I swear this post isn’t about Michael Jackson. I have nothing to add to all..that. To my mind this following story is even more pathetic.
I wrote earlier about the California Latino Water Coalition and the problems facing West Side farmers because of a three year drought and recent court rulings under the Endangered Species Act. Water law and politics are the most convoluted subjects I’ve ever dealt with and I don’t want to get into minutiae here. Suffice it to say fresh water is the lifeblood of California.
Some regions of the state have an abundance and some regions have very little. Over the years there have been projects to build dams and canals to help store and distribute the water. Some of these projects are under state control others are federal, some are combined. Historically water has been divided among urban and rural customers. Cities need drinking water, farmers need irrigation water and they’ve been fighting each other for years.
Recently a wild card has been thrown into the mix and that wild card is environmental activists. It seems that after decades of flushing their toilets into the San Francisco Bay, many people up there are now concerned about water quality. What they want is more Sierra Nevada water let out of storage facilities to run free into the bay to dilute and flush their mess out to the Pacific Ocean and they are using the Endangered Species Act to get that done.
The pumps at the Tracy plant have now been turned off in order to save a little baitfish, the notorious Delta Smelt. This results in significantly less water down the California Aqueduct going to SoCal cities and Central Valley farms and more water running through the Delta and on out to the Pacific. In SoCal this translates into higher residential and commercial utility rates. In small farming towns like Mendota it translates into dying crops, thousands of acres gone fallow, financial ruin and death. There have been suicides. Out on the westside there is open talk of violence.
Enter a celebrity. Paul Rodiriguez might not be on anybody’s A-list but he is a celebrity. He also owns a small farm here in the valley that his parents run. It was Paul that really put the California Latino Water Coalition on the map. For some reason, people in San Francisco or Santa Monica have no sympathy for white farmers, but you get some downtrodden Latinos with some T-shirts and signs and they just might pay attention between sips of their Venti soy mochas.
Rodriguez was able to finally bring a bit of national attention to this issue. He has given interviews with many national news shows and been a regular on Ray Appleton’s radio talk show. Appleton’s mic is plugged into a 50,000 watt blowtorch of an AM radio station that covers most of central and northern California and he has also done a great job of keeping us locals informed and fired up. All the information I have about this episode of the water war has been gleaned listening to the radio while driving up and down Hwy 99.
Together, Rodriguez and Appleton have raised such a stink that the politicians had to get involved. I’m really trying to keep party affiliations out of this but congressman Devin Nunes was more than up for the challenge and has been aggressively crafting and promoting legislation that will get the pumps turned back on. Lets just say Jim Costa is more of a behind the scenes guy and probably has his loyalties divided between Nancy Pelosi, environmentalists and the Latino community.
Nunes had come up with some legislation that would at least temporarily get the water flowing to valley farms. It was all set to be voted on last night. Nunes was hopeful that a fragile coalition of Republicans and Democrats was forming. Rodriguez , Appleton and some local experts were set to come to Washington DC to lobby lawmakers. For some reason after talking with Jim Costa last Friday, Paul Rodriguez decided to bail out.
Now here comes the pathetic part. According to Appleton, those lawmakers that were all set to receive our valley’s little delegation suddenly had no desire to talk with a guy like Mario Santoyo, a lifelong water manager because he’s not even a little bit famous. The trip was cancelled and Nunes’ amendment went down in flames last night. In Appleton’s own words they wanted to talk to somebody famous that could speak Spanish.
There is something very very fucked up wrong when Congress would rather talk water issues with a comedienne than a guy that has spent his adult life turning Sierra snowmelt into crops and drinking water. As far as I know Mario Santoyo doesn’t Twitter or have a Facebook Page. He certainly doesn’t have an agent. Working people…people that make this country run shouldn’t need an agent to have their voice heard.
