“We gallop everywhere we go
I just loop the reins
And I never say Whoa
To my little red horse.”
I’m
borrowing these lines from a Juni Fisher song to show the roots of the common
phrase “free rein.” For those who have never been on a horse’s back, it may not
help much. But being astride an animal
ten or fifteen times heavier, stronger and faster than yourself, and letting
him have his head, so to speak – can teach the meaning of another common
phrase, “hang on.” You’d better hope
your hands can find the reins and “rein him in” (to use another common phrase) as
you approach the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Last
week, when I wrote “Free Rain,” I was hearing this other “rein” in my head. For almost 40 years I have been researching
and writing about California’s water story.
No matter what the issue or urgency, the largest landowners in this
valley always have had free rein over the water supply. They have had free rein over the regulators
of our water supply. They most always
have free rein even over the media reporting the news about our water supply.
Last
week I wrote about the letter the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District (LSID) sent to its landowners about the
availability of water to purchase at $1,300/acre-foot (af). The seller listed was not a government agency
but a contractor for State Water Project (SWP) water. I called Scott Edwards, the manager of LSID,
to find out who had water to sell and to learn more about the circumstances.
“Tejon,”
he said is the seller. He thinks there
are two other districts asking to buy the offered water and does not yet know
how much LSID will receive of the 865 af requested. I asked who within our district was able to
buy this water, and he said “It’s all kinds of people, not just the big guys,”
understanding the meaning of my question.
Tejon
is a familiar name to most of us, but rings a special bell in my mind. Tejon Ranch was (and probably still is) the
largest landowner in the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, which surrounds
the town of Arvin, one of the two towns I’ve studied since 1981. Only part of its lands lie within the
district boundaries, but even those acres were well in excess of the 160-acre
limitation that was supposed to apply to Friant-Kern water when it was first
received by that district. The
limitation was never enforced.
Tejon
also receives SWP water through the Kern County Water Agency, which accounts
for the availability of water to sell to the Tulare and Fresno County districts
who don’t. Paul Taylor, the Berkeley
economist who was the champion of the acreage limitation provisions, understood
the State Water Project as one of several means the large landowners created to
circumvent the 160-acre law.
Besides offering irrigation water for sale at usurious prices, the large landowners are using their free rein invisibly in other ways, particularly through groundwater pumping. A friend who sits on the board of Tulare Irrigation District told me that he has become concerned about the water banking his district and the City of Tulare have done diligently for the past 10 years being tapped by Boswell’s “pump farm” to the west. Thought to be 40 acres with 28 wells, the location is not known, much less how much water they are pumping, where it is being used, or how it is being transported. No government agency is yet in charge of groundwater pumping. We have no reins.
The
North Rim approaches. What will we do?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Trudy Wischemann is a voluntary water conserver who worries about agriculture and writes in town. You can send her your water saving tips c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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