Robbing Water Projects

The idea of robbing Peter to pay Paul seems almost agreeable compared with what the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is trying to do in the San Joaquin Valley.

The bureau has agreed to a $107-million legal settlement with valley farmers for a massive, years-long mistake by the federal government that has made their land essentially sterile. Now it is proposing to make the first payment of $34 million out of money set aside for other Central Valley water projects, including $5 million in matching funds from a voter-approved state bond issue intended to help keep salmon runs healthy.

This is absurd, especially in that the Justice Department has a fund for such settlements, one paid for by a separate appropriation by Congress.

Congress also should consider the potential precedent of the size of this settlement. About 167,000 acres on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are in a similar condition. Farmers and the federal government have opened negotiations over the potential sale and retirement of those lands. At the rate of this month’s settlement, that cost could run as high as $500 million.

When the Bureau of Reclamation designed the San Luis Unit of the giant Central Valley Project in the 1950s, it knew that irrigating some lands of the Westlands Water District would pose severe drainage problems because salty, contaminated runoff water would gradually ruin the cropland.

The bureau proposed to build a drain to take the runoff back to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and out to the ocean. But the drain never got farther than the infamous Kesterson Reservoir, where selenium-contaminated runoff accumulated and eventually killed thousands of waterfowl.

The runoff from Westlands was halted in the 1980s, and when farmers could no longer farm the saturated, salty land, they sued the federal government for compensation. A federal judge in Fresno gave final approval Feb. 7 to a settlement in which the Bureau of Reclamation will pay $107 million to 19 families for the failure to drain their 34,000 acres. The land will be permanently idled.

To take money needed for vital water projects is a bad idea, which is what all 55 members of California’s delegation to Congress have told the White House in an extraordinary letter of protest. The administration should find another source of money to fix this problem. If it won’t, Congress should point the way with its own appropriations bill.