Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment
August 25, 2009
1. Top Items–
Governor again asks feds for drought aid
Fresno Bee
Schwarzenegger to Obama: declare disaster in Calif
San Jose Mercury News
Big Ag, conservationists clash over peripheral canal at Miller's office
Martinez News-Gazette
U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks trial on global warming
L.A. Times
State gets new plant for climate control
Sacramento Bee
On water issue, Democrats try to give up some power
L.A. Times
Water trauma
Riverside Press-Enterprise
Senator typical of agriculture's detractors
Visalia Times-Delta
Dying on the Vine
As another water war rages, the west side of California's storied San Joaquin Valley waits for relief that may not come
Newsweek
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Governor again asks feds for drought aid
Fresno Bee-8/24/09
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked federal officials to reconsider their decision to reject a request for emergency aid for Fresno County drought victims, his office said Monday.
Prodded by local officials and farming leaders to address the water shortage, Schwarzenegger asked the federal government in June to provide a range of assistance to Fresno County.
The federal government denied the request in July, finding that "the required response and recovery appears to be within the combined capability of the state, affected local governments and voluntary organizations," according to the Governor's Office.
The Governor's Office disagreed with that assessment, saying that the water shortage has led to tremendous costs associated with crop shortages, wildfires and other problems. Presidential disaster declarations for droughts are rare: The last one happened nearly 30 years ago.
Schwarzenegger wrote a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to reconsider the denial.
"The economic impact of the drought is especially critical in Fresno County, where per capita income is low and the unemployment rate is high," the letter states.
Letters from Fresno County government and nonprofit leaders were included in the appeal.
The federal law authorizing presidential declarations specifically include droughts as the kind of disasters that can be recognized. The selection process, though, tilts more toward disasters with outright physical destruction that overwhelm government forces.
The major selection criteria identified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency include "the number of homes destroyed," "impact on the infrastructure" and the presence of "imminent threats to public health and safety."#
http://www.fresnobee.com/1072/story/1614008.html
Schwarzenegger to Obama: declare disaster in Calif
San Jose Mercury News-8/24/09
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he wants President Barack Obama to reconsider sending federal disaster aid to help California's drought-stricken communities.
Schwarzenegger petitioned the White House to declare California a major federal disaster area in June, in a bid to get more money for food banks, unemployment assistance and legal services in Fresno County.
Three dry years coupled with restrictions on water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have cut the irrigation supplies of many San Joaquin Valley farmers and deepened rising unemployment.
The White House denied the petition for a disaster caused by "severe drought conditions" last month. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has not administered disaster funds for drought in California since 1977.#
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_13195277?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com
Big Ag, conservationists clash over peripheral canal at Miller's office
Martinez News-Gazette-8/24/09
By Greta Mart
The professionally printed demonstration signs held by hundreds of Hispanic farm workers mingled with Tea Party Patriot banners on Thursday at a protest rally at U.S. Rep. George Miller’s Concord office.
Gathering a 5 a.m., the contingent had been bussed in from the Central San Joaquin Valley to register their unhappiness with the amount of water they were receiving via and from the Delta. With the invitation of “Don’t Let Government Run Our Farms, Join Our Rally!” and billed as an Educational Rally on a flyer distributed by organizers, a group entitled “Water For All,” and “Families Protecting the Valley,” thanked the attendees on behalf of the “Valley ag industry.”
The event began at 10 a.m. and police dispersed the crowd around 1 p.m. as tempers flared under the hot sun and a few screaming matches broke out between Miller and Delta supporters and struggling Central Valley workers. Martinez City Council member Mark Ross was in attendance to back Miller, who was in Los Angeles on the day of the rally.
When the police made a move to shoo the throng from the parking lot of the Congressman’s office, staffers ordered Ross and others to cease interacting with the picketers.
“There’s not much difference between the two factions,” said Ross.
The picketing group’s Web site states “Water For All is a statewide coalition of influential Latino leaders who support the development of additional water resources in California.”
They targeted Miller due to his Congressional efforts regarding water policy.
