Water Deal Splits San Joaquin Valley

An elaborate deal to move San Joaquin River water from the farms of this heartland to the suburbs of Los Angeles has erupted into California’s version of a nasty civil war.

It pits L.A.’s Metropolitan Water District and big farmers in the southern San Joaquin Valley on one side against farming giants to the north and Bay Area environmentalists.

The south says the $45-million water transfer is a win-win, benefiting urban users in Southern California and fruit and vegetable growers in Kern County. The north says it won’t abide any deal that allows a thirsty Southern California to tap into yet another distant river vital to agriculture. It vows a long legal fight.

As early as this week, federal officials were set to approve the transfer, shunting 350,000 acre-feet of San Joaquin River water over the mountains into Southern California during the next 25 years--enough water to slake the thirst of about 2.8 million people a year.

Now the deal is on ice, perhaps permanently, while farmers and irrigation districts in the San Joaquin Valley try to work out a truce.

“Any time you propose a water transfer, you expect some controversy, but we frankly didn’t anticipate the opposition that’s now coming at us,” said Dirk Reed, the MWD engineer who helped negotiate the deal.

“They see Southern California sitting here and they think we’ve got an unquenchable thirst, and we don’t and that’s what we’re trying to tell them.”

Water transfers may be arcane instruments, but they are vital to Southern California’s survival of future droughts and an increased population, according to MWD officials. The water agency serves 16 million people from Ventura to San Diego and needs an additional 450,000 acre-feet by 2015 to meet a projected increase of 4 million customers.

With Los Angeles losing much of its Mono Lake water and its Colorado River supply threatened by a lawsuit, the region is naturally ogling the abundant irrigation water of the San Joaquin Valley.

Like many farmers opposing water transfers, Kole Upton, a cotton and nut grower in Madera County, sees Los Angeles employing an old tactic to capture the water of a faraway river: dividing and conquering local farmers and irrigation districts by playing to the greed of a few.

In a recent opinion column in the Fresno Bee, Upton all but accused the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District here of selling out to the big hydra in the 213 area code.

The ghost of the Owens Valley case--Los Angeles’ turn-of-the-century water grab that milked dry the fruit orchards of a distant plain and turned a cabal of San Fernando Valley developers into rich men--was not far away.

“We’re selling our future to L.A., because we’re going to need this water for our farms and our own growing cities,” Upton said. “This isn’t a one-year transfer of surplus water. This is a 25-year commitment.”

In the five years since federal reform paved the way for water marketing in California, only one minor deal has sent additional San Joaquin Valley farm water to Southern California.

The last time MWD officials knocked on the door of this distant farm belt looking for water, they managed to insult California’s agricultural giants and went home dry. The year was 1994 and the MWD had secretly inked a $5.6-million deal with one hard-luck dairy near Los Banos to buy 32,000 acre-feet. When the sale became public, it generated so much heat from the farming community that the transfer never took place.

It didn’t help matters that one of the owners of the dairy--and the MWD’s chief negotiating partner--was then-Assemblyman Rusty Areias from urban San Jose.

Two years later, MWD executives returned to this flatland still licking their wounds. This time, they bowed to all the rural niceties. They said they took care not to dangle millions of dollars in front of some desperate farmer. They dined at mom-and-pop restaurants in Arvin and Delano and bartered long and hard with the local big hats.

Rather than deal with Kern County farmers directly, the MWD decided it was better public relations to bargain upfront with the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, which delivers San Joaquin River water to area farms.

Instead of planting a spigot directly into the river, the two sides said they came up with an innovative plan to bank enough water in wet years to serve both the farming needs of Kern County and the urban needs of Southern California.

With more than $20 million in infrastructure funds from the MWD, Arvin-Edison would construct wells and percolation ponds near Bakersfield that would store thousands of acre-feet of river water below ground. In dry years, when its draw of San Joaquin River water was cut, the irrigation district would then have plenty of ground water to serve its carrot and grape growers. And it would have enough left over to ship an average of 14,000 acre-feet a year to the MWD.

Unlike the dairy farm deal, this one wouldn’t fallow any farmland, according to Arvin-Edison officials. And the MWD, ever mindful of its past mistakes, was careful to let the irrigation districts that share the river with Arvin-Edison know about the negotiations.

But just as the deal was headed for Bureau of Reclamation approval, growers in Fresno and Madera counties began mounting a vitriolic opposition. How could our brothers in the south valley sell water to Los Angeles when we in the north are fallowing farmland in dry years? How can we be sure that the water you’re sending south is really surplus, banked water? If you want to pursue a wet-year water banking system, why not come to us and keep it in the family?

“If Arvin had come to the group and said we want to install millions of dollars worth of percolation basins for our future use, no one would have a problem,” said Dick Moss of the Friant Water Users, which is made up of Arvin-Edison and two dozen other irrigation districts throughout the San Joaquin Valley.

“It’s only when the water goes out of the region that we begin to have a problem.”

Opponents fear that once the MWD becomes a contracted user of the San Joaquin River, agriculture’s 98% draw of water will be forever jeopardized. In times of drought, they point out, the needs of cities supersede the needs of farms.

Steve Collup, head of Arvin-Edison, believes that fear is greatly overstated. He says opponents have misrepresented the deal as a diversion of river water. “The only water we’ll be sending to Los Angeles is water from conservation and banking. There is no net loss.”

He said that district growers have long struggled with dry-year cuts in their supply and that the deal with the MWD would mean a lot more certainty for farmers in Kern County.

“We don’t see this as chiefly a Metropolitan program. This is an Arvin program designed to regulate our erratic supply,” he said.

Environmental groups have raised their own objections to the water transfer in letters to federal officials. They point out that the San Joaquin River--part of California’s historic salmon run--has been listed as one of the 10 most abused rivers in America because so much of its flow is now diverted to agriculture. What water does make it downstream is polluted by pesticides and other farm runoff, studies show.

“The San Joaquin River has been devastated by water diversions over the last 40 years,” said Hal Candee of the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. “Adding 16 million water customers as additional diverters before we’ve done anything to address the river’s environmental needs is a terrible mistake.”

The war of words between farming interests in the south and the north has sent the latter into a rare embrace with environmentalists. After weeks of recriminations, rival farmers and irrigation districts agreed last week to stop writing opinion page pieces and buying newspaper ads and to sit down and talk.

In a show of good faith, Arvin-Edison withdrew the water transfer from federal consideration. It says fellow irrigators should either put up or shut up. If opponents won’t help the district finance a similar water bank for Kern County farmers, Arvin-Edison officials say, they will resubmit the MWD deal for Bureau of Reclamation approval.

That could provoke a lengthy legal fight, putting on indefinite hold the water Southern California was counting on to sneak by in future droughts.

“I’m not going to cast MWD as the evil villain. They’re just trying to get a job done for their custom ers,” Moss said. “But our bottom line is we don’t want San Joaquin Valley water leaving the San Joaquin Valley.”