Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the Water Banking Category
Click here to view all posts

Sunday’s Top Story: A Media News Investigation: Pumping water and cash from Delta

Posted by: Maven on May 24, 2009 at 11:35 am

From the Silicon Valley Mercury News:

As the West Coast’s largest estuary plunged to the brink of collapse from 2000 to 2007, state water officials pumped unprecedented amounts of water out of the Delta only to effectively buy some of it back at taxpayer expense for a failed environmental protection plan, a MediaNews investigation has found.

The “environmental water account” set up in 2000 to improve the Delta ecosystem spent nearly $200 million mostly to benefit water users while also creating a cash stream for private landowners and water agencies in the Bakersfield area.

Financed with taxpayer-backed environment and water bonds, the program spent most of its money in Kern County, a largely agricultural region at the southern
end of the San Joaquin Valley. There, water was purchased from the state and then traded back to the account for a higher price.

The proceeds were used to fund an employee retirement plan, buy land and groundwater storage facilities and pay miscellaneous costs to keep water bills low, documents and interviews show.

Revenues from those sales also might have helped finance a lawsuit against the Department of Water Resources, the same agency that wrote the checks, documents show.

No one appears to have benefitted more than companies owned or controlled by Stewart Resnick, a Beverly Hills billionaire, philanthropist and major political donor whose companies, including Paramount Farms, own more than 115,000 acres in Kern County. Resnick’s water and farm companies collected about 20 cents of every dollar spent by the program.

MORE COVERAGE ON THIS STORY:

Paper shuffle allows for vast supply of easy money: It must have seemed like easy money. The state was delivering more water than ever to its customers, and in Kern County some of those customers sold some of it back, through a simple trade, at a higher price. Tens of millions of dollars in sales to the “environmental water account” were little more than paper shuffles. It was all perfectly legal. Click here for more on this story from the Mercury News.

Water ownership murky, complicated: Kern County water users who sold millions of dollars worth of water to a program meant to help the environment said the arrangement made sense because the water was rightfully theirs. Few would dispute that water that was purchased and stored in Kern County could be sold to the environmental water account. But the sales were made easier by the fact that the state Department of Water Resources was cranking up water deliveries to unprecedented heights at the same time it was buying water back for the environment. More from the Mercury News by clicking here.

The Resnicks: farming’s power couple: Stewart Resnick is not your typical dirt-under-the-fingernails farmer. The Beverly Hills billionaire’s companies, according to tax records, appear to own more than 115,000 acres in Kern County, about the size of four San Franciscos and more than all of the East Bay Regional Park District’s parks combined. The operation is the largest pistachio and almond growing and processing operation in the world, according to the company’s Web site, and part of a business empire that Resnick runs with his wife, Lynda, whose Web site asserts they are the largest farmers of tree crops in the country. Read the rest of this article from the Mercury News by clicking here.

May 24, 2009 · Filed Under Water Banking

Comments

One Response to “Sunday’s Top Story: A Media News Investigation: Pumping water and cash from Delta”

  1. dfb on May 24th, 2009 9:33 pm

    It seems that system was set up for shilling, plain and simple.

Leave a Reply