[env-trinity] westlands water district

[Dusty Duley]

http://www.sunmt.org/carterwater.html 
<http://www.sunmt.org/carterwater.html>  

Further Down the Drain, Sun Mt Environmental Center and Multimedia


By Lloyd G. Carter

August 2008


  "Since pre-Columbian times, the Westlands area was known to be part of
the uninhabitable Great California Desert." 


    From the history section of the Westlands Water District Website,
www.WestlandsWater.org <http://www.WestlandsWater.org>  

  

   For more than half a century, growers in the fabled Westlands Water
District have been the "bad boys" of federal irrigation projects in the
American West, ignoring residency and acreage requirements for
taxpayer-subsidized water, getting Congress to change laws they didn't
like, seducing both Republicans and Democrat politicians with a river of
campaign contributions, and reaping more crop, water and power
subsidies, tax breaks, and debt forgiveness than any other group of
farmers in America.


   Now they are poised to pull off the biggest coup in their
controversial history. If they get what they are asking for, 260 billion
gallons of publicly-owned water a year for 60 years,  they will capture
water worth anywhere from $20 to $40 billion - that's billion with a B -
with which they are free to farm tainted soils with, OR resell to urban
interests at fantastic profit margins.  At the current retail market
price of $500-600 an acre-foot in Southern California, the Westlands
water, purchased at a fraction of its true valley could be worth $2,000
an acre-foot by 2050, when there could be 60 million Californians.  The
potential value of 15.6 trillion gallons of water in a drought-stricken
climate staggers the imagination.


 The catch?  Westlands says it will solve a problem being caused by
irrigation of its drainage-impaired, highly saline soils, contaminated
with the toxic trace element selenium.  Westlands makes this promise
despite 52 years of federal research and hundreds of millions of dollars
in studies that have failed to come up with a wildlife-safe, effective
and affordable  solution.  It gets better.  Westlands also wants
forgiveness on an already interest free $489 million capital debt for
taxpayer construction of its water delivery system  it should have
already paid off.


 But first a little history.  After pumping a huge aquifer dry on the
west side of the San Joaquin Valley in less than 40 years, the
patriarchal families of the West Side, the Giffens, the Harrises, the
O'Neills, the Dieners, the Wolfsens and a few others, turned to a folksy
tire salesman from Texas named B.F. "Bernie" Sisk.  They bankrolled
Sisk's try for Congress and in 1955  he landed in the nation's capitol.
Sisk spent the next five years tirelessly promoting a U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation  project to bring Northern California (Trinity River) water
to western Fresno County.


 In a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1959, Sisk
promised that if the San Luis Unit (which would have been the last major
leg of the Central Valley Project begun in the 1930s) was built, there
would 6,000 family farmers on 100-acre ranches on the West Side and
peace and prosperity would prevail.  It was the first of many
misrepresentations Westlands, or its supporters, would make over the
next 48 years.  Twenty-five years after Sisk's promise, in 1984, there
were still only 240 growers in Westlands and 40 of them, mostly from the
original founding families, controlled over half the land and all the
politics in the one-acre, one-vote district.  Southern Pacific Railroad,
Chevron, and cotton king J.G. Boswell were among the major Westlands
landholders who influenced and directed district politics.


 The late Paul S. Taylor, a University of California economics professor
who was a well known critic of Reclamation policies in the mid-20th
century wrote a 1964 article in which he quoted Alabama Congressman
Oscar Underwood's1902 speech on the floor of Congress, the year the
Reclamation program was created to protect and foster family farming:   


  "Federal reclamation began as a program to help 'farm boys' who 'want
farms of their own' to obtain them 'without being driven into the
already overcrowded cities to seek employment.'"
 Many of the "farm boys" from Westlands would eventually live in
multi-million dollar mansions in North Fresno, on the San Joaquin River
bluffs or toney Van Ness Extension Avenue, 50 miles from their
industrialized farming operations, in a zip code that receives more farm
subsidies than any other zip code in America, 93711.