“Miller’s on the wrong side of the issue,” said one of the protestors, who declined to give his name, instead saying, ‘call me a middle-class American.’ He was part of the Tea Party Patriots, and admitted he wasn’t clear on the facets to the water controversy, including the peripheral canal plan. “We’re against the wacko environmentalist, big government and entrenched politicians like Miller.”
According to a press release issued by the group in early August, “As a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Miller has been a critic of irrigated agriculture on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Protesters plan to oppose Miller’s stance on the Endangered Species Act that has led to protections of Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta fish species and reduced water deliveries to local farmers.”
In response, Miller issued a statement Thursday calling the event a distortion of the facts about water deliveries to Central Valley farmers.
“Special interests are trying to use stunts like this to restart the state’s water wars for political and financial gain, but solving California’s water problems will take more than talk radio slogans and name-calling,” said Miller. “It appears that the goal of The Water for All and this event is to distort the facts about the realities of the economy of the Central Valley with the hope of re-igniting political battles over science, the environment, and the economy of California that offer no solution to the state’s water future.”
To back up his statements, his staff compiled a background paper on the group and its leaders, Piedad Ayala, the CEO of an agricultural labor contractor — the Ayala Corporation, whom Miller staffers say received hundreds of thousands in federal cotton subsides over the past ten years. The group is not associated with the United Farm Workers.
“The call to ‘Turn on the pumps’ is a distraction from the long-standing economic realities of the Central Valley. Piedad Ayala and his allies are criticizing current federal science and environmental policy and arguing that present economic problems are due to present-day policies. However, in 2005, long before U.S. Judge Wanger ruled on water exports from the Bay-Delta, the bipartisan Central Valley congressional delegation commissioned a report that found that unemployment in Fresno County was already double California’s average.
Six years ago, Mendota already had a 36% unemployment rate. That was under a Republican President and a Republican Congress. Joblessness in the Valley deserves everyone’s attention, but it is not new and it has nothing to do with Rep. George Miller or recent pumping restrictions,” read the report. “The orders that periodically restrict the pumping of water are in place to protect the disappearing fish populations of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, including salmon, steelhead, smelt, and sturgeon.
These fisheries support tens of thousands of jobs and several billion dollars in economic activity in California — all jeopardized when the pumping of water kills salmon and other fish.”#
U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks trial on global warming
L.A. Times-8/25/09
By Jim Tankersley
The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.
Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.
"It would be evolution versus creationism," said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. "It would be the science of climate change on trial."
The goal of the chamber, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, is to fend off potential emissions regulations by undercutting the scientific consensus over climate change. If the EPA denies the request, as expected, the chamber plans to take the fight to federal court.
The EPA is having none of it, calling a hearing a "waste of time" and saying that a threatened lawsuit by the chamber would be "frivolous."
EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said the agency based its proposed finding that global warming is a danger to public health "on the soundest peer-reviewed science available, which overwhelmingly indicates that climate change presents a threat to human health and welfare."
Environmentalists say the chamber's strategy is an attempt to sow political discord by challenging settled science -- and note that in the famed 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a courtroom battle over a Tennessee science teacher accused of teaching evolution illegally, the scientists won in the end.
The chamber proposal "brings to mind for me the Salem witch trials, based on myth," said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists. "In this case, it would be ignoring decades of publicly accessible evidence."
In the coming weeks, the EPA is set to formally declare that the heat-trapping gases scientists blame for climate change endanger human health, and are thus subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The so-called endangerment finding will be a cornerstone of the Obama administration's plan to set strict new emissions standards on cars and trucks.
The proposed finding has drawn more than 300,000 public comments. Many of them question scientists' projections that rising temperatures will lead to increased mortality rates, harmful pollution and extreme weather events such as hurricanes.
In light of those comments, the chamber will tell the EPA in a filing today that a trial-style public hearing, which is allowed under the law but nearly unprecedented on this scale, is the only way to "make a fully informed, transparent decision with scientific integrity based on the actual record of the science."
Most climate scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, are warming the planet. Using computer models and historical temperature data, those scientists predict the warming will accelerate unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced.
