Throwing Good Money at Bad Land
Environmental Working Group
10/19/2010
Thanks to five decades of bad policy decisions, a quirk of geology underlaying hundreds of thousands of acres of California's Central Valley has snowballed into a multi-million dollar taxpayer boondoggle that continues to pose an environmental threat to the fragile San Francisco/San Joaquin Bay-Delta estuary.
Much of the soil in the western San Joaquin Valley is loaded with selenium, a usually benign trace element that in high concentrations can be deadly to wildlife and humans. The selenium poses few problems -- until the land is irrigated for farming. Once that happens, selenium (and other salts) leach into groundwater and must be drained off the land to avoid poisoning the growing crops. But draining that polluted water into a stream or river causes further ecological problems.
The naturally high selenium content in the San Joaquin Valley has long presented serious barriers to farming. A 1990 report by the U.S. Department of Interior attributed the highly saline soil and poor drainage to the abandonment of farms more than a century earlier:
"Inadequate drainage and accumulating salts have been persistent problems in parts of the [San Joaquin] valley for more than a century, making some cultivated land unusable as far back as the 1880s and 1890s. Widespread acreages of grain, first planted on the western side of the valley in the 1870s and 1880s were irrigated with water from the San Joaquin and Kings rivers. Poor natural drainage conditions, coupled with rising ground-water levels and increasing soil salinity, meant that land had to be removed from production and some farms ultimately abandoned" (SJVDP 1990).
While water is scarce in the Central Valley, sunshine and good weather are abundant, making the area appear attractive for farming, despite the problems posed by selenium. In the 1940s and 1950s San Joaquin farmers hoping to expand farming operations lobbied the federal Bureau of Reclamation to extend the California Central Valley Project (CVP) – a massive taxpayer-funded water delivery system – to the region (Westlands 2010).
The farmers knew that long-term irrigation would be impossible without some kind of drainage system to funnel selenium-polluted water away from their fields. So when a group of San Joaquin farmers signed a contract with the federal government to create the new "Westlands Water District," they made sure that the contract contained a provision requiring the federal government to provide both irrigation water and drainage for those areas where selenium was a particular problem (Westlands 2010). Unfortunately, the Bureau of Reclamation didn't consider the potential environmental damages of draining off the polluted water when it agreed to provide irrigation water to Westlands.
Farmers receiving Central Valley Project water were supposed to repay taxpayers $1.1 billion against the project's $3.6 billion price tag. Under law, the farmers should have paid off this debt within 50 years after the CVP was completed (DOI 1997). The precise deadline remains a matter of debate but this much is certain. In 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available) — 65 years after the water began flowing — farmers benefitting from this project had paid back only 20 percent of their obligation under the law (USBR 2010a). According to Bureau of Reclamation documents, in 2008 Westlands still owed $367 million dollars to taxpayers, 82 percent of their debt (USBR 2010a).
In addition to being a financial mess, the Central Valley Project has caused a number of environmental problems. One of the worst was directly related to irrigating the high selenium soils in Westlands Water District. In order to provide drainage to thousands of acres of farmland, the Bureau of Reclamation constructed the San Luis Drain – a mostly unlined canal that funneled selenium-laced wastewater away from Westlands and into Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in Merced County. There, the compound concentrated in the shallow waters and aquatic vegetation, poisoning birds and other wildlife (NRC 1989).
In 1982, scientists observed record numbers of migratory birds at Kesterson hatching with massive deformities. Baby birds had grossly misshapen beaks, twisted legs, missing wings and malformed skulls. More than 1,000 waterfowl died (NRC 1989). This discovery has come to be known as the Kesterson disaster.
