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Water For Fighting PAC Month Year
"Green Gone Wild - Elevating Nature Above Human Rights"
Starving Farmers Win One in Court

 

SEPT. 26, 2011

 

By CHRISS STREET for Cal-Watchdog: Your Eyes on California Government 

 

After years of California farmers being brutally starved in favor of providing a fulfilling life for the two-inch Delta smelt, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger issued a scathing 140-page� ruling that the federal government's basis for actions to protect the Delta smelt were so unscientific that they were "unworthy of the public trust."

 

For the last three years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered devastating pumping cutbacks into the California Aqueduct that delivers water to State farmers. The cutbacks were based on supposed concerns that the giant water pumps ground up the tiny minnows. Approximately an extra 81 billion gallons of water, enough to put 85,000 acres of farmland back into production, have been ordered by Fish and Wildlife to flow out to the ocean each year.

 

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of behalf of Central Valley farmers, contending the service had no right under the U.S. Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause to regulate activity solely in California. According to PLF:

 

 "Federal regulators are turning a recession into a depression for many agricultural communities, by embracing an extremist agenda that puts fish before the well-being of millions of people.... Big government's policy of starving farms and communities of water is not just immoral - it is flat-out unconstitutional."

 

Demarcation Line

 

A key tenet of the service's justification to shut down the pumping was to permanently fix the "Delta X2" demarcation line, where river-flow, fresh-water from rains and melting High Sierra snowpack meet salt water from San Francisco Bay, at 46 miles up from the Pacific Ocean. Judge Wanger ruled that the point where California fresh water met salt water for hundreds of years has been set by nature.

 

Judge Wanger's latest ruling follows his order last December to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to rewrite its plan to drastically restrict water deliveries to California cities and farms in order to protect the Smelt. In a 225 page opinion last December, he had ruled that "cutting water exports to California cities and farms" is "arbitrary" and "capricious."

  

For the last three years, environmental litigation has resulted in an embargo on one third of all water deliveries to California's Central Valley, causing agricultural losses of tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in crops.

 

Television crews regularly would interview local teachers and policemen about farm families who had nothing to eat, because they had no water and were too proud to go on welfare. As Investor's Business Daily observed of California, the "reduction in water rendered the Central Valley a wasteland on a par with Zimbabwe."

   

In a period of all time record prices for agricultural crops, many California families who farmed for generations have suffered foreclosure and will never farm again. At the same time, the U.S. Congress passed the

 

 

 

$290 billion Farm Bill, which provides massive taxpayer subsidies to some of America's wealthiest cronies in Big Agriculture.

  

U.S. Fish and Wildlife staff lawyers will undoubtedly try to appeal the U.S. Court's ruling. But right now, it looks like Judge Wanger is determined to turn on the Aqueduct pumps on and let California farmers go back to work.

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