Seeds of Protest Sprout Around Proposed Collider

John and Sigrid Eilers have had some angry, sleepless nights lately, worrying about the giant atom smasher that state officials want to build under--and in some cases, over--some of their neighbors’ farms.

“It’s like rezoning the entire area for light industry,” asserted John Eilers, a third-generation cherry and walnut grower. He predicted that the $4.4-billion superconducting super-collider would not only consume prime agricultural land, but also would hasten other development on adjoining farms.

Down in Escalon at the other end of the proposed collider site, almond grower Clark Swanson settled back in his easy chair, smiled and shrugged off the project’s suspected growth-inducing potential.

“It’s going to happen in the long run anyway,” he contended, referring to San Joaquin County’s growing urbanization. “We already feel pressure from the (San Francisco) Bay Area. With this, at least, we . . . can have good, high-tech industry rather than a lot of fly-by-night operations.”

And so it goes as California hurries to draft its bid to win the collider--an oval-shaped research machine 53 miles in circumference, covering an area roughly the size of Philadelphia--a project so big it is seen as the richest public-works jackpot served up by the federal government since the space program.

California, which is preparing to spend perhaps $550 million to attract the collider, is ranked as a leading contender among the 30 or so states competing for the project. But those Californians who might actually have to reside near the collider are divided over whether the project’s promises of prosperity and prestige are worth the 7,710 acres of agricultural land it could take out of production--and the dozens of farm families it would dispossess.

So, even as they scramble to meet the August bidding deadline set by the U.S. Department of Energy, California officials also find themselves campaigning to persuade critics that a collider would not require anyone to choose between farming and physics. Along with their private sector allies, they are pledging, with mixed success so far, that the collider actually could help to preserve farm land while at the same time filling local industrial parks and trimming a stubborn rural unemployment rate.

“If we’re truly interested in keeping land in agriculture and keeping land in open space, this (collider) is ideal because you can just farm right on top of it,” said Norman J. Rapanich, president of the Solano Economic Development Corp., a private consortium of Solano County developers.

California and Michigan are the only states combating organized grass-roots opposition to their bids, which are due at the Department of Energy in Washington on Aug. 3. Local opposition is particularly significant because the finalists, to be chosen in December, will be judged in part on the support shown by people living near each site.

Other states, however, are not entirely trouble free. One site in New York, for example, was discovered to pass through sacred ground owned by the Mormon Church near Palmyra. When the alignment was moved, it infringed on a different sacred area. The state is now trying to compromise with the church.

Such problems are due in part to the collider’s scale which, researchers say, is essential to generate the energy necessary to study subatomic structure. If Congress agrees to build it--President Reagan has supported it and Congress has financed research and design, but not yet construction--the collider could create 20 times the energy of today’s most powerful particle accelerator. Researchers say that it should help them understand the most basic forces in nature.

But with its size come political problems to match.

The hottest battle is east of Stockton in San Joaquin County, where critics routinely heckle and harass University of California experts sent to the area to promote the facility. A less-confrontational opposition group has formed at the second suggested location, looping around the city of Davis about 20 miles west of Sacramento.

In both areas, agriculture organizations, such as county farm bureaus, have almost unanimously voted against the project, as have several small-town city councils and chambers of commerce.

Private supporters of the collider also are organizing in both locations, and have won the support of most city councils and chambers of commerce in larger cities, as well as county boards of supervisors and all the state and federal politicians representing both areas.

Both sides contend that they alone are planning for future generations--either by backing the collider and perhaps helping to open new vistas in science, or by blocking the collider and trying to preserve some of the state’s better agricultural land.

It is not clear which side has more popular support--for example, both sides at both sites circulate petitions with comparable success--but state officials are outwardly unworried. State Sen. John Garamendi of Walnut Grove, a Democrat whose district includes both sites, believes that there is “not enough (opposition) to seriously adversely affect California’s bid.”

Opponents, naturally, disagree. They have threatened to carry their protest to Washington next month when California officials submit the state’s bid.

Opponents have raised many issues, from potential industrial accidents and vibrations caused by farm equipment to air pollution and waste disposal. The main arguing point, however, concerns the loss of farm land and the dispossession of owners of small farms.

Michael Sorenson, a soils scientist and chairman of the Land, Air and Water Resources department at the University of California, Davis, agreed that parts of both sites being nominated by California contain very valuable agricultural soil, especially the Yolo-Solano area; other parts, he said, were average. The two sites also include climates that give California growers an important edge in the marketplace. For example, he said, apricots grown near Winters, in the area nominated for the collider’s main campus, are traditionally the first into the nation’s supermarkets, when prices are high and consumers are eager.

“Does it matter much if we take (these) acres out of production when there are millions of others still left?” he asked rhetorically. “No. But where do you stop? There is a limited number of acres of the very best ag land, and if you continually chip away at it, you are going to eventually run out.”

