[env-trinity] (no subject)

[Byron]

An Op-Ed from Congressman George Miller related to the Sumner-Peck
Settlement in Westlands a few years ago.  It's interesting again in view of
the soon to be released San Joaquin Valley Drainage Reevaluation
environmental document, about which I sent an earlier email today to my
members.   Tom Stokely sent earlier message to the Trinity and Pelican
lists.

 

Byron

 

Uncle Sucker to the Rescue

 

George Miller    SF Chronicle  Monday, April 2, 2001

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CALIFORNIANS, still in disbelief over the greed and manipulation of electric
utilities, should cast a suspicious eye at a quiet land purchase scam going
down in the western San Joaquin Valley, where taxpayers might soon shell out
$90 million to buy 41,000 acres of contaminated wasteland.

 

Bureaucrats from the Interior Department have been stealthily negotiating
with big landowners in the huge Westlands Water District to buy up thousands
of acres of low-quality land that, when irrigated with taxpayer subsidized
irrigation water, generated a toxic runoff brew sufficient to pollute
wildlife refuges, deform bird embryos and contaminate streams.

 

In 1994, Congress responded to this disaster by approving purchases of those
contaminated lands in western Fresno County as a way to reduce the amount of
toxic irrigation runoff.

 

But there is a bigger, and murkier, story here. The lands the Interior
Department would have taxpayers buy now in Westlands (at a price much higher
than comparable lands) were never supposed to be irrigated in the first
place.

 

When the Central Valley's San Luis Unit was authorized more than 40 years
ago, these lands on the west side of the valley were rejected by Congress
for inclusion because they were low quality and could create drainage
problems.

 

Never satisfied, Westlands managers tried to expand federal water service by
the Bureau of Reclamation to these and other unqualified lands even though
their 600,000-acre district was already the nation's largest. After being
rejected by an exhaustive federal study, they finally found a sympathetic
ear from the Reagan administration.

 

At least one key decision-maker at the time, Interior's chief legal officer
Ralph Tarr, was a former partner in a law firm that had represented big
Central Valley farm interests. Despite protests from Congress and
environmentalists, Tarr and company approved a settlement with Westlands
that expanded federal water service to include the lands previously rejected
as unsuited for federal irrigation.

 

Westlands persuaded a compliant Interior Department to provide cheap water
to irrigate the inferior lands, producing runoff laden with toxic materials.
Interior spent millions of tax dollars to ship Westlands' runoff via the San
Luis Drain that ended in a national wildlife refuge. Within a few years, a
full blown crisis appeared. Deformed birds and tainted vegetation led to
closure of the Kesterson Reservoir, which caught the farms' drainage in a
system of marshes.

 

Westlands fumed. Its growers sued the government to construct a billion-
dollar extension of the drainage canal to collect and dump the farm runoff
in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the environmentally fragile source of
water for millions of Californians, or in the Carquinez Strait at the head
of San Francisco Bay.

 

The courts ruled that the federal government must help provide drainage
service for Westlands landowners, who, under federal law, are supposed to
repay the cost.

 

A number of options exist other than a drain, which the farmers prefer but
the Clinton administration and Bay Area legislators flatly rejected.

 

One of those alternatives: Buy up the waste-producing land, take it out of
irrigation and thereby reduce toxic drainage. Not a bad idea.

 

Now for the fine print: Since Westlands growers lobbied to have the low-
quality lands added to their federal water contract despite Congress'

earlier rejection, does the district not share responsibility for their
inclusion? If Westlands is culpable, shouldn't the district share the
primary cost of land retirement? Why should taxpayers pay a premium price
for lands of such low quality that they never should have been irrigated in
the first place (and perhaps cannot be legally irrigated today because of
the pollution they produce)?

 

And if these lands are retired by taxpayer purchase, what should happen to
the valuable water that previously was devoted to them? Interior's game plan
allows Westlands to keep the taxpayer-supplied water, which the wealthy
district would likely use on other drainage-affected lands (perpetuating the
runoff problem) or resell at inflated prices into the water-hungry
Californian market. And Westlands would keep the profits from the sale of
this public resource it purchased at subsidized prices.

 

The whole scheme sounds a lot like the old law school case of the child who
kills his parents and asks mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

Westlands pressed for the right to irrigate lands everyone knew were
problematic, and when the bill falls due to clean up the mess, they think
the taxpayers should not only pay it, but make the district even wealthier
than it already is.

 

Are taxpayers, already in the red because Westlands has repaid only a
fraction of its debt to the government, going to play Uncle Sucker again and
lavish a windfall on wealthy irrigators caught by their own greed?

 

George Miller, D-Martinez, former chairman of the House Committee on
Resources, is principal author of the 1992 Central Valley Project
Improvement Act.

 

 

 

Byron Leydecker, 

Chair, Friends of Trinity River

Consultant, California Trout, Inc.

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810 ph

415 383 9562 fx

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://www.fotr.org

http://caltrout.org

 

 

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