Jim Nickel interview
Item
Title
eng
Jim Nickel interview
Description
eng
Farmer and descendant of Henry Miller. Talked about Miller and developing water rights and farming on the Kern River near Bakersfield.
Creator
eng
Nickel, Jim
eng
Provost, Jim
Relation
eng
Water Archive Oral Histories
Coverage
eng
California State University, Fresno
Date
eng
4/9/2015
Format
eng
Microsoft Word 2013 document, 11 pages
Identifier
eng
SCMS_waoh_00002
extracted text
>> Jim Provost: This is April the 9th, 2015 and I'm here with Mr. Jim Nickel
who brings with him a lot of heritage in the field of water starting with
his relatives from the turn of the century up to very active activities in
the recent times with groundwater issues. But Jim, in the early days as far
as you can remember or have been related down to you, the first stuff that
happened in your family history and then the whole state was the very first
state water law was developed on the riparian rights being the highest law
of the land and there really isn't much, I'm sure to say about that other
than whatever family lore there might be. Then you go on into that and you
go on to the development of, all those lands were developed in the Los Banos
area, that today refer to as the exchange contractors, oh I take that back.
That's the, the area I'm talking about there is where your second stage of
all your involvement was to those water rights of the San Joaquin River. The
original rights we're talking about on the Kern River, which is your
hometown today and what do you, what can you relate to us on either one of
those subjects or the Kern River first and then, since that was the earliest
rights out there. Any lore on that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, we currently own a property, Rio Brava Ranch, on the
Kern River and we enjoy some riparian rights there, which we take advantage
of and use for farming. So it's, it was, we appreciate what Henry Miller did
with the Miller-Hagan Agreement. But we also have some appropriative rights
that we use for that property and it came from what we call a second point
right so, which comes from Buena Vista. So we actually enjoy both types of
rights on that property. We moved the second point rights up to where we
farm now so that's how we get our water. We actually pump right out of the
river, the Kern River.
>> Jim Provost: Then going into the exchange contractor area what's the,
what have you been told about your family involvement in all of that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, Miller-Lux had owned most of the property that's now
there. They started, I believe, in 1865 and he built diverted water both out
of the, using the Mendota Dam and then subsequently he also did the Sac Dam
and there were 2 canals he built, 1 was the main canal then the outside
canal, which services Central California Irrigation District and we farm in
there and then we also farm in San Luis Canal Company, of which I'm the
president right now. And so we, those have been very good rights. They're
some of the more senior rights in California and we've been able to have a
adequate water supply even in these critical years but we've, we have
converted to almost 100% drip irrigation. Initially we did that for economic
reasons, we could, it wasn't economic to save water because the water was so
inexpensive at that time so we did it for yield. Now, we're quite happy we
did it because we also now conserve quite a bit of water and so, for
instance, last year we were able to farm almost all of our property because
we apply about half the water we would if we had furrow irrigation, so.
>> Jim Provost: And can you explain a little more as to how those rights are
so good today?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, in the, I'm not too sure of the date, back in the 1950s
and maybe earlier the Bureau of Reclamation came to Miller-Lux at that time
and wanted to provide water for the east side of the valley from Friant,
Fresno on down to Kern County. They wanted to build what's now the FriantKern Canal and to obtain water for that they made an agreement with Miller
Lux that they would supply Miller Lux with water out of Shasta and that
water, they would build the Delta-Mendota canal, which comes out of the
delta too, the down of Mendota, hence the name. And the exchange contract
provides that in a year that Shasta has an inflow of 4 million acre feet or
more that we get 100% supply, which is approximately 800,000 acre feet for
240,000 acres and then, except in a critical year when it doesn't make the 4
million inflow in the Shasta it's called a critical year, we get 75%, which
works out to about 650,000 acre feet. So in today's water world that's quite
an adequate water supply and we're very fortunate to have that. But the
exchange, when Miller-Lux also reserved the right that if the Bureau could
not deliver our quantities off the Delta Mendota Canal via the Shasta that
they would, we could go back to the San Joaquin River and get our water and
last year was the first year we've ever done that. And I believe last year
we took about 240,000 acre feet of our 6, what were supposed to have been
650,000 acre feet because it was a critical year. Unfortunately, the Bureau
couldn't even deliver that so we came up short by 50, 60, 70,000 acre feet
but we got most of it and we were able to farm so, they're very valuable
rights.
>> Jim Provost: And you describe that you're only able to receive the
certain amount of water. Weren't you entitled to all the water from the San
Joaquin River?
>> Jim Nickel: We were entitled to all the water and, hence, the Friant
Division got no water except we sold them some water last year at a very
inexpensive price, $250 an acre foot, I think it was about 13,500 acre feet,
to help them out when water was selling for over $1000 an acre foot. And we
also told the Bureau that if you need any water for health and safety
because some of the towns along the, like Terra Bella have no other source
of water except the Friant, that they could take the water so, but other
than that we got, we took all the water off. We didn't take it down to dead
pool, we left some water in because I believe it's the Madera Canal cannot
take delivery if it goes below a certain level. I think that's 130,000 acre
feet behind Friant.
>> Jim Provost: And what did you, since this has been a long time since
water naturally has flowed down the San Joaquin River from Friant to Mendota
Dam, what did you see or observe or experience and the delivery of that
water actually getting to your place?
>> Jim Nickel: Well there's substantial losses, as you can well imagine in
an old river bed. They have let water go down usually for repairing demand
down to what they call a gravelly ford, which is most of the way down to
there but didn't make it into the pool, Mendota Pool at Mendota. So we, but
we, extreme losses and then actually from what we call the bifurcation
structure into the pool our, the river can only carry about 1200 second feet
because it's so silted up and needs some work in the river, of which we did
some but we, so we are a little restricted to that too. But there's huge
losses. It takes, between riparian demand and losses it takes about 120,000
acre feet before we get any water, I mean, that's how much is lost or used
before it gets to us. So to get us 240,000 acre feet you have to have
360,000 acre feet.
>> Jim Provost: And this year it doesn't look much better. It looks worse.
>> Jim Nickel: Much worse and, yes, very bad.
>> Jim Provost: And going off those projects you watch and were involved and
saw the water projects being built for storing in the west side, the west
side of our valley, the water project there when the dam was under
construction when San Luis was under.
>> Jim Nickel: Yes, I was living in Los Banos then, which was kind of the
headquarters for the construction of the San Luis Dam and went 1 year of
high school there so we lived through seeing a big influence of people there
and watch the dam being built, watch some of the old properties that we used
to drive through get, you know, houses moved and inundated and I was there
for the dedication of the dam when President Kennedy and Governor Pat Brown
were there and it was, it was a big deal. That's when we actually used to
build dams instead of tear them down, so.
>> Jim Provost: Yes.
>> Jim Nickel: Instead of, instead of just dividing up.
>> Jim Provost: That's why you're known as a historian.
>> Jim Nickel: [laughter] Yes, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Well, how about your boyhood experiences in rivers or
ditches or canals or pools?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, even though we had a swimming pool, we'd swim in the
canals, water ski in the canals, which you weren't supposed to do, but.
>> Jim Provost: That's in Kern County?
>> Jim Nickel: No in Los Banos.
>> Jim Provost: In Los Banos.
>> Jim Nickel: So they would, every once in a while the canal man would
catch us water skiing and take our ski away or, then we'd have to go beg
them to give them back to us, but. So we grew up doing all of that. I don't
know, for some reason we liked swimming in the canals better than the pool
sometimes but, so we grew up doing that. My father flew as a pilot and we
also had operations in Kern County so, and for, the flight was probably only
an hour if you went straight but took my father 2 hours because he had to
fly over every canal and every lake and farm and so we, so I got to know
fairly well the water system in the valley because of that, so. I did a lot
of that.
>> Jim Provost: And you're quite active now, I know, in the Kern River. Can
you tell us anything about the Kern?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, what partly brought us to Kern County was my father
purchased what we call the Hacienda Ranch, which is on the south bed of the
Tulare Lake and it was a 16,000 acre ranch and when they were building
Isabella Dam on the Kern River my father saw that that property probably had
some rights on the river because on high flows it would flow into that
property and on into to Tulare Lake. So he kind of said wait a minute boys,
when they were building, and said wait, I have a right here. So he got them
what was the 1962 Water Rights and Storage Agreement on the Kern River,
which gave us what we call the high flow rights or the lower river rights on
the Kern River and they yielded water on an average once every 4 years and
yielded on an average 40 to 50,000 acre feet. But, unfortunately, the water
would come in huge, sometimes 700,000 acre feet 1 year and then we'd have 4
years of none and so it was unregulated supply and it came in flood years.
So we, and then also at that time my father was starting to do some
development on what we call the Rio Brava Ranch. They needed a water supply
so he transferred those rights, those lower river rights to our ranch in
Kern County. They were appropriative right, they could be transferred, pre1914 appropriative right. So we had those and then we had to find a banking
place to store that water and he kind of promoted the Water Banking in Kern
County and he was, we were some of the first ones to put banking facilities
and wells in actually on city property, what they called the city, 2800
acres. And so that, I mean, that was kind of our, while we were in Kern
County. We also moved down there to Kern County when state aqueduct water
came down. We, the Hacienda Ranch in 69. It had an entitlement of 85 acre
feet but we, it was flooded so, because of the flood, so we talked the state
into allowing us to move our water to lost hills water district and we
started farming cotton there and kept expanding that. By the time we
finished we probably had about 16,000 acres along the aqueduct on the west
side of the aqueduct in Well Ridge and Lost Hills. So, and I grew up, you
know, farming that and being part of that involvement but that's how we kind
of got to Kern County. Subsequently with the water, on the lower river water
rights we had to figure out how to regulate it. We did have, as I said, the
banking facilities but we also had 20% of the storage in Lake Isabella,
which amounted to a carryover storage about 50,000 acre feet a year. But to
really regulate it we need something else. I tried to do a deal, I did 1
with Piermont. They had an option to do it. They bought some water from me,
future water because I didn't have it, but I owed them some future water,
25,000 acre feet and, but, and they got an option to take it on a long-term
basis. They didn't exercise that option so I started looking for another
home for the water and I was talking to Rosedale and some other people about
banking and Tom Clark from the Kern County Water Agency came to me and said
Jim, why don't you just, I have some prop 13 money. I'll buy this storage
from you in Isabella and I'll give you an assured supply on the aqueducts,
so that's what we did. I, we sold, we got some cash and we have 10,000 acre
feet on the aqueduct guaranteed in perpetuity. No cuts so that's where our
lower river water rights went.
>> Jim Provost: Sounds like a good investment.
>> Jim Nickel: It's worked out very well.
>> Jim Provost: Yes. Jumping subjects just slightly but, as time has gone by
and our surface water supplies are in a 4-year drought and we're
experiencing new issues on ground water and we were all on top of all that
and now the state is proposing to regulate the ground water in contrast to
going unregulated, so on the subject of groundwater the first thing that you
probably were involved with besides the extraction was probably storage of
groundwater or storing water in the groundwater, surface waters. Have you,
what's your experience in those areas or what have you seen happen?