 The first thing West Side growers did after the water delivery project
was approved by Congress in 1960 was to annex another 200,008 acres
known as the West Plains Water Storage into the 400,000-acre Westlands,
a move a 1978 Congressional Task Force later concluded was unauthorized
by Congress. Ironically, some land in the West Plains district had been
designated too salty and unsuitable for irrigation by Bureau engineers
in the 1950s when designing the original San Luis project, which
included Westlands and  three other adjacent small irrigation districts.
Irrigation of the upslope West Plains lands, near the Coast Range along
Interstate 5, would later worsen salty and selenium-plagued  groundwater
problems on the low-lying farmland near the trough of the Valley, where
the San Joaquin River runs. Congressional funding intended for
completing the drainage system was instead diverted to build a water
delivery system for West Plains, according to the 1978 Task Force
report.


 In exchange for bringing cheap subsidized  water to the western valley,
Westlands growers had agreed to break up the huge estates, including the
106,000 acres owned by Southern Pacific, and the 100,000 acres owned by
the Giffen family, after 10 years. The excess land provisions in
Reclamation law provided that a husband and wife could own 320 acres but
no more than that.
 Of course, the Bureau of Reclamation had never enforced the residency
requirement or the acreage limitation, which is what drew the wrath of
Professor Taylor. When the mid-1970s rolled around,  National Land for
People, headed by George Ballis, sued to break up the huge ranches and
actually give "farm boys" and farmworkers a chance to have ranches of
their own. Fat chance.


 A celebrated 1977 San Francisco Examiner series titled "The Paper
Farmers" chronicled how the big growers were evading the acreage
limitations by, in some cases, adding the names of relatives, employees
and even unborn children, to land deeds to increase the amount of cheap
water they were eligible to receive.


 Westlands dragged its feet for several years in the National Land for
People case, while the Bureau maintained the status quo on water
deliveries, meaning big growers continued to get the cheap water for
ranches which often exceeded 5,000 or 10,000 acres.  Westlands also went
to Congress and Rep. Tony Coelho, who had replaced his mentor Sisk in
1975. Coelho, who would become a powerhouse in the House before
resigning following a real estate scandal, helped engineer the so-called
"Reclamation Reform Act" in 1982,  which didn't really "reform" anything
but did legalize a lot of the outright illegality occurring over the
acreage limitation. Coelho was aided by  western states congressmen
subservient to their own local large growers getting federal water. The
Reform Act eliminated the residency requirement and boosted the eligible
acreage for the cheap water to 960 acres.  It also created an even
bigger loophole  by allowing growers to get cheap water for lands they
leased, rather than owned. As a result, leasing schemes mushroomed
overnight and the mega-farms continued to get the cheap water.


 Then in 1983-1984, the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge debacle hit,
when word leaked out that drainage water from Westlands, being
evaporated in 1,280 acres of diked ponds at Kesterson, was poisoning
fish, ducks, and shorebirds at the dual purpose "refuge."  Because of a
subterranean clay layer underneath Westlands farmland, salty groundwater
accumulated near the root zone. To protect crops the shallow groundwater
had to be pumped out and sent somewhere else.  The original plan was to
funnel the salty drainage through the Delta to the Pacific Ocean.   When
Bay Area interests objected in the 1970s,  Reclamation officials latched
on to the risky idea of utilizing evaporation ponds at Kesterson as a
stop gap measure while they undertook studies to convince the State
Water Resources Control Board the drainwater would not harm the Delta.
These studies revealed that much of Westlands' acreage was riddled with
selenium, a trace element which is a micronutrient in very small doses
but toxic in slightly higher amounts.  

Selenium had been washing out of the Coast Range mountains for eons,
accumulating in the western valley.  Selenium's toxicity to livestock
was well known and Department of Agriculture studies in 1939 had
actually detected elevated levels in Fresno County's western foothills
but that information had been overlooked or ignored by Bureau officials
eager to build the San Luis Unit.


