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Tuesday’s top of the scroll: Westlands Water District, ‘the Cadillac of irrigation districts’ has more than a tiny fish to blame for its troubles

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on January 12, 2010 at 8:14 am

From High Country News, a feature story about Westlands Water District. The article begins with a rundown of Sean Hannity’s show in September:

“But there was more to the story than the drama that Fox News beamed out of Westlands that day. Congressman Nunes had been hard at work in Washington, D.C., introducing a series of amendments that would force the federal government to ignore the Endangered Species Act when it determined how much water to deliver to farmers this year. His efforts were repeatedly turned back. Then, five days after Hannity’s broadcast, Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, introduced a similar amendment in the Senate, with Westlands’ endorsement. That’s when the needle skipped off the record.

California’s warhorse Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has been a longtime champion of Westlands, but she has also tried to negotiate common ground in the state’s complicated water politics. And back home, the California Legislature — after years of ignoring the problem — was working feverishly to hammer out a sweeping package of bills to relieve the crisis in the Delta. When Feinstein learned of the DeMint amendment, she denounced it as “a kind of Pearl Harbor on everything that we’re trying to do.”

The amendment failed. Several days later, before a press conference at the U.S. Department of the Interior, Feinstein approached Tom Birmingham, the man who runs Westlands, and pulled him aside. The senior senator from California managed a tight smile, and then shook her fist at Birmingham, who has contributed to her campaigns. “Tom, I’m angry,” she said. “I’m so angry that I want to punch you.”

Chastened, Birmingham later made a rare admission that Westlands had gone too far. “We just made a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said in early November. “We made a mistake, and we need to acknowledge that.” … “

Read the whole story at High Country News by clicking here.

January 12, 2010 · Filed Under Westlands Water District

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