Floyd Dominy, head of the Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to 1969, acknowledged in 1997 that the decision to build a water delivery system to what would become Westlands Water District "a terrible mistake":
"We went ahead with the Westlands project before we solved the drainage problem. We thought we knew how to solve the drainage problem. We thought the Kesterson Reservoir could be flushed on out into the [San Francisco/San Joaquin Bay] Delta. We didn't have it solidified. So I made a terrible mistake by going ahead with Westlands at the time we did." (Else and Harrar, 1997)
Bureau of Reclamation officials closed the San Luis Drain in 1985, but they did not come up with a new way to drain selenium-fouled water. In 1998 Westlands sued the federal government for breach of contract and demanded a drainage system, as the contract specified. In 2000 a Federal Appeal Court ruled that although the government's duty to provide drainage was not excused, the government had discretion to satisfy its duty in alternate ways (see Firebaugh Canal Co. v. United States, Nos. 95-15300 & 95-16641, Feb. 4, 2000). In other words, the government could legally choose to buy out land owners and retire the land instead of providing drainage. The Bureau of Reclamation was tasked with determining the economic and environmental feasibility of various alternatives. Its conclusions were set in a 2007 document called the "Record of Decision" (USBR 2007).
As required by federal law, the agency conducted a National Economic Development account analysis that calculated the net economic gain or loss that would be generated by different solutions. Among the options it weighed:
-- Retire 140,894 acres of Westlands farmland plus 14,467 adjoining acres north of the District known as the Grasslands Drainage Area. Spend federal dollars to build drainage and treatment facilities for the remaining 113,000 selenium-impaired acres within Westlands and another 66,533 acres selenium impaired acres in Grasslands. Economic loss: $10.2 million a year.
--Retire all 253,894 selenium-impaired acres in Westlands plus 14,467 acres in Grasslands. Spend federal dollars to build drainage and treatment facilities for 66,533 selenium impaired acres in Grasslands. Economic gain: $3.6 million a year.
Oddly, the agency proposed to move ahead with the money-losing option, involving construction of new drainage and treatment systems in Westlands and Grasslands. Because federal rules require that agencies select alternatives with the greatest net economic benefits, Bennett Raley, Assistant Secretary of Water and Science at the Interior department, under the George W. Bush Administration, was required to issue a special exemption (WRC 1983).
Fortunately, Congress and the Obama Administration summarily rejected the Bureau of Reclamation plan. While plans for a drainage system in Grasslands moved forward, agency officials went back to the drawing board and came up with a new proposal for Westlands. Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Michael Connor outlined the new plan in a September 1, 2010, letter to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. (Connor 2010).
Unfortunately, the agency's latest plan is just as problematic as the previous one. Among other things, it would:
* Require the federal government to pay to build drainage and treatment facilities for a subsection of the selenium tainted land within Westlands, with the District itself footing the bill for additional drainage and treatment facilities to service acres remaining in production;
* Forgive some or all of Westlands' $497 million debt to taxpayers;
* Transfer ownership of "appropriate" elements of San Luis Unit, a federal-state water infrastructure complex of dams, reservoirs, canals, pumping plants and a power generation station, to Westlands if requested. (According to the Bureau of Reclamation website, the federal government owns the San Luis Drain, the O`Neill Pumping Plant and Intake Canal, Coalinga Canal and Pleasant Valley Pumping Plant. The federal and California state governments jointly and operate O`Neill Dam and Forebay, B.F. Sisk San Luis Dam, San Luis Reservoir, William R. Gianelli Pumping-Generating Plant, Dos Amigos Pumping Plant, Los Banos and Little Panoche Reservoirs, and San Luis Canal from O`Neill Forebay to Kettleman City, with switchyard facilities (USBR 2010b).)
* Extend Westlands' water contract length beyond the standard 25 years;
* Provide federal incentives for renewable energy development within Westlands;
* Require Westlands to retire 200,000 acres of selenium-tainted land (it is unclear from the proposal whether this figure would include or would be in addition to already retired land);
* Reduce Westlands' water deliveries proportional to the amount of land retired, but only in years with very high rainfall.
EWG found that between 2005 and 2009, the federal government issued a total of $22.4 million dollars in direct payment subsidy checks (subsidies that are based on historical production of commodity crops) and $31.6 million dollars in counter-cyclical payment subsidy checks (subsidies that fluctuate with the prices of agricultural commodities) to 356 individuals. The five-year total for both subsidy categories was $54 million, or an average of $10.8 million per year.