"The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable," said a recent letter to world leaders by the heads of the top science agencies in 13 of the world's largest countries, including the head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
The EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, as proposed in April, warned that warmer temperatures would lead to "the increased likelihood of more frequent and intense heat waves, more wildfires, degraded air quality, more heavy downpours and flooding, increased drought, greater sea level rise, more intense storms, harm to water resources, harm to agriculture, and harm to wildlife and ecosystems."
Critics of the finding say it's far from certain that warming will cause any harm at all. The Chamber of Commerce cites studies that predict higher temperatures will reduce mortality rates in the United States.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-climate-trial25-2009aug25,0,901567.story
State gets new plant for climate control
Sacramento Bee-8/25/09
By Jim Downing
California officials on Monday inaugurated a new $181 million central heating and cooling plant that brings the state back into compliance with its own environmental standards.
The central plant, at Seventh and Q streets, feeds the climate-control systems that keep things comfortable for more than 20,000 state workers in 23 buildings, including the Capitol.
The old plant, built in 1968, cooled its huge chillers with water pumped from the ground and then dumped into the Sacramento River. The warm discharge – averaging nearly 6 million gallons a day – at times raised the temperature of the river enough to potentially harm aquatic life. In 2002, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board ruled that the plant was in serious violation of state water-quality regulations.
The new plant, built adjacent to the old one, will draw less than 200,000 gallons of water a day and won't dump anything directly into the river.
"There's not even a trickle," said Will Bush, director of the Department of General Services.
After the 2002 water-quality ruling, the state first considered retrofitting or expanding the aging plant, which had already been slated for a makeover.
Some early plans included digging up Roosevelt Park to install an underground water-storage tank and building cooling towers along the Sacramento River. Those plans drew criticism from city of Sacramento officials and others, and the state eventually settled on a design that fits the entire plant on one city block.
That took some sophisticated engineering. The new plant's cooling towers sit on the building's roof, so they had to be lightweight. The walls of the towers are fiberglass, and the 20-foot-diameter fans that suck air through the system are made of carbon fiber.
While the plant is now operating, construction at the site isn't scheduled to finish until next July. The old plant will be demolished, to be replaced by a small parking lot and a 140-foot-tall water-storage tank.
The tank will hold 4.5 million gallons. It can be filled with chilled water at night when demand for electricity is low, and then pumped to state buildings to keep them cool during the day. That system will help to relieve stress on the electricity grid on hot afternoons and will lower the state's power bill.
The new plant ties into the existing pipe network that snakes underneath downtown Sacramento, delivering steam, cold water and compressed air to state buildings. The pipes connect to heating and cooling units in each building. Such a system is very energy-efficient compared to running heaters and air-conditioning units in each individual building, said DGS project director Joel Griffith.
All of the state offices that use the plant contribute to its funding.#
http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/v-print/story/2136157.html
On water issue, Democrats try to give up some power
L.A. Times-8/25/09
By George Skelton
Opinion
Take a good look because you won't see this often: The Legislature's majority party trying to surrender power.
It's power that Democrats have been incapable or unwilling to exercise anyway. And it's not like they're giving it to Republicans.
They're attempting to create an independent governing body to decide how to restore the ecosystem and remodel the waterworks of the deteriorating Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a major source of drinking water for Southern Californians and irrigation for San Joaquin Valley farms.
Wealth, livelihoods and ways of life are at stake. Some of California's most combative interests -- agricultural, business, urban, environmental -- have been battling over the delta for decades. Because these stakeholders can't agree, neither can the politicians whose policies tend to be shaped by their patron interests. That's the system.
Handing off the decision-making authority to an outside entity was suggested by a special commission -- the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force -- created by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and headed by attorney Philip Isenberg, a former high-ranking legislator and Sacramento mayor.
More than 200 federal, state and local entities have their fingers in delta water, the panel noted in its report last October. "Everyone is involved but no one is in charge. . . . Continuation of the current system of governance . . . guarantees continued deadlock and inevitable litigation."
Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), author of a bill to create a powerful Delta Stewardship Council, blames California's "reform tradition" for much of Sacramento's gridlock.
"In response to big-city machine politics on the East Coast, California created lots of checks and balances so nothing bad can happen," Simitian says. "The flip side is nothing good gets done. At some point, you have to let go and let somebody make the hard decisions.
