Further Adventures of the Hydraulic Brotherhood

Further adventures of the Hydraulic Brotherhood: Westlands Update
By Lloyd G. Carter
In the past few years public and media attention in the San Joaquin Valley have been focused on the long court battle over restoring a fishery flow in the San Joaquin River and the alleged impacts it would have on East Side agriculture.
Meanwhile, the Westlands Water District, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful federal irrigation district, has been operating below the radar to both lock up a 50-year water supply worth billions of dollars and to get the government to pay for an expensive drainage system that could cost American taxpayers up to $2 billion with no guarantees it will work. All for 400 or 500 growers.
Westlands, which sprawls across 600,000 acres in western Fresno County and a small portion of Kings County, ran into trouble 25 years ago when it was discovered its drainage water contained selenium, a trace element inherent in the western valley soils which is toxic to birds and wildlife. In the early 1980s, Westlands’ polluted shallow groundwater, loaded with salts, including selenium, was pumped from the ground and funneled via a cement drainage canal to evaporation ponds at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in Merced County 85 miles to the north.
The selenium in the stored drainage water quickly moved into the wildlife refuge food chain, killing thousands of federally protected birds outright and triggering grotesque mutations in bird embryos nesting around the evaporation ponds.
The story of the toxic ag drainage killing a national wildlife refuge exploded in newspapers around the country and was featured on CBS’ "60 Minutes." The Reagan Administration ordered the Kesterson ponds closed in 1985, cutting off the possibility of a drainage canal through the Delta to the Pacific Ocean.
Without drainage, the alkaline soils of the Westlands could not be farmed. This crisis was followed by the lengthy drought of the late 1980s and early 1990s in which water supplies for the Westlands were cut back because of the drought and the growing ecological crisis in the Delta, location of the massive pumps which push north state water uphill to the corporate farms of the western valley. A much smaller portion of this water goes over the Tehachapis to ever thirsty Southern California.
But the Westlands growers are resilient as well as clever. They filed lawsuits to get the drainage system completed and bided their time during the Clinton years. When the Bush Administration took power in 2001, Westlands was able to again gain a sympathetic ear. It didn’t hurt that the former lobbyist for the Valley federal water districts, Jason Peltier, became a top official at the Department of Interior, parent agency of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, providing western water "advice" to then Interior Secretary Gale Norton.
In 2002, some Westlands growers who had filed a suit in the early 1990s to complete the drainage, negotiated a settlement with Interior official Bennett Raley, a Norton protege, over the wishes of Justice Department attorneys who wanted to fight the law suit. A handful of Westlands growers, including former California Secretary of State Bill Jones, were given $140 million from Interior and Westlands in exchange for idling 32,000 acres of land.
Negotiations continued on an overall drainage plan for the west side of the Valley as well as Westlands efforts to renew its 1960s water delivery contract for up to one million acre-feet of water a year. That’s enough water to meet the annual water needs of a city of ten million people. The old contract was set to expire this year. The new contract would be for 25 years with a virtually automatic 25-year renewal for a total of 50 years. One million acre-feet of water a year is worth $500 an acre-foot on the retail market (urban uses) making Westlands’ annual supply worth half a billion dollars, or a total of $25 billion of the life of the new contract. Westlands’ 400-500 growers, of course, would be expecting to buy that water for less than 20 percent of its market value and any water not used for farming could be sold on the open market for very handsome profits.
Westlands wanted all that water even thought the intractable drainage problem might cause it to idle 200,000 acres of land, one third of the district. This evoked howls of protest for major environmental groups who continue to insist that massive pumping from the Delta is wreaking ecological havoc on the Delta’s fishery and imperiled drinking water supplies.
Then last month, with no publicity, Westlands general manager Tom Birmingham told the Westlands board of Directors that it now appears renewal of the water delivery contract will not take place until at least 2010.
Westlands has now begun negotiations on a series of one-year interim renewal contracts. What was the reason for the delaying in signing the ink on the water contract?
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, an Interior agency which provides Westlands water, was reiniating formal consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the way that the vast Central Valley Project is operating in the San Joaquin Valley. Particularly regarding the volume of pumping from the federal pumps at Tracy, which has caused precipitous declines in the population of the Delta Smelt, a tiny but critical fish in the Delta fishery food chain.
This formal consultation will force Reclamation to develop a formal document known as a biological assessment and to issue a new biological opinion, and this task could take at least two years.
Reclamation officials say will incorporate into the
biological opinion the terms of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP). The BDCP is an effort by a number of stakeholders in the Delta, including Westlands, to restore fishery populations will protecting irrigation supplies. The draft of the Bay Delta Plan will not be available until March 2009 and thus cannot be incorporated into the Bureau’s biological opinion in 2010.
To further threaten Westlands’ plans, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court in November arguing the California Department of Water Resources, the state corollary to the federal Bureau of Reclamation, should be required to get a permit to pump water out of the Delta
or face drastic cuts in the amount of drinking and irrigation water it sends
south.
"We're seeing a collapsing estuary. We've got fisheries living on the brink
of oblivion," said Bill Jennings, executive director of Watershed Enforcers, the
group's legal arm.
If restrictions are placed on the state pumps in the Delta, similar restrictions could follow for the federal pumps, threatening Westlands’ supplies.
Westlands’ half century quest for a cheap and safe way to dispose of its toxic drainage water also continues to run into problems.
Two days before Christmas, the Los Angeles Times reported bird deformities are again reappearing in Merced County from selenium-laced drainwater generated in irrigation districts just north of Westlands. These districts now use the San Joaquin River as a sewerline.
Reclamation’s current solution for the Westlands drainage problem, prompted by a federal lawsuit, is to build more Kesterson-like ponds, causing federal biologists to shake their heads in disbelief.
Although one proposal calls for idling up to 200,000 acres of the Westlands acreage highest in selenium, friendly Interior officials are trying to help Westlands by reducing the amount of retired land. The unofficial price tag of the new drainage "solution" is now in excess of $2 billion.
But the Westlands’ biggest problem may be the Democratic takeover of Congress. Rep. Grace Napolitano of Los Angeles County has taken over as chair of the House Subcommittee on Water formerly chaired by Rep. George Radanovich of Mariposa, who was always sympathetic to Westlands.
Napolitano, who is very interested in clean drinking water for farmworker communities in the San Joaquin Valley, is being lobbied by environmental groups to hold hearings on Westlands in the Bay Area and/or Los Angeles in order to let urban Californians the huge amount of money being spent on just a few hundred farmers in western Fresno County.
Westlands’ dwindling window of opportunity to lockup a huge long term water supply and get the taxpayers to substantially underwrite a billion dollar plus drainage system may run out with the end of the Bush Administration.