Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 23, 2008
Water plan costly: Changes sound good, but how much involved is unknown
Capitol Ag Press- 6/20/08
QUENCHING
NOT THIS WATER: In a bid to save his family's livelihood after Las Vegas laid the groundwork for a water pipeline that could reduce his land to dust, a White Pine County rancher joins forces with Utah
The Las Vegas
The
The Desert Sun – 6/22/08
Editorial
Lodi settles last piece of contamination suit, but echoes continue
The
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Water plan costly: Changes sound good, but how much involved is unknown
Capitol Ag Press- 6/20/08
By Cecilia Parsons, Staff Writer
There is no word yet on how much groundwater would be pumped into the California Aqueduct to help alleviate irrigation water shortages, but there is certainty the water will be expensive.
Sarah Woolf, spokeswoman for the Westlands Water District, said a limited number of wells along the aqueduct in the Westlands district and Mendota Pool area could contribute water for growers to use on their crops.
Westlands growers were notified two weeks ago that their allocations would be cut to 40 percent and deliveries would be rationed due to low reservoir levels.
"It's yet to be seen how much water will be available," Woolf said.
"To pump it is about $200 an acre foot and to get it where it is needed will add a couple hundred more," she said.
The water will be used by growers who have no alternative source of irrigation water during the summer and have permanent crops such as almonds. Farmers who pump water from their wells will sell it to growers who need it. Strict water quality standards must be met and not everyone will qualify to pump.
"This will only meet the needs of a few people," Woolf said.
In proclaiming a state of emergency in the nine
The state Department of Water Resources and the Water Resources Control Board are to expedite water transfers where possible and the Office of Emergency Services is to fund well drilling or well improvements. "
The emergency declaration affects
In
Statewide, there have been losses up to $65 million due to lack of rainfall on grazing land.
Ron Jacobsma, general manager of the Friant Water Authority, said there are some potential impacts to growers who receive Friant water. Those growers in
"We're exploring a means of providing water to them and they would pay us back later in an exchange process," Jacobsma said.
The district, which provides water to eastside farmers, is sympathetic to the plight of the growers who lost a significant part of their irrigation supply due to drought and the difficulty of moving water through the delta, said Jacobsma.
He said the water that they could supply would help the westside growers and the communities stay in business.
The governor's declaration did bring attention to the need for additional surface storage, Jacobsma said.
Schwarzenegger is using the severe drought conditions to push his water infrastructure plan. He has proposed an $11.9 billion water bond for water management investments that will address population growth, climate change, water supply reliability and environmental needs. His plan would dedicated $3.5 billion for development of additional water storage.#
http://www.capitalpress.info/main.asp?SectionID=67&SubSectionID=616&ArticleID=42381&TM=79722.34
QUENCHING
NOT THIS WATER: In a bid to save his family's livelihood after Las Vegas laid the groundwork for a water pipeline that could reduce his land to dust, a White Pine County rancher joins forces with Utah
The Las Vegas
By Emily Green
When Southern Nevada Water Authority Manager Pat Mulroy appealed to Congress in 2004 to provide right of way for a pipeline to deliver ground water from the heart of
One of the two sweetest valleys targeted by
Or, as an incandescent Mulroy described it,
Depending on how the states handled negotiations, what followed could either be a silky case of quid pro quo, or an all-out Western water war.
Each side wanted something from the other.
As negotiations over how much water
You scratch our back, we'll scratch yours.
But
Who knew until then what strong feelings Senators Dick Durbin, Illinois; Russ Feingold, Wisconsin; Robert Menendez, New Jersey; Joe Lieberman, Connecticut; Hillary Clinton, New York; Frank Lautenberg, New Jersey; John Kerry, Massachusetts; and Maria Cantwell, Washington, had about Southern Utah land issues?
In December, the
If this was meant to intimidate
In February 2007,
Baker Ranch sits smack dab on the state line, at the heart of
•••
Baker Ranch sits on what has always been some of the best water in the
Snowmelt cascades onto the land every spring from Wheeler Peak, the second-highest mountain in
Moreover, Wheeler's snowmelt sustains pressure in a water table extending for hundreds of miles around, well into
To the Shoshone Indians, the mountain was already sacred when Spanish explorers, trappers and then Mormons came through.
During the 19th century it went from Shoshone territory to part of Mexico, part of Brigham Young's Deseret, then the Utah Territory and finally, only after Nevada's border was tweaked repeatedly in the 1860s, it became Nevada by a whisker.
