Our opinion: This ’n that (April 12, 2006)
The Apple Valley Town Council was supposed to have announced at its regular meeting last night what it plans to do about stemming rising water rates for Apple Valley residents. As has become standard procedure, the council was to have conducted its ruminations about the matter behind closed doors and then make public what those ruminations amounted to after having been sifted through the anti-litigation screen.
The council is, according to Mayor Mark Shoup, intent on acquiring both the Apple Valley Ranchos Water Co. and the Golden State Water Co., and has received a draft study report
which, we assume, outlines the least costly path to acquisition.
That may not be the same as the least difficult.
Quoted in a Daily Press story Monday, Shoup hinted at what may be in store for AVWC and GSWC’s stockholders. Ultimately this may require a condemnation,
Shoup told Daily Press staff writer LeRoy Standish. Translation? The Town Council may be contemplating the invocation of eminent domain to avoid paying the water companies’ asking price … if there is an asking price.
The mayor also weighed in with an opinion as to why the council was weighing acquisition: You as a rate payer should elect the people who set your water rates — it is only fair,
he said.
If that’s the case, of course, expect to see the Town Council embark next on condemnation proceedings for such public utilities as Southern California Edison, whose rates are surely as unacceptable
as those for water. And good luck with that.
[…]
Steve Williams
Source: Daily Press