By Tom Stokely and Tom Dey
October 20, 2008 -- Trinity County’s water resources are vast, valuable, but not limitless. Trinity Lake and the Central Valley Project’s (CVP) tunnels and power plants that carry Trinity River water to the Central Valley have long been a bone of contention here in Trinity County.  While the value of this water and power produced annually is in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year, Trinity County itself is about as broke as broke can be, and things are not getting any better with increasing costs and declining revenues.

Water is a precious resource and while water districts in southern California are charging over $500 per acre foot Trinity County receives not one cent for it’s average annual exports of 836,930 acre feet of water to the Central Valley Project. Currently the only compensation Trinity County receives is $20,000 from the Bureau of Reclamation for in-lieu taxes per year for the thousands of acres of private land that was condemned to make Trinity and Lewiston reservoirs.  An acre-foot is the volume of water contained in an area of one acre by one foot deep. One acre foot of water is equal to 326,000 gallons and would supply the average needs of 1-2 families of four for one year.

If Trinity County were to get an extremely conservative whole sale price of $133 per acre foot, as based on the California’s Environmental Water Account Plan for 2007- 2008 (actual open market price for June 2008 is $500 - $1000 per acre-foot dependent on extraction, transport, treatment and other costs),  the county would collect over $111 Million in revenues. Additionally, if the county were able to produce its own power from these waters there would be an additional $150 million in revenues, based on $0.12 per kWh (statewide average charge for all sectors by PG&E).

These conservative estimates total $260 million dollars of annual revenue that Trinity County could be receiving from its water resources. For perspective, the annual budget of Trinity County is approximately $55 million,  twenty per cent of this lost revenue opportunity.

On the other side of the hill the entity that receives the water diverted from the Trinity River and the electrical power it generates, is  the powerful Westlands Water District (WWD). While the claim of drought has provided Westlands with a call to action related to all issues in taking other’s water, its financial condition is in much better shape than that of deprived Trinity County.

Fitch Ratings stated Westland’s recent bond issue for $30 million at, ‘A’ upper medium grade - outlook stable,  and a financial risk analysis of WWD’s fiscal condition specifically emphasized the district’s ability to move from agricultural business operations to the exclusive sale of water with greatly increased profits and reduced financial risk therein.  Westlands Water District is the largest water provider in  the federally owned Central Valley Project (CVP) and is presently mired in an environmental calamity caused by bad agricultural irrigation practices resulting in the build up of metals and salts to toxic levels in the western San Joaquin Valley.

Today, the U.S. Government is under a federal court order to resolve what could be a $2.7 billion drainage management problem proposing the implementation of complex and technically unproven methods that risk a repeat of wildlife exposure to lethal Selenium concentrations experienced at the Kesterson Reservoir  in the early 1980’s. Known as the “Kesterson effect” the environmental disaster was caused by high concentrations of selenium in the highly mobile selenate state resulting in the deformation and abnormality of animals at the Kesterson Reservoir. In 1987, the site was declared a toxic waste dump and remediation of the site began shortly after researchers reported their findings.

The San Luis drain was closed and the Kesterson reservoir was drained. The Kesterson Reservoir was capped with soil in the late 1980s and closed as a wildlife area. Currently, the Federal Government’s Bureau of Reclamation, the responsible agency for the Central Valley Project (CVP) including the diversion of water from the Trinity watershed and contracting its sale to WWD, is proposing a deal providing WWD with a contract for 1 million acre feet of water annually in perpetuity, representing 15 percent of the federally controlled water in California, which would make it the largest grant to irrigators since the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was created in 1903.

Additionally the sweet deal forgives all past debt for the capital costs of the CVP in lieu of WWD taking on the responsibility of cleaning up drainage pollution. Incredulously, this very sweet deal for WWD is flawed by its lack of monitoring and enforcement details. The deal presently has no benchmarks or progress monitoring checks in the proposal and zero penalties should WWD not clean up the mess.

The United States Geological Service recently released a report presenting data on similar drainage projects in the Panoche Drainage District which showed selenium concentrations of birds’ eggs substantially above the 10 parts per billion concentration threshold known to significantly increase risks of birth defects. The use of Trinity County water is so poorly managed as to threaten the repeat of an environmental disaster and clean up efforts will require billions of dollars for implementation.

There is a very logical solution, one which WWD doesn’t want to consider as it would put them in financial jeopardy. This rational fix would be to retire or fallow the agricultural lands that are high in salts, boron and selenium. Trinity County water is presently being used for purposes that benefit a few and cost the masses billions of dollars.

So while WWD is practicing bad irrigation practices and the federal government is trying to shirk its responsibility for cleaning up the mess with sweet deals outside of public purview, Trinity County struggles with financial crisis. The county’s credit rating was recently upgraded from ‘in poor standing’, commonly known as ‘junk’  to BBB- ‘lower medium grade’  requiring  it to pay a high interest of 8.5% about 3.2% above the current average interest costs of an ‘A’ rating and resulting in additional annual costs of over $142, 000 for our already financially strapped county.

Keeping these facts of how the precious waters of the Trinity River have made a few families rich at the expense of Trinity County’s residents in mind, one must contemplate the dire situation concerning the community’s support services.  With the exception of one professional fire chief in Weaverville, all of Trinity County’s fire departments are completely volunteer based.  Many of these volunteer departments have bake sales and raffles just to keep gas in the tanks of their fire engines, and the number of volunteers has steadily declined over the years.  Trinity County itself was barely able to borrow $5 million a couple of years ago to avoid bankruptcy, and as previously mentioned until recently, had ‘junk’ bond borrowing status.

The 200-600  phantom landowners actual represent only a few dozen families comprising Westlands Water District (a public agency established by State law), were recently able to purchase a fishing club on the McCloud River for $36 million, as well as a farm in the Yolo Bypass for several more millions of dollars.  Westlands apparently had no trouble borrowing this amount of money on the public bond market, and thereby providing  them ‘area of origin water rights’ to the Sacramento River.  

So, while Trinity County lacks basic fire and police protection services, Westlands is busily buying fishing clubs and farms to obtain water rights that can eventually be marketed to cities for huge profits.  That is, of course, after they have polluted hundreds of thousands of acres of land and underlying aquifers with selenium, salt, boron, pesticides and other toxics by growing subsidized crops such as cotton with subsidized water and power.

WWD expects to be bailed out of this environmental catastrophe caused by bad agricultural practices by the U.S. taxpayer.   According to the Environmental Working Group (ewg.org), annual water, crop and power subsidies to Westlands are in excess of $100 million/year, which is almost twice as much as Trinity County’s total annual budget.