Farmers’ Water Deals Stir Debate
Felicity Barringer
New York Times
11/12/2010
Two farmers in California’s San Joaquin Valley are proposing to do with their water what farmers around the country have done for decades: sell it to developers.
The farmers pay a maximum of $500 per acre-foot of water from the state water project, KFSN-TV reported. But the Tejon Ranch is paying the farmers $5,850 an acre-foot, meaning that the sellers will net $11.7 million. (An acre-foot is generally considered the amount of water two average households use annually.)
The fields, within the Dudley Ridge Water district, a small 30,000-acre area in southern Kings County, northeast of Los Angeles, produce fruit and nut trees — pomegranates, pistachios and the like.
Farms in the district have been the source of large water transfers to developers before.
One local legislator has been a vocal opponent of long-term transfers of water from farms to cities. Last year, after a separate sale of 14,000 acre-feet for $73 million to the Mojave Water District, which serves cities in San Bernardino County, State Assemblyman Juan Arambula told The Fresno Bee, “What am I going to tell folks when farmers sell their water and put farm workers out of a job and they make millions at the public’s expense?”
Mr. Arambula introduced a measure to prohibit long-term farm-to-city water transfers. It failed.
Farmers in the region have complained bitterly about water cutbacks from the state system in recent years; the cutbacks were necessitated by droughts and court decisions requiring more water be left in northern California rivers to improve the habitat for endangered fish like the tiny Delta smelt.
An $11 billion bond issue has been proposed to enhance the existing water delivery system and help farmers, but the vote was postponed.
Water managers in rural areas argue that without a consistent supply of water, farmers face economic chaos, if not ruin. Among other things, they cannot be sure of the viability of longer-term crops like fruit and nut trees. Annual crops like tomatoes can be abandoned for a year and the fields left fallow, but trees must be watered in wet years and dry ones. So they say they need the option of selling their rights.
At the same time, it is inevitable that the push for new development, which is expected to resume if the economic recovery picks up speed, will mean a search for water rights for homes and industry. Some investors have long dreamed of an unfettered water market, but if that dream is realized, some agricultural areas will probably wither.
The latest sale brings that trade-off back into focus. The Tejon Ranch, most of which has been preserved in a major conservation deal that I wrote about in 2008, covers 270,000 acres and is the largest privately held swath of land in the state. It was assembled and owned by the Chandler family, long the owners of The Los Angeles Times.
But on the land that was not set aside for conservation purposes, Tejon Ranch plans to build a planned community of 23,000 homes (12,800 single-family detached homes, 6,200 attached condominiums and town homes and 4,000 apartments), called Centennial, a smaller resort community called Tejon Mountain village and an industrial park.
The notion of taking water provided specifically to agriculture and selling it for a 10-fold profit to urban and suburban development is only going to get more controversial.
