In 2018, the California State Water Resources Control Board issues a Compliance Letter to Sheep Creek Water Company, along with a moratorium on adding new connections.\u00a0 This was due to changes in state requirements for water boards and companies, and how much water they should be able to produce to meet potential community needs.\u00a0 Sheep Creek Water Company was out of compliance, and as a result started looking to consolidation with Phelan\/Pinon Hills Community Service District.<\/p>\n
The consolidation process was long, with engineering firms producing studies, committees and lawyers analyzing contracts, and negotiations going back-and-forth.\u00a0 A sticking point for Sheep Creek Water Company was having shareholders receive money for their shares, as part of the the company\u2019s 3,000 acre-feet of water rights in El Mirage Basin.<\/p>\n
Heading into 2022, it seemed like an agreement was in place.\u00a0 PPHCSD would take over all of the infrastructure from Sheep Creek Water Company, and in turn receive grants from the state of California to upgrade the infrastructure to meet state municipality requirement.\u00a0 In the meantime, the State of California would purchase the water rights owned by Sheep Creek Water Company, and then turn those water rights over to PPHCSD for the community.\u00a0 In addition, PPHCSD agreed to hire Sheep Creek staff.<\/p>\n
Essentially, shareholders would receive money for the water rights, but PPHCSD would take over the rest of the company for free.\u00a0 This seemed a suitable solution for everyone.<\/p>\n
During the consolidation process, Sheep Creek Water Company had refrained from digging new wells to meet demand and end the state\u2019s moratorium so the value of the company would not increase.\u00a0 In the summer of 2022, Sheep Creek was pressing for a final decision on the consolidation, because if it fell through they would need to dig wells to meet the state\u2019s requirements.<\/p>\n
California decided not to purchase the water rights.\u00a0 PPHCSD did not want to use the $20 million they had in the bank to purchase the water rights themselves.\u00a0 Unless the shareholders were willing to give the company away for free, consolidation was over.\u00a0 Just like that, the years of work on consolidation were thrown away.\u00a0 Sheep Creek Water Company remained, and turned attention to ending the moratorium.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 2018, the California State Water Resources Control Board issues a Compliance Letter to Sheep Creek Water Company, along with a moratorium on adding new connections.\u00a0 This was due to changes in state requirements for water boards and companies, and how much water they should be able to produce to meet potential community needs.\u00a0 Sheep…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-101","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/101\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scwcshareholders.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}