"Those decisions would be better made in a less political environment by people who know what the hell they're talking about. The lesson of the last 25 years is that political institutions are not very well equipped to make plumbing decisions. We need to provide for independence and expertise."
The senator's mention of the last 25 years refers roughly to the last time the Legislature and governor had the courage to step up and make a major water decision. They were slapped down by voters.
Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature authorized a "peripheral canal" to funnel Sacramento River water around the brackish delta and directly into a southbound aqueduct. But in 1982 an unlikely coalition of rich farmers and skittish environmentalists talked voters into repealing the legislation. Farmers thought the canal's operation would be too friendly to the environment, while environmentalists believed it wouldn't be friendly enough.
Voters actually had approved the canal in 1960 when they authorized bonds for Gov. Pat Brown's State Water Project. But by the time Oroville Dam and the California Aqueduct were built, the state had run out of money for the canal.
The canal originally was proposed by state wildlife officials to protect fish from being sucked into pumps draining delta water into the aqueduct. But many environmentalists, delta farmers and Bay Area cities over the decades have fought the canal, envisioning it as a giant straw to siphon additional northern water into valley irrigation ditches and Southland swimming pools.
But things have changed. We've entered a new era in the perpetual water wars.
The fishery has tanked and courts have curtailed deliveries to save the remaining fish. Delta levees are crumbling and are vulnerable to flooding or the inevitable big earthquake that could cut off all water shipments for years.
Global warming threatens to reduce the Sierra snowpack and melt it faster, requiring more water storage -- reservoirs and underground -- to prevent worse droughts and flooding. Scientists also predict that climate change will raise the sea level, swamping the delta with salt water.
The new fight against time is to restore the ecosystem while providing a reliable water supply -- emphasis on reliable, even if the supply is reduced from previous commitments.
There's a growing consensus among farm, urban and many environmental interests -- but still not delta farmers who rely on fresh Sacramento River water -- that some peripheral canal is needed. Or perhaps a peripheral tunnel. Or a combo of both. Or both combined with a more secure water route through the delta -- a route that could devastate one of the estuary's most scenic boating areas.
Whatever the "conveyance" -- new water lingo for the emotional word "peripheral" -- Democratic legislators want it to be decided by a seven-member Delta Stewardship Council. The governor would appoint four members and the Legislature two. The chairman of a Delta Protection Commission would be the seventh member.
The council's co-equal mission would be to improve both the ecosystem and water supply. It would assess fees on users of delta water to pay for the billions in upgrades.
The Simitian bill is part of a comprehensive Democratic package that also would, among other things, require a 20% reduction in urban water consumption by 2020. Crop irrigation likewise would have to be more efficient. And all groundwater levels would be monitored by local agencies and reported to the state.
"This is the most profound, the most radical change in water policy in my lifetime," says Randele Kanouse, veteran lobbyist for the East Bay Municipal Utility District. He says much tinkering is needed and urges the Legislature to delay final action until next year.
But Democrats are holding weekly committee hearings in hopes of passing legislation by Sept. 11, the end of this year's regular session.
Schwarzenegger, backed by Republicans, dampened optimism by vowing not to sign legislation that doesn't include bonds for dams. A bond bill would require a two-thirds majority vote, a generator of gridlock. The other water bills need only a simple majority vote.
"The governor has to decide whether he wants to solve this problem or have another food fight," says Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), who heads the water committee.
Dams are needed. But they'd be of little use without a healthy delta. This is a once-in-a-generation chance to heal the estuary.
Critics might accuse Democrats of passing the buck. But it's a wise move that recognizes the Legislature's limitations.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap25-2009aug25,0,5395588.column
Water trauma
Riverside Press-Enterprise-8/21/09
Editorial
California does not need another year of stalemate on water policy.
The Legislature should not let old ideological battles again block progress on the primary water challenge facing the state: ensuring a reliable supply for the future.
That task entails addressing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta first, to secure continued water exports from Northern California. All other water issues are secondary. And the best option for protecting water supplies is to channel exports around the delta instead of through the estuary.