>> Jim Nickel: Well we did, Kern County, you know, started that, what we
were doing with the lower river water and then they eventually, which we
were out by then, but did the water bank, which was fantastic. It's enabled
Kern County to survive through these dry years and the regulatory droughts
that we now are faced with. But, so it's been a great success for them. I,
we, we kind of got out of that now in Kern County but it's worked out very
well.
>> Jim Provost: I think of that as the city of Bakersfield's groundwater
bank but it started with the involvement of agriculture.
>> Jim Nickel: No, it was their bank but they weren't using, they weren't
banking water there.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: They owned the 2800 acres but.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: And I think they were storing it but we put the first 3 wells
in at our expense for our domestic, we thought, we were using it for our
domestic supply on our Rio Brava Ranch, or going to use it.
>> Jim Provost: And then directly related to water, you already said you've
been pretty involved with the Kern River because of your riparian land and
appropriative land I think I heard that you're also involved with energy
production on the river.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, we have a hydroelectric project. It's a 14-megawatt
plant. It has a canal that runs up to 1600 cubic feet per second. It
generates on the average, well it was supposed to, about 50 million
kilowatts a year. It's probably, for a variety of reasons, more like 40
million kilowatts per year on an average. We actually just conceived of the
idea. We had the FERC license and we got the PG&E contract but we leased it
out to a, not Synergy, I'll think of their name in a minute but, yeah,
there's another group that came in and operated it and some of it's gotten
sold but recently the economics of hydro changed. We thought power rates
would go up higher quicker than they did and these people, well, we weren't
maintaining the project and they were running out of money, so we just
recently took it over last year, last May, and so we're operating the hydro
ourselves now. It's actually our district's but we own the, or control the
district but.
>> Jim Provost: And who's buying the electricity?
>> Jim Nickel: It's contracted to PG&E. We've been facing a lot of issues
there with sand, being a lot of sand build up behind the dam and in the
canal and so last year we had to actually put a barge in and dredge out the
sand. We dredged out 40,000 yards of sand and then we take about 10,000, I
mean 100,000, no 10,000 yards out of our canal about every 5 years so it's,
the sand's been a real problem for us, which has caused a lot of maintenance
problems on the turbines. But it's, we think, operate it properly it can
run. Unfortunately, we've had 2 dry years since we took it over so it's been
a negative cash flow.
>> Jim Provost: And what's your historic observations of the ground water
situation in areas you farm in? I mean, I'm sure they've declined but you
probably have more firsthand knowledge of problems and issues there.
>> Jim
really
supply
supply
years,
Nickel: Well, in the exchange contract area there are some wells. We
don't need wells too much there in a normal year because of our water
but we use them for peaking or capacity issues, not necessarily for
except in a dry year. But, and, but our wells, even in these dry
have held up partly because we have a surface supply and we have a
lot of underlying canals so we recharge underground. What we're seeing,
though, is that people to the east of us, east of the San Joaquin River have
started more intensively farming that area and they started drilling below
the cork and clay for quantity and quality purposes, which has caused
subsidence and we actually, the San Luis Canal Company has the dam that I
mentioned earlier, the Sac Dam, which diverts water out of their river into
our headworks, it's sinking at the rate of 6 inches a year. So when they
were doing, started, the Bureau was supposed to be doing the San Joaquin
River Restoration Project they discovered this that it's pretty hard to
design a dam when you're sinking 6 inches a year. Well, we went, we started
investigating it because nobody appreciates just how bad and we went out to
people familiar with like red top area, which is along 152 between Los Banos
and Madera and they're sinking at the rate of over a foot a year and that's
kind of the center spot. But as, as you see now that, the depression, that
subsidence has grown where it's now heading east all the way, it goes all
the way to 99 and around the Chowchilla area and people are, their, you
can't blame them because their commodities, prices are good. They're making
money farming, they want to keep farming but they're not getting any surface
water to recharge the underground and we, as exchange contractors, saw this
problem and instead of suing, which you know you never know the results of
that and it could get drug on, we tried the cooperative method or working
with the farmers over there and trying to help them with the supplemental
supply, helping them build, get ground water banking facilities in in case
they do get some flood waters. Unfortunately, we haven't had any since then
but hopefully that'll work and the other thing we've asked them to do is
pump above the cork and clay and quit pumping below it and we think with
recharging their quality will go up a little better and maybe their quantity
but otherwise they're going to kill themselves too. We hope that approach
works rather than litigation but, on the other hand, we embrace the
groundwater ordinance because the state's going to do something that we
wanted done and they can probably do it quicker than we can. So, if they can
enforce that maybe it'll help stop it but in the meantime we're stuck with a
dam that's sinking and we don't know when it's going to quit even if they
stop pumping because we don't know how long it takes to do it. So we're
faced with a huge problem of getting water to our, down our canal.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, when your intake is lower than your-- a lot of your
canals it makes it hard to deliver.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Then also, you noted the river itself is, since there's
overall sinkage the river itself is in a steeper grade.
>> Jim Nickel: It's shaky and there's just a hole there all the way from,
well starting north of Fireball all the way up to Washington Avenue, which
is north of 152. It's all sinking and the bypass, which was built for flood
purposes, it has sunk to the degree where it's lost about 25% of its
capacity. It was supposed to carry about 15,000 cubic feet per second in a
flood and it's probably can only carry 10, maybe 9, now. So the next big
flood we have a lot of country is going to go under water unless somebody
builds up those levies because there's just nothing you can do about it.
>> Jim Provost: Seems to me that's going to ripple back up into the other
tributaries to the San Joaquin too, like on Kings will probably have to send
more water to Tulare Lake Basin then they have been sending out to North
Fork because North Fork because North Fork...
>> Jim Nickel: I hope you talk to them about that because when the lake
starts to flood they exercise their right to send it to us and our only way
to move it is through the San Joaquin. We can't get it in the bypass so, and
nobody maintains the San Joaquin River anyhow. The channel hasn't been
cleaned and so it's silted up and, you know, it's supposed to hold 4500
cubic feet per second but I don't, in spots it won't do that. So, yeah, we,
I think we can work with them. If we can just get both the Kings River and
the San Joaquin River when they have a flood stage to anticipate it and
start releasing water sooner than holding it later and then giving us a big
slug would maybe help but, yeah, we're going to have problems. Somebody's
going to have problems. My only hope is it happens upstream of us.
>> Jim Provost: The restoration of the river for fishery is directly related
to these issues that we're talking about right now, the fish need a clear
passage like agriculture needs a clear passage but it looks very difficult
to achieve.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, that's a huge story. That, the settlement agreement,
which we weren't a part of, we were part of the litigation, I mean the
legislation but not the settlement, not the litigation. But they developed a
plan to restore the river without having any factual knowledge of the river,
is my opinion. They set flow rates and time schedules that were unrealistic
and dollars that were unrealistic. They thought, they told, it's in the
congressional record, that they could do that for $250 million, knowing full
well it was going to cost more. We had an engineering firm give us an
estimate at that time and they said it was 1.2 billion. This was 6 years
ago. Today the Bureau thinks the first phase is going to cost 1.2 billion
dollars and the total is going to cost more like 2.4 billion and the Bureau
is always wrong so it's probably a lot more than that. So we've been trying,
we don't want to kill that project. What we want to do is see it done in a
realistic manner based on the funds they have and their budget only has $35
million a year for a while and they need, and they need to spend $1.2
billion before they're supposed to have fish and flows. Well, they're trying
to put the fish and flows in before they've done anything. They've spent
$150 million so far and not done 1 project. The only project they did is the
1 I did. I went in, they were going to put a tidal lane on my property and I
didn't trust them because they had to do all these reports first, so I put
it in myself first and then I filed a claim and then they also did some crop
damage that I was able to, you know, verify and document and so I had a
claim and I settled but the only way I got the money is I had to actually
sit in Senator Feinstein's office with the Bureau and the Senator turned to
the Bureau and said if you owe Mr. Nickel pay him and that's the only
project money they've spent on any physical project. The rest they've done
nothing. It's a crying shame what they've done to the public and it's, it's
a project that we all could be proud if they do it but it's going to be a
30, 40 year project, not a 5 year project like this so it's kind of sad.
>> Jim Provost: It'd be a hard lesson to learn. So is there other subjects
that I haven't brought up or you can say more on in depth starting with the
Kern River is really your heart, I think.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, because, I live right on it so I see it.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, it'd be nice if we could get another flood year so we
could just what it's like [laughter]. But, it'd sure help my hydroelectric
out but.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, paying bills maybe instead of spending.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. But it, I just, we've just got to get back to building
things and instead of dividing up the resources we have among ourselves and
I, I just don't see the will of Congress to do that but this idea of just
now we're arguing over how many gallons an almond takes to grow. Why don't
we argue over how many gallons it takes to save a salmon? Why don't they
talk about that? It's crazy. They're willing to send 70 to 240,000 acre feet
down the San Joaquin River and they will admit, it's in the congressional
record, if they get 500 salmon back, returning, they'll be happy. And you
put it in dollars and just people's eyes glaze over it but they seem to be
focusing on how much water it takes to grow almonds, let's focus on how many
gallons it takes to raise these fish and how wasteful that is.
>> Jim Provost: Well, nothing like history.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: The subject of groundwater, is this the new [inaudible] I
believe in our valley is manage groundwater? What are your observations
there?
>> Jim Nickel: The good and bad is that farming is doing economically very
well, which is the reason why people are drilling wells and maybe it's,
maybe we've got to the point that my professors talked about when I was in
college is that the world's going to start starving and you have to go out
there and farm everything you can to save the world from starvation kind of
approach. Now, we're, maybe we're there, maybe we're getting there. But
we're, we're, we've cut off water. We're not developing more water projects
so the only choice is to go out of the groundwater and the old timers, when
they, they didn't want to sign up for water on the west side but they could
see their groundwater depleting so they had to keep going and then it
becomes a vicious circle. Then they, then they start making more money so
then they plant higher value crops and then they need more water to grow
those and it becomes kind of a vicious circle but I, I don't know where it's
going and I'm concerned about where we are because I don't see any will to
replace this groundwater and it's going to take a long time even if we did.
If we got some wet years some of these groundwater basins are so depleted
that it could take years of recharge to bring them back to where they were
and unless we get these people in a surface supplied irrigate I just don't
know where we're going to end up. I don't have a lot of optimism on
agriculture in California unless we get a change in people's, you know,
desire to see something good, productive happen.
>> Jim Provost: Well, the history books will tell us the story. Not looking
good to me either [laughter]. Do you have any other things I haven't asked
you about that are on your mind?
>> Jim Nickel: You know, I.
>> Jim Provost: Even as a boy growing up. Did you go fishing?