 Many federal scientists saw Kesterson coming although they did not know
that it would be selenium, not pesticides,  that would cause Kesterson's
Silent Spring.   Despite the documented  misgivings of field level
biologists as early as 1962, the Department of Interior, parent agency
of both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of
Reclamation, had actually claimed in the late 1970s that the Westlands
salty drainage would be good for the Kesterson wetlands. Amazingly, much
of the tab for constructing the Kesterson facilities was deducted from
the Westlands' repayment tab because it was designated a benefit to
wildlife and the general public.


 The wetlands at the 5,900-acre Kesterson refuge adjacent to the San
Joaquin River in Merced County were in the middle of the wintering
grounds for hundreds of thousands of migratory ducks supposedly
protected by an international treaty, the federal Migratory Bird Treaty
Act. When full strength drainwater began flowing to Kesterson in 1981,
high levels of selenium dissolved in the drainage water quickly moved
into the food chain, killing fish and birds and triggering grotesque
deformities in wildlife. Kesterson neighbors Jim and Karen Claus, who
watched their cattle die after drinking water seeping from the
evaporation ponds, filed a complaint with the regional water board and
sounded the alarm.


 On March 15, 1985, following a year of intensive media scrutiny,
including a segment on CBS' "60 Minutes" and front page stories in the
New York Times and the Washington Post, Secretary of Interior Donald
Hodel ordered the Kesterson ponds closed and irrigation water deliveries
to Westlands shut off.  Hodel said the evaporation ponds were a
violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.


 A delegation of Westlands officials and growers, including former
California Secretary of State Bill Jones (Jones' family owned several
thousand acres in Westlands), traveled to Washington to lobby Hodel to
resume irrigation deliveries. In exchange for the Bureau to continue the
flow of Northern California water to Westlands, the water district
officials signed an agreement on April 3, 1985 in which they pledged to
halt drainage flows to Kesterson even though this would worsen their
drainage crisis.  In that 1985 agreement, Westlands also  assumed any
liability for lawsuits from individual Westlands growers.


 In 1991, some growers in a 42,000-acre area of Westlands who had
originally drained their wastes to Kesterson filed suit against
Westlands and the Bureau of Reclamation for damages caused when the
drainage system was closed and plugged.  The suit was placed on the back
burner during the Clinton years, as Reclamation officials plodded along
spending tens of millions of dollars on drainage studies, including a
$50 million, five-year investigation by a state-federal team. Their
report, issued in 1990, concluded the cheapest solution was to take the
high selenium lands out of production and drastically reduce the amount
of drainage produced.


 When George W. Bush came to office, the growers who had filed the
lawsuit a decade earlier began pushing it again.  A career Justice
Department attorney, Yoshinori H.T. Himel, representing the Department
of Interior and the Bureau in the grower suit, filed a motion in August
of  2002 to get it dismissed.  Himel pointed out that Westlands, in the
1985 agreement, had agreed "to design, install, and operate alternative
means for disposal of drain water in an  efficient and environmentally
sound manner." 


 Himel then noted that the 1985 Agreement "placed the obligation on
Westlands "to design, install and operate alternative means for disposal
of drain water from Westlands."  Himel said alternative means included
evaporation ponds, salt tolerant crops and recycling.


 While Himel acknowledged it could be argued the 1985 agreement may not
have required Westlands to assume long-term  responsibility for drainage
for the entire San Luis Unit he said Westlands assumed, at the minimum,
responsibility for solving the drainage problems of the 49,000 acres
that had been draining to Kesterson.


 Himel added "One thing the Agreement did alter, however, was Westlands'
obligation to indemnify the United States for, among other things,
'losses, damages, claims and liabilities' arising from Westlands'
performance or non-performance of the Agreement. The language 'losses,
damages, claims and liabilities' indicates money claims, such as
Plaintiffs' money claims in this lawsuit . . . Westlands thus undertook
at a minimum to indemnify the United States for lawsuits by those who
might be dissatisfied with the results of Westlands' 'alternative means'
for drainage."