But the Legislature also needs to avoid another political impasse over new dams and reservoirs -- an issue which has stymied progress on water policy for years. The governor this week demanded that money for new dams be part of the water legislation, an approach Democrats oppose. But the governor should set that issue aside for now; California does not have the time for more knee-jerk quarrels over policy while its water system deteriorates.
Democratic legislators introduced a package of bills last month aimed at addressing the state's water needs. The legislation, which had its first hearing this week, would create a new delta oversight council, mandate increased conservation, expand monitoring of water usage and build new protections for the delta.
Just how a large share of that legislation would work remains unclear, but the issue is vital for California. Water from the state's northern regions serves two-thirds of the state's population and irrigates millions of acres of agriculture. But that water now flows through the delta, which is facing environmental collapse. A 2007 federal court ruling slashed water exports from the delta to protect an endangered fish, leaving the state without a vital water source as it faced a persistent drought.
The effect on the state has been substantial. Five San Joaquin Valley counties reported last month that their agricultural losses from the water shortage could reach $1.4 billion. Many water agencies have raised rates and started rationing. But the delta's environmental woes also have a cost: The state's salmon industry has shut down for two years running, causing losses exceeding $500 million for that period.
The state should start by finding a way to channel water around the delta, which would keep the much-needed supplies flowing south. And that step would let the state address the environmental needs without those steps affecting water exports. Preserving the status quo is not a realistic option; neither is cutting off water exports to the rest of the state.
And while California may well need more dams and reservoirs, as the governor argues, that is a discussion for later. Changing precipitation patterns will require the state to catch and store more winter rains in the future. But the projects the governor supports have not even completed feasibility and environmental reports yet. And new reservoirs will accomplish little if the state has no way to get the water to the rest of California.
The delta's troubles and their effect on water supplies are the crucial issues. The Legislature should resolve those questions first, and not dive into another futile political standoff.#
Senator typical of agriculture's detractors
Visalia Times-Delta-8/24/09
By Don Curlee Opinion
Opinion
One California Senator has become the poster boy for the wide band of dislike and misunderstanding that engulfs the state's agriculture industry.
As contradictory as it seems, he is Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Democrat Dean Florez, Elected to the State Senate in 2002 after serving two terms in the State Assembly, Florez comes from Shafter, a predominantly agricultural community in Kern County.
But his garishly gerrymandered district helps explain his mind boggling positions and off-the-wall statements. It meanders along a heavily Democrat, but sometimes narrow path from south of Bakersfield north into parts of Tulare, Kings and Fresno Counties. Farming is paramount in all of it, but farm workers outnumber farmers 100 to 1 or more in much of it.
In his four years as an assemblyman Florez frequently aligned himself with the United Farmworkers union and its leader, turning his back on farmers in regard to bills and positions they favored. The union's headquarters near Tehachapi is just outside Florez's senate district.
In doing so he established himself as the perennial "loose canon," likely to fire intermittently and erratically in any direction that seems politically expedient, no matter what it means to his constituency.
His ascendancy to a vital committee leadership position is more a tribute to his aggressiveness and political ambition than to any demonstrated performance or proficiency in behalf of the state's agricultural industry. For the Democrat power structure in Sacramento he filled a gap handily that few if any others in the party wanted to occupy.
Early in his current term he proposed off-the-wall legislation that offered little more than superficial support for agriculture.
He favored a bill that would have forced egg producers in other states supplying eggs to California to meet the unfortunate restrictions placed on California poultrymen by last November's ill-conceived Proposition 2. It was clearly in restraint of interstate commerce, and collapsed of its own weight.
More recently Florez has proposed elimination of the state's Department of Food and Agriculture, unquestionably the biggest and best of any state, and on a strategic and economic level with that of several nations of the world.
He seems unaware that the diversity of production of 350 commercial crops by 80,000 farmers requires specialized oversight and administration.
The agriculture industry has been an interested and somewhat astonished observer as Florez's legislative antics have unfolded as part of the sordid Sacramento political drama.
Most agricultural leaders are holding their tongues, aware that his committee can be expected to consider and possibly sponsor strategic legislation dealing with their industry.
The Secretary of Food and Agriculture spoke volumes when he refused to attend a discussion group on the Florez "kill the department" bill, and appeared at an important citrus disease meeting in San Diego instead.
