In times past, the amount of time between a housing project’s approval and the start of construction was someplace from 15 to 18 months. Then came the lawsuits from various environmental groups, and the time from approval to construction is someplace from 10 to 15 years. In a few cases in the SCV nearly 30 years.

This means that for many of you who are wondering why new homes are being built during a water crisis and drought – the plans were approved many years ago. It has just taken that long to get past the various lawsuits and hassles.

For those of you living next door to these new developments, I’ll bet many of you didn’t even know they were on the drawing board. You had no idea that a huge development was going to take place next door, and I would bet it wasn’t disclosed when you bought your home. Guess what? There is not any requirement for you to be advised of that right now.

If there is a lawsuit affecting the land next to the place you’re buying, I think it should be disclosed to you before you get anywhere near signing the documents to buy. Sometimes this isn’t possible because, buried in a title search, a lawsuit might not show up – even if it is a lawsuit of many years standing.

Today isn’t the best time to see new homes being built, but many of those new tracts are just building out permits approved a decade ago or longer. So folks blame our current City Council members and the county and the state – when the projects were approved before many of them held office.

What if you owned, say, 20 acres of land here in the SCV? You went through and subdivided it into lots and wanted to build a tract. After getting the plans approved and of all the hoops jumped through, some group comes along and says your development will endanger a little bug that few have seen and may not even be on your property. But that group takes you to court to stop you from building on your land because they think this little bug my become extinct if you do build.

You have expensive and exhaustive studies performed to find the elusive little bug and can’t find it. You think you are home free, but now the same group from the first lawsuit files again because water that might run off of your development could have toxic chemicals trapped in the existing soil from cattle operations 40 years before you owned it.

More expensive studies and negative results. So finally you get to build … 10 years after you first applied and the project was approved. Now you’re a bad guy because you want to add homes during a drought. You think your property rights were violated. I tend to agree.

So do we blame the almond growers for our water problems? Or do we blame a bottled water company? How about the trillions of gallons of water that are being released to protect the little Delta smelt fish?

Maybe it is the lack of dams and reservoirs. Lack of conservation of water could play a role, too. Golf courses and lawns in your own yards. The causes are so many, we can’t figure out what they are.

Maybe the solution is to spend a lot of our taxpayer dollars on a high-speed rail system? Maybe it could be expanded and used to haul water from the Columbia River. Maybe.

Maybe our priorities are a little warped. Maybe we ought to be looking at some of the basic functions of government instead of our government building trains. Basic functions include roads, infrastructure for water distribution, education, public safety (police and fire protection), the courts of course and tax collection. Railroads are not a part of that equation. Railroads are a private industry and should not be a state-built and -operated system.

Most of all, I just can’t see us building a railroad when we’re getting a little more thirsty every day.

You’d think with all that hot air in Sacramento, it would be warm enough to use for a desalinization plant.

I don’t have any other answer except to adjust our priorities to what we need and not what we want. We need water. We need lots of water. We might want a train. Water trumps train every time.

Darryl Manzer grew up in the Pico Canyon oil town of Mentryville in the 1960s and attended Hart High School. After a career in the U.S. Navy he returned to live in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he serves as executive director of the SCV Historical Society. He can be reached at dmanzer@scvhistory.com. His older commentaries are archived at DManzer.com; his newer commentaries can be accessed [here]. Watch his walking tour of Mentryville [here].