 

A federal court rejected this argument but critical issues of
apportionment of liability for the drainage mess remained.  Of course,
we will never know what would have happened had the apportionment of
fault issues been decided by a jury or a judge.  Bennett Raley, a
Colorado attorney who represented irrigation districts and was appointed
Assistant Secretary for Water and Science by his Interior Secretary Gale
Norton in 2001, made sure that a trial on the merits did not happen.
Raley, undoubtedly with the support of Norton and the White House,
undercut Himel and other Justice Department career attorneys defending
the suit, agreeing to a $139 million settlement in December of 2002,
with most of the money coming from U.S. taxpayers, not Westlands.
Raley, of course, gained fame in 2002 for allotting water from Oregon's
Klamath River to irrigators rather than to endangered fish, leading to a
massive salmon die-off.  News reports later indicated Vice President
Dick Cheney masterminded the Klamath decision. It is unknown if Cheney
or  former White House advisor mastermind Karl Rove were consulted or
involved in the decision to concede victory to the Westlands growers
without a court fight.


 In an October, 24, 2002 pre-trial order for partial summary judgment in
the growers' suit, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger noted that
there was no dispute the growers continued to irrigate their lands
knowing "that their lands would be damaged without drainage." 


 Wanger added, "There are multiple issues to address at trial, however,
regarding the operative 'cause' of damage to plaintiffs' land, whether
that damage constitutes a public or private nuisance, whether federal
defendants and Westlands are concurrent tortfeasors, apportionment of
any comparative fault of plaintiffs, and whether plaintiffs[] consented
to or assumed the risk of a nuisance or trespass by demanding  water
deliveries to their farmlands, despite the knowledge that no drainage
facility existed." (Emphasis added.) In other words, a jury or a judge
may have found the growers knowingly ruined their own lands and might
not have awarded them a cent in damages.  But Raley, as already noted,
pre-empted any jury determination of those issues and, contrary to the
Justice Department attorneys' written arguments, settled.    


 Under the settlement, the federal government was to pay $107 million to
have the farmers' lawsuit dismissed. Westlands had to spend $32 million
to settle its part of the case,
buying 34,000 acres of the plaintiff's ruined land and retiring it.


 "We weren't batting a thousand with this court," Raley claimed in a
2002 interview with the Sacramento Bee.  "They were claiming that we had
damaged them, damages in excess of $400 million."  Raley did not mention
Westlands officials had signed the April 1985 agreement assuming
liability for all such lawsuits or that his own government attorneys
thought they had a good case and could win in court.


 Rep. George Miller and environmental activists howled at the
settlement, which they warned would be used as a precedent for the still
unsolved drainage problem facing the Western San Joaquin Valley. Having
given away $107 million in taxpayer money, Raley returned to private
practice representing water districts in December of 2004.  


 Following the 2002 settlement (in which the federal government admitted
no wrongdoing),  Westlands worked on getting a new long-term water
delivery contract and pressuring Reclamation to come up with a drainage
solution because a district court, and then the federal Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeal, had ruled Reclamation had a legal obligation to try and
complete a drainage system for Westlands.


 Westlands growers  had a powerful ally in Jason Peltier, a native
Californian and deputy secretary at Interior who was the
Administration's point man on western water issues and was a former
lobbyist for Westlands and other California  federal irrigation
districts.  Peltier claimed in news interviews he had nothing to do with
matters involving Westlands.  However, Westlands recently hired Peltier
at an undisclosed salary.  A former regional Reclamation official, Susan
Ramos, has also been hired by Westlands.