>> Jim Nickel: No I've never been too much of a fisherman. I mean, you know,
I went to Canada and did some of the fishing there but not around here
locally. I fish a little bit in the Kern River but that's not my real
passion. I did, you know, kayaked on the Kern River. I like doing that but
no, water's been good to us and I just kind of hate to see it become such a,
well, a villain in a way or ag's use of water such a villain. It seems kind
of misplaced. I don't know where people think they're going to get their
food but it's not going to--.
>> Jim Provost: Well rumor has it is the grocery stores have it.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. Well, I'm going down to Mexico and look, watch them
farm down there and see if they really want that food, so. Life will change.
I hope I'm not too much of a pessimist. Farmers are usually optimistic, we
always see the glass half full but I don't know. I'm having a hard time
finding that now.
>> Jim Provost: Well, history is pointing the way you're suggesting. Any
other areas you can think of to tell me about?
>> Jim Nickel: Uh, no, I, we talked about the floods or you and I did a
little bit at lunch about the, like 69 went through the floods there on the
Hacienda Ranch and we, that's 1 of the, well, the Kern River’s a little
passed that but we didn't have the inter tide then that we do now but, so
the water had to come all the way from Bakersfield all into Tulare Lake so
we worked with Boswell at the time and started damming up and spreading
water so it wouldn't get into Buena Vista Lake. I was just out of college
then and so we, we would flood water, flood our land and other people's
lands and then as the water receded we'd disc it and plant barley and so we
had in that years we had over 60,000 acres of barley planted from highway 46
all the way to Tulare Lake and that's when Boswell, they built a big levy
across what was, what is the Hacienda Ranch, which we subsequently sold to
them and the Tulare Lake entrance. And syphoned some water, put these huge
syphons in and syphoned water that we couldn't stop into Tulare Lake rather
than letting it flood in the road. So that was, those were fun times. There
was a lot work, a lot of moving a lot of water around.
>> Jim Provost: And if you remember going out and seeing flooding and flood
damages and Tulare Lake basin, especially? What did it look like? What was
going on? There were... a levy, was it all levies then or was it all?
>> Jim Nickel: Well Tulare Lake was levies and that's when to save their
levies from erosion, wind erosion mostly they, Boswell would buy junk cars
and line their levies with them to keep the erosion from eating away their
levies. There were always stories about Boswell and Salyer [phonetic] trying
to cut each other's levies so that it would flood the other guy's land and
supposedly somebody got 1 partly cut but it didn't erode enough to really
wipe it out. But yeah, there was, I remember, thousands of ducks dying from
botulism from the decaying barley straw, you know, it’d be... was anaerobic
and the ducks would die or get sick and so there were people all around
trying to save the ducks, which is kind of sad but it was lots of shallow,
warm water, so it was quite something.
>> Jim Provost: Would you see flooding in the town of Bakersfield?
>> Jim Nickel: No, I've never seen that. They say it will but I've never
seen that.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: We've never, they've never really had a real huge release
out. We have, it could, it will happen but it hasn't happened yet.
>> Jim Provost: Probably off of the local creeks there.
>> Jim Nickel: I remember as a kid when I grew up in Los Banos out at the
ranch, before the bypass was built that the San Joaquin would flood. My
father, my sisters had some, a date 1 night and my father says you're not
going on the date. I'm taking your date and he's going to help me fill
sandbags. We're going to sand bag the levies. So the date got to do that
instead of take my sister out.
>> Jim Provost: You had a smart dad.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah [laughter]. Or a dumb date [laughter].
>> Jim Provost: One of the 2, huh?
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, that, people seem to overlook flooding and the impacts
it has on our environment and ag big time. Can't grow crops sometimes.
>> Jim Nickel: I know and that's going to be the, I know that's going to be
the next challenge. It usually goes from a drought to then we get a big
year.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: And things are going to happen and we're not prepared for it.
We haven't maintained our channels so I think like Bakersfield itself,
they've allowed in all, a lot of these channels, they've allowed lots of
stuff to grow up and everybody wants to see the river run year around and
all it does is builds up growth with growth then you get water gets backed
up and the levies can't hold it. I mean, I understand it's people's desire
to have a nice, beautiful, running river but it doesn't work good for
floods.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, I see a, like you just said, I could see major
problems on the King/San Joaquin confluence areas. There hasn't been
flooding, like you said, the bypass you say, has capacities limited?
>> Jim Nickel: Just--yeah.
>> Jim Provost: That means more has got to be forced down the river, which
means Mendota's going to get in trouble and Fireball and then, yeah.
>> Jim Nickel: Correct.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, they're going to get flooding problems.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, the San Joaquin, as I think I said earlier, from the
bifurcation structures at Mendota it only holds 1200 second feet so that's,
it's going to go before anything unless somebody...
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, it's going to be terrible.
>> Jim Nickel: So it's not going to get to us. The King's River water could
still get to us, which will, yeah, get the Mendota, Fireball.
>> Jim Provost: Right. It's either there or flood more Tulare Lake Basin.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Not a good future.
>> Jim Nickel: But, you know, some, with some innovation, maybe taking that
water and getting it back up, somehow pumping it back into the aqueduct and
moving it to some spreading area would work.
>> Jim Provost: I'm personally aware of some of those projects being
proposed now.
>> Jim Nickel: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Provost: I think they will be in place but really when you talk about
floods you usually talk about large quantities of water, far exceeding what
pumps can pump.
>> Jim Nickel: Oh sure.
>> Jim Provost: So. So you have any other memory that you can keep on our
records?
>> Jim Nickel: No, that's about it really.
>> Jim Provost: Unfortunately, if you're like me it's until you walk out the
door [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: That's right, yeah. Should've said that.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right. Well, looks like that wraps it up.
>> Jim Nickel: Okay. Good. Enjoyed it.
who brings with him a lot of heritage in the field of water starting with
his relatives from the turn of the century up to very active activities in
the recent times with groundwater issues. But Jim, in the early days as far
as you can remember or have been related down to you, the first stuff that
happened in your family history and then the whole state was the very first
state water law was developed on the riparian rights being the highest law
of the land and there really isn't much, I'm sure to say about that other
than whatever family lore there might be. Then you go on into that and you
go on to the development of, all those lands were developed in the Los Banos
area, that today refer to as the exchange contractors, oh I take that back.
That's the, the area I'm talking about there is where your second stage of
all your involvement was to those water rights of the San Joaquin River. The
original rights we're talking about on the Kern River, which is your
hometown today and what do you, what can you relate to us on either one of
those subjects or the Kern River first and then, since that was the earliest
rights out there. Any lore on that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, we currently own a property, Rio Brava Ranch, on the
Kern River and we enjoy some riparian rights there, which we take advantage
of and use for farming. So it's, it was, we appreciate what Henry Miller did
with the Miller-Hagan Agreement. But we also have some appropriative rights
that we use for that property and it came from what we call a second point
right so, which comes from Buena Vista. So we actually enjoy both types of
rights on that property. We moved the second point rights up to where we
farm now so that's how we get our water. We actually pump right out of the
river, the Kern River.
>> Jim Provost: Then going into the exchange contractor area what's the,
what have you been told about your family involvement in all of that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, Miller-Lux had owned most of the property that's now
there. They started, I believe, in 1865 and he built diverted water both out
of the, using the Mendota Dam and then subsequently he also did the Sac Dam
and there were 2 canals he built, 1 was the main canal then the outside
canal, which services Central California Irrigation District and we farm in
there and then we also farm in San Luis Canal Company, of which I'm the
president right now. And so we, those have been very good rights. They're
some of the more senior rights in California and we've been able to have a
adequate water supply even in these critical years but we've, we have
converted to almost 100% drip irrigation. Initially we did that for economic
reasons, we could, it wasn't economic to save water because the water was so
inexpensive at that time so we did it for yield. Now, we're quite happy we
did it because we also now conserve quite a bit of water and so, for
instance, last year we were able to farm almost all of our property because
we apply about half the water we would if we had furrow irrigation, so.
>> Jim Provost: And can you explain a little more as to how those rights are
so good today?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, in the, I'm not too sure of the date, back in the 1950s
and maybe earlier the Bureau of Reclamation came to Miller-Lux at that time
and wanted to provide water for the east side of the valley from Friant,
Fresno on down to Kern County. They wanted to build what's now the FriantKern Canal and to obtain water for that they made an agreement with Miller
Lux that they would supply Miller Lux with water out of Shasta and that
water, they would build the Delta-Mendota canal, which comes out of the
delta too, the down of Mendota, hence the name. And the exchange contract
provides that in a year that Shasta has an inflow of 4 million acre feet or
more that we get 100% supply, which is approximately 800,000 acre feet for
240,000 acres and then, except in a critical year when it doesn't make the 4
million inflow in the Shasta it's called a critical year, we get 75%, which
works out to about 650,000 acre feet. So in today's water world that's quite
an adequate water supply and we're very fortunate to have that. But the
exchange, when Miller-Lux also reserved the right that if the Bureau could
not deliver our quantities off the Delta Mendota Canal via the Shasta that
they would, we could go back to the San Joaquin River and get our water and
last year was the first year we've ever done that. And I believe last year
we took about 240,000 acre feet of our 6, what were supposed to have been
650,000 acre feet because it was a critical year. Unfortunately, the Bureau
couldn't even deliver that so we came up short by 50, 60, 70,000 acre feet
but we got most of it and we were able to farm so, they're very valuable
rights.
>> Jim Provost: And you describe that you're only able to receive the
certain amount of water. Weren't you entitled to all the water from the San
Joaquin River?
>> Jim Nickel: We were entitled to all the water and, hence, the Friant
Division got no water except we sold them some water last year at a very
inexpensive price, $250 an acre foot, I think it was about 13,500 acre feet,
to help them out when water was selling for over $1000 an acre foot. And we
also told the Bureau that if you need any water for health and safety
because some of the towns along the, like Terra Bella have no other source
of water except the Friant, that they could take the water so, but other
than that we got, we took all the water off. We didn't take it down to dead
pool, we left some water in because I believe it's the Madera Canal cannot
take delivery if it goes below a certain level. I think that's 130,000 acre
feet behind Friant.
>> Jim Provost: And what did you, since this has been a long time since
water naturally has flowed down the San Joaquin River from Friant to Mendota
Dam, what did you see or observe or experience and the delivery of that
water actually getting to your place?
>> Jim Nickel: Well there's substantial losses, as you can well imagine in
an old river bed. They have let water go down usually for repairing demand
down to what they call a gravelly ford, which is most of the way down to
there but didn't make it into the pool, Mendota Pool at Mendota. So we, but
we, extreme losses and then actually from what we call the bifurcation
structure into the pool our, the river can only carry about 1200 second feet
because it's so silted up and needs some work in the river, of which we did
some but we, so we are a little restricted to that too. But there's huge
losses. It takes, between riparian demand and losses it takes about 120,000
acre feet before we get any water, I mean, that's how much is lost or used
before it gets to us. So to get us 240,000 acre feet you have to have
360,000 acre feet.
>> Jim Provost: And this year it doesn't look much better. It looks worse.
>> Jim Nickel: Much worse and, yes, very bad.