The water issue, one of the most serious and strategic to face agriculture and at least 25 million off-farm residents in 50 years, seems to submerge Florez. The all-important California Aqueduct, central to the issue, passes through his district within a mere 20 miles of Florez's home town of Shafter on its way to Southern California.
The next shot fired by Florez probably won't be from a water cannon. But it is predictable that he will do something to enhance his reputation as a loose canon. The state's agriculture industry needs to erect some armor plate or at least be prepared to duck.#
Don Curlee is a freelance writer who specializes in agricultural issues.
Dying on the Vine
As another water war rages, the west side of California's storied San Joaquin Valley waits for relief that may not come
Newsweek-8/24/09
By Katie Paul
Playing cards and a small wad of dollar bills sit on a pool table at Los Kiki, a dusty pool hall at the end of the main drag in Mendota, Calif. A breeze blows through a broken window, past six men hunched over the table, beer bottles in their hands. It is middle of a Wednesday afternoon.
A year ago, they would have been out planting and pruning in the vast fields of grapes, tomatoes, onions, and nut trees that fan out from the city limits. But this year, many of those fields are lying fallow, and the men at Los Kiki are out of work.
"Before, it was good. There were jobs eight months, 10 months out of the year. Now, nothing," says Luis Cortez, 52. Others nod in agreement. Cortez says he has worked just three days all year.
Mendota touts itself as the cantaloupe capital of the world, but its de facto motto is far less optimistic. "No water, no work" is the refrain repeated everywhere here in the western reaches of the San Joaquin Valley.
The unemployment rate in this 10,000-person town was an unfathomable 38 percent in July (including documented and undocumented workers). Nearly all those who have lost their jobs are farm workers, who often straddle the poverty line even in boom times. The result is a cruel irony: in the region that produces more food than anywhere else in the country, food lines have become regular fixtures, drawing hundreds, sometimes thousands.
After three years of drought, California's legendary water wars are flaring once again, and towns like Mendota, San Joaquin, and Firebaugh are getting a first glimpse of what their future might look like. Farmers blame the area's blight on a "man-made drought" brought on by increasingly strict environmental regulations, but that is only the beginning of the story.
There's also the crushing confluence of political negligence, drought, and a century's worth of unbridled growth. Now, as residents wonder if normalcy will ever return, planners are forced to consider a far uglier question: should it? Is a new "normal" required?
That towns like Mendota even exist reflects the extraordinary ambition that built the American West. A century ago, much of the San Joaquin Valley was an undeveloped dust bowl, its few small farming communities clustered around natural water sources.
Today, it is a green expanse of agricultural empires. Most of the water that has irrigated these seemingly endless fields comes from northern California, diverted by an epic system of dams and canals born from New Deal funds. It was one of the most ambitious water systems ever built, and the San Joaquin Valley became, in the words of historian Kevin Starr, "the most productive unnatural environment on Earth."
The valley is home to a $20 billion crop industry; the San Joaquin region alone produces more in farm sales than any other individual state in the country. Mark Borba, 59, has a big stake in that business, just as his grandparents did in the valley's development.
Borba Farms started off with about 20 milk cows and 30 acres of land in 1910, at a time when farmers who had tapped an underground aquifer were kicking off a race to cultivate. The farm now covers 10,000 acres, and Mark Borba is only one of 600 growers in the Westlands Water District, a water-contracting group of farmers and landowners on the far west side of the valley where Mendota and other towns sit. By the time Borba took over his family's operation in the 1970s, the valley was already supplying 25 percent of the country's food.
Making that explosive growth possible is access to water delivered through an increasingly byzantine system centered on the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, a thousand-square-mile web of channels, islands, and levees where the two rivers meet before flowing into the San Francisco Bay.
From there, giant dams and pumps suck the water southward through veinlike aqueducts to 25 million people and more than 5 million acres of farmland. But not all water consumers are created equally. In fact, access to the water is essentially based on a squatters' rights notion: "First in rights, first in time." In other words, whoever signed up for a water contract first got the best guarantees.
Latecomers got junior rights, meaning they'd be the first to get cut in a dry. Westlands, which has a contract for water delivery with the federal government, is the most junior of the bunch.
