Don't blame fish
Guest commentary by David Pritchett

Casitas Water District - don't blame the fish for your alleged troubles. The recent "Water Supply" newsletter distributed by Casitas is nothing more than anti-environmental fearmongering that attempts to blame water shortages and higher water bills on the district's legal obligation to protect endangered steelhead trout in Ventura River. The newsletter is an insulting, neanderthal publicity stunt full of disinformation.

Water district customers from Upper Ojai to Rincon coast to western Ventura received this slick propaganda piece produced by Rauch Communications, a highly paid public relations consultant that already has sucked away about $25,000 in ratepayer funds and plans to spend another $100,000 if its full scope of work is enacted. The real reason "customers will have to pay increased costs resulting from water diverted to the fish passage" (as the newsletter claims so conclusively) has far more to do with years of district mismanagement and its constant spending sprees unrelated to its water delivery mission.

Casitas is a sleeper "special district" form of local government that provides about one-third of Ventura's municipal water supply and nearly all water for Ojai and Ojai Valley. The district sits on nearly $11 million in cash and investments that belong to its 50,000 customers. So stealthy is Casitas that two of its three incumbent directors did not even appear on the ballot last November because they ran unopposed for re-election.

Even a cursory review of Casitas meeting minutes and periodic observations during their meetings reveal a shocking and arrogant, or incompetent, spending pattern. For instance, the "Lazy River" water park project initially proposed to cost about $900,000 has many cost overruns (the most recent at $360,000) because the water district's general "manager" John Johnson wrote a poorly defined contract that requires frequent work change orders. Also symptomatic, Casitas recently spent $9,562 for a postage meter and $11,494 for five notebook (laptop) computers for board members who already have ones that work fine.

Other examples of such irresponsible spending no doubt can be found easily by examining the district's records. However, this may become far more difficult if Johnson gets his way to abbreviate the meeting minutes. Twice in March he proposed to the board that the minutes be sanitized so his contradictory and quixotic statements never made the public record.

One example of a big financial and political blunder by Casitas is that John Johnson has spent more than a year attempting to fool everyone by building a fish ladder that he never intended to have enough water to work properly. Fish do not swim in air and need continuous surface water for a sufficient duration to make their way from the ocean to the ladder 10 miles upstream at Robles Dam.

As a result of this stalling under Johnson's leadership, Casitas has lost $2.25 million in state grants because the contracts have expired or will expire too soon to build the fish ladder this year. The other $2.5 million in grants - free money to district ratepayers - likely will dry up as well because that granting agency would want to see some matching funds from other sources.

Securing new grants for the fish ladder now will be far more difficult if not impossible with such an obstructionist track record by Casitas. Tremendous political and personal good will has been squandered with the many project supporters who could lobby for new, second-chance grants. Instead, Casitas probably will be stuck paying for the entire $6 million price of the project.

If Casitas does not build the fish ladder, it will lose a swift, no-brainer lawsuit that has been postponed only because the fish ladder project appeared to be progressing. Public grants do not pay for lawsuit settlements. Making up for these lost grants seems to be the real reason Casitas claims in its current newsletter that rates will increase for the water district customers.

How did Casitas get into this predicament and doom-and-gloom scenario alleged in the newsletter? Many parties have been trying to help the district design, fund and, eventually, build the fish ladder. And many common and easy methods now exist to reduce water demand and conserve water resources. During the large public forum sponsored by Casitas last December, 28 of the nearly 100 comments were by local people who said they are ready and willing to conserve water to benefit steelhead trout in Ventura River. More than half of the comments that night also were pro-fish or pro-river or anti-Casitas, indicating that the district's expensive public relations spin machine had failed. The district still paid Rauch's bill, though.

The district's general manager, perhaps the highest paid government official in Ventura County with a base salary of $174,807 per year, should be a people pleaser, able to find smart, creative, win-win outcomes that keep Casitas out of trouble. A significant drain on ratepayer funds himself, Johnson should treat the public and district customers as partners in the fish ladder project and not as a nuisance from whom the district needs to withhold embarrassing information.

