Oh dam! An aging North County dam is giving the city of San Diego trouble.
On the latest episode of the VOSD Podcast, our podcast hosts explain why a company is suing the city for $300 million. The company claims the city released six billion gallons of water from El Capitan Dam and Reservoir “without notice,” which ruined the company’s plan to mine sand from the earth for profit.
The attorney representing the company is a name known to many in the city.
“… the city is aware that we don’t file frivolous cases, we take legitimate cases,” he told our North County reporter Tigist Layne.
Also on the show, our hosts explain the San Diego County Board of Supervisors’ decision to change a policy to allow them to dip into the county’s massive reserve funds. And Assemblymember Chris Ward calls in from Sacramento to talk about California’s redistricting measure on the ballot.
Are they running? We’ve had a few guests on the show who are sort of, kind of thinking about running for mayor and San Diego City Council. We’ve got their noncommittal responses on the show.
Here are a few message options you can send to the world about your “social network community.” Pick the one that fits your style, or tell me your tone and length and I’ll tailor it.
Start making cash right now… Get more time with your family by doing jobs that only require for you to have a computer and an internet access and you can have that at your home. Start bringing up to 2000-2700+Dollar per week . I’ve started this job and I’ve never been happier and now I am sharing it with you, so you can try it too. You can check it out here…
JUST TEB ON MY PROFILE
5) Call to action
Maybe we should add dam and reservoir management to the growing list of things the City of San Diego should not be doing. Historically, local wealthy real estate developers (like J.D. Spreckles) built private dams in San Diego’s back country to ensure that there would be enough water available to support their development projects.
Over time, these private dams were sold to the city, while the water collected became the focus of the San Diego County Water Authority, which also imports water here from the Colorado River and Northern California via the Metropolitan Water District.
For more than 100 years, the City of San Diego has proven itself unwilling and incapable of safely maintaining local dams. It could use the money from water sales to do regular testing and maintenance of the dams it controls, but over time local politicians have diverted much of that money to fund a growing water department workforce and other priorities.
Now the state has found that several regional dams, including Lake Hodges, Sweetwater, Lake Henshaw Dam and El Capitan are now unsafe, and required that the reservoirs behind those dams be reduced significantly. In some cases it is because the dams won’t stand up in an earthquake.
The city has demonstrated that under the oversight of money hungry and unqualified politicians, it is not suited to handle a wide range of governmental functions. It’s time to move the function of dam maintenance away from the city to another, better managed level of government.