LAFCo Rubber-Stamps TWD Again

They're starting to realize that we've woken up.

Opponents of the proposed Tuscan Water District made a good showing at the March 2 meeting of LAFCo in Oroville. We didn’t stop the board from green-lighting a request to the County for another “landowner election,” but we asked lots of questions.

We got very few answers though. As always with TWD, there was an ambience of politely going through the motions of public input while driving the train to its next station without delay.

Someone got to Butte County Supervisor Bill Connelly before the meeting with evidence he had taken a $250 campaign contribution from one of the TWD’s petitioner-landowners less than three months after last February (2022)’s vote to move the District forward. He recused himself, and TWD opponent Supervisor Tami Ritter sat in for him as his alternate.

Ritter’s principal question to the Commission and its attorney, Steve Lucas, was whether the entire population dependent on the Tuscan Aquifer in Butte County should be included in any vote on something so consequential to its future.

The answer was: No.

Attorney Jim McCabe, a Durham resident dependent on a home well who is part of Groundwater For Butte’s coalition, had written a series of objections to the resolution at the previous monthly LAFCo meeting (Feb. 7). In response, the new “Amended Resolution” taken up this month has changed the voting basis for TWD from one-acre, one-vote, to assessed land value.

It was asked, but not made clear, later in the meeting if the vote would be apportioned on the full assessed land values, or the much-reduced assessed values under the Williamson Act, which provides relief to farmers and growers with the laudable goal of keeping land in agriculture production. No answer was immediately given.

Several speakers used the public-comment period to raise new questions about the TWD’s funders, about its intended budget, about plainly visible problems and contradictions in the whole process moving it forward.

Groundwater For Butte’s Communications Director, Jeffrey Obser, pointed out that the law requires any new district like this to have a five-year financial plan. He read from the Butte LAFCo Operations Manual: “LAFCo will prepare, or cause to be prepared, a fiscal analysis for the proposed district which projects services to be provided, costs to service recipients, and revenue and expenses for a period of at least five years… LAFCo will not approve an application for district formation unless the fiscal analaysis demonstrated the district can provide the needed services and remain fiscally solvent.”

Yet Mr. Lucas had already stated out loud that the District’s financials were impossible to lay out in any detail until it was established.

Obser also read from the TWD’s Application for Formation, June 2021, that “landowners, as a condition of formation, (A) consent to a board of directors levying assessments on District lands, (B) approve initial assessments not to exceed $10.00 per acres, and (C) authorize Butte County to collect such assessments along with other taxes to recover District formation costs, cost for initial staff and administration of the District… etc.”

In other words, the District’s formation is contingent on the public knowing how it will be funded – for five years. Do we have that information? Absolutely not.

Catch-22 much?

“How do you expect us to vote on this when you’ve admitted you don’t know what the TWD is going to do and you don’t know how much it’s going to cost?” one speaker asked.

Groundwater For Butte treasurer Gina Tropea-Hall made a sweeping request for all records, receipts, and correspondence between LAFCo and the Tuscan Water District’s organization and funders be made public. To date, there has been no public disclosure of who put up the approximately $900,000 and change to advance the District as far as it has come.

Would the petitioners have to be paid back by the County if the voters were to reject the district’s formation or the tax assessment? Mr. Lucas and others stated not.

To sum it up, the TWD is being propelled forward with its now-customary lack of funding disclosure or even the vaguest outline of what exactly it is proposing to do once it starts to consume public money.

The next round will be at the Butte County Board of Supervisors. We’ll keep you posted on when that is, and will have some ideas on how to get TV cameras to show up. Perhaps if a hundred people burned phony ballots outside their door?