By Wayne Lusvardi

As with the fish eating Jonah in the Bible story, salmon now are eating California farmers.

The San Joaquin River is California’s longest river, running 366 miles from the Sierra Nevadas through the Central Valley, then flowing out into San Francisco Bay.

According a recent green account by environmentalists recited in the Los Angeles Times, the San Joaquin River’s Chinook salmon, “once numbered in the hundreds of thousands … were so plentiful that farmers fed them to hogs … and settlers were kept awake at night by splashing fish as they struggled upstream to their spawning grounds.”

The reality of the old San Joaquin River was ugly: periodic natural flooding — called the “June Rise” — made the San Joaquin area an inland sea that “drowned” salmon, wiped out cropland, and destroyed human structures and life.  Historically, salmon runs have boomed and busted over the centuries due to natural — not man-made — climate-change cycles.  Dikes and dams built by farm irrigation districts were the only way that massive flooding was contained.  But farmers are now being shaken down for their share of river water purportedly to restore salmon runs (and green jobs) to the seasonal dry portion of the San Joaquin River. 

Environmentalists armed with court orders want to restore the dry portions of the river purportedly to renew the salmon runs.  But the real story is not about the fish at all. It is about how environmental jobs programs are pushing farmers out of the dry reach of the San Joaquin River.

Photo ops for jobs funding

The Times story, “In a long, dry stretch of the San Joaquin, a sign of hope for salmon,” tells how environmentalists have experimentally relocated 104 salmon by tanker truck to the upper river to see if the fish would spawn there.  Fish biologists are reported giddy over discovering 11 salmon nests, called REDDs.   But this is not so much an experiment as it is a photo op for continuing the funding for environmentalists jobs.  Quipped Cannon Michael, the vice president of a local farm company,  “You get the same photo ops by trapping fish.”

What environmentalists are using the photo ops for is to push Congress into funding U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s $1 billion San Joaquin River Restoration Act that is stalled in Congress because of the sequestration budget cutbacks. The San Joaquin River Restoration Project is essentially a redevelopment program to create 11,000 jobs.

Ninety percent of these jobs, about 9,900 jobs, would be temporary construction jobs.  Six percent of the jobs, or 660 of them, would be long-term government-funded fish monitoring jobs.  The remaining 4 percent of jobs, or 440 jobs, would be in tourism, river real estate sales, and tourist-related retail business.  These jobs would not appear for another 10 or 15 years, however.

In other words, 60 percent of the permanent jobs would be for artificial green jobs funded by government and 40 percent would go to commercial businesses related to restoring the flows of the river along the old San Joaquin river bed. The cost per private sector permanent job created maybe 10 years from now would be more than $2 million per job.

Restoring salmon runs to the San Joaquin River is superfluous because the proposed Klamath River “wilding” and dam removal project would end up bringing salmon back into California’s rivers anyway.

As sure as salmon migrate back and forth from the ocean to upstream spawning grounds, real estate speculation, residential subdivision, and tourism will drive out farming.  But right now all this is being touted as “river restoration.”

River restoration making salty farmland 

The L.A. Times reports how releasing upstream water from Friant Dam to restore river flows for salmon runs has created seepage under farm fields near the river. That caused high salt content of the water and the ruination of crops and, worse, the cropland.   Farmers have had to install interceptor drains at a cost of $250,000 each, paid for by higher Central Valley agricultural water rates.

The article fails to explain how, if there is no river water for irrigation, farming has thrived along the dry portion of the San Joaquin River.

The reason: The introduction of reliable water pumps and hydroelectric power in the 1920s allowed farmers to reclaim former salt-accumulated land for irrigated farmland by tapping large underground water tables.

But large-scale water resource redevelopment plans along the San Joaquin River have not included salt management.  So Central Valley farmers are having their irrigation water allocation reduced and having their water rates increased to pay for farmers who have been negatively impacted by rising soil salinity along the dry portions of the San Joaquin River.

Regulate first, think later

The assumption by politicians is that the San Joaquin River can be re-engineered so that irrigated farming and artificial fish monitoring jobs, tourism, and water-oriented real estate development can all coexist.  But as the Wall Street Journal has recently pointed out, the guiding principle of California policy is “regulate first, think later.”   Applied to the proposed San Joaquin River restoration, this might be re-stated: create artificial jobs programs first, deal with the consequences to farmers later.