It was complicated and costly, but for a long time, the system worked. Over the last three decades, however, the valley's explosive growth has caused rivers to run dry, dead fish to accumulate near the water pumps, and chronic water shortages.
The levees near the bay are old, prompting worries that a failure, perhaps following an earthquake, could cause salt water from the bay to rush into the delta, crippling the water supply for the entire state. And the delta smelt, an endangered species of fish no bigger than an index finger, began disappearing as the massive pumps sucked up fish along with the water it was sending south.
Lawsuits over the fish filed by environmental groups and water contractors multiplied, and court-imposed restrictions and regulations began siphoning off more and more of the 6 million acre-feet of water exported through the river basin each year.
Most people in the valley blame their water woes on those lawsuits and the fish. Since 1992, when Congress established new federal ecosystem standards, increasing amounts of water have been set aside for wildlife restoration. Since then, Westlands has received on average about half as much water as the 1.2 million acre-feet per year it ordered up in its contract, forcing farmers to rely on expensive pumps that suck up water from the aquefier and water transfers from their better-connected competitors to the east.
This year, Westlands is down to nearly nothing, and its farmers are livid. Federal officials slashed the district's allocation to zero at the beginning of the season; only after a furious lobbying campaign did they succeed in bumping it up to 10 percent of the water deliveries stipulated in their contract.
A University of California, Berkeley analysis claims that the economic impact of the water reductions on the valley's agricultural production tops $48 million. That figure will likely get worse once the water agencies begin implementing new rules this summer designed to protect other fish such as sturgeon, salmon, and steelhead trout. In a normal year, such a hit is difficult, says Sarah Woolf, a Westlands District spokeswoman. After three years of natural drought, she says, it's ruinous.
But Barry Nelson, the National Resources Defense Council advocate behind the fish lawsuits, says the fish vs. people argument is nonsense. Even after three years of drought, the Central Valley Project (CVP) is still making half of its water deliveries to farms in the valley. Westlands just isn't getting that water. "There's a myth in the valley about the delta smelt, and it's really a tragedy," he says. "I don't mean for a moment to suggest that those small communities on the west side aren't seeing impacts; they are. They're seeing the impact of drought, and those impacts are real and they're hard." Nelson contends that the fish aren't the problem; it's the way the system is set up.
Just adjacent to Westlands, he says, four other contractors are getting a full 100 percent of their water allocation this year, despite the drought. And while Westlands has adopted some of the most water-efficient irrigation methods in the business, other farmers in the valley with senior water rights are under no pressure to conserve.
The result is a patchwork valley, where a Westlands farmer like Mark Borba is forced to fallow land while his neighbor has excess water that he can sell at a hefty profit. Buying that excess and pumping water from underground is sustainable to a point, says Borba. But the expenses—and the poor quality of the underground water—would drive the business into the ground in the long term.
But that may be all that the Westlands district can hope for. Climate models by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the state's water resources agency, and researchers at the University of California, Davis all point to the same trend: the Sierra snowcaps that supply the state's water are disappearing. If that's the case, farmers should expect droughts more frequently, and Westlands may have to come around to the notion that they will never receive all the water that their contracts call for. "No drought comes to you with a label that says, 'Brought to you by climate change,' " says Nelson. "But in the American Southwest and in California, we should be prepared for a drier future."
To at least a few teams of researchers, ending the conversation with a doomsday prediction for agriculture on the west side of the valley is insufficient. Like the farmers and engineers who, a century ago, looked at the desert and imagined farms, these teams, which pull together researchers at federal and state agencies, California universities, and think tanks into a planning group called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), say a good plan and some new hardware is all the valley needs to conquer its water challenge.
They are likely to suggest building a new "peripheral" canal that would transport northern water around the delta, rather than through it, to restore its battered ecosystem.
To farmers like Borba, that's the kind of investment worth making. "I've traveled all over the world—Egypt, Australia, Brazil, China—and I've never seen an agricultural resource like we have in the San Joaquin Valley. The soils, the climate, the crop variability. We've got 300 crops we can grow here. You can't find that just anywhere," he says. "So I have a hard time saying, for lack of the will, that we should neuter the most productive agricultural resource in the world. I don't think that's where America wants to go."
