The Guardian publishes two-part series on Los Angeles' continuing control over California's Owens Valley

Don't miss Katie Licari's excellent, in-depth reporting here and here.  She is writing about the long-term consequences of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP)'s secretly buying up Owens Valley water rights decades ago.  In short, LA DWP still owns so much land in the Owen's Valley, part of the Eastern Sierra, that both public and private entities there remain beholden to this Los Angeles entity.

The first story focuses on how LADWP is hurting private enterprise in the Owens Valley, where it is the landlord for so many businesses.  A short excerpt follows: 

The land under [Mike] Allen’s [feed and outdoor supply] store belongs to an owner 300 miles away: the city of Los Angeles, specifically its department of water and power (DWP).

LA has owned large swathes of the Owens valley, where Bishop is located, for more than a century. The city first swooped in in the early 1900s, at the dawn of California’s water wars. As the metropolis grew at breakneck speed, its leaders searched for ways to sustain that population, and when they entered the Owens valley, they found what LA lacked: plenty of water.

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Today, DWP owns 90% of privately available land in Inyo county, which encompasses the Owens valley, and 30% of all the land in neighboring Mono county. Aqueducts transporting water from both counties provided 395,000 acre-feet of water to LA last year – about 73% of the city’s water supply.

Stories of LA’s brazen land grab in the Owens valley have been told for decades – it was loosely depicted in the 1974 film Chinatown. And the fierce legal battles that have ensued, including over the environmental impact, have made regional headlines for years.

But residents, business owners, and some municipal leaders in this rural region say LA’s landownership in the valley has taken on a new, and crippling, dimension in recent years.

DWP has taken steps to exert even greater control over its land holdings in the valley. An AfroLA review of hundreds of documents obtained through records requests, as well as interviews with municipal officials, residents, legal experts and business owners, reveals DWP started changing the terms of leases in 2015, and formally added restrictions on the transfer of leases from one owner to the next in 2016.

DWP’s moves have meant that hundreds of families who have built lives in the Eastern Sierra region have seen their plans upended, often being left with the stark choice of abandoning their livelihoods or fighting DWP.

The second story is about how LADWP is hurting public infrastructure, like airports, by ham stringing the ability of local government agencies to make necessary repairs and improvements.  Here's more:  

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.