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Westlands Irrigation District deal making news across the country

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 1, 2007 at 6:44 am

The possible deal for the Westlands Irrigation District story has worked its way across the country, and here it is on the Chicago Sun-Times:

The U.S. government appears poised to turn over the rights to billions of gallons of water to a politically connected group of farmers in California, where most people are being asked to conserve.

Landowners in the Westlands Water District would gain the rights to 1 million acre feet of water under a proposed settlement federal regulators are likely to present today. An acre foot translates to the amount needed to cover one acre with a foot of water. That’s 15 percent of the federally controlled water in California — the largest grant to irrigators since 1903.

The Westlands Water District, a coalition of giant agribusinesses in the fertile San Joaquin Valley, draws its water from the Central Valley Project, a vast irrigation system that also supplies drinking water to about 1 million households.

If drought-like conditions persist in the West, the deal would guarantee the farmers’ irrigation pumps will flow, even if that means some cities in the San Francisco Bay area will get less drinking water.

”Can a proposal that appears to put a small group of farm operations ahead of the taxpayers and our fish and wildlife resources be justified because it may help one federal agency deal with a specific drainage problem?” said Hal Candee, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

To read the full text of the story from the Chicago Sun-Times, click here.

Here’s a reprint of a 2001 San Francisco Chronicle article on the Westlands Irrigation District, which talks about the long-term problems facing the district, and discusses some of the issues that the proposed settlement is meant to solve:

Westlands, the nation’s biggest irrigation district, where almost 1,000 square miles of semidesert in western Fresno and Kings counties bloom with crops grown with cheap federal water, may have to shrink to survive. A diminishing water supply and an intractable drainage problem have the area’s farmers cornered, but they’re not going down without a fight.

Westlands Water District has been a matrix for political controversy since the late Democratic Rep. B.F. “Bernie” Sisk began lobbying for its creation in the early 1950s, asserting that it would create 6,000 “family farms.” It is moving with characteristic aggressiveness to avoid reducing its acreage, which was mostly arid rangeland before the arrival of low-cost irrigation water from Northern California rivers.

The district is suing to increase and stabilize its federal water ration, attacking the Cal-Fed program created to end California’s water wars and pressuring the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to build the sites it needs to take care of its wastewater.