In a 5-0 vote without comment, the board signed off on the park district’s agreement with the water agency, retroactive to last September and continuing until June 30, 2029.

The two entities first formed a compact in 2022, under which the park district deployed three uniformed rangers and a part-time field maintenance technician to take care of segments of the Santa Ana that tie into the Hidden Valley wetlands, Louis Rubidoux Parkland marsh and surrounding locations.

The deployment was for the benefit of the San Bernardino Municipal Valley Water District’s “Upper Santa Ana River Tributaries Restoration Project,” which is well underway.

The project has been aimed at safeguarding habitat for the Santa Ana sucker fish, which is native to the river and has been listed as “threatened” aquatic life on the U.S. Endangered Species Act going back a quarter century. Some area water agencies have challenged the listing in federal court, but the designation hasn’t changed, despite disruptions to fresh water access stemming from the protections.

Under the new agreement between SBVMWD and the park district, the water agency will increase annual funding to ensure there are four uniformed rangers and a full-time field maintenance tech working around the tributaries on a regular basis.

The annual cost for the personnel will be $1.017 million, all of which will come from the water district, according to the agreement.

“Because of the ecological sensitivity of these sites and their proximity to developed urban areas, additional patrols and proactive management efforts are necessary to prevent damage from improper land use,” the park district said. “The ongoing presence of uniformed rangers conducting patrols in marked vehicles has effectively reduced illegal dumping, unauthorized encampments, trespassing and vegetation clearing, helping to protect conservation objectives.”

Improvements to riparian spaces connected to the Santa Ana involve multiple agencies, including the Riverside County Flood Control & Water Conservation District, which is upgrading the levee system.

The Santa Ana River bottom is a magnet for the homeless, who erect encampments on an ongoing basis. Brush fires and other environmental impacts are often blamed on them.

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The administration has hailed the project by Houston-based Sable Offshore Corp. to restart production in waters off Santa Barbara damaged by a 2015 oil spill as the kind of project President Donald Trump wants to increase U.S. energy production.

The state oversees the pipelines that run through Santa Barbara and Kern counties, said Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta.

“The federal administration has no right to usurp California’s regulatory authority,” he said at a news conference. “We’re taking them to court to draw a line in the sand and to protect our coast, beaches and communities from potentially hazardous pipelines.”

But the U.S. Transportation Department agency that approved Sable’s plan pushed back on the lawsuit.

“Restarting the Las Flores Pipeline will bring much needed American energy to a state with the highest gas prices in the country,” said a spokesperson with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Sable did not respond for comment on the lawsuit.

Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term to reverse former President Joe Biden’s ban on future offshore oil drilling on the East and West coasts. A federal court later struck down Biden’s order to withdraw 625 million acres of federal waters from oil development.

The federal administration in November announced plans for new offshore oil drilling off the California and Florida coasts, which the oil industry has backed for years.

But critics say the plans could harm coastal communities and ecosystems.

Bonta said one of the pipelines Sable wants to restart burst in 2015, spilling oil along the Southern California coast. The event was the state’s worst oil spill in decades. More than 140,000 gallons (3,300 barrels) of oil gushed out, blackening beaches for 150 miles (240 kilometers) from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. It polluted a biologically rich habitat for endangered whales and sea turtles, killing scores of pelicans, seals and dolphins, and decimating the fishing industry.

The drilling platforms were subsequently shuttered.

Sable has faced a slew of legal challenges but has said it is determined to restart production, even if that means confining it to federal waters, where state regulators have virtually no say. California controls the 3 miles (5 kilometers) nearest to shore. The platforms are 5 to 9 miles (8 to 14 kilometers) offshore.

“It’s crazy that we are even talking about restarting this pipeline,” said Alex Katz, executive director of the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara group formed in response to a catastrophic 1969 California oil spill.

The federal government’s approval to restart the pipelines ignores painful lessons the community learned from the 2015 oil spill, said California Assemblymember Gregg Hart, a Democrat representing Santa Barbara.

“California will not allow Trump and his Big Oil friends to bypass our essential environmental laws and threaten our coastline,” he said in a statement.

California has been reducing the state’s production of fossil fuels in favor of clean energy for years. The movement has been spearheaded partly by Santa Barbara County, where elected officials voted in May to begin taking steps to phase out onshore oil and gas operations.

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The National Park Service had been embroiled in a years-long dispute with the company, Dateline Resources Ltd., alleging that it was operating the Colosseum Mine without authorization and had damaged the surrounding landscape with heavy equipment. Dateline said it had the right to work the mine under a plan its prior operators had submitted to the Bureau of Land Management decades before.

President Trump had taken office just weeks before my visit. Environmentalists told me the conflict posed an early test of how his administration would handle the corporate exploitation of public lands.

At the time, observers weren’t sure how things would shake out. Conserving public lands is one of the rare issues that’s popular on both sides of the political aisle, they pointed out.

Almost a year later, it’s clear that the Trump administration has sided with the corporations.

