Farmers Reject Concessions on Collider

Legislative backers of California’s effort to win a $4.4-billion federal atom smasher Tuesday offered concessions to Northern California farmers opposed to the project, but the farmers rejected the offer as “nothing substantial.”

Rejection of the compromise, made at the first meeting of Gov. George Deukmejian’s California Collider Commission, could damage the state’s competitiveness in the nationwide contest to provide the site for the proposed superconducting super collider because community support is listed as a federal requirement.

At the same meeting, the commission, which includes the governor, the president of the University of California and other state executives, announced it is studying several innovative bond-based financing packages to bolster the state’s bid. Commission officials have said the state will offer to contribute perhaps $500 million to the collider project if it is built here.

More than 30 states are seeking the massive proton accelerator, which at 53 miles in circumference would be the largest and most powerful scientific research machine on Earth.

The federal Department of Energy, which is coordinating the siting process while it seeks to assure continued congressional funding, has made it clear that financial inducements, as well as community support, will be considered when it evaluates each site proposal submitted.

The two sites being considered in California are southeast of Stockton in the San Joaquin Valley and encircling the city of Davis, just west of Sacramento. Both proposed sites include working farms, and the project would require the purchase of about 8,000 acres.

Opponents of the project, most of them farmers and most from small towns near Stockton, have complained that the project will consume land used by several hundred family farmers and force them out of business.

They also contend that the project would take prime agricultural land out of production and off local tax rolls, would consume scarce water and encourage industrialization of surrounding prime agricultural land.

In an effort to ameliorate those concerns, and perhaps save the thousands of new jobs and hundreds of millions of new state tax dollars that a collider would create, state Sen. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) offered his compromise Tuesday in an appearance before the commission.

Among other things, it would require that the collider project disturb the least amount of agricultural land necessary, force the state to mitigate unavoidable negative impacts and assure farmers that they would not have to sell property to the state at the current depressed property values.

“It’s the same old stuff. There’s nothing substantial,” said farmer John Eilers as he rejected the offer.

Eilers heads the Coalition Against the SSC, which during the meeting presented Deukmejian with 2,400 signatures of people opposed to the project.

Stockton-area civic leaders countered by displaying newspaper advertisements signed by 3,000 people supporting the collider project.

Earlier, the commission was advised of a financial consultant’s search for an acceptable bond-based financing package for the collider bid. Bonds are seen by the commission as a way to avoid being handcuffed by a 1979 initiative that limits state spending.

Among the proposals being considered is an “equity strip lease” in which the state would raise money by selling state property, such as buildings, to another public entity, such as the state Public Works Board. The board would pay for the buildings by issuing bonds, which would be paid off by leasing the buildings back to the state.

Donate Facilities

An even more innovative proposal being studied is a “lease-leaseback” arrangement, in which the state would donate some collider facilities to the federal government, lease them back from the federal government, then turn around and sublease them to the federal Energy Department.

Details of this proposal were not made public, but one commission member grinned and described it as “the most imaginative leaseback arrangement I’ve ever seen.”