San Joaquin Farmers Protest Planned Water Cutbacks

Farmers on tractors and workers with signs pleading for jobs paraded to a hearing where they protested proposed water cutbacks aimed at saving fish and enhancing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Signs with slogans such as “I Want Work, not Welfare” and “Without Water, We Perish” showed the agribusiness community’s concern over proposed cutbacks.

Three U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials conducted the hearing on proposed diversions of water that traditionally have gone to farms and cities south of the delta. Under the proposal, hundreds of thousands of acre-feet would be kept in the delta to help water quality, the delta smelt and the Sacramento splittail, a type of minnow.

Speakers said sharp cutbacks in the amount of federal water available for San Joaquin Valley farms would translate into idle land and lost jobs.

“People marched many blocks making the point we are talking about jobs, about the future of the valley,” state Sen. Phil Wyman (R-Bakersfield) told the panel.

Mendota Councilman Robert Rasmussen said unemployment in his western Fresno County community of 4,800 residents has hit 40% because of irrigation water cutbacks.

Orange Cove Mayor Victor Lopez said his eastern Fresno County city, “Can’t afford to lose the jobs that we have. Take it back to the president, Congress, the Senate that fish have never voted.”

Assemblyman Bill Jones (R-Fresno) said environmentalists have vilified dams and irrigation facilities “as destroyers of the environment. But without those facilities, there would have been no delta smelt as we went through one of the worst droughts in history.”

Jones asked the federal officials to “give us the consideration that the largest state in the union and the largest agriculture community in the world deserves.”

Howard Frick, president of Arvin-Edison Water Storage District in Kern County, said there is no proof the delta proposals will help fish, but “we know they will have a devastating effect on the economy.”

Kerman grape grower Phil Larson, who organized the demonstration for the Fresno County Farm Bureau called on federal officials to come up with “a balanced approach to restoration of the delta. We want to be included in it, not excluded from it.”