By the time an Army cartographer named Wheeler showed up to map the area in 1869, a Mormon was farming in
In the 1870s, a man named Baker moved in. By 1892, Baker Ranch had a post office and a store and was the site of Goshute tribe fandangos celebrating the pine nut harvest.
Baker's family started buying neighboring farms. Soon Baker Ranch was reputed to be the finest in White Pine County.
It even sprouted a "town" called Baker.
In the 1920s another Baker, Fred Baker, no relation to the then owner of Baker Ranch, showed up to work the hay harvest.
Fred Baker was from Delta, a
Delta farms have water from the
In Baker, there was so much water from
Back in Delta, Fred Baker ran sheep, started an alfalfa seed business and was partner in a flight school that trained World War II veterans as crop-dusters.
He was saving for his dream ranch in his dream valley.
One of Baker's sons, Dean, was in college, unable to decide among majors — pre-med, chemistry and business — when the call came in 1959 from his father that a lease was available on his dream ranch, so perfect that it already bore their name.
When Dean Baker left the
•••
Half a century later, Dean Baker's uniform is farmer's denim, he lives in a small house and often eats cereal for dinner. His life cannot be measured in cars or granite countertops or vacations or clothes, but in land.
Baker "town" is still little more than an intersection with a bar, a grocery store and a gas station.
But Baker Ranch now consists of 12,000 deeded and water-rich acres. In addition, it has grazing rights to so much federal land that on the winter range, cattle from the same ranch might browse 50 miles from one another.
To his neighbors, Dean Baker is a rancher's rancher, respected for his knowledge of seed and cattle genetics, his weed-free fields, and the care he takes of his workers — at least the ones who don't leave jobs undone and him to count their cigarette butts.
At the monthly White Pine County Commission meetings, Baker's the lean, quiet, balding, watchful man who listens to hours of chatter and then sums up what's important with one simple comment. He's respected for that.
All in all, an unlikely Lothario.
So when you meet Baker's ex-wife at the truck stop down the road from his ranch, then find out that the woman in the pink T-shirt with "Outrageous Older Woman" on it is one of four women Baker has married, you are compelled to give the rancher's rancher a second glance.
One evening late last summer, Baker kept a scheduled interview even after learning that his brother had died from a stroke after a fruitless period on a respirator.
Frogs had started to chorus, an owl to hoot, and Baker was uncharacteristically elegiac.
And vulnerable. It was as good a moment as any to try for an answer to a question that otherwise he probably would not have answered. "What's with all the wives?"
"I wasn't a very good husband, no matter how hard I worked at it," he said.
It turns out that his first wife, whose family owned a summer home near the ranch, had been accustomed to servants and the good life in
The marriage lasted 18 years. His first wife bore him four children before deciding that she needed more than a small ranch house with a gas station behind it.
According to Wife Number Two down at the truck stop, Baker's passion is flying the Piper J-3 Cub that he uses to reconnoiter those 12,000 acres, sometimes flying under power lines.
"He loves his ranch second," she says, "and his wives third."
The second marriage lasted 10 years.
The third marriage he won't talk about.
Glancing at his fourth wife, the woman pretending to read in the next room, he added, "But I appreciate Barbara and I'm not going to let her get away."
Looking back, he thinks he never really learned how to talk to girls in high school, where, as one of only two non-Mormons in a tightly knit Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints community, dating was effectively off limits.
He focused on farming instead, mastering the most perilous art of all in Great Basin ranching: developing Mt. Wheeler's often elusive springs, digging irrigation ditches and hauling water to cattle or getting cattle to water.
•••
Water rights in
The amount of water that might be awarded is directly related to how much the state engineer calculates will be replenished by annual snowmelt, and whether awarding this water will affect existing holders of water rights.
In 1989, when the Las Vegas Valley Water District first applied for rights in
The two basins fed by
Baker was flabbergasted by the number for
How could
Of this he was sure: Pulling the amount of water
As his neighbors across the county cried "
But those concerns seemed moot by 1995 because
Then in 2003, as
Would White Pine County like to send a man named Dean Baker to be a "stakeholder" in the water authority's "Integrated Water Planning Advisory Committee?" On the committee, they could work out
They were all Nevadans.
When Baker heard the news, he decided that it could mean only one thing.
Baker gathered his sons together.
"I said, 'I have to know if any of you want to sell,' " he recalls. "Not a one of them did."
Baker's stepson from his second marriage, Gary Perea, was on the White Pine County Commission at the time.
While Baker's sons worked the ranch, Baker asked Perea to attend the meetings with him.
Baker would fly down.
