Water in the Pork Barrel

The federal government provides subsidized water to wealthy San Joaquin Valley farmers to grow subsidized products that contribute to crop surpluses. Government buys high-cost private power to pump the subsidized water to the subsidized farms to grow subsidized crops. Contaminated irrigation runoff threatens environmental destruction and requires a costly cleanup program.

The farmers’ water payments are not enough to offset project operation costs. So the feds juggle the books with vague hopes of recouping the money some years in the future.

Classic pork-barrel boondoggle? Certainly. Sound familiar? Of course. This theme is taken from a new report by the National Resources Defense Council and California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation on the financial record of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project in general and the Westlands Water District in particular. The 157-page report calculates the “hidden and illegal” subsidies of the giant project at $1.5 billion.

Actually, the subsidies have been scrutinized and documented for a number of years, although the new report does go into exhaustive detail and provides some valuable data. The bulk of the subsidies have been sanctioned by Congress and various Administrations time and again. There is no secret, either, that the CVP never was designed to settle the arid West with family homesteads as envisioned by the original 1902 Reclamation Act.

Most of the recommended corrections have been proposed before. Some have been tried, to a degree, by the federal bureaucracy and Congress. It is slow going for a variety of political and economic reasons. The Bureau of Reclamation at least had the good sense not to denounce the report out of hand. The bureau mildly welcomed the authors to the discussion of reclamation law.

The Reagan Administration has attempted to impose local and state cost sharing on any new projects, and has made a modest effort to get farmers to pay higher water rates at some point in time. It will take years of prodding to overcome some of the old subsidies that can no longer be tolerated but that are locked into long-term contracts. Congress has imposed some fiscal discipline on other projects, and the government finally has brought lawsuits against irrigation districts for failure to comply with the Reclamation Reform Act of 1982.

The government can push reclamation reform only as fast as political and economic reality will permit. Constructive prodding will be needed to achieve that. The real challenge now is for all interests to make certain that truly needed future projects are tailored to the economic, environmental and social demands and constraints of a water-scarce age.