Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [239]
The growers made their case to Bill Warne and found him sympathetic. Naturally, he said, there ought to be some restrictions. The surplus water should go only to lands that overlie the aquifer (the extreme southern part of the San Joaquin has no usable groundwater at all). Otherwise it would bring a lot of land into production that would be stranded when the surplus deliveries ended, creating even more pressure for new water development. The water would have to be sold on an interruptible basis, from one year to the next, and it ought to irrigate only pasture or alfalfa, not permanent crops such as orchards. Otherwise, when the surplus ran out, the farmers, having invested a lot of money in trees, would begin pumping groundwater like crazy to protect their investment, and demand still more dams, and the vicious cycle the State Water Project was intended to stop would begin all over again.
If Warne was amenable to the idea, Joe Jensen, the thin-lipped, mercurial Mormon chairman of the Metropolitan Water District, was not. The growers, he told Warne, were self-interested, avaricious cut-throats who wanted a free ride on the Met’s customers. They—the urban users—would be paying capital and interest costs on each acre-foot developed, whether it was delivered to them or not. In fact, they would be paying higher development costs on the surplus water, without seeing a drop of it, than the growers would pay to have it delivered to them. Why, shouted Jensen, should not receiving water cost more than receiving water? The whole idea was an outrage. The Met, Jensen said, would never stand for it.
Jensen held his board of directors under “an almost absolute dictatorship” —those were Warne’s words—so the prospect that the growers would get anywhere were slim. When Warne tried intervening on the growers’ behalf with some friendlier members of the Met’s board, they spurned him. One day, however, an old colleague of Warne’s from his Interior days, who had since become chief counsel for the Kern County Water Agency—which owns the largest entitlement of all in the State Project, 788,409 acre-feet—called. The lawyer, Stanley Kronick, told him that the issue of cost-of-delivery surplus water was extremely important to the growers, and could jeopardize the whole future of the project, because without it the growers might not be able to pay their way, and the project could default. Kronick wondered whether he shouldn’t go down to Los Angeles and speak with the board himself.
Warne remembers being faintly amused. “Sure, Stan,” he said. “You’re welcome to try. But you aren’t going to get anywhere, you know. Joe Jensen is adamant, and the rest of them have got their heels dug in. I’ve been over it with them a dozen times already.”
Nonetheless, Kronick said, he was going to try. A few days later, Warne received another call from him. When he picked up the telephone, he felt sure that he knew what he was going to hear.
“Well,” said Kronick, “they agreed.”
The fifty-two members of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District are protected, by charter, against conflict-of-interest disclosures. No one has to release information on stock ownership, business connections, or anything else that might provide a clearer picture of where their true interests lie. As a result, no one knew much about them—though many tried to find out—except what was obvious: in the 1960s most were white, male, middle-aged or older, wealthy, and passionately committed to water development.
Therefore, the most cynical interpretation of the Met’s decision