No wonder so many Casitas board meetings are held in closed sessions to discuss actual or anticipated lawsuits against the district.
If Casitas stuck to the water business and did not try to be a regional park district instead, most of its expensive legal problems, traffic congestion, and lust for boating revenue would not occupy so much of its time and money. During a board meeting just last week, Johnson was pitching luxury campgrounds that he said would cost $65 a night. So much for the board's frequently stated desire to offer affordable camping opportunities for the underprivileged youth of Oxnard.

Plenty of water can be found for fish, people and oranges in the Ventura River watershed. Instead of blaming an endangered species for its troubles and expressing perpetual sour grapes through cynical newsletters spinning voodoo economics and spurious hydrology, Casitas needs to get its fiscal house in order, starting with a regime change in its uppermost management. Casitas needs to follow the examples of numerous water agencies in Southern California that now have adopted water conservation as their standard operating procedure in the 21st century.

The good people of Ventura and Ojai Valley are smart enough to know that the sky is not falling and any increases in water rates are not the result of the fish ladder and steelhead protection, as Johnson would like everyone to believe.
David Pritchett has worked professionally for six years on steelhead issues in Ventura County and much of Southern California.

Stolen time
Bret Bradigan, OVN publisher

Warning: This column is written under the influence of sleep deprivation caused by that annual thief of slumber, Daylight Saving Time.

For some weeks, I will go through the early-morning motions, aware, with every sluggish cell of my drowsy body, of that lost hour of somnolescent relief. And as those who know me can attest, I need all the beauty sleep I can get.

For those people who say look on the literal bright side, that it doesn't get dark until much later in the evening, I say move to Alaska, it doesn't get dark there at all for weeks. Just let me have my hour of blissful relief back.

I read somewhere that DST was responsible for saving hundreds of lives by leaving the lights on longer, so that people commute home in the daylight, and don't knock over as many pedestrians as usual. I thought, perhaps that's true, but did anyone consider that it was because the most dangerous drivers forget to set their clocks ahead, and are safely snoozing away as the rest of us clamber aboard our death machines.

Our first bout with Daylight Stolen Time was during World War I, and it was quickly repealed after war's end. One Wisconsin legislator actually got on the floor of Congress and, in his testimony, pronounced against DST on the grounds that the extra hour of sunlight would burn the crops. Perhaps, in a delusion common to this nation's lawmakers, he actually thought that ordering the duration of the day was among the prerogatives of office. More power to him, then, that he chose to refuse to wield that authority.

And if Nixon's legacy wasn't dark enough, it is he we have to thank for our present strait, since he signed DST into law during the 1973 energy crisis, one of his final, and most durable, acts of villainy.
A few places have stood firm against this unwarranted encroachment of federal authority. In fact, one study showed that on a 35-mile stretch of Route 2 between Moundsville, W.Va., and Steubenville, Ohio, every bus driver and his passengers had to endure seven time changes.

One of the few things I miss about Arizona was its reliance on the natural flow of sunrise and sunset, the arc of light and dark as it was meant to be, before the jerry-rigging of industrial-age bureaucrats determined to cram another hour of labor out of our already-packed schedules. That may be one reason why Arizona's population is growing like the federal deficit. The chink in that reasoning, is that then California's population also continues to grow. Illegal immigration is often touted as the cause, but perhaps it's because somewhere a gang member's gun jammed. Or maybe innocent bystanders have a better chance of avoiding drive-by shootings in the well-lit evenings.

Robertson Davies, a Canadian novelist of world repute, wrote in 1947,"I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves."

Fitting then, that Benjamin Franklin was the first to seriously propose such a clock-altering concept. And while he is revered by many, he is vilified by me. I would work up more anger about his treacherous theft of time, if only I wasn't so tired.

© 2003 The Ojai Valley News

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