This article is reported by AfroLA and co-published by AfroLA, Guardian US and Inyo county’s the Sheet. It’s the second of several stories examining the impact of Los Angeles’s extensive landownership in the Owens valley. You can read the first one here.
Two rural California airports that are crucial to local air ambulance services, firefighting efforts and search and rescue operations are unable to perform critical repairs, blocked by an agency 300 miles away: the city of Los Angeles.
The airports are two of several major pieces of infrastructure in California’s Owens valley left in disrepair because of LA policies, an investigation by AfroLA, the Sheet and the Guardian reveals.
Los Angeles has owned large swaths of Inyo county, where the Owens valley is located, for more than a century. With ownership of the land comes rights to its water – water that is key to servicing the thirsty metropolis of 3.8 million people. Aqueducts carrying water from Inyo and neighbouring Mono county to LA provided 73% of the city’s water supply last year.
Today the Los Angeles department of water and power (DWP) owns 90% of privately available land in Inyo county, the majority of which it leases back to the county, its residents, business owners and ranchers.
But in recent years, county officials say, DWP has refused their applications to renew long-term leases, including those for the land that includes county airports, landfills and campgrounds.
An analysis of tax records shows nearly every DWP lease held by Inyo county is expired. More than 60% of leases between the county and DWP have been expired for more than a decade, and half of those have been expired since the aughts.
Without these long-term leases, the officials say, the county cannot apply for state and federal funding that supports critical infrastructure work. With fewer than 20,000 residents and a limited tax base, the county does not have the funds to bankroll those projects itself.
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What were California’s water wars?
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The early 1900s marked the dawn of what became known as California’s water wars. As Los Angeles exponentially grew in those years, its leaders searched for ways to sustain its population. In the Owens valley, they found what LA did not have: plenty of water.
Over the next decades, LA agents secretly, and aggressively, worked to buy up land in the valley and take ownership of the water rights that came with those parcels. By 1933, LA department of water and power had gobbled up the large marjority of town properties in the area.
Today, DWP owns 90% of privately available land in Inyo county, which encompasses the Owens valley. (The federal government is the biggest landowner, owning the land in Death Valley national park and Inyo national forest). The agency also owns 30% of the land in neighboring Mono county.
“We have a landlord that is stonewalling us on the leases, and making it impossible for us to do improvements,” said Leslie Chapman, a former Inyo county administrative officer.
Failure to launch
Three of Inyo county’s small airports sit on a combination of DWP easements and leases. There’s Independence airport, which is primarily used by the Bureau of Land Management to fight wildfires in the Eastern Sierra. The Lone Pine airport provides air ambulance services for the southern part of the county, and search and rescue for Mt Whitney and Death valley. And then there’s the Eastern Sierra regional airport, located in Bishop, the only commercial one in the county. (The county’s fourth airport, Shoshone airport, is located on the other side of Death valley near the border with San Bernardino county.)
Both the Lone Pine and Independence airports sit in various states of disrepair, their maintenance hampered by DWP lease terms.
“Right now, there have been cracks on that runway that certainly could pose a safety risk,” Ashley Helms, one of Inyo county’s deputy directors of public works, said about Independence. She described how landing gear can get stuck and break off in a 4in crack. “Right now, we’re filling cracks like that by hand with cold mix asphalt,” she said.
At Lone Pine, there are cracks in one taxiway and extensive damage to a second.
California state law requires landlords to maintain their properties, but DWP leases have a specific carveout stipulating that leaseholders are the ones in charge of maintaining the property.
For a rural county like Inyo to be able to do that, it needs federal and state grants to pay for infrastructure work. But to qualify for grant funding, counties must prove they have tenure of the land for the length of the project. A new runway or road requires 20 years; a new building is 50 years. Time to plan, permit, and procure contracts for the project can also add years required for the lease.
