Farm Town Withering on Vine

The women come in for milk in the morning, and the sun-wearied men for their 24-ounce Budweisers in the afternoon.

Beyond that, Joseph Riofrio’s general store stays afloat by cashing checks, collecting utility bills and selling the $5 phone cards that farm workers use to call El Salvador and Mexico from the pay phone shaded by an aging portico outside.

Come 6 p.m. every other Tuesday night, Riofrio, 41, leaves the struggling store that his grandfather built 60 years ago and puts on his other hat -- as mayor. Then he ponders whether the city itself will survive another year, or dry up like cotton plants in the fall.

Across California, there are small cities and towns like Mendota that did not share in the boom of the late 1990s. Now, in tougher economic times, they find themselves facing the possibility of collapse with little chance of assistance.

State officials wrestling with a $38-billion budget shortfall have no money to spare to help Riofrio and his town. At the same time, the town’s agricultural economy is crumbling -- the result of years of poor irrigation practices, which have turned much of the land here into a salty wasteland.

“We’ve been in the grocery business for 60 years and it’s been getting worse and worse. It’s like someone is choking us,” Riofrio said. Usually, at this time of year, “we’re making bucks, putting money away. Now, we’re only making enough to make ends meet.”

Uncertain Future

The fate of the city is entwined with the fate of Riofrio’s store: As go his sales, so goes sales tax for Mendota.

Property taxes, the other prime source of money for local governments, have taken a hit as high-value farm land leaves the tax rolls.

The local school district must pay off $8 million in bonds with reduced revenue. Meanwhile, if population drops because there are fewer farm workers, the district will get less enrollment-based funding.

If this dust-devil of cause and effect spins any tighter, Riofrio fears, only a federal bailout will save Mendota.

“If not,” he said, “then we’re going to die.”

Councilman Alfonso Sierras admits he has “entertained the thought and envisioned the day” when the city is forced to disincorporate. It hasn’t come yet, but he’s not sure it’s out of the question either.

“It’s teetering,” Sierras said. “With some help, we can meet the challenges. On the other hand, if none is forthcoming, I really don’t know, you know?”

Mendota, population 8,055, has been fading for years. It has been decades since the bleached streets of the “Cantaloupe Center of the World” were full of packers paid at union rates and eager to spend.

Nightclubs are shuttered, and the town, west of Fresno and about 235 miles from Los Angeles, is little more than a collection of sundry stores, billiard halls and cafes named for the Mexican towns that residents left behind. Unemployment runs around 36%, among the highest in the stressed farm economy of the Central Valley, according to the state Employment Development Department.

“This town has been a labor camp,” Riofrio said. “We supply the whole labor force for Fresno County.” He pointed down a side street to a complex of gray boxes that pass for homes. “People have sold their houses, or moved and are renting them out. For people who’ve lived a long time in town, all of a sudden they live next to 20 or 30 men and at 4 a.m. there are vans outside with the horns honking.”

Going Farther Afield

There are about 300 farm-labor vans registered in Mendota. As more nearby fields turn fallow, the vans haul their human cargo out to fields farther and farther away.

For years, the federal government’s Bureau of Reclamation failed to fulfill its obligation to build an adequate system to drain the runoff from farms here. As a result, minerals from irrigation water built up in the soil, turning many once-fertile fields into salty bogs.

The federal government has agreed to buy out 32,400 acres of damaged farmland to settle a lawsuit. Even before the buyout, however, farmers have fallowed hundreds of acres south and east of Mendota, leaving behind alkali flats pocked by weeds and stray cotton plants.

Much of the remaining acreage has been planted with wheat and alfalfa, which require less labor than vegetable crops or cotton.

An economic impact study by the Westlands Water District, which controls the irrigation allotments here, predicts that crop outputs eventually will increase on the remaining land, because it will wind up with more water than before.

City officials, however, say their town may not survive to see the greener days the water district officials envision.

“I don’t think they have any idea what it’s like to live here,” Riofrio said. “I think that’s the spin they put on it. It’s obvious if you take the land out of production that’s near the community, it’s going to be devastating. It’s not something you can ride out. We don’t have big surpluses in our accounts.”

Plenty of Mendota’s troubles are of its own making, Riofrio acknowledges. A former mayor was imprisoned for taking bribes in 1990, and the city is entangled in several costly lawsuits over water contracts and public-works projects. A half-million-dollar investment in a new hotel never panned out, and the city could face questions from the state over what happened to that grant money, Riofrio said.

The newest crop of city officials, however, fears facing the task of righting past mistakes and missteps without money, jobs or the one thing that used to provide both: water.

Meanwhile, signs of a bleak future are all around. On a farm road south of town, Councilman Sierras stopped his car in front of six pale green ranch houses. All the windows were broken, and the grass on the lawns was waist-high. “A few months ago, these were nice houses,” he said. But the farm that owned the dwellings retired some land, the workers left and the houses fell into disrepair, he said.

Bad Situation Worsens

“People say, ‘Well, these people will make do,’ ” said Sierras, whose father spent his life as an irrigator for the large farms in the region. “We will, but a difficult situation is going to be made impossible.”

“I’m an electrician. I have a skill. ... . I can go to Southern California,” he said. “But these people have no skills.”

Jose Brilloso, an irrigator who stopped by Riofrio’s store one afternoon, said he would move on, after 12 years in Mendota. “There won’t be work. If there’s no work, why stay here?” he said. “But it’s going to be tough ... because I won’t know anyone there.”

Al “Big Al” Orta, 52, an itinerant truck driver who has moved in and out of Mendota several times over the last 27 years, said he remembers climbing the sugar towers south of town and looking down over verdant fields, thinking, “Man, I want to be buried here.”

Now, he says, “Who wants to come to a town that’s dried up? Who wants to come to a town that’s a bag of bones?

“Once the water goes away, this town will be swinging in the wind. It’s a shame. It used to be full of life. Full of culture. The melon capital of the world.”