But then it might be too late to “restore” farming later due to high land salinity.  Or the costs of de-salinizing farmland might be prohibitive.  And the speculative commercial fishing, tourism, and real estate development businesses that might replace farming would be highly prone to economic cycles and unsustainability.

This is why salmon are eating farm jobs along the San Joaquin River.  And why in California the “fish catches the man.”

By Wayne Lusvardi

An Indian proverb says, “A bird thinks it a favor to give a fish a lift in the air.”

In a similar way, politicians think it is a favor to help lift salmon upstream to feed commercial fishing, tourist, real estate development and environmental jobs programs by calling it a “river restoration project.”

In the Indian proverb, the bird eats the fish.

For the politicians, the special interests that back them eat the taxpayers’ redistributed money and the farmer’s water.

The Fresno Bee reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s $1 billion showcase water project, the San Joaquin River Restoration Project, has run into an unanticipated problem of land subsidence ironically caused by the project diverting water from farmers. Fifteen percent of San Joaquin river water has been diverted from farmers to restore seasonal water flows during the late summer when the river runs dry.  This water diversion would allow salmon to again swim up and down river to the spawning grounds and the ocean.

Farmers in another part of the San Joaquin Valley also lost water when the National Resources Defense Council’s bogus lawsuit to protect the smelt fish resulted in a court-ordered shut off of water for farmers from 2007 to 2010.  Thus, farmers had to shift to using groundwater to keep crop production up and continue to pay off debts on their farm operations.

Sack Damn

Now it ends up that the pumping of deep groundwater under layers of clay soil has caused the ground surface to slump in the San Joaquin Valley.  This subsidence has lowered the ground surface in the area of Sack Dam. Fish ladders and a system to lower and raise the dam so fish can pass through are planned as part of the San Joaquin River Restoration Project.  Land subsidence lowers irrigation canals and thus reduces the amount of water that can be conveyed.  In the interim, salmon have had to be captured and hauled upstream by biologists near Fresno until the fish ladders and dam lowering system can be re-designed.

Mike Wade of the California Farm Water Coalition reports that farmers along the San Joaquin River have had their fields flooded as experimental flows of water have increased the amount of water released from Friant Dam as part of the river restoration project.  A compound loss of water and flooding means a reduced food supply and higher food prices.

River restoration project is like climbing a tree to catch a fish

The $1 billion San Joaquin River Restoration Project is essentially a project to create a system of river parks that eventually can be planted in the middle of farmland to incubate a future tourist and commercial salmon fishing and tourist economy for the San Joaquin Valley. But coldwater salmon do not thrive in the habitat of the San Joaquin River in the hot summer. And fishing and eco-tourists may bring foreign bacteria into virgin farmlands that may contaminate crops.

The river restoration project would result in about 11,000 short-term union construction jobs and an overestimated 450 permanent tourist-related jobs projected to emerge in 2025.  There is no funding from Congress for this project, other than the $88 million included in the 2009 original authorization for environmental studies and planning.  The House of Representatives opposes the project and has zeroed out discretionary funding for it over the past two years. The project will soon run out of money and will have to stop.

The only potential source of funding is robbing farmers of water and adding a surcharge on federal water deliveries for the project by court order.  But this will result in a loss of 3,000 permanent farm jobs.

Feinstein’s San Joaquin River Restoration Project will cost $2,275,789 per permanent job created.  Even worse, it will create 650 nonprofit jobs that will be dependent on government funding. This is in addition to the hundreds of government jobs necessary to complete and operate the project.

Biologists and environmental planners continue to feed on jobs to cart fish upstream and plan a river restoration commercial tourist project that neither the federal nor state government has any money for without further going broke.

All the over-hyped political marketing and media coverage about the San Joaquin River Restoration Project are like another Indian proverb that says: “To talk and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish.”

Nov. 26, 2012

By Wayne Lusvardi

There is no apparent drought of journalists with metaphors to define the so-called water crisis in the United States and California.  Every month, it seems, another new end-of-the-world water book comes out.

Cynthia Barnett is the author of the book, “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.” In the Los Angeles Times, she recently wrote an op-ed, “America’s Water Mirage.”  After visiting Hoover Dam with her daughter, Barnett’s sudden insight was, “[E]ven at Hoover Dam, the ugly truth about our water crisis is being ignored.”

