Where the Water Wars Are Fought

The Westlands Water District is headquartered in a single-story building that looks like an insurance office, which in fact it used to be. The architecture is a disappointment. Westlands is an infamous player in California’s water wars, the institutional metaphor for subsidized irrigation on a grand scale, and one expects, if not a plantation estate, at least a fountain or two. Or maybe a moat.

The board room is equally understated--small, boxy and done up entirely in dull beige. The only splash of color is a green stripe that runs down a state map hung on one wall. The stripe designates the vast acreage of the Westlands, desert land reclaimed with federal water that is captured behind Shasta Dam and carried south by canal--the Central Valley Project.

On Monday, the board of directors met here for the first time since passage of the Omnibus Water Bill. This congressional legislation, through fiat and free market incentives, would take a good chunk of CVP water from farmers and put it to work serving cities and protecting the environment. At the rhetorical extreme, the bill--yet to be signed by President Bush--has been described as one more step toward the grave for the kind of farming peculiar to the San Joaquin Valley’s West Side.

So I came up to record the reaction of the big cigars of Westlands--but there was other business to attend to first.

*

The directors, all farmers, sat around a horseshoe table. I recognized some of the names like Giffen and Borba, sons of famous West Side pioneers. They wore shirt sleeves, collars open--casual attire that in some cases disguised a good deal of wealth. The dialogue was low-key, almost shy at times. These are not public men.

For the next couple of hours, the meeting would provide a wide-ranging sampler of all that has come to plague West Side farming. At the top of the agenda, the directors heard complaints from a farmer whose land had been declared ineligible for federal water, a victim of tougher rules created by tighter supplies. He held a bill from the district that he could not pay. He was advised to consider withdrawing from Westlands. “We’re throwing him out on the street,” one of the younger board members complained. The others expressed sympathy and moved on.

A rundown on the amount of available water followed--not much better than last year. This elicited a bit of head shaking, nothing more. An update was given on efforts to purchase land and take it out of production, freeing up water. A staff member reported that concerns about environmental impacts on the delta were blocking delivery of water to the south, and that the San Luis Reservoir was dropping fast. “The bureau is just not filling it,” he said. The district lawyer reported movement in litigation involving contaminated irrigation water.

And so it went for two hours. The water bill did not come up until the end. The district manager said President Bush, “as of two hours ago,” had not decided whether to keep an earlier promise and veto the bill. The directors swapped a bit of political insight gleaned from people described in such terms as “a well-placed source of mine.” Mainly, though, they kept quiet, giving away little.

*

As the meeting broke apart, I felt tugged--and not for the first time--to write an obituary for the West Side’s grand experiment in cultivating a desert. In patches, the soil has turned to poison. Water is in short supply above ground and below. Political support for the whole endeavor has soured. Farmers once lauded as pillars of American know-how are disparaged as water-wasting, money-grubbing demons. In this context, the water reform bill can be seen as more writing on the beige wall. It’s over.

Flying home, though, I made the mistake of looking west out the window. My neat analysis fell apart. Huge grids of farmland spread across the valley floor below and into the coastal foothills. The sun played off the California Aqueduct to paint a long silver streak through the middle of the farmland. There is too much down there, I said to myself, to bury.

I thought back to a brief conversation I had with one of the board members. He reminded me that legislation is only a first step. When the politicians finish, the rule-makers step in, interpreting the new law. After that come the lawyers. With these rounds come opportunities to take a law and reduce its impact, or reinvent it altogether. California water is a game that is never over, and this is not the first time the West Side has looked down the barrel of legislative reform.

“We don’t know what this bill will do yet, and anybody who tells you they do know is guessing,” this farmer told me. “Nobody knows.” He spoke with the conviction of someone who’s been there.