Posted on 10/08/2009 8:22:50 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
Finally acknowledging that there is a significant government-created crisis in the San Joaquin Valley, the Interior Department convened a public hearing Sept. 30, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein has announced she has asked her staff to begin assembling a major piece of legislation to address the water crisis facing the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has issued a "memorandum of understanding" that will keep representatives from six federal agencies talking to various interest groups in California.
The problem is that it will take months to make such decisions and years for results to be apparent. The crisis is immediate for San Joaquin Valley farmers in the agricultural breadbasket for California and much of the nation. While the search for long-range solutions is worthy, in the short run the best and highest-impact option is to reverse a questionable decision to cut off irrigation water to Central Valley farmers.
The decision to cut off water to farmers resulted from a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service that the delta smelt, a three-and-a-half-inch-long minnow, was threatened, as defined by the Endangered Species Act. That announcement led to lawsuits by environmental groups arguing that sending water to farmers disrupted the fish's fall spawning season. In 2007, U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger agreed and ordered the 6 million-acre-feet of water normally sent to farmers to be cut by a third.
The result has been agricultural devastation. A reader who recently drove home from Sacramento told us of miles and miles of brown fields, of groves of fruit and nut trees dying. A UC Davis study estimated farm revenue losses of $482 million to $647 million a year. To be sure, California's water troubles are driven by a number of factors, but the smelt ruling greatly exacerbated the problem...
(Excerpt) Read more at appeal-democrat.com ...
ping
You’re on twitter too? I must be the last one.
Even if the government would pay attention to its human constituents and restore the water to them, isn’t it kinda silly that a state with nearly 1000 miles of coastline has any problem at all with water?
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
Yeah, but I don’t tweet much.
I drives me nuts when Enviroweenies would see humans suffer to save a critter that virtually no one has ever seen.
The spotted owl put many a breadwinner out of work and the darned bird died anyway.
I’m all for stewardship but these clowns never consider the impact on human beings.
I say we throw a hose over the Oregon border and steal their water. They’re so high, they’d never notice.
This sort of institutional insanity makes one wonder if there is any hope for survival.
If we just figured out a way where the liberals died off first it might be worth it.
“As usual, government IS the problem.”
That’s right. As I’ve posted to past articles on the matter I believe it’s part of another one of Feinstein’s land grabbing schemes.
Jerry Brown used to say “I’ll take that under advisement”, or he was taking whatever the topic under advisement, and then wouldn’t do anything. That appears to be the tactic of Feinstein’s as well.
These clowns aren’t going to do a damned thing for the farmers, or the State but milk it for all they can for their own personal wealth, and power.
Didn't know they had Twitter for a DEC. :-)
Arnie hasn’t the desire or the nads. A Tom McCormick would.
It’s criminal what the environazis, politicians and judges are doing here and all over the West.
Now that’s a plan I could support.
That’s pretty comical, coming from an Californian. Besides, you might want to check on how well the farmers on our side of the Klamath Basin noticed it when their water was taken.
Well, it was a joke. :-)
Please...Arnold is a girlie-man. He has a damn line item veto and couldn’t figure out how to balance the budget.
I would volunteer if I could.
Then watch all Mr. Miller and Diane Feinstein's and their double talk. Makes you sick.
PS... Rep. Nunes would make a GREAT California Governor.
Good population control. Stop growing food. Free abortions. Class and race warfare. The Muslims immigrate, proliferate and take over. End of America.
It is really more than that, Jim.
My family has owned about twenty acres of land in the San Joaquin Valley for nearly a century. It is non-productive land without water rights. It is, however, part of a natural geological feature called a ‘dome’. You know, as in the “Teapot Dome” of long ago scandalous fame.
Ours too, has natural gas and petroleum underneath. So its value lies not on the surface, but below ground. At ground level there exists dry desert-like climate - jack rabbits, reptiles and a few desperate birds and insects manage to scratch out an existence there.
Despite the harsh surface for the past ten years someone, using land brokers, has been trying to buy our property. We figure it was Pacific Gas & Electric, who also own parcels of the same tract on this ‘dome’ adjacent to ours. Then this past month we get a letter from a group called American Land Conservancy; you know, the people who were buying up all the farmer’s land in the Klamath Basin after the Department of the Interior’s Secretary Bruce Babbitt put into effect the Endangered Species Act which shut off the water to farmers ten years ago and effectively ran them off their land?
Sounding familiar, ain’t it?
I figure it this way: American Land Conservancy is a shill for Pacific Gas & Electric. They are tryiing to persuade land owners by saying that this ‘dome’ will become a wild life refuge (making their property worthless for drilling to extract oil/natural gas) so that they sell to ALC using the Bureau of Land Magagment (at inflated prices) which screws the taxpayer who pays a larger assessed value for these properties than they are actually worth. Why larger? Because the BLM pockets the difference. That is how they get around having to prove that this land is an important natural resource, mandated by Congrees and that is a very time consuming process that is oftentimes unsuccessfull. It is like having a slush fund to purchase land for ulterior purposes, such as the land swaps in Nevada that landed Senator Harry Reid in so much trouble during the past two to three years. Those too, involved the ALC and the BLM.
I suspect that this too is a land swap. Pacific Gas & Electric may have land that the ALC and BLM consider more environmentally valuable than a natural gas dome in the San Joaquin Valley. But PG&E wants that dome. They won’t deal unless they get the complete title to that geologic feature, a part of which my family owns.
Oh! Did I tell you that the most politically powerful person on the Board of Directors for ALC is none other than Clinton’s former Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt?
Babbitt is no friend of the little people, like the farmers and smaller land owners in the San Joaquin Valley. He is an elitist, one of many in San Francisco, where the American Land Conservancy is headquatered.
For information on American Land Conservancy google them: the stories about Nevada land swaps and Klamath Falls will appear.
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