 Which brings us to the present.  Westlands general manager and general
counsel Tom Birmingham is now pushing a "global" settlement to the
outstanding drainage lawsuits (filed by water districts downslope from
Westlands) and Westlands' desire for a long-term secure water supply.
In recent closed door meetings with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Valley
congressmen Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa (who represents the Westlands
area), Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Hamilton Candee and a
few others, the various stakeholders have tried to work out a deal.  The
news media is not permitted to cover these talks while decisions are
made involving billions of taxpayer dollars. 


  Ed Imhoff, a retired federal scientist who headed a post-Kesterson $50
million, five-year study of the drainage problem from 1985-1990, was
also kept out of the talks. Feinstein reportedly insisted "too many"
people were in on the talks. Imhoff has been critical of the proposed
drainage solutions of both Reclamation and Westlands. His 1990 study,
dubbed the "Rainbow Report" noted land retirement was the cheapest
option.


 In the Central Valley Project, water supplies have always been
distributed on a first in time, first in right priority system in which
the oldest CVP irrigation districts get the water they need before
irrigation districts down the totem pole get their water.  Westlands,
as the last CVP area to come on line, is at the bottom of the totem
pole.  This has often meant drastically reduced supplies for Westlands.
For example, during the 1987-1992 drought, Westlands, in 1990 and 1991,
only got 25 percent of its annual contract amount of 1.15 million
acre-feet (an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons). Westlands has tried
repeatedly in court to get on the same footing as more senior water
contractors but to no avail.  The drainage crisis, widely misunderstood
and mishandled by both Reclamation and Westlands,  has provided the
growers an opening.


 A few months ago, Westlands announced it could solve the drainage
dilemma for less than half of the $2.6 billion Reclamation officials say
it will cost to provide reverse osmosis, bio-remediation, recycling, and
land retirement. Birmingham said that in exchange for letting the Bureau
off the hook on drainage, Westlands wanted the Bureau's extraordinarily
valuable state water permit and operational control of the huge San Luis
Reservoir near Los Banos.  As anticipated, the audacious claim provoked
a hostile response from Rep. Miller, Northern California interests and
environmental groups statewide.


 Birmingham then abandoned that strategy amid a torrent of negative
publicity and, in the first week of August, just prior to another closed
door meeting with Feinstein  he came up with a revised, but still
sketchy, proposal. Birmingham suggested that if the federal government
would forgive a $489 million debt the Westlands owes for capital
construction costs, and would exempt Westlands and other San Luis Unit
water districts from acreage limitations and pricing provisions of
federal law, Westlands would take over responsibility for the drainage
mess.


 In addition, Westlands wants a 60-year water delivery contract with
rights of renewal (federal law now prohibits federal water contracts in
excess of 25 years) and wants the Bureau to authorize transfer of title
to various pumping plants, internal distribution systems, and the
Coalinga Canal.


 Apparently unmentioned in the Feinstein talks is that Westlands signed
a "waiver/indemnity agreement" with Interior back on April  3, 1985,
after the Kesterson closure or that the federal government admitted no
liability in the 2002 settlement. The claim that the United States is
somehow responsible for any damage to the former desert lands and thus
should make major concessions on water delivery or drainage issues is
simply unproven in a court of law.  


 Feinstein also seems unclear on the concept that even though the Bureau
estimates it may take up to $2.6 billion to produce a drainage program,
Westlands is ultimately required under the 1960 legislation to pay for
it, albeit over 40 or 50 years and interest free. Neither the district
court nor the Ninth Circuit has ever held that Congress must appropriate
money to build a drainage system or that Westlands would not have to
ultimately pay for it.


 Moreover, few people in Washington seem to be questioning why Westlands
should get off the hook for the $489 million still owed on the delivery
system.  If a man builds you a house and a plumbing system and fouls up
the pipes underneath the bathroom, you don't get the house for free. You
just get your plumbing fixed.


