Chowchilla, California

in 1912. Half the ranch was divided into tracts for sale to farmers, with the northeast corner set aside for the site of the town to be known as Chowchilla, currently 11 square miles. Robertson’s ambitious plans were soon carried out. Surveys were completed and maps were made. Streets in the town site and about 300 miles of country roads were opened. This included the 12- mile, palm-tree-lined Robertson Boulevard (100- feet wide so a team of horses could comfortably turn around; now still tree-lined and listed as a scenic highway on the state register). A large hotel and office buildings were erected. The first post office was opened. Soon, a town water system was put into operation and streetlights were put up. Later, some 12 miles of track were laid in connection with the Southern Pacific Line, to aid settlers and expedite the new colonizing efforts. (Now abandoned, the Chowchilla Pacific Railroad served the area for 40 years as one of the shortest lines in the nation.) In 1917, Robertson and famed Chicago meat packer, Louis Swift, purchased the Western Meat Ranch, roughly 40,000 acres of adjoining property, a cattle and farming operation under different managements since it was purchased. In 1919, Robertson purchased 26,000 acres of the Old Bliss Ranch, again, subdivided and sold in small tracts. Robertson had much of his money tied up in extensive land speculation ventures, and when the country began to experience the recession and subsequent Great Depression of the late 1920s and early ‘30s, he became more and more pressed for funds. When Robertson passed away in 1933, he had lost his vast fortune and died practically penniless. Yet, Chowchilla stands as the legacy of a farsighted real estate promoter who saw the future and agricultural productivity of the Valley. Business View Magazine recently spoke with Rod Pruett, self-described “CPA numbers guy” and Finance Director of Chowchilla (recently also installed as Interim City Administrator), about Chowchilla’s more recent projects and plans. “Most recently, we issued multiple bonds for projects, such as solar arrays at multiple locations,” Pruett begins. “The biggest is at our wastewater treatment plant, part of it directly associated with the wastewater treatment, and the rest of that array going back into the grid to reduce costs for all our city facilities and all of our water wells. At our corporate yard, we put a carport up and put solar on the carport to power a new well and a 750,000-gallon water tank and booster stations there. Then, we have a second location for another 750,000-gallon water tank by our industrial area that also has a booster pump station and pressure sustaining valves, due to the geography of our city, as one side of the 99 Freeway is higher than the other side.” “Also, as part of this project, we were not fully water-metered in the city,” he continues. “We needed about 2,000 meters, so now every connection is water-metered. We had an interest- free loan from the state Water Resources Control Board to do that project. We did some other energy efficiency improvements: we replaced all our HVAC units on all our public facility buildings with new energy-efficient HVACs. We swapped out all our streetlights for LED street lights, and all our public facility buildings got LED lights. “The bond issues were taxable bonds, that is, part of them were taxable bonds. There were three series of bonds for each one, for a total of nine. Three for the general fund, three for the water, three for the wastewater. The first series, which