(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20230907-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
The Feature this week: “Billionaires’ Landgrab Seeks to Destroy Farm land, Create an AI city, and Sparks Opposition,” provides the reader with some of the media coverage of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires plan to build a new city south of Sacramento, to be techie’s dream city run by solar power and, of course, to make everything so expensive, only people like them will be able to live there.
There website does list the investors, which is a group of billionaire tech investors, most of them being based in Silicon Valley. Some of them are big promoters of Artificial Intelligence. Some are directly involved in funding the “progressive” agenda.
In addition, they have secretly purchased, over the past five years, more than 50,000 acres of land secretly already in Sonoma County where the “new city” is planned. They have paid about $800 million for the land already purchased. The area is mostly ranches and farms and they plan to take most of the land out of food production.
And these oligarchs have not only paid ten times what the land is worth to those willing to sell, but have sued and threatened those who refuse to sell. As one article put it: “Seeking more parcels, it is suing resistant farmers for a total of $510 million in damages, describing them as ‘a group of wealthy landowners’ and accusing them in the lawsuit of conspiring to ‘overcharge’ out of ‘endless greed.’”
The State Legislature and the members of Congress, plus local elected officials are now getting involved and they appeared determined to stop the entire project.
You can find their website in the full story below, beginning on page 6.
I provide extensive coverage of the whole story in this Feature.
The rest of the report
The U.S. Drought Monitor shows, and it very different for a September in recent years, that the state is 99% drought free.
More water storage for California?
The article begins with:
“Three reservoir projects in the Diablo Range on the westside of both the Northern San Joaquin Valley and the Delta are part of a strategy to store receive runoff during wet years to cushion California water supplies against prolonged drought.
“The projects — raising San Luis Reservoir, building a Del Puerto Canyon dam and raising Los Vaqueros Reservoir — would add 245,000 acre feet of water storage capacity.
“When coupled with the proposed Sites Reservoir in the Antelope Valley portion of the Coastal Range — of which the Diablo Range is a subrange — an additional 1,827,000 acre feet of off-stream storage could be created.”
In the section on the Colorado River, the article included discusses the recent storms and the impact on the water level of Lake Mead. Some will be surprised.
The concluding section is the Feature for this week.
