Posted on 08/31/2009 3:49:18 PM PDT by WayneLusvardi
The great Roman ruler Caesar Augustus (63 BC to 14 AD) was quoted by historian Suetonius as saying "I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble." Tim Brick, the Chairman of the Board of The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Pasadena's representative on the MWD Board, seems determined to reverse Augustus's statement to "I found Pasadena a city of marble fountains and left it a city of bricks."
According to the Orange County Register, MWD is poised to use a recent mandated 20% regional water rate hike to increase MWD employee pensions by 25%, instead of pouring the money into new water system infrastructure. It appears the contrived "drought" is nothing more than a taxing scheme to prop up the ailing California Employees Retirement System (CAL-Pers) from its investment losses.
At the local level it also seems that not much of the mandated water rate increase will not be put toward replenishing groundwater which is being depleted due to water conservation activities. Rather, the city water rate increase will be used to plug a $4 million shortfall in its Water Department Fund due to fewer water sales as a result of conservation; and unsold and unrented new downtown housing units which presently are not paying monthly water bills. Additionally, the City of Pasadena will also tack onto its rate increase a nearly 8% surtax which will be diverted into its General Fund to support City Hall retirements among other things.
The MWD is preparing to vote soon to hike its pension formula from 2 percent at age 55 to 2.5 percent at age 55. What this means is that an MWD employee with a $100,000 annual salary will have their pension increase from $50,000 to $62,500 annually. Adjusted for inflation this would equate to about $18,750 annually or $281,750 if an employee lives retires at age 55 and expires at age 70. The reported total cost to MWD's ratepayers will be $70 million.
The Chairman of the MWD Tim Brick has no incentive to preserve cheap local groundwater supplies which cost about one-fifth ($100 per acre foot) of the typical price of MWD's imported water from the Colorado River or the Sacramento Delta (about $500 per acre foot). MWD's bureaucratic self interest dictates that local, cheap and environmentally sustainable groundwater sources be replaced with expensive imported water.
Additionally, the MWD has dragged its feet for years in completing the Raymond Basin Conjunctive Use Project which would have stored imported water in the local Raymond Basin as well as preserving Pasadena's precious groundwater supplies.
Neither MWD nor Pasadena required that the recent water rate hikes, purportedly for water conservation, be mitigated by also requiring new recharge basins, cisterns, or "rain gardens" to replenish the Raymond Basin for any water lost due to conservation efforts. It appears that neither the MWD nor the City of Pasadena are concerned about preserving our cheap groundwater resources because they both benefit from hidden taxation schemes from the purchase of imported water.
MWD is Southern California's regional water importer for some 19 million ratepayers in L.A., Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego, and Ventura Counties. The water comes from the Colorado River and the State Water Project.
The above apparent diversion of increased water rate funds to bolster retirement funds and the city treasury provokes another Roman phrase: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, a Latin phrase from the Roman poet Juvenal, which literally translates to "Who will guard the guards themselves?" Who will watch the watchmen? Water ratepayers are left without a watchman to protect their interests under the current system of water government. It is a system without accountability and serves mostly to protect only the interests of the bureaucracies. And as government gets bigger it seems the fortune of the state and the city continues to sink underwater. Water is being used to turn marble into bricks.
How much can the voters take of this?
I sense a coming ‘hollowing-out’ of California’s population, with the self-employed, small businesses and middle class looking for any reason to shake the iron pyrite dust of California in a move to elsewhere in the U.S.A. The wealthy and their chicano gardeners and pool cleaners will remain, one segment because their infrastructure requires it and the second because they make more from the ‘safety net’.
For full disclosure, the author is a member of CAL-Pers and a former employee of The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
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