Bond Debt

 

Bond debt adds up for local residents

October 04, 2009 9:19 AM

BROOKE EDWARDS Staff Writer

Adelanto and Victorville residents are nearly tied when it comes to how much debt they’re carrying on behalf of their cities, largely as a result of infrastructure and enterprise projects.

Though Victorville has four times the bonded debt as Adelanto — with $480 million on the books as of June — debt in both cities averages out to more than $4,000 per person.

Hesperia has twice the debt of Adelanto but that equals half as much per resident, with $2,682 per person.

Apple Valley finishes a distant fourth both in the amount of debt it carries and its per capita total, at $936 per resident.

To read the full story, see Sunday’s edition of the Daily Press. To subscribe to the Daily Press in print or online, call 760-241-7755 or click here.

Brooke Edwards may be reached at 955-5358 or at bedwards@VVDailyPress.com.

Filed under: Water Scams

Victorville’s Outrageous Water Use Growing . . . R-Cubed Project Enables Victorville’s Water Addiction

The chart above is the Alto water basin projected replacement water obligations through 2025. This is the amount of water that Victorville uses above and beyond what they are allocated. The parties are required by the Adjudication or the Judgement to replace the amount that they “overdraft” from the basin that is the sole source of water for the entire High Desert.

Filed under: Water Scams, buck johns, mojave water agency, victroville, water

Dr Pepper Plant: Victorville is a Corporation’s “Wet Dream” . . . How Taxpayer Money Funds the Privatization of Water in the High Desert

Next time you hear Victorville politicians talk up the Dr Pepper slated to open up here in the High Desert sometime in 2010, think of this article:

Dr Pepper’s Wet Dream: Water, Government Subsidies and Transfer of Wealth in the Middle of the Desert
By Yasha Levine, AlterNet
Posted on September 8, 2009, Printed on October 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142504/

VICTORVILLE, Calif. — On a sun-baked afternoon in October 2008, a group of soft-drink executives and city officials gathered for a groundbreaking ceremony at an old Air Force base on the outskirts of the city, 100 miles east of Los Angeles.

They were standing on the edge of the Mojave Desert, one of the driest, most inhospitable terrains in America. Yet there they were, posing for photographs, gold-plated shovels in hand, to mark the construction of a massive new bottling plant and distribution hub for the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, a facility that will to suck up hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year from this water-scarce area to supply soft drinks to 20 percent of its domestic market.

A bottling plant in the middle of the desert? It sounds too absurd to be real. But in the warped “pro-growth, pro-business” logic of a city on the frontier of Southern California’s urban sprawl, the plan made perfect economic sense.

If the scheme is pulled off without a hitch, Dr Pepper will fire up one of its biggest production nodes in America sometime near the end of 2010.

The $120 million plant will occupy 57 acres, with 200 low-skilled workers manning almost 1 million square feet of warehouse space. Using 250 million gallons of water a year, six production lines will crank out 350,000 gallons worth of liquid refreshments a day, shipping perennial soft-drink favorites like Dr Pepper, Snapple, 7UP, A&W, Hawaiian Punch and 50 other brands all across the West Coast and Southwest.

The Victorville plant was a steal for the beverage manufacturer, receiving tens of millions of dollars in subsidies from the city. Local officials have painted it as a win-win situation, talking up the jobs and tax revenue it will bring to a community hard-hit by the recession and housing market collapse.

Yet, no one has seriously addressed the big wet elephant in the room: water. Where will it come from, and at what cost to the local population?

Filed under: Water Scams