Remembering the Forgotten Law

Published in edited form March 12, 2014, in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     "Check the back page of the sports section in the Bee," said my friend Walt Shubin, the radical retired raisin grower who supports restoration of the San Joaquin River, referring to the weather page.  "Look at the reservoir statistics, see what San Luis has."


     You'd have to be steeped in water poitics to know the meaning of his question, but San Luis Reservoir is the joint state/federal off-stream dam project that serves Westlands Water District and the state water contractors south of Westlands on the valley's west side, some of the driest, salt-laden land that should have been left to sagebrush and jackrabbits.  As of Sunday, March 9, 2014, the holdings of San Luis have increased over 100,000 acre-feet since Feb. 16th, while Millerton, the reservoir that fills the Friant-Kern Canal which serves us here on the east side, has decreased almost 15,000 acre-feet, despite the rain two weeks ago.


     You'd have to have read the papers over the last 40 years to realize why that's important:  those "growers" on the southwest side of the valley are agricultural giants who have controlled not only California's water politics but also many other areas of the state's decision making for almost a century.  They've controlled the discussion of water, the words we use, the facts we're allowed to know.  In doing so they've caused us to forget the law that brought all this water into being, water which, until now, we've taken for granted.


   "No right to the use of water for land in private ownership shall be sold for a tract exceeding 160 acres to any one landowner," begins the forgotten clause in the National Reclamation Act of 1902, which initiated federal investment in water development in the western U.S., "and no such sale shall be made to any landowner unless he be a bona fide resident on such land, or occupant thereof residing in the neighborhood of said land."


     Known as the acreage limitation provision, this one sentence, designed by the originators of the Reclamation Bureau to protect the entire country from the ill effects of land speculation and water monopoly in the West, has been the source of enormous battles in legislatures and courts as the administrators of federal water projects closed their eyes and delivered water to the big boys.  One of those battles over the Central Valley Project went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1958 that the acreage limitation applied to the CVP, stating "The project was designed to benefit people, not land."


     The acreage limitation drew attention in the 1976-1977 drought, when water shortage provoked the question who should get the limited supplies.  Secretary of Interior Cecil Andrus began investigating the possibility of enforcing the 160-acre limit, which triggered a series of legislative moves to increase the acreage allowed, remove the residency clause and destroy the law altogether.  Most people think that was finally accomplished in 1992, when environmentalists teamed up with the large landowners and created "water marketing," thinking they were negotiating a deal for more reasonable use of the state's water supplies.  Instead they opened the door to even bigger give-aways like the Kern Water Bank now controlled by Stuart Resnick's Paramount Farms and Tejon Ranch, who are profiting directly from water sales to urban development, skipping the dirty work of farming except where it's profitable.


     But they cannot erase the intent of the law, the purpose of investing the tax dollars from every citizen in the United States over the last 100+ years to make water available for agriculture in the West.  The purpose was to build homes and farms, to build an evenly-distributed rural economy that would then develop the kinds of towns we find on the east side of the valley, but not the west side.


     In forgetting the law, they have forgotten the people.  They have benefitted land and its largest owners to the detriment of whole communities: small farmers and townspeople whose fates are indelibly linked.  The entire purpose of the Reclamation Act has been sabotaged by the federal government's failure to enforce its own law, and we, the people, have been paying the price in terms of lost farming opportunities and rural towns' declines.  But those losses will look small when we start paying the big boys' price for water, and we see who gets to survive.


     Unless, of course, we decide not to remain "forgotten."
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Trudy Wischemann is a student of reclamation law and the common good.  You can send her your ideas about how to become remembered c/o P.O. Bo 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a message below.