Barnett’s article displayed a photograph of the “bathtub ring” around the rim of Lake Mead on the Colorado River showing evidence of “misuse of this precious resource.”

The problem is that the imagery doesn’t square with the reality. Lake Mead is part of the Colorado River system that has shown great variability in water levels over the last 100 years. A picture of the side walls of Lake Mead or Lake Powell showing water levels have dropped from their peak doesn’t tell us much of anything.  The level of water in the system of dams that make up the Colorado River system has been rising and falling for half a century.  And the ups and the downs mostly offset each other.

Conservation Ethic

The ignored problem here in California is that the “conservation ethic” that Barnett calls for has been mostly tapped out.  It is granted that water conservation has been successful in California ever since 1982, when voters turned down the proposed Peripheral Canal Project.  Population has grown about 59 percent since 1980. No new dams or reservoirs have been added to the state’s water system since then.

But the era of water conservation has mostly run dry by design, not drought.  According to Bob Johnson, a water consultant retired from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, this has left California with only a six-month supply of water.

California has spent $18.7 billion on five water bonds since 2000.  These bonds funded mostly open space acquisitions and landscaping projects that captured no new water and built no new reservoirs.

Those bond funds could have funded the proposed $13 billion Delta Tunnels.  Or they could have funded both new reservoirs proposed as part of the $11.1 billion Consolidated Water Bond to appear on the 2013 ballot.  Instead the bond monies have been mostly squandered.  Water bonds have been partly turned into a slush fund for the state Legislature to redistribute Cap and Trade taxes among other activities.

Another green water project failure is Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s $1 billion San Joaquin River Restoration Project. The project has been turned into a wealth redistribution scheme that Congress refuses to continue funding beyond the $88 million allotted for environmental studies.  Even if funded, all this project would do is take water from farmers and give it to commercial fishing, tourist hotel-motel developers and real estate enterprises.

On top of losing water, farmers would have to pony up a tax to pay for the projects that would benefit those who get the water from the politicians.

In her book, Barnett doesn’t mention the outcome of the infamous Delta Smelt court case in California. From 2007 to 2010, this environmental protection case shut down water deliveries to Southern California and some Central Valley farmers. The presiding judge ruled the science on which the case rested was “bogus.” During the “man-made drought” from the water shutdown, Southern California cities enacted water conservation ordinances, hired an army of water police, and raised water rates 15 percent or more. When the water shutdown order expired, and Brown officially declared the “drought” over, no cities or water districts repealed their water rate increases.

Water Conservation is Bad for Your Aquifer

Barnett’s “Blue Revolution water conservation ethic” advocates stopping the depletion of aquifers and halting large water projects.

Here she is uninformed about how aquifers work. They are mostly drawn down during dry years. And most urban aquifers in California are adjudicated by state courts and can’t be “depleted” beyond their safe yield, except possibly by urban water conservation efforts.

David Powell, former chief engineer for the California Department of Water Resources’ San Diego Office, paradoxically has demonstrated that urban water conservation actually depletes local aquifers and costs an astronomical $1,083 per acre-foot of water saved. Current water rates are about half that for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Stopping large water projects in California has about a snowball’s chance in Death Valley.  This is because the electorate has turned into a Fusion Party for unchecked taxation and the governor has endorsed the Delta Restoration Project and Tunnels.

Can Big Water Projects be Financed?

The politics of water conservation in California has failed to be sustainable. The only likely thing that would stop the proposed Delta Restoration and Tunnel Projects now is red ink. There are no assured commitments yet for financing the Delta Restoration unless farmers pay for most of it.  And farmers are only willing to pick up most of the tab if they can in return get “regulatory assurance” of no shut downs of water by lawsuits for 35 years. Good luck with that in Green California.

The only other alternative is for urban water districts to raise water rates by an estimated $240 per year per household (assuming 25 percent share of costs by farmers and no federal funding).  But there would be no guarantee of how much water Southern California would be entitled to for that hefty price tag.

The possibility that Congress would fully fund California’s package of water projects — as it did in the 1930’s Great Depression — is dead, given a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the federal Fiscal Cliff. It is not yet clear what Democrats would be willing to give up to get the Republican House to vote for the federal share of the cost of the Delta Restoration Plan.