At the first meeting, a jovial, silver-haired man slipped into the seat next to Baker and, according to Baker, announced, "I'm going to sit next to you for the next two years."
Baker had had a marriage that amounted to less.
The new companion was Richard Bunker.
A former
Since using his influence to get Mulroy appointed head of the water district in 1989, Bunker had also become chairman of
There was only one thing that Richard Bunker could possibly want from Dean Baker. Baker Ranch has rights to nearly 40,000 acre-feet of water a year, or roughly a seventh of
"Richard went everywhere that I went," Baker says of the next 13 months. "I got a newspaper, he got a newspaper. I got the distinct feeling he was assigned to me."
Baker and Perea watched, listened and rarely spoke. Then Baker noticed the water authority setting up a finance committee to talk about funding the pipeline. He finally had a point to make.
"You also need to set up an independent committee to study the hydrology and see if the water is available," Baker said.
"They ignored it," Perea says. "They just moved on."
When the Southern Nevada Water Authority released a 2005 report summing up the collective deep thoughts from these meetings, it included a letter from Baker reprising his request.
But tucked in next to it was a rebuttal from the executive secretary of the AFL-CIO, saying, "I think we will learn a lot more about basin impacts once we start stressing ground water basins."
In other words, let pumping begin and see what happens.
Soliciting the opinion of a union leader about rural ground water only sounds crazy. Scientifically, it might be. Politically, however, it tracked nicely. As Perea recalls, "The thing I kept hearing was that MGM Mirage employed more people than lived in White Pine County."
•••
By January 2006,
The first hearing would be for Wheeler's water flowing into the basin next to Baker's,
The dream scenario for
So Bunker and Mulroy started in. He played good cop, she played bad.
Bunker visited White Pine County. He looked up Perea and called on Baker.
According to Bunker, he and Baker rode to Baker Ranch together. During that visit, Bunker urged, "Dean, don't dig in."
Bunker came back to
Good cop failed.
Bad cop succeeded.
Mulroy sent observers to White Pine County Commission meetings, fully aware that open meeting laws meant that the commission could not strategize how to fight
In January 2006, Mulroy opened a field office in Ely, the seat of White Pine County.
The two sides maneuvered.
The commission extended an offer to Mulroy to provide relief water to
The commission asked for an independent body to be put in charge of pumping.
Mulroy put a $12 million offer on the table as recompense for any loss of revenue to the region and to cover any pumping damage.
The White Pine County Commission refused.
By that point, however, Mulroy was making another move. In July 2006, a month after the deadline lapsed for
Soon, almost every ranch in Spring Valley was in negotiation with
The ranchers figured that once a big city started pumping and the water table fell, they would have no way to keep their alfalfa irrigated or water troughs full. Their ranches would all be worthless. Better to get out at the front end.
As one of them explained as she wept with shame in a local grocery store, she had no choice. None of them did.
Just why Las Vegas spent $78 million — and counting — to buy the ranches is a subject of debate.
Mulroy said she did it to "preserve the ranching lifestyle." Because water rights are assigned for a specific purpose, to keep that newly acquired ranch water in the short term, the Southern Nevada Water Authority had to enter the alfalfa and cattle business.
Now if
Moreover, noted Dean Baker,
One basin over from Spring Valley, Dean Baker had no idea how much his
He had nearly twice the land and three times the water of Spring Valley's Robison Ranch, which
He had no doubt that
He also knew that staying meant the fight of his life.
•••
As the White Pine County Commission went ahead in September 2006 protesting the Spring Valley applications before
The commission would appeal to the good graces of Senator Reid.
In 1985, then congressman Reid had sat at Dean Baker's kitchen table. He was there to talk about creating a national park out of
At first, Baker was opposed. He was worried about grazing and water rights. Reid listened and, Baker now concedes, "He worked diligently."
When the act creating the
Then in 2005, Reid returned to Baker for the opening of a visitors center for
To his consternation, the group waiting for a private meeting was not there to thank him for the park, or the new multimillion-dollar visitors center. Instead, his former park allies now stood with the ranchers.
Reid's normal speaking voice is so soft and low, listeners usually strain to hear him. But when a former volunteer challenged him over the
Seven weeks later, aides announced that Reid had seen a doctor about a "transient ischemic attack," or small stroke.
The following year, as the White Pine County Commission fought and lost in the battle with Mulroy over who would control the
They bore drafts of a sweeping new land bill for White Pine County. This was the latest in a series of bills that, led by Reid, had been putting federal land in
High among the beneficiaries of the three previous land bills had been the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which received 10 percent of the proceeds from federal land sales.
