Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [222]
If there were no controls over groundwater pumping, a lot of farming in the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley faced extinction. By the late 1950s, the land was producing the greatest agricultural bounty in the world. Four counties—Fresno County, Kings County, Kern County, Madera County—that were consistently among the six wealthiest agricultural counties in the nation now looked as if they might topple like a row of dominoes. The farmers were like addicts, oblivious to their self-destructive ways; they were making so much money they wouldn’t think of groundwater regulation, and any politician who so much as uttered the phrase was instantly marked as a threat. (A hand-picked Fresno legislator named Ken Maddy once referred to groundwater regulation as “World War III.”) The only answer, then, was to try once more to have the citizens of the nation’s richest state build them a huge project to bring in more water from somewhere else.
A Himalaya of obstacles, a series of seemingly insurmountable crests, stood between the San Joaquin Valley and its goal. Cities could afford to build dams and aqueducts, because urban water was at least ten times more valuable than irrigation water. And urban property was worth much more than agricultural land—the richest acre of valley land couldn’t be traded for a ten-by-ten-hundred plot in Beverly Hills—so a big urban aqueduct would have billions in assessed valuation standing behind its bonds. But without the fabulous subsidies written into the Reclamation Act—the “ability to pay” clause, the exemption from interest, the hydropower profits shoveled right back to the farmers—few irrigation projects could be built anywhere. The only feasible ones were at perfect sites—where a first-class river with a first-class gunsight canyon lay right above some first-class irrigable land. If one had to build a huge dam on a middling river or an aqueduct hundreds of miles long, or if the water had to be pumped uphill, any nonfederal project was out of the question.
Unfortunately, the San Joaquin Valley had every one of those problems. Much of the land in need of rescue was second- or third-class, even fifth-class, with vast depths to groundwater or drainage problems or alkaline deposits in the soil. Some of the barren acreage held for speculative purposes by oil companies at the southern extremity of the valley had no usable groundwater at all. The big rivers were all in the north, so an aqueduct hundreds of miles long would have to be built. And since the San Joaquin Valley slopes imperceptibly upward as one travels south, most of the land lay several hundred feet above sea level. The water would have to go to sea level in order to cross the Delta, in the middle of the state; then it would have to be pumped three to five hundred feet uphill.
One thing was clear: the growers, rich as they were, could never finance such a project themselves, as cooperative irrigation districts had financed a few smaller projects on the east side. The state would have to build it. But California had become highly urbanized since World War II; the votes had shifted toward the cities on the coast. Those urban voters would be crucial in getting the project through the legislature. In fact, they would probably demand a public referendum, and a referendum cannot be bought as easily as an act of legislation. The urban voters would obviously have to subsidize the growers, too. Between the astronomical cost of building such a project and the cost of pumping the water uphill, the farmers could never afford it—not as long as CVP water was being sold to farmers next door for $3.50 an acre-foot. Not as long as their cotton-farming competitors in Georgia and Texas and Louisiana (cotton was the main crop in the southern San Joaquin) got their water free from the sky. And that meant only one thing: urban Californians would have to get some of the water. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t vote for the project.
Only one major city could logically be tied into the project, and that was Los Angeles. Water on its