>> Jim Provost: And going off those projects you watch and were involved and
saw the water projects being built for storing in the west side, the west
side of our valley, the water project there when the dam was under
construction when San Luis was under.
>> Jim Nickel: Yes, I was living in Los Banos then, which was kind of the
headquarters for the construction of the San Luis Dam and went 1 year of
high school there so we lived through seeing a big influence of people there
and watch the dam being built, watch some of the old properties that we used
to drive through get, you know, houses moved and inundated and I was there
for the dedication of the dam when President Kennedy and Governor Pat Brown
were there and it was, it was a big deal. That's when we actually used to
build dams instead of tear them down, so.
>> Jim Provost: Yes.
>> Jim Nickel: Instead of, instead of just dividing up.
>> Jim Provost: That's why you're known as a historian.
>> Jim Nickel: [laughter] Yes, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Well, how about your boyhood experiences in rivers or
ditches or canals or pools?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, even though we had a swimming pool, we'd swim in the
canals, water ski in the canals, which you weren't supposed to do, but.
>> Jim Provost: That's in Kern County?
>> Jim Nickel: No in Los Banos.
>> Jim Provost: In Los Banos.
>> Jim Nickel: So they would, every once in a while the canal man would
catch us water skiing and take our ski away or, then we'd have to go beg
them to give them back to us, but. So we grew up doing all of that. I don't
know, for some reason we liked swimming in the canals better than the pool
sometimes but, so we grew up doing that. My father flew as a pilot and we
also had operations in Kern County so, and for, the flight was probably only
an hour if you went straight but took my father 2 hours because he had to
fly over every canal and every lake and farm and so we, so I got to know
fairly well the water system in the valley because of that, so. I did a lot
of that.
>> Jim Provost: And you're quite active now, I know, in the Kern River. Can
you tell us anything about the Kern?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, what partly brought us to Kern County was my father
purchased what we call the Hacienda Ranch, which is on the south bed of the
Tulare Lake and it was a 16,000 acre ranch and when they were building
Isabella Dam on the Kern River my father saw that that property probably had
some rights on the river because on high flows it would flow into that
property and on into to Tulare Lake. So he kind of said wait a minute boys,
when they were building, and said wait, I have a right here. So he got them
what was the 1962 Water Rights and Storage Agreement on the Kern River,
which gave us what we call the high flow rights or the lower river rights on
the Kern River and they yielded water on an average once every 4 years and
yielded on an average 40 to 50,000 acre feet. But, unfortunately, the water
would come in huge, sometimes 700,000 acre feet 1 year and then we'd have 4
years of none and so it was unregulated supply and it came in flood years.
So we, and then also at that time my father was starting to do some
development on what we call the Rio Brava Ranch. They needed a water supply
so he transferred those rights, those lower river rights to our ranch in
Kern County. They were appropriative right, they could be transferred, pre1914 appropriative right. So we had those and then we had to find a banking
place to store that water and he kind of promoted the Water Banking in Kern
County and he was, we were some of the first ones to put banking facilities
and wells in actually on city property, what they called the city, 2800
acres. And so that, I mean, that was kind of our, while we were in Kern
County. We also moved down there to Kern County when state aqueduct water
came down. We, the Hacienda Ranch in 69. It had an entitlement of 85 acre
feet but we, it was flooded so, because of the flood, so we talked the state
into allowing us to move our water to lost hills water district and we
started farming cotton there and kept expanding that. By the time we
finished we probably had about 16,000 acres along the aqueduct on the west
side of the aqueduct in Well Ridge and Lost Hills. So, and I grew up, you
know, farming that and being part of that involvement but that's how we kind
of got to Kern County. Subsequently with the water, on the lower river water
rights we had to figure out how to regulate it. We did have, as I said, the
banking facilities but we also had 20% of the storage in Lake Isabella,
which amounted to a carryover storage about 50,000 acre feet a year. But to
really regulate it we need something else. I tried to do a deal, I did 1
with Piermont. They had an option to do it. They bought some water from me,
future water because I didn't have it, but I owed them some future water,
25,000 acre feet and, but, and they got an option to take it on a long-term
basis. They didn't exercise that option so I started looking for another
home for the water and I was talking to Rosedale and some other people about
banking and Tom Clark from the Kern County Water Agency came to me and said
Jim, why don't you just, I have some prop 13 money. I'll buy this storage
from you in Isabella and I'll give you an assured supply on the aqueducts,
so that's what we did. I, we sold, we got some cash and we have 10,000 acre
feet on the aqueduct guaranteed in perpetuity. No cuts so that's where our
lower river water rights went.
>> Jim Provost: Sounds like a good investment.
>> Jim Nickel: It's worked out very well.
>> Jim Provost: Yes. Jumping subjects just slightly but, as time has gone by
and our surface water supplies are in a 4-year drought and we're
experiencing new issues on ground water and we were all on top of all that
and now the state is proposing to regulate the ground water in contrast to
going unregulated, so on the subject of groundwater the first thing that you
probably were involved with besides the extraction was probably storage of
groundwater or storing water in the groundwater, surface waters. Have you,
what's your experience in those areas or what have you seen happen?
>> Jim Nickel: Well we did, Kern County, you know, started that, what we
were doing with the lower river water and then they eventually, which we
were out by then, but did the water bank, which was fantastic. It's enabled
Kern County to survive through these dry years and the regulatory droughts
that we now are faced with. But, so it's been a great success for them. I,
we, we kind of got out of that now in Kern County but it's worked out very
well.
>> Jim Provost: I think of that as the city of Bakersfield's groundwater
bank but it started with the involvement of agriculture.
>> Jim Nickel: No, it was their bank but they weren't using, they weren't
banking water there.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: They owned the 2800 acres but.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: And I think they were storing it but we put the first 3 wells
in at our expense for our domestic, we thought, we were using it for our
domestic supply on our Rio Brava Ranch, or going to use it.
>> Jim Provost: And then directly related to water, you already said you've
been pretty involved with the Kern River because of your riparian land and
appropriative land I think I heard that you're also involved with energy
production on the river.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, we have a hydroelectric project. It's a 14-megawatt
plant. It has a canal that runs up to 1600 cubic feet per second. It
generates on the average, well it was supposed to, about 50 million
kilowatts a year. It's probably, for a variety of reasons, more like 40
million kilowatts per year on an average. We actually just conceived of the
idea. We had the FERC license and we got the PG&E contract but we leased it
out to a, not Synergy, I'll think of their name in a minute but, yeah,
there's another group that came in and operated it and some of it's gotten
sold but recently the economics of hydro changed. We thought power rates
would go up higher quicker than they did and these people, well, we weren't
maintaining the project and they were running out of money, so we just
recently took it over last year, last May, and so we're operating the hydro
ourselves now. It's actually our district's but we own the, or control the
district but.
>> Jim Provost: And who's buying the electricity?
>> Jim Nickel: It's contracted to PG&E. We've been facing a lot of issues
there with sand, being a lot of sand build up behind the dam and in the
canal and so last year we had to actually put a barge in and dredge out the
sand. We dredged out 40,000 yards of sand and then we take about 10,000, I
mean 100,000, no 10,000 yards out of our canal about every 5 years so it's,
the sand's been a real problem for us, which has caused a lot of maintenance
problems on the turbines. But it's, we think, operate it properly it can
run. Unfortunately, we've had 2 dry years since we took it over so it's been
a negative cash flow.
>> Jim Provost: And what's your historic observations of the ground water
situation in areas you farm in? I mean, I'm sure they've declined but you
probably have more firsthand knowledge of problems and issues there.
>> Jim
really
supply
supply
years,
Nickel: Well, in the exchange contract area there are some wells. We
don't need wells too much there in a normal year because of our water
but we use them for peaking or capacity issues, not necessarily for
except in a dry year. But, and, but our wells, even in these dry
have held up partly because we have a surface supply and we have a
lot of underlying canals so we recharge underground. What we're seeing,
though, is that people to the east of us, east of the San Joaquin River have
started more intensively farming that area and they started drilling below
the cork and clay for quantity and quality purposes, which has caused
subsidence and we actually, the San Luis Canal Company has the dam that I
mentioned earlier, the Sac Dam, which diverts water out of their river into
our headworks, it's sinking at the rate of 6 inches a year. So when they
were doing, started, the Bureau was supposed to be doing the San Joaquin
River Restoration Project they discovered this that it's pretty hard to
design a dam when you're sinking 6 inches a year. Well, we went, we started
investigating it because nobody appreciates just how bad and we went out to
people familiar with like red top area, which is along 152 between Los Banos
and Madera and they're sinking at the rate of over a foot a year and that's
kind of the center spot. But as, as you see now that, the depression, that
subsidence has grown where it's now heading east all the way, it goes all
the way to 99 and around the Chowchilla area and people are, their, you
can't blame them because their commodities, prices are good. They're making
money farming, they want to keep farming but they're not getting any surface
water to recharge the underground and we, as exchange contractors, saw this
problem and instead of suing, which you know you never know the results of
that and it could get drug on, we tried the cooperative method or working
with the farmers over there and trying to help them with the supplemental
supply, helping them build, get ground water banking facilities in in case
they do get some flood waters. Unfortunately, we haven't had any since then
but hopefully that'll work and the other thing we've asked them to do is
pump above the cork and clay and quit pumping below it and we think with
recharging their quality will go up a little better and maybe their quantity
but otherwise they're going to kill themselves too. We hope that approach
works rather than litigation but, on the other hand, we embrace the
groundwater ordinance because the state's going to do something that we
wanted done and they can probably do it quicker than we can. So, if they can
enforce that maybe it'll help stop it but in the meantime we're stuck with a
dam that's sinking and we don't know when it's going to quit even if they
stop pumping because we don't know how long it takes to do it. So we're
faced with a huge problem of getting water to our, down our canal.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, when your intake is lower than your-- a lot of your
canals it makes it hard to deliver.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Then also, you noted the river itself is, since there's
overall sinkage the river itself is in a steeper grade.
>> Jim Nickel: It's shaky and there's just a hole there all the way from,
well starting north of Fireball all the way up to Washington Avenue, which
is north of 152. It's all sinking and the bypass, which was built for flood
purposes, it has sunk to the degree where it's lost about 25% of its
capacity. It was supposed to carry about 15,000 cubic feet per second in a
flood and it's probably can only carry 10, maybe 9, now. So the next big
flood we have a lot of country is going to go under water unless somebody
builds up those levies because there's just nothing you can do about it.
>> Jim Provost: Seems to me that's going to ripple back up into the other
tributaries to the San Joaquin too, like on Kings will probably have to send
more water to Tulare Lake Basin then they have been sending out to North
Fork because North Fork because North Fork...
>> Jim Nickel: I hope you talk to them about that because when the lake
starts to flood they exercise their right to send it to us and our only way
to move it is through the San Joaquin. We can't get it in the bypass so, and
nobody maintains the San Joaquin River anyhow. The channel hasn't been
cleaned and so it's silted up and, you know, it's supposed to hold 4500
cubic feet per second but I don't, in spots it won't do that. So, yeah, we,
I think we can work with them. If we can just get both the Kings River and
the San Joaquin River when they have a flood stage to anticipate it and
start releasing water sooner than holding it later and then giving us a big
slug would maybe help but, yeah, we're going to have problems. Somebody's
going to have problems. My only hope is it happens upstream of us.
