Falling Stars and Deep Pockets: the Westlands Water War
What plays out this summer in California’s Central Valley may be seen by history as one of the most significant tests of American political courage and a turning point in establishing national priorities.
It is a war misunderstood as being over the fate of a two-inch minnow versus farms mistakenly regarded as being run by absentee corporate agribusiness—the innocence of a small bit of life confronted with the greed of wealthy private landowners. But what happens this summer may more likely decide the fate of a vital industry to both California and the nation than it will the future of the Delta smelt. It may alter the political character of the Golden State and it may strip away the righteous posture of ever more arrogant and elitist environmentalists to reveal their real motives in the destruction of American agriculture.
It’s about water, but it’s really about political power.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in his news conference revealing his new budget at the beginning of February referred to the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers as an “ecosystem on the brink of collapse.” Organizations of farmers reliant on supplies of irrigation water from the Delta might not disagree with him, but Salazar offered no federal means of help and did not explain what is bringing on the environmental disaster.
It is not, as radical green organizations would have us believe, all or even mostly caused by agriculture, but by long years of mismanagement and neglect that have allowed the river systems to a become sewers for the upstream cities such as Stockton and Sacramento, and by the badly planned series of dams that failed in their main purpose and served to block the annual runs of Chinook salmon while risking even greater salt-water intrusion from San Francisco Bay. It is also the greens themselves who press for destruction of levees and other structures to control the fresh-water flow and who stand in the way of expensive measures to finish the job begun a half century ago to better direct the system in sharing water with the south.
The “nonprofit” greens think they have the ultimate upper hand with federally financed lawsuits and hardly disguised extortion of state and federal authorities to gain their cooperation. As long as they are paid, they will pose as cooperative with toothless commissions and advisory boards being offered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But when they threaten, as did the Environmental Defense Fund and others, to remove their participation in any reasonable solution if Sen. Dianne Feinstein does introduce a bill skirting the Endangered Species Act by granting farmers 40 percent of their allocation, the greens reveal that what they really want is not a constructive solution, but the absolute destruction of agriculture on the west side of the Central Valley.
And that may be something begun by a second year of irrigation denial to the Westlands Irrigation District. If so, it won’t be the only disaster brought about by drying up more than 680,000 acres of some of the most productive farmland in America.
The single legal authority with the power to make any decision right now is Federal Judge Oliver Wanger, whose ruling early in the season last year cut off irrigation supplies to the Westlands and who only last week reversed his own ruling to give the district 14 days of full supplies by reducing that to only 10 percent of their allocation.
Wanger can claim he had no choice after attorneys for the Environmental Defense Fund and Center for Biological Diversity brought suit under terms of the Endangered Species Act to protect the habitat of the Delta smelt. All the rest of that dry season last year smelt continued to die, adding more questions to arguments that it is not the pumps that are killing them. Yet as soon as Wanger agreed to test that by opening the pumps for a limited time this year, environmentalists showed state wildlife authorities six dead smelt found near the pumps. By their estimates, finding one dead smelt computes to six more dead that weren’t found. That’s eco-math, but neither Wanger nor anybody else can do anything against the “law of the land” in the Endangered Species Act.
In November, when it may already be too late, California voters will be asked to vote on an $11.14 billion bond issue to aid the state’s water system. Although meant for the Delta, only about $2.2 billion would be directed to actual engineering projects like a peripheral canal to better direct fresh water. The rest would be earmarked mostly to pay the costs of those commissions littered with conservationists with no real power, but plenty of deep pockets for untaxable nonprofit money. That is, if they agree to cooperate.
Meanwhile, unemployment in the Central Valley is over 35 percent. Food banks, offering donated commodities, some of which is imported from China, report serving between 2,000 and 4,000 meals a month to people who used to grow food that fed the entire nation. Some farmers have already given up; others are on the edge. Neither the workers, nor the farmers, are “outsiders” or “absentees.” Any migrants left the valley long ago, those who are there now, out of work and losing their homes, have lived in towns like Mendota and Firebaugh for most of their lives, sometimes for generations. It would be an incredible contradiction for them to be starving in a region that once bragged it could feed the world.
Although actual figures are elusive, Westlands claims to contain about 600 farms. Many of them, however, are divisions of the fewer than 50 original families’ farms there when the district was created in 1952, and, undoubtedly, some exceed the 900-acre federal irrigation limitation. They may be formed into family corporations, but they are not absentee-owned “corporate” farms. At the bottom end of Central Valley irrigation system, Westlands has struggled in past dry years with insufficient water allocations, but its farmers utilize elaborate drip systems to feed their crops, and Westland farms are regarded as highly efficient. Still, they are plagued by seepage from the mountains of toxic selenium into their drainage water, a problem that does present a hazard to the ecology. For years, a battle has raged over responsibility for dealing with the drainage. Both the district and the federal government have spent millions in search of a solution.
Left-leaning organizations have accused Westlands of being “Water Pirates” for taking advantage of federal subsidies, but all federal irrigation projects in the West receive such subsidies. Westlands has been remarkably successful with its share.
And therein is the heart of the “war.” It’s not the methods of Westlands that the left resents, it’s their wealth. No matter how much they may shelter themselves with an environmental cause, at heart what the left is fighting is a “class war” against any part of the “agribusiness” they hate.
The next political move is up to Feinstein, not facing re-election this year and thus arguably the most powerful politician in the state. That is, if you don’t count the unelected, and unaccountable environmentalist bullies who know better than anybody.—Tim Findley