10 CapitalPress.com
November 27, 2015
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California
Water agency’s land purchase rattles California farmers
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
and JAE HONG
Q&A: A look at the
Colorado River and
its role in the West
Associated Press
BLYTHE, Calif. (AP) —
The nation’s largest distributor
of treated drinking water be-
came the largest landowner in
a remote California farming re-
gion for good reason: The alfal-
fa-growing area is fi rst in line to
get Colorado River water.
Metropolitan Water District
of Southern California’s play
in Palo Verde Valley, along the
Arizona line, tapped a deep
distrust between farm and city
that pervades the West over a
river that’s a lifeline for seven
states and northern Mexico.
Farmers recall how Los
Angeles’ modern founders
built an aqueduct a century
ago to bring water hundreds of
miles from rural Owens Val-
ley, a story that was fi ctionally
portrayed in Roman Polanski’s
1974 fi lm, “Chinatown.”
“Are we going to dry up
our rural, agricultural commu-
nities just to keep Los Angeles,
San Francisco and San Diego
growing? I think it would be a
sad state of affairs,” said Bart
Fisher, a melon and broccoli
farmer who is board president
of the Palo Verde Irrigation
District.
Metropolitan tried to calm
nerves by sending its chairman
in September to a public forum
in Blythe, 225 miles east of its
Los Angeles headquarters. It
pledged to honor a 2004 agree-
ment that caps the amount of
land it pays farmers to idle at
28 percent of the valley.
That agreement, which
expires in 2040, is hailed as
a model for farms and cities
to cooperate. Metropolitan
pays farmers about as much
as they would profi t to harvest
— $771 an acre this year — to
bring foregone Colorado River
water on its 242-mile aqueduct
to 19 million people in the
coastal megalopolis it serves.
Palo Verde enjoys Califor-
nia’s highest rights to the riv-
er, making them immune to
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
Associated Press
Metropolitan Water Dis-
trict of Southern California,
the nation’s largest drinking
water distributor, bought
nearly 13,000 acres of re-
mote farms in July for $256
million, rattling farmers but
giving it prized rights to the
Colorado River.
compact, raising the possi-
bility of cuts. The Colora-
do has been in drought for
15 years. This year, Lake
Mead dropped close to lev-
els that would trigger cuts
until rain staved off a day
of reckoning.
The U.S. Bureau of Rec-
lamation estimates that the
shortfall will grow to 3.2
million acre-feet by 2060.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
In this Nov. 13 photo, Bart Fisher, farmer and president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District, looks at
the Colorado River while pausing for photos in Blythe, Calif. The third-generation farmer who was born
in Blythe left 29 percent of his farmland fallow this year. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California, the nation’s largest distributor of treated drinking water, became the largest landowner in
the region including Blythe for good reason: The alfalfa-growing area sits at the top of the legal peck-
ing order to Colorado River water, a lifeline for seven Western states and northern Mexico.
drought.
The dynamic changed
when Metropolitan paid $256
million in July to nearly dou-
ble its Palo Verde holdings to
29,000 acres, or about 30 per-
cent of the valley. The agen-
cy denied its purchase from
Verbena LLC, a company
that bought the land several
years earlier from the Mormon
church, was part of an orches-
trated plan.
“It’s made the farmers out
there nervous that we are the
largest owner but there was a
strategic opportunity that came
up,” Metropolitan’s general
manager Jeffrey Kightlinger
said.
Metropolitan stirred simi-
lar angst this month in North-
ern California when its board
expressed interest in buying
farms on several islands in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Riv-
er Delta. Its staff said the land
could provide water storage
and wildlife habitat.
Blythe, a riverside town
of about 13,000 people in the
Mojave Desert with two state
prisons, is an oasis of gas sta-
tions, motels and fast-food
restaurants on Interstate 10 be-
tween Los Angeles and Phoe-
nix. Thomas Blythe staked
claim to the river in 1877,
beating Southern California
cities under a Gold Rush-era
doctrine called “fi rst in time,
fi rst in right.”
Los Angeles and its suburbs
founded Metropolitan in 1928
to build the remarkably dura-
ble Colorado River Aqueduct.
Parker Dam and the reservoir
it created in Lake Havasu emp-
ties into a gray Art Deco-style
building with nine pumps that
quietly pipe water 300 feet up
a steep slope. Teal metal cases
that cover the pumps vibrate so
little that a nickel placed on top
stands on its side.
The water goes uphill
through four more pump sta-
tions and through tunnels,
canals and pipelines before
reaching Southern California’s
coastal plain two days later.
The Colorado’s huge man-
made reservoirs have made the
river an unheralded savior in
California’s four-year drought.
Last year, the river supplied
two-thirds of the 1.7 billion
gallons of drinking water that
Metropolitan delivers daily, up
from a third three years earlier.
The river sustains 40 mil-
lion people and farms 5½ mil-
lion acres, but white “bathtub
rings” lining walls of the na-
tion’s largest reservoir in Lake
Mead, near Las Vegas, are ev-
idence of shrinking supplies.
California took more than it
was entitled to until Sunbelt
cities like Phoenix and Las
Vegas clamored for their share
and forced the nation’s most
populous state to go on a diet
in 2003.
“It’s really the only sup-
ply of water to this otherwise
bone-dry region,” said Bill
Hasencamp, Metropolitan’s
manager of Colorado River
resources.
WHY IS THE
COLORADO RIVER
SO IMPORTANT?
The river, which travels
1,400 miles from Colorado
to northern Mexico, is the
main source of water for
an extremely dry region. In
1922, Upper Basin states
of Colorado, New Mex-
ico, Utah and Wyoming
agreed to split deliveries
with Lower Basin states
of Arizona, California and
Nevada. A 1944 treaty gave
a fi xed amount of water to
Mexico.