 Following a meeting in her office on Aug.1, Senator Feinstein said of a
potential agreement "the devil is in the details."  Environmentalists
fear she isn't really paying attention to the details or looking out for
the interests of American taxpayers and especially Californians, who are
cutting back usage in urban areas while Westlands' 500-600 growers could
get enough water annually to meet the needs of a city of eight million
people, or two cities the size of Los Angeles.  


 Consider this: If Westlands gets 800,000 acre-feet of water a year,
which is what it would like, that translates to 260.68 billion gallons
of water a year and 15 trillion, 640 billion gallons over the life of
the proposed 60-year contract.


  If you calculate the urban retail value of 800,000 acre-feet of water
at a conservative $500 an acre-foot (Rep. Grace Napolitano of Los
Angeles, new chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Water and Power
Resources,  says its $600 an acre-foot in Southern California) you come
up with $400 million a year.  Assuming the Westlands pays a generous
$100 an acre-foot (they will argue for, and probably get, a cheaper
price) that means they will pay $80 million for $400 million worth of
water in a given year.  Over 60 years, $400 million times 60 turns out
to be $24 billion worth of water for a few hundred growers(Westlands
claims 600 growers but has never produced a list and critics say it
could be as few as 400). And many of those "growers are connected by
blood or marriage, or simply entities operating under different
corporate names but controlled by the same people. Of course, in my
example, they would pay for 20 percent of that water ($100 an acre-foot)
which means the retail value of that water delivered over the life of
the contract, less what they paid for it, would be $19.2 billion.


 Actually, the potential profits of water sale could be much higher.
First of all, you can bet that the current urban price of water will be
far higher in 60 years, when the western San Joaquin Valley may look
like the San Fernando Valley.  Water then may be worth $2,000 an
acre-foot or even more if climate change produces extended drought.


 Although Westlands' Birmingham contends any guaranteed supply of water
is strictly for farming in the district, there is no question it is
legally permissible, thanks to a 1992 change in Reclamation law, for
Westlands to sell its water on the retail market to the highest bidder,
i.e. Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has an
insatiable thirst. Indeed, several San Joaquin Valley irrigation
districts are already selling water to developers or urban interests and
some individual Westlands growers have already offered to sell water to
Metropolitan.  They understand very well that water is the new cash
crop.


 Westlands' so-called solution to the drainage problem is (1)
conservation, (2) recycling and the most controversial and unproven, (3)
use of sprinklers to disperse the tainted drainage water into the air,
with the water evaporating and the salts and selenium falling back onto
a gravel bed.  The technology has never been tried large scale  other
than on one California Department of Water Resources test plot that was
less than the size of a city lot.


 Westlands officials have not explained where the millions of tons of
salts that would accumulate over the decades would be hauled for
disposal. Or what would happen if their scheme did not work.
Environmentalists worry the drift of the salty spray from the
sprinklers, especially in windy conditions, could damage surrounding
fields or further taint groundwater.   And sprinklers, or puddling of
water  would surely draw wildlife to the tainted water.  The spray drift
zone downwind would be more than two football fields long.  If trees
were planted for a drift barrier that would created a selenium-charged
terrestrial environment. Huge amounts of land for a safety zone around
the sprinklers would be required for the amount of drainage Westlands
generates. The district hasn't said how much land.


 So if Westlands' drainage scheme doesn't work the growers will simply
idle the bad lands and keep the very valuable  water which they can
resell to the highest bidder under the 1992 law.  How fortunate.


 At Feinstein's Aug. 1 meeting with Birmingham and others, U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service scientist Joseph Skorupa was not in attendance although
Senator Feinstein reportedly asked for him to be there.  Skorupa is
probably the premier expert in the United States on the  impacts of farm
drainage water on wildlife, especially birds, and has been studying San
Joaquin Valley drainage since the 1980s.  Fish and Wildlife managers,
under pressure from Bureau officials,  told Sen. Feinstein that Skorupa
was unable to attend the Aug. 1 Washington meeting.  According to
sources at Interior, however, this was an outright lie and Skorupa was
both willing, and able, to attend the Feinstein meeting.