>> Jim Provost: The restoration of the river for fishery is directly related
to these issues that we're talking about right now, the fish need a clear
passage like agriculture needs a clear passage but it looks very difficult
to achieve.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, that's a huge story. That, the settlement agreement,
which we weren't a part of, we were part of the litigation, I mean the
legislation but not the settlement, not the litigation. But they developed a
plan to restore the river without having any factual knowledge of the river,
is my opinion. They set flow rates and time schedules that were unrealistic
and dollars that were unrealistic. They thought, they told, it's in the
congressional record, that they could do that for $250 million, knowing full
well it was going to cost more. We had an engineering firm give us an
estimate at that time and they said it was 1.2 billion. This was 6 years
ago. Today the Bureau thinks the first phase is going to cost 1.2 billion
dollars and the total is going to cost more like 2.4 billion and the Bureau
is always wrong so it's probably a lot more than that. So we've been trying,
we don't want to kill that project. What we want to do is see it done in a
realistic manner based on the funds they have and their budget only has $35
million a year for a while and they need, and they need to spend $1.2
billion before they're supposed to have fish and flows. Well, they're trying
to put the fish and flows in before they've done anything. They've spent
$150 million so far and not done 1 project. The only project they did is the
1 I did. I went in, they were going to put a tidal lane on my property and I
didn't trust them because they had to do all these reports first, so I put
it in myself first and then I filed a claim and then they also did some crop
damage that I was able to, you know, verify and document and so I had a
claim and I settled but the only way I got the money is I had to actually
sit in Senator Feinstein's office with the Bureau and the Senator turned to
the Bureau and said if you owe Mr. Nickel pay him and that's the only
project money they've spent on any physical project. The rest they've done
nothing. It's a crying shame what they've done to the public and it's, it's
a project that we all could be proud if they do it but it's going to be a
30, 40 year project, not a 5 year project like this so it's kind of sad.
>> Jim Provost: It'd be a hard lesson to learn. So is there other subjects
that I haven't brought up or you can say more on in depth starting with the
Kern River is really your heart, I think.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, because, I live right on it so I see it.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, it'd be nice if we could get another flood year so we
could just what it's like [laughter]. But, it'd sure help my hydroelectric
out but.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, paying bills maybe instead of spending.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. But it, I just, we've just got to get back to building
things and instead of dividing up the resources we have among ourselves and
I, I just don't see the will of Congress to do that but this idea of just
now we're arguing over how many gallons an almond takes to grow. Why don't
we argue over how many gallons it takes to save a salmon? Why don't they
talk about that? It's crazy. They're willing to send 70 to 240,000 acre feet
down the San Joaquin River and they will admit, it's in the congressional
record, if they get 500 salmon back, returning, they'll be happy. And you
put it in dollars and just people's eyes glaze over it but they seem to be
focusing on how much water it takes to grow almonds, let's focus on how many
gallons it takes to raise these fish and how wasteful that is.
>> Jim Provost: Well, nothing like history.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: The subject of groundwater, is this the new [inaudible] I
believe in our valley is manage groundwater? What are your observations
there?
>> Jim Nickel: The good and bad is that farming is doing economically very
well, which is the reason why people are drilling wells and maybe it's,
maybe we've got to the point that my professors talked about when I was in
college is that the world's going to start starving and you have to go out
there and farm everything you can to save the world from starvation kind of
approach. Now, we're, maybe we're there, maybe we're getting there. But
we're, we're, we've cut off water. We're not developing more water projects
so the only choice is to go out of the groundwater and the old timers, when
they, they didn't want to sign up for water on the west side but they could
see their groundwater depleting so they had to keep going and then it
becomes a vicious circle. Then they, then they start making more money so
then they plant higher value crops and then they need more water to grow
those and it becomes kind of a vicious circle but I, I don't know where it's
going and I'm concerned about where we are because I don't see any will to
replace this groundwater and it's going to take a long time even if we did.
If we got some wet years some of these groundwater basins are so depleted
that it could take years of recharge to bring them back to where they were
and unless we get these people in a surface supplied irrigate I just don't
know where we're going to end up. I don't have a lot of optimism on
agriculture in California unless we get a change in people's, you know,
desire to see something good, productive happen.
>> Jim Provost: Well, the history books will tell us the story. Not looking
good to me either [laughter]. Do you have any other things I haven't asked
you about that are on your mind?
>> Jim Nickel: You know, I.
>> Jim Provost: Even as a boy growing up. Did you go fishing?
>> Jim Nickel: No I've never been too much of a fisherman. I mean, you know,
I went to Canada and did some of the fishing there but not around here
locally. I fish a little bit in the Kern River but that's not my real
passion. I did, you know, kayaked on the Kern River. I like doing that but
no, water's been good to us and I just kind of hate to see it become such a,
well, a villain in a way or ag's use of water such a villain. It seems kind
of misplaced. I don't know where people think they're going to get their
food but it's not going to--.
>> Jim Provost: Well rumor has it is the grocery stores have it.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. Well, I'm going down to Mexico and look, watch them
farm down there and see if they really want that food, so. Life will change.
I hope I'm not too much of a pessimist. Farmers are usually optimistic, we
always see the glass half full but I don't know. I'm having a hard time
finding that now.
>> Jim Provost: Well, history is pointing the way you're suggesting. Any
other areas you can think of to tell me about?
>> Jim Nickel: Uh, no, I, we talked about the floods or you and I did a
little bit at lunch about the, like 69 went through the floods there on the
Hacienda Ranch and we, that's 1 of the, well, the Kern River’s a little
passed that but we didn't have the inter tide then that we do now but, so
the water had to come all the way from Bakersfield all into Tulare Lake so
we worked with Boswell at the time and started damming up and spreading
water so it wouldn't get into Buena Vista Lake. I was just out of college
then and so we, we would flood water, flood our land and other people's
lands and then as the water receded we'd disc it and plant barley and so we
had in that years we had over 60,000 acres of barley planted from highway 46
all the way to Tulare Lake and that's when Boswell, they built a big levy
across what was, what is the Hacienda Ranch, which we subsequently sold to
them and the Tulare Lake entrance. And syphoned some water, put these huge
syphons in and syphoned water that we couldn't stop into Tulare Lake rather
than letting it flood in the road. So that was, those were fun times. There
was a lot work, a lot of moving a lot of water around.
>> Jim Provost: And if you remember going out and seeing flooding and flood
damages and Tulare Lake basin, especially? What did it look like? What was
going on? There were... a levy, was it all levies then or was it all?
>> Jim Nickel: Well Tulare Lake was levies and that's when to save their
levies from erosion, wind erosion mostly they, Boswell would buy junk cars
and line their levies with them to keep the erosion from eating away their
levies. There were always stories about Boswell and Salyer [phonetic] trying
to cut each other's levies so that it would flood the other guy's land and
supposedly somebody got 1 partly cut but it didn't erode enough to really
wipe it out. But yeah, there was, I remember, thousands of ducks dying from
botulism from the decaying barley straw, you know, it’d be... was anaerobic
and the ducks would die or get sick and so there were people all around
trying to save the ducks, which is kind of sad but it was lots of shallow,
warm water, so it was quite something.
>> Jim Provost: Would you see flooding in the town of Bakersfield?
>> Jim Nickel: No, I've never seen that. They say it will but I've never
seen that.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: We've never, they've never really had a real huge release
out. We have, it could, it will happen but it hasn't happened yet.
>> Jim Provost: Probably off of the local creeks there.
>> Jim Nickel: I remember as a kid when I grew up in Los Banos out at the
ranch, before the bypass was built that the San Joaquin would flood. My
father, my sisters had some, a date 1 night and my father says you're not
going on the date. I'm taking your date and he's going to help me fill
sandbags. We're going to sand bag the levies. So the date got to do that
instead of take my sister out.
>> Jim Provost: You had a smart dad.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah [laughter]. Or a dumb date [laughter].
>> Jim Provost: One of the 2, huh?
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, that, people seem to overlook flooding and the impacts
it has on our environment and ag big time. Can't grow crops sometimes.
>> Jim Nickel: I know and that's going to be the, I know that's going to be
the next challenge. It usually goes from a drought to then we get a big
year.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: And things are going to happen and we're not prepared for it.
We haven't maintained our channels so I think like Bakersfield itself,
they've allowed in all, a lot of these channels, they've allowed lots of
stuff to grow up and everybody wants to see the river run year around and
all it does is builds up growth with growth then you get water gets backed
up and the levies can't hold it. I mean, I understand it's people's desire
to have a nice, beautiful, running river but it doesn't work good for
floods.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, I see a, like you just said, I could see major
problems on the King/San Joaquin confluence areas. There hasn't been
flooding, like you said, the bypass you say, has capacities limited?
>> Jim Nickel: Just--yeah.
>> Jim Provost: That means more has got to be forced down the river, which
means Mendota's going to get in trouble and Fireball and then, yeah.
>> Jim Nickel: Correct.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, they're going to get flooding problems.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, the San Joaquin, as I think I said earlier, from the
bifurcation structures at Mendota it only holds 1200 second feet so that's,
it's going to go before anything unless somebody...
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, it's going to be terrible.
>> Jim Nickel: So it's not going to get to us. The King's River water could
still get to us, which will, yeah, get the Mendota, Fireball.
>> Jim Provost: Right. It's either there or flood more Tulare Lake Basin.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Not a good future.
>> Jim Nickel: But, you know, some, with some innovation, maybe taking that
water and getting it back up, somehow pumping it back into the aqueduct and
moving it to some spreading area would work.
>> Jim Provost: I'm personally aware of some of those projects being
proposed now.
>> Jim Nickel: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Provost: I think they will be in place but really when you talk about
floods you usually talk about large quantities of water, far exceeding what
pumps can pump.
>> Jim Nickel: Oh sure.
>> Jim Provost: So. So you have any other memory that you can keep on our
records?
>> Jim Nickel: No, that's about it really.
>> Jim Provost: Unfortunately, if you're like me it's until you walk out the
door [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: That's right, yeah. Should've said that.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right. Well, looks like that wraps it up.
>> Jim Nickel: Okay. Good. Enjoyed it.
>> Jim Provost: This is April the 9th, 2015 and I'm here with Mr. Jim Nickel
who brings with him a lot of heritage in the field of water starting with
his relatives from the turn of the century up to very active activities in
the recent times with groundwater issues. But Jim, in the early days as far
as you can remember or have been related down to you, the first stuff that
happened in your family history and then the whole state was the very first
state water law was developed on the riparian rights being the highest law
of the land and there really isn't much, I'm sure to say about that other
than whatever family lore there might be. Then you go on into that and you
go on to the development of, all those lands were developed in the Los Banos
area, that today refer to as the exchange contractors, oh I take that back.
