4 Families to Split Big Share of Farm Deal

Four prominent farming families, including California Secretary of State Bill Jones and his relatives, would receive $70 million from the federal government as part of a proposed settlement announced last week that would fallow 32,400 acres of damaged farmland.

Exhibits filed in U.S. District Court here also show that the four families would receive an additional $19 million from the private water district that acted on their behalf to provide federal water to irrigate farms now saturated with salt and selenium.

The families had argued that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and their own Westlands Water District failed to build a drainage system to remove the toxic runoff of water irrigating what is an ancient seabed on Fresno County’s west side. This failure to finish one of the biggest irrigation projects in the West doomed their land, they said, making fertile fields a boggy wasteland.

The 18-page proposed settlement, made public last week, never listed the total amount each family would receive, stating only that 19 families would share the $140 million from the federal government and the water district to idle their land. Critics who had called the proposed deal a “taxpayer bailout” said it was troubling to learn that four families controlling 21,900 acres would be collecting two-thirds of the money.

If a federal judge approves the settlement and Congress appropriates the money, the Wolfsen family and its partnerships and trusts, for instance, would receive $40 million for idling nearly 10,000 acres of spoiled land, court documents show.

“What this settlement does is put four families ahead of the entire state of California when it comes to solutions for restoring rivers and fisheries and improving water supply and quality,” said Barry Nelson of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a San Francisco-based environmental group that filed a formal objection Thursday with the U.S. District Court here. The group has fought for years to get some Sierra water, now diverted for farming, returned to California rivers.

Lloyd Carter, president of Save Our Streams, acknowledged that some of the farming families had suffered serious damages and were entitled to a settlement, but he said much of the harm had been caused by Westlands Water District. “Their own water district continued to deliver water to the saltiest land and this ended up polluting their good land.

“But if you look at this settlement, the federal government is paying the lion’s share and Westlands gets to keep the development rights to the land and the water that went with it,” he said.

Bill Jones, who leaves office in January after failing in a bid for governor, deferred comment to Theodore Chester, a Los Angeles lawyer representing the 19 families. Chester said the environmental community and some members of Congress were misrepresenting the settlement.

“They’re trying to paint this as if it’s a big federal subsidy and that misses some very big points,” he said. “It misses the fact that their farms have been destroyed by the government’s failure to provide drainage. This settlement isn’t a payout for the land alone but for the damages suffered over 30 years.”

Carolyn Peck, the matriarch of one of the San Joaquin Valley’s most prominent farm families, said the money wouldn’t begin to cover the costs -- both monetary and emotional -- caused by the federal government’s decades-long failure to provide a drain. She has watched the buildup of salt kill her family’s 500 acres of almonds and blight its cotton and melon fields.

Now she’s seeing what she considers a tragedy taking place on the same land from which her father, Russell Giffen, and grandfather, Wylie Giffen, produced a bounty: Entire stretches of the valley’s west side are reverting to desert.

She said the $18-million deal for the 5,000 acres she and her late husband, Sumner Peck, had farmed would cover a mountain of farm debt and lawyer’s bills and maybe give the next generation -- eight children and 25 grandchildren -- enough money to start anew.

“People hear about all these millions and think we’re celebrating,” she said. “But five generations of Giffens and Pecks have farmed the west side. This was some of the best ground anywhere. We built it up with our own hands, and now we’re losing our way of life.

“What are we going to do? My sons are in their 40s and 50s. We just can’t up and leave and move to Oregon.”

Critics of west side farming have long contended that the canals and dams provided by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were a form of taxpayer subsidy. They say wealthy families divided their empires into smaller trusts to evade a federal law that limited the water to 960 acres.

Bill Jones, his family’s trusts and partnerships control 3,200 acres and would receive more than $10 million for idling their land. The O’Neill family controls 4,600 acres and would receive more than $19 million.

Peck said her family had never divided its acreage into multiple trusts to make them eligible for federal crop subsidies. And people who say her water is subsidized are using what cities pay -- $300 an acre-foot -- as a benchmark. Farms aren’t cities, she said. She has paid the government $50 to $90 an acre-foot to irrigate the family’s 5,000 acres, she said.

“People call us ‘corporate farmers,’ but look at us,” she said, pointing to five of her sons and daughters wearing blue jeans and chinos and work shoes as they gathered inside the living room of her home in Fresno.

“They all got their hands in the dirt. They farm from sunup to sundown every day, putting every penny we’ve got on the line.”

Peck, the lead plaintiff in the 10-year-old lawsuit, said she first noticed the damage from rising salt in the water table in 1977. A healthy field of black-eyed peas suddenly started turning yellow. Over the next decade, a plume of salty water bubbled higher and higher beneath the rich soil.

The family spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to stave off the problem. They built their own plumbing system to shunt the drainage water to makeshift ponds and installed drip irrigation. All the while, she said, they waited for the federal government to make good on its promise for a real drain to the San Francisco Bay.

Half the Peck ranch has now died as a result of salts.

“How many times in life do you make an agreement with your government and see it completely done away with?” she said. “We wanted a drain, not a settlement. It’s a sad day.”