[env-trinity] Fresno Bee February 16, 21997

[Byron Leydecker]

U.S. floats water transfer

Valley farmers would clean up tainted land.

By Mark Grossi and David Whitney / The Fresno Bee

02/16/07 03:55:34





The federal government Thursday announced a plan to hand over part of
California's largest water project to west San Joaquin Valley farmers and
let them pay for cleaning up 370,000 acres of land tainted by salty
irrigation drain water. 

The sweeping proposal would settle a decades-old controversy. It also would
forgive almost a half-billion dollars of debt that the farmers owe for
construction of reservoirs, canals and other irrigation facilities that make
up the San Luis Unit of the Central Valley Project. 

Without the deal, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, owner of the project, is
on the legal hook for a cleanup that could cost almost three times the
agency's annual budget -- more than $2.2 billion. 

Water officials who worked on the concept said it seemed sound. Tom
Birmingham, general manager and counsel of the 600,000-acre Westlands Water
District, said farmers would be taking on a tremendous obligation. 

"We think we can undertake the cleanup at a lower cost than the government,"
he said. "But it will still take hundreds of millions of dollars." 

The deal would end a 15-year lawsuit over the tainted land, but the
settlement is still in the preliminary stages, said Kirk C. Rodgers, the
bureau's regional director in Sacramento. 

In addition, if the deal is completed between the bureau and farm water
officials, it would have to be approved by Congress. Officials expect the
process to be controversial. 

Environmentalists were cautious about the announcement on Thursday, saying
they did not have much detail. The 20-page description of the arrangement
was circulated late Thursday afternoon. 

"The concern in the environmental community is that are just going to repeat
the mistakes of the past," said Fresno resident Lloyd Carter of Save Our
Streams. 

Carter was referring to the wildlife disaster at Kesterson Reservoir in
western Merced County in the 1980s. Biologists discovered dead and deformed
wildlife at Kesterson where Westlands irrigation drainage had been pooling
for several years. 

Selenium, a natural trace element found in abundance on the Valley's west
side, had become highly concentrated at Kesterson. Thousands of migrating
birds died, and thousands more were disfigured. 

The bureau built the San Luis Drain to send used irrigation water to
Kesterson as a solution to a long-standing drainage problem on the Valley's
west side. Layers of clay beneath the soil surface prevent irrigation
drainage from percolating into the deep underground water. 

When officials were forced to close down Kesterson in the 1980s, the
irrigation drainage had nowhere to go. On many west-side acres, more and
more water became trapped above the shallow clay layers. 

The bad water began rising from the underground until it eventually started
to poison the land surface with salts, affecting hundreds of thousands of
acres of land. 

Irrigation districts sued the federal government in the early 1990s,
demanding drainage of the bad water. Federal law obligates officials to
provide the drainage. 

An appellate court in 2000 ordered the bureau to come up with a solution.
The ideas included retiring 300,000 acres of farm land, creating huge ponds
to evaporate the drain water or sending it through a pipeline for ocean
dumping off the coast of San Luis Obispo County. 

A final solution was supposed to be submitted in federal court today, but
officials said that filing will be delayed probably until next week. A
negotiated settlement based on the concept announced Thursday might be
substituted. 

If the details are worked out, the agreement would form a joint-powers
authority among 10 irrigation districts to take over 100 miles of canals,
pumping plants, reservoirs and possibly power plants in the San Luis Unit.
The authority would be responsible for running the water system and devising
a cleanup for the tainted land. The farmers would be forgiven $490 million
in debt for construction of the San Luis Unit. 

As a sweetener for environmentalists, the agreement also would cap water
deliveries to west-side farmers at 1 million acre-feet a year. This would
free 400,000 acre-feet to remain in Northern California reservoirs for other
uses. One acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons of water, or a 12- to
18-month supply for an average family. 

Tom Graff, senior attorney for the national nonprofit Environmental Defense,
said the west Valley should not have been allotted 1.4 million acre-feet of
water in the first place. In many years, the project does not deliver that
much water to farmers. 

"They're giving back 400,000 acre-feet of water?" he asked. "That's no deal.
This a first offer. The real negotiations will take place as Congress looks
at this." 

 

 

Byron Leydecker

Friends of Trinity River, Chair

California Trout,Inc., Advisor

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810 ph

415 383 9562 fx

 <mailto:bwl3 at comcast.net> bwl3 at comcast.net

 <mailto:bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org> bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org
(secondary)

http:// <http://www.fotr.org> www.fotr.org

http:// <http://www.caltrout.org> www.caltrout.org 

 

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