Land bills also deal with water and
Reid's aides stalled, dwelling instead on other issues such as recreational vehicle access and tribal concerns. "Early on we were told, 'Let's take care of these other issues. We'll deal with water later,' " Perea says.
Later meant never.
Unbeknown to
The battle was no longer Southern Nevada versus Northern Nevada, but
Baker's boyhood friends across the state line in
The
The
More water for St. George meant fuel for developers. Slow growth advocates wanted to block the pipeline.
Nonetheless, a tacit understanding had emerged between the
Except
In July 2006, freshly victorious after defeating the White Pine County Commission and buying up the ranches of Spring Valley, Mulroy was in
The longer
There was no other construction to put on it than: If Utah gave Las Vegas what it wanted from Snake Valley, then her friend Senator Reid might help with them with their bill and their pipeline to St. George.
Even Mulroy's fans shook their heads.
Had the woman who gave up dreams of a job with the State Department to rise instead in the
She had.
The
In the closing days of 2006, over frantic protests from Perea, Reid slipped the White Pine County land bill through as a rider on the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006.
There was no provision for the pumping impact study requested by the White Pine County Commission.
Senator Bennett's land bill containing the request for right of way for the pipeline to St. George was left behind in committee.
•••
As gratifying as sucker punching
The failure of Bennett's land bill in
Then, as Reid got the White Pine County land bill passed without the pumping impact study and against the wishes of the White Pine County Commission, an already mad
Memory runs deep in the small towns of central
The Millard County Commission went directly to the Utah Legislature and demanded that a rancher be appointed to
In February 2007, the state Legislature resolved it should happen.
But the Millard County Commission didn't want a
As it happened, Millard County Commissioner John Cooper knew Baker. The Bakers and Coopers went to school together.
That Cooper is a devoted Mormon and Baker is a gentile didn't matter. The four wives didn't matter.
To Cooper's mind, Baker was born in
"No one has more integrity than Dean Baker," Cooper says. "Dean Baker owns 40,000 acre-feet from that aquifer. Can you imagine how much that would be worth to the Southern Nevada Water Authority? Yet he is unyielding in his right to use that water to ranch."
Baker's addition to the
As it happened, the
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/22/not-water/
The
The Desert Sun – 6/22/08
W. Bentnick
Two state Senate bills seeking funding for the $9 billion, 75-year so-called Salton Sea Restoration Plan supported by the Salton Sea Authority have not passed and $10.3 million proposed for the 2008-09 state budget may suffer reduction or elimination.
This means there will apparently be little progress on the present plan, which would rearrange the sea into a small lake at the north end and a salt sink at the south end with a dry area in between, which can be a source of wide area dust storms if not continually maintained at an estimated cost of $800,000 per year.
Most people with an interest in the Salton Sea and who remember what it was like in the 1950s and '60s would like to see it truly restored to what it used to be, a major fishing and water recreational area attracting more visitors than
An engineering firm, CRM Inc., did a study and put forth a proposal in 2005 to truly restore the sea to its former beauty with clean water and a stable shoreline.
This would be accomplished by a canal from the
I urge interested readers to read the proposal and, if you find it plausible and preferable to other proposals, contact your legislators to urge them to give it consideration.
A clean
http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080622/OPINION02/806220314/1143/RSS27
Editorial
Lodi settles last piece of contamination suit, but echoes continue
The
What city officials say is a settlement with the final party in its long-running groundwater contamination case ends a case that ultimately is expected to cost the city about $48 million.
The case began years ago after the discovery in 1989 of contamination from PCE and TCE, chemicals used as industrial solvents and in dry cleaning in the 1970s and '80s.
The last case settled for $50,000 from United Dry Cleaners. In all, about 100 businesses and individuals have agreed to pay for the contamination. About $15 million was collected.
An additional $19 million was collected from the city's former insurance companies.
The $48 million city cost includes legal fees, the actual cleanup, and repaying its own water and wastewater funds, drained to help pay for the lawsuit.
For their part,
Councilman Bob Johnson calls the matter "a horrible, horrible ... period in the life of
Except it hasn't.
Most of the city's woes, city officials claim, come from a dicey legal strategy crafted by Michael Donovan, a private attorney hired by
In 2004, the city fired Donovan and City Attorney Randall Hays.
Here's the it-isn't-over part: The city has sued Donovan for fraud and malpractice. And Donovan has countersued, demanding $14 million he says the city owes him.
The cases are pending. So is the possibility
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080623/A_OPINION01/806230306/-1/A_OPINION
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