That's the, the area I'm talking about there is where your second stage of
all your involvement was to those water rights of the San Joaquin River. The
original rights we're talking about on the Kern River, which is your
hometown today and what do you, what can you relate to us on either one of
those subjects or the Kern River first and then, since that was the earliest
rights out there. Any lore on that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, we currently own a property, Rio Brava Ranch, on the
Kern River and we enjoy some riparian rights there, which we take advantage
of and use for farming. So it's, it was, we appreciate what Henry Miller did
with the Miller-Hagan Agreement. But we also have some appropriative rights
that we use for that property and it came from what we call a second point
right so, which comes from Buena Vista. So we actually enjoy both types of
rights on that property. We moved the second point rights up to where we
farm now so that's how we get our water. We actually pump right out of the
river, the Kern River.
>> Jim Provost: Then going into the exchange contractor area what's the,
what have you been told about your family involvement in all of that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, Miller-Lux had owned most of the property that's now
there. They started, I believe, in 1865 and he built diverted water both out
of the, using the Mendota Dam and then subsequently he also did the Sac Dam
and there were 2 canals he built, 1 was the main canal then the outside
canal, which services Central California Irrigation District and we farm in
there and then we also farm in San Luis Canal Company, of which I'm the
president right now. And so we, those have been very good rights. They're
some of the more senior rights in California and we've been able to have a
adequate water supply even in these critical years but we've, we have
converted to almost 100% drip irrigation. Initially we did that for economic
reasons, we could, it wasn't economic to save water because the water was so
inexpensive at that time so we did it for yield. Now, we're quite happy we
did it because we also now conserve quite a bit of water and so, for
instance, last year we were able to farm almost all of our property because
we apply about half the water we would if we had furrow irrigation, so.
>> Jim Provost: And can you explain a little more as to how those rights are
so good today?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, in the, I'm not too sure of the date, back in the 1950s
and maybe earlier the Bureau of Reclamation came to Miller-Lux at that time
and wanted to provide water for the east side of the valley from Friant,
Fresno on down to Kern County. They wanted to build what's now the FriantKern Canal and to obtain water for that they made an agreement with Miller
Lux that they would supply Miller Lux with water out of Shasta and that
water, they would build the Delta-Mendota canal, which comes out of the
delta too, the down of Mendota, hence the name. And the exchange contract
provides that in a year that Shasta has an inflow of 4 million acre feet or
more that we get 100% supply, which is approximately 800,000 acre feet for
240,000 acres and then, except in a critical year when it doesn't make the 4
million inflow in the Shasta it's called a critical year, we get 75%, which
works out to about 650,000 acre feet. So in today's water world that's quite
an adequate water supply and we're very fortunate to have that. But the
exchange, when Miller-Lux also reserved the right that if the Bureau could
not deliver our quantities off the Delta Mendota Canal via the Shasta that
they would, we could go back to the San Joaquin River and get our water and
last year was the first year we've ever done that. And I believe last year
we took about 240,000 acre feet of our 6, what were supposed to have been
650,000 acre feet because it was a critical year. Unfortunately, the Bureau
couldn't even deliver that so we came up short by 50, 60, 70,000 acre feet
but we got most of it and we were able to farm so, they're very valuable
rights.
>> Jim Provost: And you describe that you're only able to receive the
certain amount of water. Weren't you entitled to all the water from the San
Joaquin River?
>> Jim Nickel: We were entitled to all the water and, hence, the Friant
Division got no water except we sold them some water last year at a very
inexpensive price, $250 an acre foot, I think it was about 13,500 acre feet,
to help them out when water was selling for over $1000 an acre foot. And we
also told the Bureau that if you need any water for health and safety
because some of the towns along the, like Terra Bella have no other source
of water except the Friant, that they could take the water so, but other
than that we got, we took all the water off. We didn't take it down to dead
pool, we left some water in because I believe it's the Madera Canal cannot
take delivery if it goes below a certain level. I think that's 130,000 acre
feet behind Friant.
>> Jim Provost: And what did you, since this has been a long time since
water naturally has flowed down the San Joaquin River from Friant to Mendota
Dam, what did you see or observe or experience and the delivery of that
water actually getting to your place?
>> Jim Nickel: Well there's substantial losses, as you can well imagine in
an old river bed. They have let water go down usually for repairing demand
down to what they call a gravelly ford, which is most of the way down to
there but didn't make it into the pool, Mendota Pool at Mendota. So we, but
we, extreme losses and then actually from what we call the bifurcation
structure into the pool our, the river can only carry about 1200 second feet
because it's so silted up and needs some work in the river, of which we did
some but we, so we are a little restricted to that too. But there's huge
losses. It takes, between riparian demand and losses it takes about 120,000
acre feet before we get any water, I mean, that's how much is lost or used
before it gets to us. So to get us 240,000 acre feet you have to have
360,000 acre feet.
>> Jim Provost: And this year it doesn't look much better. It looks worse.
>> Jim Nickel: Much worse and, yes, very bad.
>> Jim Provost: And going off those projects you watch and were involved and
saw the water projects being built for storing in the west side, the west
side of our valley, the water project there when the dam was under
construction when San Luis was under.
>> Jim Nickel: Yes, I was living in Los Banos then, which was kind of the
headquarters for the construction of the San Luis Dam and went 1 year of
high school there so we lived through seeing a big influence of people there
and watch the dam being built, watch some of the old properties that we used
to drive through get, you know, houses moved and inundated and I was there
for the dedication of the dam when President Kennedy and Governor Pat Brown
were there and it was, it was a big deal. That's when we actually used to
build dams instead of tear them down, so.
>> Jim Provost: Yes.
>> Jim Nickel: Instead of, instead of just dividing up.
>> Jim Provost: That's why you're known as a historian.
>> Jim Nickel: [laughter] Yes, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Well, how about your boyhood experiences in rivers or
ditches or canals or pools?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, even though we had a swimming pool, we'd swim in the
canals, water ski in the canals, which you weren't supposed to do, but.
>> Jim Provost: That's in Kern County?
>> Jim Nickel: No in Los Banos.
>> Jim Provost: In Los Banos.
>> Jim Nickel: So they would, every once in a while the canal man would
catch us water skiing and take our ski away or, then we'd have to go beg
them to give them back to us, but. So we grew up doing all of that. I don't
know, for some reason we liked swimming in the canals better than the pool
sometimes but, so we grew up doing that. My father flew as a pilot and we
also had operations in Kern County so, and for, the flight was probably only
an hour if you went straight but took my father 2 hours because he had to
fly over every canal and every lake and farm and so we, so I got to know
fairly well the water system in the valley because of that, so. I did a lot
of that.
>> Jim Provost: And you're quite active now, I know, in the Kern River. Can
you tell us anything about the Kern?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, what partly brought us to Kern County was my father
purchased what we call the Hacienda Ranch, which is on the south bed of the
Tulare Lake and it was a 16,000 acre ranch and when they were building
Isabella Dam on the Kern River my father saw that that property probably had
some rights on the river because on high flows it would flow into that
property and on into to Tulare Lake. So he kind of said wait a minute boys,
when they were building, and said wait, I have a right here. So he got them
what was the 1962 Water Rights and Storage Agreement on the Kern River,
which gave us what we call the high flow rights or the lower river rights on
the Kern River and they yielded water on an average once every 4 years and
yielded on an average 40 to 50,000 acre feet. But, unfortunately, the water
would come in huge, sometimes 700,000 acre feet 1 year and then we'd have 4
years of none and so it was unregulated supply and it came in flood years.
So we, and then also at that time my father was starting to do some
development on what we call the Rio Brava Ranch. They needed a water supply
so he transferred those rights, those lower river rights to our ranch in
Kern County. They were appropriative right, they could be transferred, pre1914 appropriative right. So we had those and then we had to find a banking
place to store that water and he kind of promoted the Water Banking in Kern
County and he was, we were some of the first ones to put banking facilities
and wells in actually on city property, what they called the city, 2800
acres. And so that, I mean, that was kind of our, while we were in Kern
County. We also moved down there to Kern County when state aqueduct water
came down. We, the Hacienda Ranch in 69. It had an entitlement of 85 acre
feet but we, it was flooded so, because of the flood, so we talked the state
into allowing us to move our water to lost hills water district and we
started farming cotton there and kept expanding that. By the time we
finished we probably had about 16,000 acres along the aqueduct on the west
side of the aqueduct in Well Ridge and Lost Hills. So, and I grew up, you
know, farming that and being part of that involvement but that's how we kind
of got to Kern County. Subsequently with the water, on the lower river water
rights we had to figure out how to regulate it. We did have, as I said, the
banking facilities but we also had 20% of the storage in Lake Isabella,
which amounted to a carryover storage about 50,000 acre feet a year. But to
really regulate it we need something else. I tried to do a deal, I did 1
with Piermont. They had an option to do it. They bought some water from me,
future water because I didn't have it, but I owed them some future water,
25,000 acre feet and, but, and they got an option to take it on a long-term
basis. They didn't exercise that option so I started looking for another
home for the water and I was talking to Rosedale and some other people about
banking and Tom Clark from the Kern County Water Agency came to me and said
Jim, why don't you just, I have some prop 13 money. I'll buy this storage
from you in Isabella and I'll give you an assured supply on the aqueducts,
so that's what we did. I, we sold, we got some cash and we have 10,000 acre
feet on the aqueduct guaranteed in perpetuity. No cuts so that's where our
lower river water rights went.
>> Jim Provost: Sounds like a good investment.
>> Jim Nickel: It's worked out very well.
>> Jim Provost: Yes. Jumping subjects just slightly but, as time has gone by
and our surface water supplies are in a 4-year drought and we're
experiencing new issues on ground water and we were all on top of all that
and now the state is proposing to regulate the ground water in contrast to
going unregulated, so on the subject of groundwater the first thing that you
probably were involved with besides the extraction was probably storage of
groundwater or storing water in the groundwater, surface waters. Have you,
what's your experience in those areas or what have you seen happen?
>> Jim Nickel: Well we did, Kern County, you know, started that, what we
were doing with the lower river water and then they eventually, which we
were out by then, but did the water bank, which was fantastic. It's enabled
Kern County to survive through these dry years and the regulatory droughts
that we now are faced with. But, so it's been a great success for them. I,
we, we kind of got out of that now in Kern County but it's worked out very
well.
>> Jim Provost: I think of that as the city of Bakersfield's groundwater
bank but it started with the involvement of agriculture.
>> Jim Nickel: No, it was their bank but they weren't using, they weren't
banking water there.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: They owned the 2800 acres but.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: And I think they were storing it but we put the first 3 wells
in at our expense for our domestic, we thought, we were using it for our
domestic supply on our Rio Brava Ranch, or going to use it.
