Monthly Archives: June 2010

I love how audacious C-WIN is, and am glad they’re out there.  They’re taking on the right issues, and often go straight to the heart of them.  These are all from memory, so I don’t know if I have them exactly right, but suing the State Board to define and enforce reasonable and beneficial use, challenging the big project contracts, getting DWR to take environmental documentation seriously  –those are all great.  I would love it if they could wrest the Kern Water Bank back from private ownership.  They’re right; the state should own and operate that reservoir.  I love that they’re raising the real hard questions and I usually hope they’ll win.  I don’t even mind that they’re litigious; bad as courts are for deciding complex multi-party questions, it isn’t like we’ve got a better forum here.

That said, their legal complaints kinda kill me.   I’m not a lawyer and they are, so presumably they know what they’re doing better than I do.  They’ve won a fair number of their CEQA cases, I believe.  But when their grounds for complaint is, like, the Constitution, dude, I start thinking about pro se defendents waving a copy of the Bill of Rights at a judge.  “It says right here…”  They may well be right that some of our big practices aren’t Constitutional.  But they are well ingrained.  Getting a judge to up-end big pieces of our system sounds hard, especially on broad Constitutional principles.  Glad they’re doing the work, but it looks like an uphill battle to me.

My Dad once told me that the only thing anyone ever manages is risk. You see that here, in this story about uncertainty and Westlands. The lede:

Like many Central Valley farmers, Todd Allen says it’s the unpredictability of his water supply that causes the most damage.

You know, Mr. Allen doesn’t have to be uncertain about his water supply. He could look at historic supplies and see that Westlands has always gotten at least ten percent of contract allotments. He could plant to match that ten percent and never worry again. (Actually, he can’t, because climate change will introduce even more variability than we’ve seen this decade. But, for the next couple decades, he can probably be sure of at least ten percent.) But what Mr. Allen wants is something different. He wants enough water to plant most of his acreage, and he wants certainty. He wants to offload that risk; in real life, without legal protection, the fish would feel the brunt of that variability. Bummer that Mr. Allen has to live his life during the transition period for climate change. He (and the rest of us) will feel the effects of increased variability first hand.

Allen is a mid-sized producer of lower-value crops on land whose productivity is further impacted by drainage problems. With transferred water known to cost up to $500 an acre-foot and a new well more than $500,000, he took the realistic option and reduced his production to 40 acres of wheat.

Soon Westlands’ attorneys were calling to add his story to court briefings challenging the bio-ops. Wanger pointed out Allen’s example in his May 27 ruling on flow restrictions protecting salmon, saying such human impacts — along with pollutants entering the waterway, along with other possible stressors — were missing from the agencies’ documents.

It is kindof bullshit to come in as junior contractors, explicitly accepting a risk regime, then later complain that you can’t manage the variability. That was what they bargained for when they started. They got used to more supplies under a governing regime that was willing to shunt that variability to the Delta, but a few years of regular supplies, even decades of them, shouldn’t become the new standard of acceptable risk for them. High risk activities suck, but the appropriate response is to recognize what you’re working with and not allow yourself to depend on them. That type of farming operation should only ever have been bonus, bonus production when the water is high. Mr. Allen is looking at the right response, although he probably doesn’t like it.

Allen said he was building a promising future, having upgraded irrigation equipment and purchased new land in the past few years. He wasn’t expecting such an impact from something beyond his control.

“I was really starting to turn the corner, and all of a sudden … I feel like I’m being punished and I’ve done nothing wrong,” Allen said. “Now I’m thinking about getting another career going in case this falls apart.”

Yes. He needs something stable to support his family, which being the junior contractor wasn’t ever and especially will not be from here on out. It is a shame that he didn’t understand the risk regime he entered, and gambled on more reliability than was ever there. It is even more of a shame that he feels victimized. I hope he understands that he’s in the vise of big forces, and doesn’t direct that at any particular person (like a judge, say).  What he did wrong was believe that what he observed around him was guaranteed by something (if nothing more than his lived experience).  It is a human mistake to make, but the same big forces will inexorably exact the full cost of that error.