Trump directed the Department of Interior to inventory mineral deposits on federal lands and prioritize mining as the primary use of those lands. He instructed officials to dramatically fast-track permitting and environmental reviews for certain types of energy and critical minerals projects — and designated metallurgical coal a critical mineral, enabling companies that mine it to qualify for a lucrative tax credit.

His budget bill lowered the royalty rates companies must pay the government to extract coal, oil or gas from public lands and provided other financial incentives for such projects while reducing the authority of federal land managers to deny them.

Under the president’s direction, the DOI has opened up millions of acres of federal land to new coal leasing and moved to rescind both the 2021 Roadless Rule, which protects swaths of national forest lands from extractive activities by barring most new road construction, and the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which puts conservation and restoration on par with other uses of BLM land like mining, drilling and grazing.

The administration is seeking to roll back limitations on mining and drilling for specific pieces of public land, including portions of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the watershed feeding the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and a buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers overturned management plans limiting energy development on certain BLM lands in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Altogether, the Trump administration and its legislative allies have taken steps to reduce or eliminate protections for nearly 90 million acres of public land, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. That figure rises to more than 175 million acres if you include the habitat protections diminished by the administration’s moves to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the organization notes.

“All of these things represent in some ways the largest attack on our public lands and giveaway to large multinational mining corporations that we’ve seen probably since the 19th century,” said U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, who likened the level of resource exploitation to “something like what happened during the robber baron era when there was no regulation or protection for our communities or the environment.”

Stansbury has introduced legislation that would increase the fees mining companies must pay to sit on speculative claims on federal lands and require those funds be used for conservation. She told me it’s just a tiny contribution to a larger effort to push back against the administration’s approach to initiate extraction on public lands, which she described as so frequent and pervasive that “it’s a bit like whack-a-mole.”

“So much damage has been done, both administratively and legislatively, over the last 11 months since Trump took office,” she said.

As for the Colosseum Mine, the DOI sided with its operators back in the spring, saying Dateline Resources did not have to seek authorization from the Park Service to keep mining. The announcement was followed by public endorsements from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The company’s stock value soared, and by September, it had kicked off a major drilling blitz.

The company has already uncovered high-grade gold deposits. It’s taking a break for Christmas, but is expected to resume drilling in the new year.

The post How the Trump administration sold out public lands in 2025 appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Simple logic tells us that as climate change alters precipitation patterns, California must expand its capacity to capture and store water.

Even if the overall amount of precipitation remains unchanged, we will receive more of it in the form of rain and less as snow, which means the natural reservoir of the Sierra snow pack will decline as a water source.

We can prepare for that decline by creating more storage, either in new reservoirs or by replenishing underground aquifers. However, despite the urgency of the situation — one underscored by the current drought — California politicians have been lackadaisical about doing what needs to be done.

Local and regional water authorities have been more diligent. Southern California’s recent construction of more storage capacity is one reason it is less affected by the current drought than Northern California.

Belatedly, increasing storage is moving upward on the political agenda. Last week, the federal Environmental Protection Agency invited sponsors of the Sites Reservoir project , which has been on the back burner for decades, to apply for a $2.2 billion loan that would cover roughly 40% of the project’s estimated cost.

Along with some state water bond money and commitments from prospective users of the project — Southern California water agencies, mostly — Sites is now in position to put together a financing package to make it a reality.

“We’ve definitely turned the corner and we have a nice tailwind at our back,” said Jerry Brown, executive director of the Sites Project Authority. Brown is not related to former Gov. Jerry Brown, whose Colusa County retirement home, incidentally, is not far from Sites.

It’s not going to happen immediately, despite the urgency of the situation. Just assembling the loan package and getting approval could take several years and there are other hurdles to clear. Nevertheless, the strong possibility of a federal loan is a huge step forward.

If it becomes reality, the reservoir would be constructed on the west side of the Sacramento Valley, west of Maxwell. It would have a capacity of up to 1.8 million acre-feet of water, about half the size of the state’s Lake Oroville, but unlike Oroville, would not dam a major river.

Sites would be an off-stream reservoir, similar to — and slightly smaller than — the San Luis Reservoir in the Pacheco Pass west of Los Banos. During periods of high precipitation and runoff, Sacramento River water would be pumped into Sites, then released back into the river as needed for agriculture, residential use or to maintain flows for fish.

As an off-stream reservoir, Sites escapes at least some of the traditional opposition to big water projects from environmental groups, but there is some criticism that it could be used to divert water during low precipitation periods.

“It’s just a, kind of, different way of thinking about it,” project boss Brown told the Associated Press. “There’s a lot of fear and distrust and we have to operate in a way that we, you know, secure trust and address the fears.”

The good news about Sites should be kept in perspective. It’s just one of many steps that California must take to protect its vital water supply from the potential ravages of climate change.

It’s entirely possible that climate change will not only change the mix of precipitation — more rain and less snow — but reduce the overall volume of water that falls on California, thus making more storage even more crucial while forcing us to rethink the entire pattern of water use.

Nothing is more critical to California’s future.

Dan Walters | Contributed

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