About Us.

We are a group of your neighbors in the community of East Landers who first met in 2013 because of a shared concern about the high water rates charged by San Bernardino County Special Districts (SDD). In 2015, we were successful in getting Bighorn Desert View Water Agency (BDVWA) to replace SDD as the water provider for our community in East Landers. However, this does not in any way mean that the work on behalf of any of our communities is complete. That work will never be complete for the following reasons.
 
First, even though BDVWA itself is currently well managed and fully accountable, there is the ongoing need to make sure that BDVWA remains that way. Prior to 2007, BDVWA was not well managed and was just as bad as SDD was. It was literally a stroke of good fortune that BDVWA ended up with good management at the time that we needed them to replace SDD as our water provider. We must not let BDVWA become badly managed ever again.
 
Second, there are government agencies that are a threat to BDVWA and that need to be held accountable just as SDD was. Currently, the worst one is the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) but there are others.
 
Third, BDVWA is facing alarmingly rapid cost increases of its own. The 5 major ones are:

  1. BLM and its outrageous and outrageously increasing right of way (ROW) fees.
     
  2. Healthcare.
     
  3. Southern California Edison (SCE) electricity rates, and especially demand charges. BLM is also in part responsible for this cost problem as well since it is extracting ROW fees from SCE for SCE's long distance power transmission lines.
     
  4. Unfunded California State mandates where the state suddenly says to local agencies: "you now need to..., but we can't pay for you to..., so you will need to pay for..." The latest example of one of these unfunded state mandates is the hexavalent chromium fiasco.
     
  5. Ridiculously expensive Davis Bacon wages and/or "prevailing" wages that BDVWA will have to pay for any work that BDVWA has an outside contractor perform.

 
The writing is on the wall ... we need to continue to work to make sure that BDVWA remains clean and that its costs are kept under control. We can do so, or we can stand by and watch BDVWA and all of our communities get slowly consumed. Unless we act, BDVWA and all of our communities will get slowly consumed.

  Sincerely,
 
The LandersWaterRescue.com
ratepayers group


 
The LandersWaterRescue.com ratepayers group is composed entirely of community activists who have lived in Landers, and been water ratepayers, for 10 years or longer. Several have been attending regular board meetings of multiple water districts in the Morongo Basin. This experience has given the LandersWaterRescue.com ratepayers group a strong working knowledge of our water districts.