>> Jim Provost: And then directly related to water, you already said you've
been pretty involved with the Kern River because of your riparian land and
appropriative land I think I heard that you're also involved with energy
production on the river.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, we have a hydroelectric project. It's a 14-megawatt
plant. It has a canal that runs up to 1600 cubic feet per second. It
generates on the average, well it was supposed to, about 50 million
kilowatts a year. It's probably, for a variety of reasons, more like 40
million kilowatts per year on an average. We actually just conceived of the
idea. We had the FERC license and we got the PG&E contract but we leased it
out to a, not Synergy, I'll think of their name in a minute but, yeah,
there's another group that came in and operated it and some of it's gotten
sold but recently the economics of hydro changed. We thought power rates
would go up higher quicker than they did and these people, well, we weren't
maintaining the project and they were running out of money, so we just
recently took it over last year, last May, and so we're operating the hydro
ourselves now. It's actually our district's but we own the, or control the
district but.
>> Jim Provost: And who's buying the electricity?
>> Jim Nickel: It's contracted to PG&E. We've been facing a lot of issues
there with sand, being a lot of sand build up behind the dam and in the
canal and so last year we had to actually put a barge in and dredge out the
sand. We dredged out 40,000 yards of sand and then we take about 10,000, I
mean 100,000, no 10,000 yards out of our canal about every 5 years so it's,
the sand's been a real problem for us, which has caused a lot of maintenance
problems on the turbines. But it's, we think, operate it properly it can
run. Unfortunately, we've had 2 dry years since we took it over so it's been
a negative cash flow.
>> Jim Provost: And what's your historic observations of the ground water
situation in areas you farm in? I mean, I'm sure they've declined but you
probably have more firsthand knowledge of problems and issues there.
>> Jim
really
supply
supply
years,
Nickel: Well, in the exchange contract area there are some wells. We
don't need wells too much there in a normal year because of our water
but we use them for peaking or capacity issues, not necessarily for
except in a dry year. But, and, but our wells, even in these dry
have held up partly because we have a surface supply and we have a
lot of underlying canals so we recharge underground. What we're seeing,
though, is that people to the east of us, east of the San Joaquin River have
started more intensively farming that area and they started drilling below
the cork and clay for quantity and quality purposes, which has caused
subsidence and we actually, the San Luis Canal Company has the dam that I
mentioned earlier, the Sac Dam, which diverts water out of their river into
our headworks, it's sinking at the rate of 6 inches a year. So when they
were doing, started, the Bureau was supposed to be doing the San Joaquin
River Restoration Project they discovered this that it's pretty hard to
design a dam when you're sinking 6 inches a year. Well, we went, we started
investigating it because nobody appreciates just how bad and we went out to
people familiar with like red top area, which is along 152 between Los Banos
and Madera and they're sinking at the rate of over a foot a year and that's
kind of the center spot. But as, as you see now that, the depression, that
subsidence has grown where it's now heading east all the way, it goes all
the way to 99 and around the Chowchilla area and people are, their, you
can't blame them because their commodities, prices are good. They're making
money farming, they want to keep farming but they're not getting any surface
water to recharge the underground and we, as exchange contractors, saw this
problem and instead of suing, which you know you never know the results of
that and it could get drug on, we tried the cooperative method or working
with the farmers over there and trying to help them with the supplemental
supply, helping them build, get ground water banking facilities in in case
they do get some flood waters. Unfortunately, we haven't had any since then
but hopefully that'll work and the other thing we've asked them to do is
pump above the cork and clay and quit pumping below it and we think with
recharging their quality will go up a little better and maybe their quantity
but otherwise they're going to kill themselves too. We hope that approach
works rather than litigation but, on the other hand, we embrace the
groundwater ordinance because the state's going to do something that we
wanted done and they can probably do it quicker than we can. So, if they can
enforce that maybe it'll help stop it but in the meantime we're stuck with a
dam that's sinking and we don't know when it's going to quit even if they
stop pumping because we don't know how long it takes to do it. So we're
faced with a huge problem of getting water to our, down our canal.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, when your intake is lower than your-- a lot of your
canals it makes it hard to deliver.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Then also, you noted the river itself is, since there's
overall sinkage the river itself is in a steeper grade.
>> Jim Nickel: It's shaky and there's just a hole there all the way from,
well starting north of Fireball all the way up to Washington Avenue, which
is north of 152. It's all sinking and the bypass, which was built for flood
purposes, it has sunk to the degree where it's lost about 25% of its
capacity. It was supposed to carry about 15,000 cubic feet per second in a
flood and it's probably can only carry 10, maybe 9, now. So the next big
flood we have a lot of country is going to go under water unless somebody
builds up those levies because there's just nothing you can do about it.
>> Jim Provost: Seems to me that's going to ripple back up into the other
tributaries to the San Joaquin too, like on Kings will probably have to send
more water to Tulare Lake Basin then they have been sending out to North
Fork because North Fork because North Fork...
>> Jim Nickel: I hope you talk to them about that because when the lake
starts to flood they exercise their right to send it to us and our only way
to move it is through the San Joaquin. We can't get it in the bypass so, and
nobody maintains the San Joaquin River anyhow. The channel hasn't been
cleaned and so it's silted up and, you know, it's supposed to hold 4500
cubic feet per second but I don't, in spots it won't do that. So, yeah, we,
I think we can work with them. If we can just get both the Kings River and
the San Joaquin River when they have a flood stage to anticipate it and
start releasing water sooner than holding it later and then giving us a big
slug would maybe help but, yeah, we're going to have problems. Somebody's
going to have problems. My only hope is it happens upstream of us.
>> Jim Provost: The restoration of the river for fishery is directly related
to these issues that we're talking about right now, the fish need a clear
passage like agriculture needs a clear passage but it looks very difficult
to achieve.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, that's a huge story. That, the settlement agreement,
which we weren't a part of, we were part of the litigation, I mean the
legislation but not the settlement, not the litigation. But they developed a
plan to restore the river without having any factual knowledge of the river,
is my opinion. They set flow rates and time schedules that were unrealistic
and dollars that were unrealistic. They thought, they told, it's in the
congressional record, that they could do that for $250 million, knowing full
well it was going to cost more. We had an engineering firm give us an
estimate at that time and they said it was 1.2 billion. This was 6 years
ago. Today the Bureau thinks the first phase is going to cost 1.2 billion
dollars and the total is going to cost more like 2.4 billion and the Bureau
is always wrong so it's probably a lot more than that. So we've been trying,
we don't want to kill that project. What we want to do is see it done in a
realistic manner based on the funds they have and their budget only has $35
million a year for a while and they need, and they need to spend $1.2
billion before they're supposed to have fish and flows. Well, they're trying
to put the fish and flows in before they've done anything. They've spent
$150 million so far and not done 1 project. The only project they did is the
1 I did. I went in, they were going to put a tidal lane on my property and I
didn't trust them because they had to do all these reports first, so I put
it in myself first and then I filed a claim and then they also did some crop
damage that I was able to, you know, verify and document and so I had a
claim and I settled but the only way I got the money is I had to actually
sit in Senator Feinstein's office with the Bureau and the Senator turned to
the Bureau and said if you owe Mr. Nickel pay him and that's the only
project money they've spent on any physical project. The rest they've done
nothing. It's a crying shame what they've done to the public and it's, it's
a project that we all could be proud if they do it but it's going to be a
30, 40 year project, not a 5 year project like this so it's kind of sad.
>> Jim Provost: It'd be a hard lesson to learn. So is there other subjects
that I haven't brought up or you can say more on in depth starting with the
Kern River is really your heart, I think.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, because, I live right on it so I see it.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, it'd be nice if we could get another flood year so we
could just what it's like [laughter]. But, it'd sure help my hydroelectric
out but.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, paying bills maybe instead of spending.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. But it, I just, we've just got to get back to building
things and instead of dividing up the resources we have among ourselves and
I, I just don't see the will of Congress to do that but this idea of just
now we're arguing over how many gallons an almond takes to grow. Why don't
we argue over how many gallons it takes to save a salmon? Why don't they
talk about that? It's crazy. They're willing to send 70 to 240,000 acre feet
down the San Joaquin River and they will admit, it's in the congressional
record, if they get 500 salmon back, returning, they'll be happy. And you
put it in dollars and just people's eyes glaze over it but they seem to be
focusing on how much water it takes to grow almonds, let's focus on how many
gallons it takes to raise these fish and how wasteful that is.
>> Jim Provost: Well, nothing like history.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: The subject of groundwater, is this the new [inaudible] I
believe in our valley is manage groundwater? What are your observations
there?
>> Jim Nickel: The good and bad is that farming is doing economically very
well, which is the reason why people are drilling wells and maybe it's,
maybe we've got to the point that my professors talked about when I was in
college is that the world's going to start starving and you have to go out
there and farm everything you can to save the world from starvation kind of
approach. Now, we're, maybe we're there, maybe we're getting there. But
we're, we're, we've cut off water. We're not developing more water projects
so the only choice is to go out of the groundwater and the old timers, when
they, they didn't want to sign up for water on the west side but they could
see their groundwater depleting so they had to keep going and then it
becomes a vicious circle. Then they, then they start making more money so
then they plant higher value crops and then they need more water to grow
those and it becomes kind of a vicious circle but I, I don't know where it's
going and I'm concerned about where we are because I don't see any will to
replace this groundwater and it's going to take a long time even if we did.
If we got some wet years some of these groundwater basins are so depleted
that it could take years of recharge to bring them back to where they were
and unless we get these people in a surface supplied irrigate I just don't
know where we're going to end up. I don't have a lot of optimism on
agriculture in California unless we get a change in people's, you know,
desire to see something good, productive happen.
>> Jim Provost: Well, the history books will tell us the story. Not looking
good to me either [laughter]. Do you have any other things I haven't asked
you about that are on your mind?
>> Jim Nickel: You know, I.
>> Jim Provost: Even as a boy growing up. Did you go fishing?
>> Jim Nickel: No I've never been too much of a fisherman. I mean, you know,
I went to Canada and did some of the fishing there but not around here
locally. I fish a little bit in the Kern River but that's not my real
passion. I did, you know, kayaked on the Kern River. I like doing that but
no, water's been good to us and I just kind of hate to see it become such a,
well, a villain in a way or ag's use of water such a villain. It seems kind
of misplaced. I don't know where people think they're going to get their
food but it's not going to--.
>> Jim Provost: Well rumor has it is the grocery stores have it.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. Well, I'm going down to Mexico and look, watch them
farm down there and see if they really want that food, so. Life will change.
I hope I'm not too much of a pessimist. Farmers are usually optimistic, we
always see the glass half full but I don't know. I'm having a hard time
finding that now.
>> Jim Provost: Well, history is pointing the way you're suggesting. Any
other areas you can think of to tell me about?
