Newsletters
2023 Year in Review
Thanks to your support, Protect Todos Santos had an incredible year furthering our mission to protect our region from illegal development, keep construction off our dunes and find solutions to our water situation.
Here are this year’s many accomplishments:
• We are growing and residents are being educated. We now have 360 members, and the growth rate is increasing each month. In addition, our website had over 4,500 new visitors this year, achieving one of our main goals of educating our community.
• We are fighting hard against the proposed new PDU. As most of you know, the Municipality in La Paz is trying to replace the PDU written by our community and enacted over a decade ago with one of their own. It is not an overstatement to claim their plan would simply destroy us. It contains no plan for additional water or power and would increase housing densities in most areas by 500% and increase the population over time by 700% to 175,000 inhabitants. Currently about 25,000 people live in the region.
A summary of the proposed PDU with a link to the Community Comments that were submitted to La Paz along with 1,127 petition signatures supporting them can be found here.
Reading it will give you a good understanding of what La Paz wants to do to us, the illegalities of their current proposal, and how we plan to stop them. If the plan in its current form is adopted, we have already informed the Municipality that the community will sue in Federal court to void their plan.
We will keep you informed as we receive new information. We may know more in a couple of weeks because the deadline for IMPLAN to reply to our comments is January 15th. What our community is asking for is to be given a year to study what is being proposed and allow us to rewrite it so we can create a sustainable future for the region.
• We stopped the only dune project that was started this year. In October we got a federal judge to force PROFEPA to close Eddie Ogden’s illegal dune construction in Las Tunas and are now awaiting the judge’s ruling. We hope his ruling will include demolition of the home that was started and restoration of the dune.
• We know a lot more about our water situation. This year we hired two separate PhD hydrologists, both college professors, to study our aquifers and prepare reports of findings. One study was for all the four aquifers in our region, and one was specifically for the Todos Santos Aquifer, the sole source of water for the town. The reports make it very clear that we are extracting significantly more water from the aquifers than is recharged in an average year. We have a lot of work ahead of us in 2024 as we focus on this important issue. For more information on our water situation, click here.
And if you would like to read the full report on the Todos Santos Aquifer, click here.
• We are winning our court battles. We have continued to file administrative complaints and lawsuits against illegal projects that violate our PDU. Complaints have caused many projects to be downsized and the number of reported illegal projects dropped significantly in the second half of this year. Our attorney John Moreno has also achieved rulings that resulted in stop work orders and the demolition of illegal construction.
• We are turning our attention to Cerritos. Believe it or not, Cerritos Beach is in the RT zone which means only single-family homes built on only 15% of the lot are allowed. However as anyone can see, illegal condo projects have been built and are continuing to be built all over Cerritos. This next year we will be taking legal action against the 21 illegal condo projects we have identified that are in pre-construction sales mode or are currently under construction.
• Donations have grown. None of our success would have been possible without the generous financial support of so many of you. The more funds we have available the more we can accomplish together in 2024. This year we received over $50,000 in donations which paid for the water studies and litigation fees to stop illegal development and protect our dunes.
If you have not donated, we hope you will consider making a one-time or monthly contribution so we can continue our important work of protecting this place we all love and call home.
Have a Happy New Year,
The Team at Protect Todos Santos