  Ironically, the same day Skorupa was told he could not attend the
Feinstein meeting, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Director Dale Hall was
testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee Hearing
regarding Interior's questionable scientific and policy decisions under
the Endangered Species Act and claimed  that "Science is the cornerstone
of the Service's work; it is what guides the agency's decisions."
Unless, of course, Westlands is involved.


 Westlands growers have making campaign contributions to Feinstein for
years, including nearly $5,000 personally from Birmingham. No one has
calculated how much.  But they have a lot to gain if Feinstein buys off
on their proposal and sponsors legislation.


 According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG) website, in a recent
year the largest 10 percent of the farms in the Central Valley Project -
which stretches from Redding to Bakersfield - got 67 percent of the
water, and of course, Westlands has the biggest CVP farms of all and
uses the most water of any district. Twenty-seven large CVP farms, most
in the Westlands, received water subsidies averaging in excess of $1
million annually (i.e. the cost of replacement water).  One Westlands
farm, Woolf Enterprises, received more water by itself than 70 water
districts in the Central Valley Project, for a subsidy worth up to $4.2
million annually at urban prices for water.  EWG has also documented
that CVP farmers get power subsidies to pump that Delta water uphill
into the San Joaquin Valley at rates that are about 1/15th what the
average citizen pays for the monthly electricity bill. CVP growers'
water rates are about two percent of Los Angeles residents' rates.


 Fortunately, any deal the Westlands/Bush Administration cabal makes
with Feinstein must run the gauntlet of a Democratic Congress, which may
not be as solicitous of the Westlands as Feinstein is.  Rep. Miller and
Rep. Napolitano promise to closely monitor any sweetheart water
giveaway.  California environmental groups, fishing groups and Northern
California Native Americans are also mobilizing to fight the latest
Westlands scheme.


 One question for Congress to ask is how many billions do American
taxpayers owe the few hundred Westlands growers?  Kesterson
whistleblower Felix Smith, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist
who first leaked to the news media the selenium-caused bird deformities,
has been writing about the Kesterson debacle for 25 years. He estimates
the overall subsidy to the Westlands (cheap water, cheap power, interest
free construction costs), per acre, is now well over $6,600 per acre,
or $3 billion for the whole district.  The per acre subsidy is far more
than the land is worth.


 More worrisome is that if Westlands is guaranteed an enormous amount of
water, it will increase the stress on a Delta that is already on the
verge of ecological collapse due to overpumping by the State Water
Project as well as the federal pumps.


 However, Westlands' "farm boys" are hoping that public apathy and
congressional confusion or ignorance will result in one more very big
payday.   Over 15.6  trillion gallons of water in the middle of a
desert.  Think of the riches.  Their desert may be uninhabitable but it
does rain money.
 

 If you want to protect your tax dollars and slow down the Westlands
express  you can go to, and sign the petition at,
www.thepetitionsite.com/1/no-more-secret-deals. The Planning and
Conservation League is also adding information on the Westlands proposal
to its website. It is your tax money and your public water supply that
is being given away.  The devil is indeed in the details. Stay informed.

 

 

Lloyd Carter has been writing about Westlands water issues for more than
30 years and served as a reporter for United Press International from
1969 to 1984 and again from 1987 to 1990.  He spent three years as a
reporter at the Fresno Bee from 1984 to 1987. He won the San Francisco
Press Club's Best Environmental Coverage award in 1985 for his stories
on the bird deformities at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge caused
by selenium-tainted drainage water from Westlands. He is now an attorney
in Fresno, CA.


Dusty Duley
Planner I
Mendocino County
Planning and Building Services
501 Low Gap Road, Room 1440
Ukiah, CA  95482
Phone: (707) 463-4281
FAX: (707) 463-5709
email: duleyd at co.mendocino.ca.us 
Web site: www.co.mendocino.ca.us/planning/