys to Cadiz, Inc., as the Fenner Valley Mutual Water Company is essentially a creature of Cadiz, Inc.
During the four years the Trump Administration was in place, the federal government sought to streamline and lessen regulations pertaining to projects like the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery & Storage Project.
Congressman Cook, reelected to Congress in 2014, 2016 and 2018 in part by hefty donations from Cadiz, Inc., its corporate officers or its investors, intensified his efforts to promote the project. He appealed to Interior Secretary Zinke to excise the Cadiz Valley from the Mojave Trails National Monument proposal. Including that expanse as part of the National Monument introduced further regulations over diversion of the desert’s water assets out of the area. Ultimately, given Senator Feinstein’s pull and the resistance of other members of Congress along with employees within his own agency, Zinke did not include Cook’s suggestion in the Department of the Interior’s creation of the new monument.
In 2021, Susan Kennedy, who served as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, Governor Gray Davis’s cabinet secretary, as a member of the California Public Utilities Commission and was the founder and chief executive officer of the energy company Advanced Microgrid Solutions before it was bought out by AES/Siemens in 2020, was appointed to the Cadiz, Inc. Board of Directors. She moved up to the position of executive chairwoman of the board just a few months later. In December 2023, Cadiz announced that Kennedy would succeed Slater as Cadiz’s chief executive officer and that Slater would move into a role as the company’s senior advisor.
The executive suite change knelled what the company claims will be the ultimate final push to make good on the water exportation project. Under Kennedy, the company is taking a different approach. Prior to sending water to Orange County, which it yet intends to do, it hopes to remake its image by casting off the guise of an entity stealing water from the poor desert to give it to rich coastal communities. Rather, it will first take that water from the southeast Mojave Desert and send it via a new pipeline to the northwest Mojave.
Taking note of the fact that cities such as Barstow, Victorville, Hesperia and the Town of Apple Valley have an ever-unquenched thirst for more water, Kennedy sought, and obtained, the support of those governmental entities for Cadiz, Inc.’s water importation plans. Under Kennedy, the Cadiz Water Project is now being represented as “California first fully integrated groundwater conservation and storage project.”
The idea is to construct an 86-mile pipeline from the Cadiz Valley to Barstow, carrying water that will be offloaded at various points along the way to desert communities in need of it or who are otherwise dependent on the state water project bringing water from up north.
Under the guise of the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Company, Kennedy and Cadiz, Inc. approached those cities with what was represented as a solution for their water needs. They asked officials from those three cities and the town to sign a letter of intent to participate in the Mojave-San Bernardino One Water project. The four did so.
With those documents in hand, Cadiz, Inc. is looking to get the ball rolling on its water exportation activity.
For the time being, Cadiz, Inc. is downplaying or seems to have forgotten about and has abandoned the sale of water – lots of it – to the Santa Margarita Water District. That, of course, is not actually the case but making it seem so is a crucial element of the company’s latest strategy. What is actually going on is Cadiz corporate officers, led by Kennedy, are now focusing on removing water from the East Mojave just as before, but instead of emphasizing sending it outside of the desert or outside of San Bernardino County, the company will convey the water to the High Desert portion of the Mojave Desert – Hesperia, Apple Valley, Lucerne Valley, Victorville and Adelanto – as well as north-lying Barstow.
In doing this, Cadiz, Inc. will accomplish at least two goals.
Upon getting water from the Fenner and Cadiz valleys to Barstow, it will then move a significant quantity of it to Kern County, using the Northern Pipeline.
Moreover, having established that it can export water out of San Bernardino County to Kern County, it will be easier at some future date to export water to Orange County.
With Senator Dianne Feinstein gone, there is no one to lead the effort to prevent the East Mojave water diversion.
Lost in much of this is that Cadiz, Inc. has not established rights to the quantity of water it envisages pumping out of the Cadiz and Fenner Valleys – 75,000 acre feet annually – and then exporting elsewhere.
There had been some hope that, despite the influence that Cadiz, Inc. had purchased with its generosity to San Bernardino County’s top politicians, county officials at some point would come to recognize that establishing the precedent of allowing an entity outside the county to profit by commandeering the desert’s water and selling it for use outside the desert would lock in a situation wherein the future of the East Mojave would be limited for an untold number of generations to come. That realization would result, it was thought, in the county, either through the board of supervisors or county counsel or the county chief executive officer, challenging Cadiz, Inc.’s claim to the water it wants to take.
Next week, however, the board of supervisors is set to sign off on allowing the law firm of Downey Brand, which beginning in 2010 had represented the county in formulating a memorandum of understanding regarding a groundwater management plan for, and the county’s oversight of, the Cadiz Valley Groundwater Conservation, Recovery, and Storage Project, to represent Cadiz, Inc. Downey Brand’s former representation of the county extended to water rights, land use permitting, environmental review, and litigation that was commenced against the county following approval of the Cadiz Valley Groundwater Conservation, Recovery, and Storage Project. Downey Brand is no longer engaged in representing the county with regard to the project. Nevertheless, the firm’s attorney’s have a comprehensive understanding and knowledge of what the county’s position with regard to the project is as well as insight into the attitudes, notions and positions of the county’s political and administrative leaders about the diversion of the desert’s water.
The Cadiz Land Company, in its masterful orchestration of public policy in San Bernardino County to allow its water exportation scheme to succeed, has now retained Downey Brand to help it map out a legal path to capturing the lion’s share of water rights in the Cadiz and Fenner valleys.
County Counsel, Tom Bunton, San Bernardino County’s top in-house lawyer, took a nonchalant approach to the matter. He arranged for the waiver to be placed on the consent calendar of the county board of supervisors’ August 6 agenda. Consent calendar items are deemed to be noncontroversial.
In his report to the board of supervisors regarding the item, Bunton wrote that he recommended the board “approve a consent to representation and waiver of conflict of interest arising out of Downey Brand LLP’s representation of Cadiz, Inc.” and that the board “authorize the county counsel or chief assistant county counsel to execute any required documentation to consent to Downey Brand LLP’s representation of Cadiz, Inc., and waiver of conflict of interest.”
-Mark Gutglueck