Mendota isn’t really that atypical of a Central Valley town. It’s not that much different than anywhere else in the region. It is slightly more dependent on agriculture than the big population centers in Bakersfield and Fresno, but so are many of the smaller towns in the Valley.
And Mendota has been hit hard. It has now come to be something of a symbol for the greater plight of the Central Valley. And all of the strange contradictions that lie at the heart of this region. The Valley is running out of water. Over the last 100 years, the Central Valley has grown to become the leading producer of fruit and vegetables in the country by using subsidized irrigated water from the state and federal governments. The water is drying up as there is pressure to conserve endangered species as well as from a powerful 3-year drought.
A few months back, McClatchy’s article looked at the terrible employment numbers and the desperate situation in this small town. The LA Times returns and goes over the same grounds with this town where unemployment is nearing 40%:
Farmers have idled half a million acres of once-productive ground and are laying off legions of farmhands. That’s sending joblessness soaring in a region already plagued by chronic poverty. … Lost farm revenue will top $900 million in the San Joaquin Valley this year, said UC Davis economist Richard Howitt, who estimates that water woes will cost the recession-battered region an additional 30,000 jobs in 2009.
Desperation is rippling through agricultural communities such as Mendota, 35 miles west of Fresno, where an estimated 39% of the labor force is jobless. It’s a stunning figure even for this battered community of about 10,000 people, which has long been accustomed to double-digit unemployment rates. (LAT 7/6/09)
Yet the question is always of water in Fresno County and the region. As Arnold Schwarzenegger came to find out when he held a town hall there, the farmers and the farmworkers want the water back pronto. The problem is that Mendota is situated in what used to be an extension of the California desert. The Central Valley wasn’t really so green until we greened it with an intricate network of water diversions and piped in federal water. The interesting thing is that while the government was building this infrastructure in the region, a growing conflict was burgeoning: Ted Nugent style “we don’t want the government to do anything” with a sense of entitlement to the water. From the Times article:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month asked President Obama to declare Fresno County a disaster area to boost federal aid. But that’s not what the farmers say they want. At a recent town hall meeting in Fresno, while some women in the audience knitted, men in baseball caps and T-shirts shouted down officials from the Interior Department: “We don’t want welfare, we want water.”
Unfortunately, this has been and will be blamed on the Endangered Species Act, but even if we went through and ensured that every last Delta smelt was dead and pulverized, there simply isn’t as much water as there used to be. The last 100 years were particularly wet, and as we see climate change take its toll the future is uncertain. Will rainfall revert to the norm leaving the Central Valley a desert once again? Will the snowpack dissipate to such a level as to make runoff too early to capture?
These are just some of the questions, but at the same time, while many choose to term it differently, farmers are looking for a bailout. It’s not undeserved, they are hard working people who need help, but whether we put billions into their pockets or into water infrastructure it is still the government action that is the key. Sorry, Mr. Nugent, perhaps you should stick to the guitar.
But at this point the state simply doesn’t have the resources to begin new massive water projects. While there are some bonds outstanding, they are insufficient and not tasked to this particular question. Those bonds focus more on serving the water needs of the urban populations. But as the far Right seeks to drown the government in a bathtub, the water they are using to fill it up is coming from the Central Valley.