Deal Includes $107 Million to Retire Farmland

In a proposed settlement of a 10-year-old lawsuit, the Department of the Interior has agreed to pay $107 million to retire farmland laden with salts and toxic minerals, the consequence of growers irrigating land in an ancient seabed without proper drainage.

On Thursday, the deal came under criticism from environmentalists who called it a giveaway of taxpayer money that will undermine federal efforts to restore California fisheries.

Some of the money could come from a federal fund to boost San Francisco Bay Delta fisheries harmed by water diversions for San Joaquin Valley farming, federal officials said.

Environmentalists said they thought the long-awaited deal would allow the federal government to take over ownership of the problem land in the Westlands Water District.

But the 18-page settlement filed in U.S. District Court reveals that the government would not only forgo ownership of the salty land, it also would allow Westlands to keep the federally subsidized water allocated to the farms.

After Westlands pays the growers $28 million -- or $850 an acre -- the water district will take over ownership of the 32,500 acres from the 19 farming families that sued. The water district and the growers can still dry-farm the land -- meaning they can use only rainwater. They also would retain the right to develop the land into houses and distribution centers, a potential windfall of tens of millions of dollars.

“These are growers who cooked their own goose by irrigating land that should have never been farmed for decades and decades,” said Lloyd Carter, a professor of water law at San Joaquin College of Law and president of Save Our Streams, a local environmental group. “Now they want the taxpayers to rescue them, and the U.S. Department of Interior is proposing to do just that.”

Attorneys for Westlands and officials with the Interior Department defend the deal, saying the federal government failed on its promise to build a drainage system for the farmers. If the matter had made its way to trial, they say, the government could have been on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Environmentalists point out that Congress allocated money for a drainage system in the 1960s. But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, under pressure from growers, used it instead to improve a water delivery system that brought into production more than 150,000 acres of hillside land heavy in salts. It was that increase that worsened the drainage problem, causing salt-laden water to intrude on better land in the district’s lower-lying areas.

The valley’s west side was desert scrub in the early 1900s when a group of pioneer farmers began growing wheat and barley by pumping water from beneath the hard clay. Over the decades the land sank because of over-pumping, and in the early 1960s the Bureau of Reclamation extended the massive Central Valley Project irrigation system to Westlands.

For decades, government scientists and environmentalists warned that the vast cotton, grain and vegetable farms on Fresno County’s west side would eventually succumb to salts. Selenium, a naturally occurring mineral, lies dormant in the soil until irrigation water brings it to the surface.

In the 1980s, the government connected pipes that shunted drainage water from the farms to Kesterson Reservoir near Los Banos. The plan was to continue the drainage all the way to the Bay Delta, but the ponds at Kesterson were shut down in 1986 after being linked to massive fish kills and mutations in migratory birds.

For the next decade, the state and federal government spent almost $100 million on studies to resolve the drainage problem but no permanent plan was put in place. Then came the lawsuit from 19 growers and the settlement announced Thursday.

“I think the taxpayers and the Department of the Interior ... did a risk assessment and concluded that given the potential liability of the U.S. to these individual landowners, it was better to settle than to risk going to trial,” said Tom Birmingham, general manager for Westlands.

Birmingham said the district has suffered from two big problems: poor drainage and a chronic shortage of water that has idled farmland and hurt the economies of small towns. Getting land out of production is expected to make for a smaller but healthier farm district.