So if voters, farmers, or urban ratepayers and the House are unwilling to pop about $53 billion for the total package of the Delta restoration, tunnels, dike repairs and ecosystem restoration, California would have to continue with water conservation even in wet years. The state’s 20/20 Water Conservation Plan calls for a 20 percent reduction in water use by 2020.

Contrary to Barnett, most of any continued conservation will come from farmers, not urban or industrial users. Barnett is still living in 1982, when the Peripheral Canal got shot down by voters.

Oct. 23, 2012

By Wayne Lusvardi

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., continues to refuse to debate her Republican opponent, Elizabeth Emken. That may be because Feinstein doesn’t want to be questioned about the many policies in her 20 years in the Senate that have put herself — and California — up the river without a paddle on environmental and other issues.

Her policies have not addressed California’s many ills.  That is because she is still using the same unchanged environmental platform she always has used to remedy every situation California faces.

What has Senator Feinstein done to remedy any of California’s many ills?

* Planned higher electricity bills due to the start of the Cap and Trade emissions surtax next year;

* Continued lack of water storage despite plentiful rainfall;

* An estimated $5 billion hole in California’s Medicaid budget due to the Obama administration’s shift of people off unemployment and onto Social Security Disability;

* Massive unemployment that, although improving slightly, remains in double-digits in California.

All that she has done is to continue to tout the mostly symbolic restoration of the San Joaquin River.  This $1 billion project is meant to re-wet the portion of the river that runs dry in the late summer months.  This is so that a system of river parks eventually can be planted in the middle of farmland to incubate a future tourist and commercial salmon fishing economy for the San Joaquin Valley.  But coldwater salmon do not thrive in the habitat of the San Joaquin River in the hot summer.

The river restoration project would result in about 11,000 short-term union construction jobs and an overestimated 450 permanent tourist-related jobs projected to emerge in 2025.  According to an email from Damon Nelson of the office of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, Feinstein has no funding from Congress for this project other than the $88 million included in the original authorization.  The House of Representatives opposes the project and has zeroed out discretionary funding for it over the past two years. The project will soon run out of money and will have to stop.

The only potential source of funding is robbing farmers of water and adding a surcharge on Federal water deliveries for the project by court order.  But this will result in a loss of 3,000 permanent farm jobs.  This is the empty record of accomplishment that Feinstein is running for re-election on.

Let’s hypothetically assume President Obama is re-elected, the Senate remains in Democratic hands and the Democrats improbably regain majority control of the House of Representatives.  Feinstein and her party would still be facing the reality of the $1.2 trillion annual “fiscal cliff” that must cut $500 billion from both defense and domestic spending every year. Reality is something you can’t wish or legislate away.

Feinstein and her party have no clue as to how to solve the “fiscal cliff” other than making all cuts to national defense.  Her only solution to California’s problems is to add $1 billion to the federal debt that would result in killing jobs in California’s farm economy.  It might be said that Feinstein is up the San Joaquin River without a paddle, a canoe or a clue.  While Feinstein is drifting, other states are making progressive changes to keep pace with advancing technologies and new emerging markets.

Egypt Building Fertilizer Plant Up Iowa’s “Sugar Creek”

Egypt’s Orascom Construction Industries is planning on building a $1.4 billion fertilizer plant in the Corn Belt of Iowa near Sugar Creek in Lee County.  Orascom is Eqypt’s multinational corporation specializing in the production of building materials, natural gas plants and related technologies.  Orascom has selected Iowa due to its lower costs of doing business over Democrat-controlled Illinois.

What is attracting Middle Eastern investment in the United States is the low price of natural gas needed to produce fertilizer.  Reportedly, Orascom wants to eventually export natural gas to the Middle East!  I repeat: an Egyptian company is planning to export natural gas to the Middle East and Europe from the United States because it’s cheaper than producing it from from Middle Eastern gas fields.  The reason is the competitive price of natural gas in the United States and its open market system.

U.S. Natural Gas Price (Source: Century Management)

The Wall Street Journal additionally reports Dow Chemical is planning to build a “multi-billion dollar” natural gas plant to convert plastic into building blocks in Texas.  It will create 2,000 permanent jobs by 2017.

Royal Dutch Shell will build a similar plant for $2 billion near Pittsburgh, Pa., near the Marcellus Shale Oil and Gas Field.

The Iowa-based Weitz Company also plans a “sizable” expansion to its ammonia-ethanol plant in Beaumont, Texas.

Iowa is offering $100 million in incentives to attract Orascom’s fertilizer plant. The plant will bring 2,500 construction jobs and 165 permanent jobs.  That equates to a public investment of $650,000 per permanent job.

If that sounds outrageous, Feinstein’s San Joaquin River Restoration Project will cost $2,275,789 per permanent job created.  Even worse, it will create 650 nonprofit jobs that will be dependent on government funding. This is in addition to the hundreds of government jobs necessary to complete and operate the project.  The San Joaquin River Restoration Project is a loser of a project both economically and environmentally.

Consider what $1 billion in public investment in California, as opposed to the same amount of private investment in Iowa, will generate in taxes to local governments.  As long as the natural gas boom is sustainable by investors fleeing stocks, bonds, and real estate for commodities such as natural gas, this trend will be sustainable.

Nat Gas Development Generates World Peace

Fertilizer plants closed many years ago in the Midwest due to high energy costs and taxes.  Today, Egypt’s population is starving due to the high price of wheat and grain to feed cattle to meet demand for protein for an affluent China.  This is causing political and social unrest in the Middle East.  Egypt needs to grow its own cheap food; or make multinational investments that can lower the domestic price of its imported grain and food.  In other words, a fertilizer plant in Iowa is a way to further “world peace.”

California has substantial undeveloped natural gas resources. It doesn’t need to worry about domestic pollution from natural gas extraction if it is to be exported for use elsewhere in the world.  Natural gas reduces air pollution by about two-thirds compared to other fuels.  Which brings us back to Feinstein’s so-called “dysfunctional” environmental agenda in California.

The important thing to understand is that the discouragement of fertilizer plants or oil refineries in California is not “dysfunctional” to its cultural and political values.  California has embraced a post-industrial model in reaction to modernization and globalization.  This goes way back to California’s opposition to the Southern Pacific Railroad.  California’s post-industrialism doesn’t want ugly fertilizer or natural gas plants anywhere near urban or idyllic agricultural areas.

It has no problem, however, with ugly wind and solar farms that kill birds in remote desert areas.  It has no problem with trying to restore seasonally dry rivers to create bucolic green “parkways” purportedly to put cold-water salmon into seasonally warm water river environments.  It has no problem with contaminating nearby farm fields with infestation and bacteria from eco-tourists.   Such green energy and river restoration projects are really not environmentally “sustainable” except in their public marketing imagery.

Feinstein’s environmental platform is not about restoring the environment, furthering the Progressive values of “world peace,” or  fighting global warming. It is about creating artificial union jobs and wealth redistribution that will only add to the national debt and inconspicuously damage the environment.

In his book, “Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders,” Garry Wills defined a leader as one who needs followers and, in turn, is partly defined by them. Feinstein and her compatriot, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, get re-elected every term because they go to the proverbial well of the environmental agenda to the total neglect of the economy.  This may seem “dysfunctional.” But it follows the wishes of their elite environmental constituency, as well as California’s postmodern cultural and political values.

In sum, why does Feinstein’s platform fail to provide any real solution to California’s protracted problems?  Because California doesn’t want industrial-driven population and economic growth, as dysfunctional as that sounds.  Its elite ruling class doesn’t want to solve the state’s lingering problems.  The “political dysfunction” theorists are all wrong.  In fact, voting for Gov. Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30 tax increase on “the rich” will only give wealthy elite environmentalists even more power than they have now.

No candidate or proposition can succeed without getting vetted by California’s environmental ideological apparatus.  This ideology serves the same function as the Southern Pacific Railroad and its ideology of progress once did.  It is ironic that the railroad’s opponents claimed themselves to be Progressives so as to assert that they were the ones on the right side of historical change.

Political redistricting, majority rule in the legislature to pass a budget, increased taxes, and the creation of new unelected regional governments under Proposition 31 will do little to change California’s structural problems.  All they will do is to allow the elites to feed at the public trough and plug the $5 billion hole Obama’s policies created in California’s Medicaid budget.

It will do nothing to fix California’s problems with its budget, public pensions, poor school performance, drought-prone water system and intentionally over-priced energy. Nor will it lessen harm to the environment or bring about world peace.

This is not to oppose or endorse Feinstein’s re-election bid or any proposition on the upcoming election ballot.  It is mainly to clarify California’s reigning environmental platform and the set of cultural and political values that support it. For those liberals who believe they are not “values voters,” perhaps they should think again.

TAGS: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, San Joaquin River Restoration Project, Orascom fertilizer plant, Iowa; Natural Gas Boom, California, Wayne Lusvardi

By Wayne Lusvardi

The San Joaquin River wasn’t named after Joaquin Murrieta, the infamous bandit of the 1850’s Gold Rush in California. But it might as well have been called “Bandit River” after U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s long pursuit to restore the San Joaquin River.  The initial action to restore the river was brought by a lawsuit by the National Resources Defense Council in 1994 and adjudicated in 2006.

The $1.081 billion project is an agricultural land and water grab that plants government funded “green jobs farms” in the middle of the agriculture rich Central Valley of California.  Funding for the project came from U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s H.R. 146 — the San Joaquin River Restoration Act of 2009.  Approval for this funding only came when Democrats had one-party rule in both houses of Congress and the Presidency. But even then the funding could only be approved as a trailer bill to the Omnibus Lands Act of 2009 due to the bipartisan opposition of the farm lobby.

The San Joaquin River Restoration Act is a project of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that will re-wet a 60-mile reach of the riverbed that runs dry, especially in hotter seasons and dry years. According to Wikipedia.com, during the winter, spring and early summer months rainfall and snowmelt swell the river.  But during the late summer and autumn a portion of the river dries up. Dams and irrigation diversions after 1914 contributed to drying up the river during dry seasons and years.

The long awaited approval of the river restoration project has been heralded by a wide array of green organizations. The Golden Gate Audobon Society sees it as a win for “birders.” No mention was made of the 6,642-acre San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge, which is a part of three wildlife refuges totaling 48,825-acres or 76-square miles.

The “Revive the San Joaquin” organization touts 11,000 new jobs from the project.  The National Resources Defense Council called it a “new era” of “jobs creation,” “improving water supply and flood management,” and a “living river” for a more vibrant San Joaquin Valley.

The Fresno Bee called it a “win for farmers and salmon.” But that headline appears to be highly dubious. It is more like a one-sided win for politicians and environmentalists at the cost of farmers and the public purse.

More Permanent Jobs Lost Than Gained

The reality is very much different than portrayed by politicians, green organizations dependent on the Federal dole, and environmental legal advocacy organizations. The river restoration project:

* Will likely take away many more private sector jobs than are gained;

* Will require enlarging levees to reduce the threat of farmland flooding; and,

* Will take water from farmers with no plan to “restore” the water taken by conservation measures or new water resource development.

Moreover, 90 percent of the jobs created will be short-lived construction jobs. Another 6 percent will be long-term fish monitoring jobs for non-profit organizations that will be dependent on grants and “green welfare” for their long-term support.

Mike Wade of the Farm Water Coalition stated in an email that river restoration would come at a loss of 3,000 agricultural jobs. And it could take 50,000 to 70,000 acres of cropland out of production for new riverbed and levee expansion.

Private Sector Permanent Jobs Gained & Lost

Democratic politicians are demanding a cost-benefit study of the proposed Peripheral Canal Tunnels through the Sacramento Delta.  But no such cost-benefit study has been conducted of the San Joaquin River Restoration Project.

The major study being touted by project proponents is a one-sided study of only economic benefits by the University of California at Merced (“The Economic Benefits of the San Joaquin River Restoration Project” – no link provided online but study can be found at the website for the Fresno Regional Foundation).

The nearly 11,000 new jobs estimated by the U.C. Merced study as a result of the project ignore 3,000 agricultural jobs lost. The study downplays that 96 percent of the jobs created by the project will be temporary construction jobs or long-term environmental monitoring jobs that would be dependent on government stipends or grants.

The 475 private sector jobs estimated to be created by 2025 reflects only 4 percent of all hypothetical jobs. This estimate is based on other studies of the number of jobs generated by public water recreation projects.

But as Mike Wade of the Farm Water Coalition points out, the San Joaquin River corridor is mainly comprised of farmland with no commercial access easements to the river. How an estimated 3,696 “induced (indirect) jobs” for real estate, retail sales, motel worker, and sports fishing jobs would materialize seems more conjecture without the accompanying re-zoning of land to commercial uses.

As Wade expressed it in an email:

‘The (U.C. Merced) report said that there would be enhanced recreational opportunities as a result of the river’s restoration.  I questioned how extensive those would be since there is already a considerable amount of recreation on the upper reaches of the river.  As far as the lower reaches, because most of the river abuts private property there would be little, if any, new recreation created in and around communities like Mendota and Dos Palos.”  

As far as urban encroachment on farmland, Wade stated:

“The biggest concerns over encroachment right now are the effects of seepage under private property from the river.  We are hopeful that mitigation efforts that are required as part of the project would eliminate those effects but as for now we are unsure how effective they will be. Commodity prices are high enough now that farmers in the area are more interested in being able to farm than they are worried about urban encroachment.  The area is far enough off the beaten path that this likelihood is pretty remote for the time being anyway.” 

Project Will Kill Trout in San Joaquin River 

Fishing guide Louis Mossios says that, as a result of the project, 18,000 trout anglers per year will end up having to go to the Kings River instead.

The reason pointed out by Mossios is the State Water Code grants exclusive rights to salmon in California rivers as provided in Chapter 21, Section 3.3 of the California Fish and Game Code:

“Domesticated or non-native fish species will not be developed or maintained, in drainages of salmon waters, where…they may adversely affect native salmon populations by competing with, preying upon, or hydridizing with them.” 

The project’s proponents have apparently kept low key that it would result in eradication of trout in the San Joaquin River. Currently, the San Joaquin Fish Hatchery plants about 750,000 catchable trout annually. The mitigation plan for the project includes the cost of relocating trout to the Kings River.

Project Benefits Mainly Special Interests

The San Joaquin River Restoration Project has almost totally benefited environmental interests at the expense of agricultural interests in California’s Central Valley.

To answer the question how the public interest has been benefitted, a comparison has been made of the jobs generated from the San Joaquin River Restoration Project and Disneyland when it was first built in 1955.

Disneyland cost about $117 million in today’s dollars when it was built in 1955. It generated 2,190 permanent jobs and 5,000 construction jobs at that time. That equates to $53,425 per permanent job and $23,400 per temporary job created.

By comparison, the San Joaquin River Restoration will cost about ten times as much as Disneyland, but will generate only 475 permanent private commercial jobs at a cost of $2,275,789 per job.  Temporary construction jobs will cost about five times more per job for the river restoration than would rebuilding the original Disneyland in today’s dollars.  Make work jobs for “physical and biological (fish) monitoring” of the river restoration will alone cost $40,950,000.

SJ River Restoration & Disneyland Jobs/Costs Compared

The project will provide economic relief to an area “suffering chronic unemployment.”  But it would equate to a stimulus of $13,975 for every household in Merced County.

The state portion of the funding for the project will come from Proposition 84, the Safe Drinking Water, Water Quality and Supply, Flood Control, River and Coastal protection Bond Act of 2006; and Proposition 1E, the Disaster Preparedness and Flood Protection Bond Act of 2006. Both are general obligation bonds paid by statewide taxpayers. What water bonds have become in California under the Democratic-controlled Legislature is a slush fund for local redevelopment projects dressed up an environmental restoration and park greenscaping projects.

What did Feinstein’s River Restoration Buy?

Feinstein’s bill mainly buys a local and regional redevelopment project for the Merced County area.  It takes jobs, land and water from farmers and gives it to construction workers, scientists, and environmental consultants with a pittance of hypothetical jobs generated to the private economy. It takes blue-collar farm jobs and gives them to blue-collar construction workers in the short term and white-collar technocrats in the long term.

Any gain in salmon runs and commercial fishing will be offset by the cost to expand trout fishing in the Kings River.  The San Joaquin River Restoration project is not an environmental project per se.  It is mainly a rural redevelopment project that will trade salmon for trout habitats.

Gov. Jerry Brown has recently refused to sign bills to replace redevelopment agencies in California.  But redevelopment is alive and well along the banks of the San Joaquin River under the guise of river restoration projects funded with water bonds.