san joaquin valley

On July 21, I attended a field hearing of the House Subcommittee on Water and Power at Fresno City Hall and was so appalled by the obvious slanted nature of the proceedings that I decided to write Subcommittee Chairwoman Grace Napolitano to register my dismay. I asked that my letter be placed into the field hearing record. Here is my letter:

Fresno Mayor Alan Autry is calling for citizens to stop paying their taxes until more water is delivered to the Westlands Water District. He says he'll stop paying his taxes and go to jail if necessary. Autry spoke to the Fresno Bee editorial board Tuesday afternoon (July 22) and offered his views on the current drought situation. Bee editorial page editor Jim Boren posted the following on his blog at the Bee's website.

The State Water Resources Control Board recently issued a draft five-year work plan on the Delta ecosystem's water needs. This so-called "work plan" has been fiercely criticized by the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) and the California Sportsfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) for being nothing more than foot-dragging.

Congress considers continuing irrigation of contaminated lands; C-WIN proposes ambitious plan to end water waste

Ed Imhoff, was a top Interior Department official who headed a $50 million five-year study of the drainage problems on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley from 1985 to 1990. He saw my story on Felix Smith in the Sacramento Bee, http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/888598.html , and sent me the following note:

Felix Smith is the Kesterson whistleblower who filed a petition with the State Water Resources Control Board to halt the irrigation of high selenium soils on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Both the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources filed responses to Smith's petition, which were posted earlier on this website. Now Smith has responded. His response is attached. CLICK HERE.

Felix Smith, the whistleblower on the bird deformities at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge back in the 1980s, has filed a complaint with the State Water Board over the continued irrigation of high selenium soils in the Western San Joaquin Valley. He wants the water board to declare irrigation of these tainted soils an unreasonable use of water under California law. He is joined in his complaint by the California Salmon and Steelhead Assocation. The Water Board has asked the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which supplies Northern California to federal irrigation districts farming the high selenium soils, to explain what is being done to solve the selenium crisis, now in its third decade. The Bureau of Reclamation recently replied to the Water Board's inquiry. See if you can spot the flaws in the Bureau of Reclamation's arguments that the problem is being solved. Here is the Bureau's response: CLICK HERE

Way out West the big farmers fly Lear jets, have private airstrips on gargantuan factory farms, control politicians in both major parties, and harvest barrelfuls of taxpayer subsidy money. They also dry up rivers, pollute aquifers, and conscript an army of Third World families to bring in the crops at below-povertyline wages. Grotesque deformities in ducks and geese, poisoned national wildlife refuges, massive fish kills, and pesticide-sprayed fields littered with thousands of dead birds are common, and unpunished, depredations in California’s agricultural heartland, despite numerous state and federal wildlife-protection laws.