>> Jim Nickel: Uh, no, I, we talked about the floods or you and I did a
little bit at lunch about the, like 69 went through the floods there on the
Hacienda Ranch and we, that's 1 of the, well, the Kern River’s a little
passed that but we didn't have the inter tide then that we do now but, so
the water had to come all the way from Bakersfield all into Tulare Lake so
we worked with Boswell at the time and started damming up and spreading
water so it wouldn't get into Buena Vista Lake. I was just out of college
then and so we, we would flood water, flood our land and other people's
lands and then as the water receded we'd disc it and plant barley and so we
had in that years we had over 60,000 acres of barley planted from highway 46
all the way to Tulare Lake and that's when Boswell, they built a big levy
across what was, what is the Hacienda Ranch, which we subsequently sold to
them and the Tulare Lake entrance. And syphoned some water, put these huge
syphons in and syphoned water that we couldn't stop into Tulare Lake rather
than letting it flood in the road. So that was, those were fun times. There
was a lot work, a lot of moving a lot of water around.
>> Jim Provost: And if you remember going out and seeing flooding and flood
damages and Tulare Lake basin, especially? What did it look like? What was
going on? There were... a levy, was it all levies then or was it all?
>> Jim Nickel: Well Tulare Lake was levies and that's when to save their
levies from erosion, wind erosion mostly they, Boswell would buy junk cars
and line their levies with them to keep the erosion from eating away their
levies. There were always stories about Boswell and Salyer [phonetic] trying
to cut each other's levies so that it would flood the other guy's land and
supposedly somebody got 1 partly cut but it didn't erode enough to really
wipe it out. But yeah, there was, I remember, thousands of ducks dying from
botulism from the decaying barley straw, you know, it’d be... was anaerobic
and the ducks would die or get sick and so there were people all around
trying to save the ducks, which is kind of sad but it was lots of shallow,
warm water, so it was quite something.
>> Jim Provost: Would you see flooding in the town of Bakersfield?
>> Jim Nickel: No, I've never seen that. They say it will but I've never
seen that.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: We've never, they've never really had a real huge release
out. We have, it could, it will happen but it hasn't happened yet.
>> Jim Provost: Probably off of the local creeks there.
>> Jim Nickel: I remember as a kid when I grew up in Los Banos out at the
ranch, before the bypass was built that the San Joaquin would flood. My
father, my sisters had some, a date 1 night and my father says you're not
going on the date. I'm taking your date and he's going to help me fill
sandbags. We're going to sand bag the levies. So the date got to do that
instead of take my sister out.
>> Jim Provost: You had a smart dad.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah [laughter]. Or a dumb date [laughter].
>> Jim Provost: One of the 2, huh?
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, that, people seem to overlook flooding and the impacts
it has on our environment and ag big time. Can't grow crops sometimes.
>> Jim Nickel: I know and that's going to be the, I know that's going to be
the next challenge. It usually goes from a drought to then we get a big
year.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: And things are going to happen and we're not prepared for it.
We haven't maintained our channels so I think like Bakersfield itself,
they've allowed in all, a lot of these channels, they've allowed lots of
stuff to grow up and everybody wants to see the river run year around and
all it does is builds up growth with growth then you get water gets backed
up and the levies can't hold it. I mean, I understand it's people's desire
to have a nice, beautiful, running river but it doesn't work good for
floods.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, I see a, like you just said, I could see major
problems on the King/San Joaquin confluence areas. There hasn't been
flooding, like you said, the bypass you say, has capacities limited?
>> Jim Nickel: Just--yeah.
>> Jim Provost: That means more has got to be forced down the river, which
means Mendota's going to get in trouble and Fireball and then, yeah.
>> Jim Nickel: Correct.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, they're going to get flooding problems.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, the San Joaquin, as I think I said earlier, from the
bifurcation structures at Mendota it only holds 1200 second feet so that's,
it's going to go before anything unless somebody...
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, it's going to be terrible.
>> Jim Nickel: So it's not going to get to us. The King's River water could
still get to us, which will, yeah, get the Mendota, Fireball.
>> Jim Provost: Right. It's either there or flood more Tulare Lake Basin.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Not a good future.
>> Jim Nickel: But, you know, some, with some innovation, maybe taking that
water and getting it back up, somehow pumping it back into the aqueduct and
moving it to some spreading area would work.
>> Jim Provost: I'm personally aware of some of those projects being
proposed now.
>> Jim Nickel: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Provost: I think they will be in place but really when you talk about
floods you usually talk about large quantities of water, far exceeding what
pumps can pump.
>> Jim Nickel: Oh sure.
>> Jim Provost: So. So you have any other memory that you can keep on our
records?
>> Jim Nickel: No, that's about it really.
>> Jim Provost: Unfortunately, if you're like me it's until you walk out the
door [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: That's right, yeah. Should've said that.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right. Well, looks like that wraps it up.
>> Jim Nickel: Okay. Good. Enjoyed it.
who brings with him a lot of heritage in the field of water starting with
his relatives from the turn of the century up to very active activities in
the recent times with groundwater issues. But Jim, in the early days as far
as you can remember or have been related down to you, the first stuff that
happened in your family history and then the whole state was the very first
state water law was developed on the riparian rights being the highest law
of the land and there really isn't much, I'm sure to say about that other
than whatever family lore there might be. Then you go on into that and you
go on to the development of, all those lands were developed in the Los Banos
area, that today refer to as the exchange contractors, oh I take that back.
That's the, the area I'm talking about there is where your second stage of
all your involvement was to those water rights of the San Joaquin River. The
original rights we're talking about on the Kern River, which is your
hometown today and what do you, what can you relate to us on either one of
those subjects or the Kern River first and then, since that was the earliest
rights out there. Any lore on that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, we currently own a property, Rio Brava Ranch, on the
Kern River and we enjoy some riparian rights there, which we take advantage
of and use for farming. So it's, it was, we appreciate what Henry Miller did
with the Miller-Hagan Agreement. But we also have some appropriative rights
that we use for that property and it came from what we call a second point
right so, which comes from Buena Vista. So we actually enjoy both types of
rights on that property. We moved the second point rights up to where we
farm now so that's how we get our water. We actually pump right out of the
river, the Kern River.
>> Jim Provost: Then going into the exchange contractor area what's the,
what have you been told about your family involvement in all of that?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, Miller-Lux had owned most of the property that's now
there. They started, I believe, in 1865 and he built diverted water both out
of the, using the Mendota Dam and then subsequently he also did the Sac Dam
and there were 2 canals he built, 1 was the main canal then the outside
canal, which services Central California Irrigation District and we farm in
there and then we also farm in San Luis Canal Company, of which I'm the
president right now. And so we, those have been very good rights. They're
some of the more senior rights in California and we've been able to have a
adequate water supply even in these critical years but we've, we have
converted to almost 100% drip irrigation. Initially we did that for economic
reasons, we could, it wasn't economic to save water because the water was so
inexpensive at that time so we did it for yield. Now, we're quite happy we
did it because we also now conserve quite a bit of water and so, for
instance, last year we were able to farm almost all of our property because
we apply about half the water we would if we had furrow irrigation, so.
>> Jim Provost: And can you explain a little more as to how those rights are
so good today?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, in the, I'm not too sure of the date, back in the 1950s
and maybe earlier the Bureau of Reclamation came to Miller-Lux at that time
and wanted to provide water for the east side of the valley from Friant,
Fresno on down to Kern County. They wanted to build what's now the FriantKern Canal and to obtain water for that they made an agreement with Miller
Lux that they would supply Miller Lux with water out of Shasta and that
water, they would build the Delta-Mendota canal, which comes out of the
delta too, the down of Mendota, hence the name. And the exchange contract
provides that in a year that Shasta has an inflow of 4 million acre feet or
more that we get 100% supply, which is approximately 800,000 acre feet for
240,000 acres and then, except in a critical year when it doesn't make the 4
million inflow in the Shasta it's called a critical year, we get 75%, which
works out to about 650,000 acre feet. So in today's water world that's quite
an adequate water supply and we're very fortunate to have that. But the
exchange, when Miller-Lux also reserved the right that if the Bureau could
not deliver our quantities off the Delta Mendota Canal via the Shasta that
they would, we could go back to the San Joaquin River and get our water and
last year was the first year we've ever done that. And I believe last year
we took about 240,000 acre feet of our 6, what were supposed to have been
650,000 acre feet because it was a critical year. Unfortunately, the Bureau
couldn't even deliver that so we came up short by 50, 60, 70,000 acre feet
but we got most of it and we were able to farm so, they're very valuable
rights.
>> Jim Provost: And you describe that you're only able to receive the
certain amount of water. Weren't you entitled to all the water from the San
Joaquin River?
>> Jim Nickel: We were entitled to all the water and, hence, the Friant
Division got no water except we sold them some water last year at a very
inexpensive price, $250 an acre foot, I think it was about 13,500 acre feet,
to help them out when water was selling for over $1000 an acre foot. And we
also told the Bureau that if you need any water for health and safety
because some of the towns along the, like Terra Bella have no other source
of water except the Friant, that they could take the water so, but other
than that we got, we took all the water off. We didn't take it down to dead
pool, we left some water in because I believe it's the Madera Canal cannot
take delivery if it goes below a certain level. I think that's 130,000 acre
feet behind Friant.
>> Jim Provost: And what did you, since this has been a long time since
water naturally has flowed down the San Joaquin River from Friant to Mendota
Dam, what did you see or observe or experience and the delivery of that
water actually getting to your place?
>> Jim Nickel: Well there's substantial losses, as you can well imagine in
an old river bed. They have let water go down usually for repairing demand
down to what they call a gravelly ford, which is most of the way down to
there but didn't make it into the pool, Mendota Pool at Mendota. So we, but
we, extreme losses and then actually from what we call the bifurcation
structure into the pool our, the river can only carry about 1200 second feet
because it's so silted up and needs some work in the river, of which we did
some but we, so we are a little restricted to that too. But there's huge
losses. It takes, between riparian demand and losses it takes about 120,000
acre feet before we get any water, I mean, that's how much is lost or used
before it gets to us. So to get us 240,000 acre feet you have to have
360,000 acre feet.
>> Jim Provost: And this year it doesn't look much better. It looks worse.
>> Jim Nickel: Much worse and, yes, very bad.
>> Jim Provost: And going off those projects you watch and were involved and
saw the water projects being built for storing in the west side, the west
side of our valley, the water project there when the dam was under
construction when San Luis was under.
>> Jim Nickel: Yes, I was living in Los Banos then, which was kind of the
headquarters for the construction of the San Luis Dam and went 1 year of
high school there so we lived through seeing a big influence of people there
and watch the dam being built, watch some of the old properties that we used
to drive through get, you know, houses moved and inundated and I was there
for the dedication of the dam when President Kennedy and Governor Pat Brown
were there and it was, it was a big deal. That's when we actually used to
build dams instead of tear them down, so.
>> Jim Provost: Yes.
>> Jim Nickel: Instead of, instead of just dividing up.
>> Jim Provost: That's why you're known as a historian.
>> Jim Nickel: [laughter] Yes, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Well, how about your boyhood experiences in rivers or
ditches or canals or pools?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, even though we had a swimming pool, we'd swim in the
canals, water ski in the canals, which you weren't supposed to do, but.
>> Jim Provost: That's in Kern County?
>> Jim Nickel: No in Los Banos.
>> