“I like people to be able to see with their own eyes that the state is not out of water because of lack of rainfall or snow pack,” Johnny Amaral, manager of California’s Westlands Water District, told the LA Times, after inviting the newspaper to tour the Westland facilities. “The state is out of water because it’s simply being mismanaged. Too much is being allowed to flow out to sea.”
Westlands, the largest water agency in the country, is in a perpetual battle with environmental groups, which think it should allocate more water to wildlife and pump less to agricultural fields. But in addition to this conflict, Westlands has an “image problem,” said the Times, “ranging from an unprecedented Securities and Exchange Commission fine for what its manager called ‘a little Enron accounting’ to the recent revelation that it spent more than a million dollars creating a Latino farmworkers group that posed as a grassroots organization.”
Amaral was once chief of staff for Republican U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, who regularly accused “radical environmentalists” of scheming to end agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. For his part, Amaral told the Times that he is wary of people who “have a political ax to grind against agriculture, who would like to see us gone.” He claimed the data shows that diverting water to irrigate farms isn’t responsible for the demise of certain native fish species, including the delta smelt. The real culprits, he said, are cities that waste water and even predatory species that eat the threatened fish.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife and the Bay Institute would disagree, though. The three organizations recently teamed up to send an urgent letter to the state’s Water Resources Board, blaming the smelt’s dire situation on ever-thirsty farms and calling for immediate intervention before the species disappears completely. The smelt population has dropped from an estimated 112,000 just a year ago to 13,000 today.