‘A National Treasure’

“This (soil) is a national treasure, a resource the likes of which are not found anywhere else on Earth,” said walnut grower Craig McNamara, who founded the Super-Collider Action Committee to fight the Yolo-Solano site, which would use some of his land near Winters. “We don’t question the need to build this. But . . . why not select a site that would not impact agriculture?”

He and other opponents suggested Utah or Idaho or Texas, each of which also is bidding on the collider. However, state officials and collider boosters say those states are pursuing the project for the same reason California ought to, for its economic benefits.

Those benefits would be considerable, figures a team of UCLA economists led by Professor Larry J. Kimbell. In his report to the state commission preparing California’s bid, Kimbell said he expects that the collider could employ 10,000 short-term construction workers, 3,000 permanent staff workers and create perhaps another 7,000 additional jobs for doctors, store clerks, restaurant workers and others in an expanded local economy. In addition, the team forecast that construction and operation of the collider could pump $7.88 billion into the state’s economy by the end of the century, including $549 million in added revenue to the state.

There also would be some negative economic effects, which the UC Agricultural Extension Service is trying to calculate. In a revised draft report dated June 24, the service estimated that putting the collider in San Joaquin County would result in a loss of $9.8-million worth of farm products, chiefly dairy foods, feed corn and other field crops, and fruits and nuts. The Yolo-Solano site would suffer $6 million in losses, primarily field crops, truck crops such as melons and tomatoes, and fruits and nuts.

Bearing the Load

Even when those losses are added up over the same 12-year period covered by the UCLA study--and when adjusted for inflation and improved crop yields--they would appear not to be comparable to the anticipated gains. But, local farmers noted, all the costs would be shouldered by relatively few people, while the benefits would be shared by hundreds of thousands.

Particularly hard hit would be the families whose houses would be bought to make way for a collider campus and other buildings. The San Joaquin site would require the purchase of 250 parcels, including 133 homes. The Davis site would need 192 parcels, including 35 homes.

“We don’t want those spinoffs; we don’t want extra industry,” said Sigrid Eilers, who with her husband heads the San Joaquin County Coalition Against the Super-Collider. “We don’t want things that will destroy this area.”

Agricultural lands were a prime consideration in locating the collider’s main campus and other buildings, insisted James Albertson, executive director of the steering committee for the California Collider Commission, the board formed by Gov. George Deukmejian to prepare the state’s bid package.

“It simply isn’t true to say the impact on agriculture was not a factor in choosing the alignments,” he said.

Discount Loss of Land

Some backers of the collider discount the loss of farm land, noting that the biggest part of the project, its huge ring, would be 50 feet or more below ground. The buildings, they add, would need only about 1,000 acres, at least at first; the remaining 6,710 acres of land requested by federal planners may be leased back to farmers.

Opponents counter that the federal government has not agreed in public that any part of the collider site would be leased to farmers--much less leased back to local, family farmers.

Federal officials decline to discuss the matter, saying they do not want to even appear to be influencing the open competition among the states.

If all 7,710 acres were to be immediately taken out of production, it would represent about 1% to 1.2% of the total acreage under cultivation last year in either area being considered.

Even before the state set out to nominate possible collider sites, both the San Joaquin and Yolo-Solano areas were wrestling with urbanization pressure from the San Francisco Bay Area. Indeed, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District last week said it plans to eventually extend commuter train service to both regions.

Forecast Growth

Local officials have said that each region should grow between 40% and 50% in the next 20 years. Both areas have worked to draft general plans trying to accommodate this growth without sacrificing traditional agricultural bases. At both sites, the collider was proposed for those areas the plans had set aside for family farms.

Opponents, some of whom are refugees from urbanization elsewhere, view this as the first stride toward the kind of development that consumed similar prime fruit- and nut-growing areas in Orange County and what is now Silicon Valley.

Collider proponents argue that the collider would add only a small fraction to the growth already anticipated, while providing large economic benefits. If the collider creates any so-called “spinoff” industry in the private sector, proponents said, it would be accommodated within established industrial parks.

“There is ample industrial land (available) in San Joaquin County . . . many hundreds, even thousands of acres,” said Peggy Keranen, senior planner at the county Department of Planning and Building Inspection. “The super-collider is not going to make that much difference.”

To try to assure that, Garamendi has offered legislative guarantees. He has amended his bill authorizing the sale of bonds to finance the state’s collider bid, adding language that would forbid local governments from changing existing zoning protecting agricultural lands “unless they make a special finding that doing so will not adversely affect agriculture, and that the change is not the result of locating the (collider) in the area.”

But Keranen said it is legally uncertain if the state can usurp local authority on land-use matters.