“We are hoping to do a runway rehabilitation project [at Independence airport] in 2025, funded by the Federal Aviation Administration. But that will require an updated and extended lease from DWP,” said Helms.
A renewed lease probably won’t come soon. State law gives DWP lessees the right of first refusal of lease renewals, effectively guaranteeing lease renewals, but county officials say DWP has failed to process the paperwork to renew the lease for Independence airport. When this happens, leases are in holdover status, meaning they’re not technically active, but tenants continue to make payments month to month.
Los Angeles DWP did not respond to a detailed request for comment. DWP’s Eastern Sierra division also did not respond to a request for comment. The office of the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, also did not respond to a request for comment.
The situation in Lone Pine is similar. The main taxiway and two runways are built on an active DWP lease, but it’s expiring soon. The county’s public works department has a project planned to fix cracks on one of the runways before the lease expires. The other, more damaged taxiway needs more extensive work that would require a new lease.
If Lone Pine were to close, Helms said, search and rescue efforts in the region would be seriously harmed. Because of the high elevation, search and rescue flights to Mt Whitney, the highest peak in the continental US, often have to refuel 10 times during an operation. “If [search crews] had to come all the way to Bishop either to refuel or pick people up, that would be a huge impediment,” Helms said.
Lone Pine airport was also important for local emergency medical services, she said. There is a small hospital in Lone Pine, but it is considerably smaller than the one in Bishop or facilities in larger cities across the state. “Anything serious does need to be flown out,” said Helms. “It’s a pretty bumpy ride.”
The Eastern Sierra regional airport in Bishop has had its own struggles with DWP. In the early 2000s, Inyo county began negotiations with DWP to convert the airport lease to an easement, which would give the county the permanent land tenure required for FAA grants.
The negotiations went on for years. According to the local newspaper, the Inyo Register, the then DWP board president, Dominick Rubalcava, presented DWP’s position thus in 2004: “More water, new lease.” Deliver more water to LA, and you’ll get your lease. In 2010, nearly a decade after the county began the talks, the petition was granted. Rubalcava declined to comment on his 2004 remarks.
Securing the Eastern Sierra regional airport easement allowed the county to clear a backlog of maintenance and safety projects. Pursuing an easement for the other airports, particularly Lone Pine, which has had to cease night-time operations of its air ambulance services until lighting upgrades can be done, would mean the county would never need to worry about land tenure again and could be more responsive to maintenance issues, county officials said.
A vicious fight
Other infrastructure and planning projects have faced similar roadblocks.
All but one of Inyo county’s parks and campgrounds have expired leases. That meant county officials could not apply for funding from Proposition 68, a 2018 ballot measure that allocated a quarter-billion dollars to parks statewide, including $23.1m to rural communities for campgrounds.
While she was Inyo’s county administrative officer, Chapman tried to negotiate an extension to the park leases directly with DWP. But the department refused to renew or extend the lease, she said. “A lot of our tourists are from LA. And it’s just so frustrating,” said Chapman.
In 2020, the Eastern Sierra transit authority (Esta), the public transit system that provides service from Lancaster, California, to Reno, Nevada, obtained a $457,000 federally funded grant to build a new administration and dispatch center on its bus yard that would serve the Eastern Sierra region, a copy of the grant shows. The grant would cover more than 78% of the new building’s cost.
State and federal grant regulations require land tenure for about 50 years for a new building. But Esta’s bus yard is located on an expired sublease at the Bishop airport, and DWP has failed to renew that lease. That means the county cannot use the grant money and will be forced to give it back at the end of this year. In the meantime, the county is renting a trailer out of pocket – at a cost of $45,000 a year. In 12 years, the portable trailer will have cost as much as the administration building designed to last 50 years.
“It’s a poor use [of public funds] to rent this facility when we could have just built one,” said Phil Moores, the head of Esta.
Moores said Esta’s building project was a victim of the deterioration of the relationship between the county and DWP in the aftermath of a series of lawsuits over the county’s landfills.
Inyo county operates five landfills, three of which are on DWP land and two of whose leases expired in 2009. (Bishop’s had an active lease in 2017 when the lawsuits were filed; Lone Pine and Independence are still in holdover status.) Starting in 2013, the three landfills have racked up hundreds of inspection violations for exceeding their daily capacity. The state recycling agency advised the county in January 2013 to expand the daily tonnage allowance at the dumps to prevent future violations. The county has argued that that issue can only be fixed with an active and expanded lease.
In February 2018, Inyo county tried to force DWP’s hand and filed an eminent domain suit against DWP, hoping to seize the land the landfills are on and the associated water rights from the department through the courts, bringing them under county ownership.
DWP filed a countersuit, arguing Inyo county was not in a position to take ownership of the land because the county had not complied with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). LA also said it had concerns about the county’s operation of the landfills.
A vicious legal fight ensued. In a 30 July 2018 deposition, the then Inyo county administrative officer, Kevin Carunchio, said an unknown DWP official had told him on the phone that LA would “rain fire and fury” down on Inyo county if it pursued efforts to take back its land, including the water rights.
In 2022, an appeals judge agreed with LA: Inyo county had failed to comply with CEQA regulations. DWP kept ownership of the land, and the county was ordered to pay the city of LA more than $800,000 in attorney’s fees.
A complicated relationship
Inyo county’s problems, local leaders say, are exacerbated by its lack of revenue. “Most counties survive on property tax revenue, and we don’t hardly have any property tax revenue,” said Jen Roeser, a DWP tenant and county supervisor. “There’s only so much land you can build on which generates a minimal amount of property tax revenue.”
The biggest landowner in Inyo county is the federal government, which owns the land in Death Valley national park and Inyo national forest. The feds pay the county $2m annually in lieu of taxes, 1.4% of the county’s revenue.
With 252,000 acres and a $20m tax bill, DWP is the largest private landholder and taxpayer in the county. How to tax DWP’s land holdings in the Eastern Sierra prompted an entire chapter in the state constitution, which establishes a separate taxing system called the Phillips Factor. This means the base value of DWP’s landholdings was fixed in 1966, and the value of the land has not been reassessed since.
While Inyo county has an at-times volatile relationship with DWP, the agency also has its defenders in the region.
They argue LA’s extensive landownership has shielded the region from development.
Additionally, they say, DWP stimulates local economies as Inyo county’s largest employer, providing hundreds of well-paying jobs with good benefits for local residents, including multigenerational families who live in the county but work for the city of Los Angeles. The department has a longstanding relationship with ranchers in the region, generally offering them land at lower prices than other utilities.
“In the past, it has been a mutually beneficial relationship, to provide services for the whole community in that the city of Los Angeles department of water and power needs these services. And their workers are members of our community, and constituents of the city of Bishop and Inyo county,” said the county supervisor and DWP leaseholder Jeff Griffiths.
But, Griffiths concurred, “in the recent past, [DWP] has been very difficult to work with, and has not been renewing leases or has made it extremely difficult, or put very onerous terms to those leases”.
Credits
This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.
The stories are the result of more than two years of records requests, interviews and data analysis by AfroLA. Guardian US provided assistance as a co-publishing partner in the editing, production and promotion of this story. Collaboration and co-publication with Inyo County’s the Sheet helped ensure that Owens valley residents have ready access to news that directly affects their lives and communities. Thank you to the many people who made reporting and sharing this story possible.
For AfroLA
Justin Allen, technology manager
Dana Amihere, editor
Jennings Hanna, interaction designer
Alexandra Kanik, web developer
Katie Licari, reporter
Stu Patterson, copy editor
Alex Tatusian, visual designer
For Guardian US
Matthew Cantor, copy editor
Will Craft, data editor
Eline Gordts, editor
Thalia Juarez, photo editor
Andrew Witherspoon, data editor