The Colorado’s reser-
voirs — including the na-
tion’s largest, Lake Mead,
at Hoover Dam — can
store 60 million acre-feet of
water, allowing wet years
to position the region for
drought. (An acre-foot is
enough to supply two typ-
ical households for a year.)
WHAT’S THE
OUTLOOK?
States
overestimated
how much water the river
would deliver in the 1922
WHAT ABOUT
CALIFORNIA?
As the nation’s most
populous state, California
has sparred repeatedly with
its neighbors, particularly
Arizona, which prevailed
in a 1963 U.S. Supreme
Court decision over how to
divide the water. Arizona
later built a 336-mile aque-
duct system to bring river
water from Lake Havasu to
central and southern parts
of the state. The growth of
Sunbelt cities like Phoenix
forced California to stop
using more than its share
and go on a water diet in
2003.
California cut its use of
the river partly by having
farms sell water to cities,
bringing water from Lake
Havasu to Lake Matthews
in Riverside County on
Metropolitan’s 242-mile
aqueduct. The Imperial Ir-
rigation District, located in
the state’s southeast corner,
sells water to San Diego in
the nation’s largest farm-to-
city water sale. Metropoli-
tan buys water from Palo
Verde Valley.
California focuses on power Owners of fi re-damaged land
lines as top cause of wildfi res urged to guard against soil erosion
By TIM HEARDEN
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) —
California lawmakers focused
last week on power lines as a
cause of devastating wildfi res,
possibly including a blaze this
summer that killed two people
and damaged or destroyed 965
structures in the Sierra Nevada
foothills.
Pacifi c Gas & Electric Co.,
the state’s largest utility, said
in September that a power line
rubbing against a tree may have
started the blaze that burned
70,000 acres and caused $52
million in damage, becoming
the seventh-most destructive in
state history.
California fi re offi cials have
yet to announce their conclu-
sions on the cause.
It was the second-most dev-
astating fi re in a drought year
that so far has seen more than
6,000 wildfi res, about one-third
more than the recent average,
David Shew, a fi re-prevention
planner at the state’s forestry
and fi re protection department,
told a state Senate subcommittee
Wednesday.
Electrical equipment — in-
cluding power lines that brush
against trees or hit the ground
— typically rival only trash fi res
as the chief cause of wildfi res in
California, said state Sen. Jerry
Hill, D-San Mateo, the head of a
state Senate subcommittee over-
seeing the safety of utilities.
He convened the hearing to
scrutinize what the state’s utili-
ties and utility regulators were
doing to lessen the risk.
Hill, long a critic of PG&E
and the California Public Utilities
Commission on safety issues, fo-
cused attention on PG&E.
“I really would like to fi nd a
way to trust PG&E again,” said
Hill, whose district includes the
San Francisco Bay Area city of
San Bruno, where a PG&E gas-
line explosion in 2010 killed
eight people and triggered years
of examination of state regula-
tors’ oversight of utilities.
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LAKEPORT, Calif. — Tim-
ber, livestock and wine produc-
ers with fi re-scarred lands near
here are safeguarding against
soil erosion, and some are
counting their blessings that the
damage wasn’t worse, a farm
adviser says.
As the University of Cali-
fornia Cooperative Extension is
encouraging fi re-affected land-
owners to leave some tree rem-
nants and even debris in place to
prevent too much rain-caused
runoff, timber producers are
planning salvage logging opera-
tions for the spring, UCCE farm
adviser Greg Giusti said.
“What we’re telling them as
well as other people is to make
sure culverts are clear before
the rain, and after rains to check
culverts,” Giusti said. “We’re
telling folks to look at their road
conditions, as roads are a prima-
ry source of sediment.”
Extension offi cials want to
prevent too much soil and ash
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
A hot saw salvages logs in a burned-out forest near Shingletown,
Calif., in 2013. A University of California Cooperative Extension
adviser says forested areas that had been grazed had a much
better survival rate after this year’s wildfi res.
from clogging streams, which
could cause fl ooding when El
Nino-powered winter rains
come. Giusti has advised land-
owners to consider using hay
bales as debris traps in front of
culverts that are still functional,
he said.
Together, the Valley Fire,
Jerusalem Fire and Rocky Fire
burned nearly 200,000 acres
of timberland and rolling hills
northeast of the San Francis-
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co Bay area this summer. The
fi res burned 1,329 homes, 27
multi-family residences and 66
commercial properties, accord-
ing to the California Department
of Forestry and Fire Protection.
For some agricultural pro-
ducers, however, the damage
could have been worse.
For one thing, on forest lands
that had been grazed, the fi res
went through with much less
intensity because of the lack of
fuel loads than in areas with lots
of underbrush, Giusti said.
“Even though (the grazed
areas) are heavily forested, the
trees are still standing,” he said.
“There’s still a tremendous
amount of cover on rangelands
that I’ve seen … I don’t see any
obvious difference.”
Though they were singed
by the fi res, Giusti still expects
grazing lands to be green by
spring, he said.
Meanwhile, most of the ar-
ea’s vineyards are on relatively
fl at ground and the vineyards
weren’t obliterated, Giusti said.
Some vineyards suffered heat
damage or lost fi ve or six rows
of vines, but the entire vineyard
wasn’t lost, he said.
“Most vineyard owners up
here in Northern California are
on a winter erosion schedule
anyway,” Giusti said. “They’re
using cover crops or trap crops
to minimize the off-site move-
ment of soil for their properties.
Whether they were burned or
not, they’re going to do what
they always do.”