Today, I want to take a look at the opportunity costs of having Democrats run everything in this state and the incredible amount of waste due to mismanagement we face here every single day. Why me? Because media here, or anywhere else, for that matter, won’t focus on it.

We have a Republican Assemblyman in California who ran for Governor in the recent recall attempt of Gavin Newsom. We actually do have more than one Republican person in our state’s junior legislative house, but it often seems to conservatives like we only have the one. Democrats enjoy supermajorities in both chambers, holding 62 of 80 seats in the state Assembly, and 32 of the 40 state senate seats. It’s been a bloodbath for Republicans in Sacramento for a very long time.

Kevin Kiley has some statewide name ID due to his attempt to run in 2021 as a replacement governor if Gavin Newsom were to have been recalled. He wasn’t, largely because former radio talk show host Larry Elder became the would-be replacement governor is the recall passed, and Newsom and union leaders in this state painted Elder as the ultimate boogeyman, letting Newsom off the hook.

Kiley posted a video on his Twitter page from drought central. Don’t let the recent precipitation here fool you. The climate apostles still want you to believe there is still a drought here, and you shouldn’t water your lawn, wash your car, or spend more than a minute in the shower. The most recent data in California is that the average Californian uses 85 gallons of fresh water a day. The state wants to cut that to 55 now, down to 47 in the near future, and down further to 42 shortly after that. Here’s the video Kiley posted last week.

We are releasing 20,000 cubic feet per second into the ocean from Folsom because there’s no place to store it. pic.twitter.com/4ov5njAEd2

— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) March 17, 2023

That’s a lot of water. But you have to do a little digging around to find out how many reservoirs there are in California, and how much water is being let out of them, directly or indirectly, into the ocean.

We haven’t built many reservoirs in recent years, but the current count of reservoirs large and small in the Golden State stands around 1,300. Now we’ve been having rainfall since November in this current rain year ending in June, and the reservoirs were largely emptied out when the heavens began opening up. But as early as January 11th, we began reading stories here and there about reservoirs releasing water not because they were at capacity, but because they were already close enough to capacity that they had to save room for more rain to come, and for the eventual snowpack melting that would take place in the spring. So we’ve been releasing water that we’ve been told was in existential short supply back into the ocean on and off for three months now. What I want to do for you is give you just a flavor of the kind of volume of water we’re talking about.

Just in the past 10 days, from March 14th to March 24, here is the data of how much water was either already released or is scheduled to be released by Friday. This is just one bloc of release schedules. There are more planned in the future, and there have been several that have taken place already. But just for the purposes of this column, let’s pretend this 10-day release statewide is the only one for the year.

Water release is measured in cubic feet per second. The scheduled releases only show the flow rate, not the actual amount of water being let go out of the reservoir. If further days are necessary, they’re added as another scheduled release. The California Data Exchange Center, which is housed under the California Department of Water Resources, has the most current 10-day period I referenced above, and there are 160 individual line items of reservoirs, what days they’re opening up the spillways, and how fast they’re opening the flow rate. I added up the 160 individual releases. It’s 828,007 cubic feet per second statewide. Anytime you hit six digits in anything (except maybe the national debt), that’s a lot. In the debt’s case, six digits is a rounding error. But again, it’s a flow rate, not a total gallon amount. There’s 86,400 seconds in a day. So it’s 828,007 X 86,400, or 71.54 billion gallons of water. That’s a lot of water. And to be certain, not every release is in a 24-hour cycle. In fact, in some cases, they increase and decrease the flow rate throughout the day at some dams in order to keep downriver from overflowing the banks. But we’re still talking a vastly substantial amount of usable water and dumping it back from whence it came, especially if you include in the flow to the ocean urban street runoff into drainage channels. It’s staggering how little water we actually try to retain when it does rain.

There’s 39.24 million people living in California, less every day thanks to Gavin Newsom’s exodus the last couple years. If every one of them uses their average of 85 gallons a day, that’s a daily total of 3.33 billion gallons. That’s 21 days of full water use for every Californian that’s going right back into the ocean because we can’t seem to find the means to harness it. There have already been similar releases. There will be more before the rains end for the year. We’ve probably flushed two months’ worth of water away already.

Now you might think that we’d be able to built a few more reservoirs. They’re pricey. They’re just under a billion each to make. If we had not spent or committed to Gavin Newsom’s Scam Tram, the train from nowhere to nowhere, the one that no one will ride and that has not got a lick of substantial track built, but yet has run up a price tag of $128 billion, with future cost overruns as far as the eye can see, it doesn’t take a rocket science to see that even building 20 new reservoirs and accounting for the operating expenses each year once they’re built, you’d still have about $90 billion left over. Remember, California is in the red this year by $97.5 billion.

If the average reservoir built holds a modest two-million acre-feet of water, that would be an additional 651.7 billion gallons of water that could be stored for future use. Do we do that? No. we spend it on non-trains and plans to give reparations money from taxpayers living in a state that was formed as a free state, never participating in the institution of slavery, and using tax money from people who have never owned slaves, in order to give it to people who were never slaves. That’s how we like to plan our big spending here.

You might say the Pacific Ocean could actually be the biggest reservoir of all if you only built a few desalinization plants along the coastline. How much do those cost? $700 million to make, $53 million a year to run. Again, we are committed to spend at least $128 billion on the Scam Tram. There was a vote last fall in Costa Mesa, a 12-member board of the California Coastal Commission, on whether there should be a desal plant built in Orange County. The vote was a unanimous no. Why? Because of the potential negative impact it would have on the ocean level. I’m no scientist, but dumping 71.54 billion gallons of water into the ocean might have an inflationary impact on sea level, if any impact at all. Surely, dipping a straw into the ocean to skim a little off the top and take out the salt so we can water our grass isn’t going to lead to the end of all things.

I’m just here to lay down the marker so when the eggheads conspire with the Democrats in July to start telling you it’s the worst drought in the history of droughts again, you can tell them to come talk to us again in four months after we’ve used our portion of the water they irrigated the sharks with due to mismanagement. Drought is a choice here in California. I choose not to participate in it.