North of the valley, where the canal would be built, not everyone is so enthusiastic. Opponents, who beat back the idea in a 1982 referendum, see it as a destructive, expensive water grab by southern users. They have a point; according to the BDCP and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, preliminary construction-cost estimates for the two biggest projects under consideration are $13 billion, a price tag California is hardly in a position to bear in its present state.
Other critics, like Nelson, say the drop in water supply caused by climate change would render such mega-investments moot. The better bet, they argue, is an aggressive push for water-conservation standards. Yet others, like the University of the Pacific's Jeffrey Michael, who does business forecasting, note that the issues facing Westlands are hardly valley-wide problems. Rather, he says, farm employment this year has actually gone up, making it one of the few success stories in a region pummeled by the mortgage crisis.
Still, support for the idea might be building steam. The BDCP has missed benchmarks, but there's evidence the governor's office is behind the idea. State officials recently announced they intend to start preliminary drilling for ground tests this month, while state lawmakers recently unveiled five new major water bills focused on the delta.
Even if that comes through, though, there's no guarantee all of Westlands would reap the benefits. As productive as the farms in the district have been, bad drainage underneath means the soil fills up with salt, boron, selenium, and other minerals—toxins that make plants shrivel just as quickly as a drought.
A drainage system could address the problem, but, again, nobody seems to want to pay for one. Instead, starting in 2000, Westlands and the Bureau of Reclamation negotiated a deal to permanently retire from farming 100,000 acres of land in the district in return for compensation from the federal government.
"There's a reason some of the land in Westlands was the last land in California to be irrigated," says Nelson, the NRDC analyst. "The land that was retired a few years ago has already salted up. It looks like it snowed." That might be just the beginning; federal agencies estimate the number should be two to four times that amount.
All of this leaves the valley's west side caught in a painful limbo until California answers big questions about where and how it wants to make use of its resources. In the meantime, some economic planners are eyeing the area as a potential clean energy source where almond farms could be transformed into solar farms. Those plans, too, are preliminary.
"It took a century of bad decisions to get us here. The good news is, we are on the verge of making some major changes on what we're going to do about it," says Jeff Mount, a water-geology researcher at UC Davis who supports the peripheral canal proposal. "So, yes, the valley's farm economy itself is probably going to shrink some. But that may not be a bad thing in the long run. And it may be an inevitable thing."
Such talk makes 34-year-old Dora Chavarria wonder about her future. She was born in Mendota, the daughter of a field worker who arrived there 38 years ago, worked the fields, and saved enough money to open up an auto shop.
She's climbed the social ladder yet another rung, working at a program for immigrant families in the Firebaugh school system. Chavarria recalls a time when she could be proud of Mendota; when people filled the streets, when her father would drive her around in trucks filled with tomatoes from the surrounding fields, when musical acts would pass through town, and when the melon-capital claim rang true. It's been a long time since that was the case; for more than a decade, the streets have been empty and dangerous, she says, and getting worse as people head for Las Vegas and Los Angeles in search of work. Chavarria doesn't let her children out alone, and now her husband wants to leave, too.
To keep the town alive, Mendota's leaders have, in their own way, started to think about alternatives to agriculture. Mayor Robert Silva says the best bet is the federal prison under construction on the outskirts of town, a project he courted, thinking it will spark an economic revival as hotels and restaurants spring up to accommodate prison visitors.As the town waits to see if Silva's development predictions come true, residents face a crushing tide. This summer, the town's only bank announced it was shutting down because of insufficient deposits.
As the public schools lose students, officials worry funding cuts will follow. Most eerily, around the outskirts of town, billboards and flags advertise the empty, unfinished development of single-family homes with bright green lawns, constant reminders that, on more than one front, foresight has been hard to come by in the valley.
Still, Chavarria is not ready to give up on Mendota just yet. "It's just slowly dying, and we can't let that happen. This is my heritage," she says. "Change is good, and hopefully something better comes along. But if we don't stay here to make that change, then the change is never going to happen."#
http://www.newsweek.com/id/211381
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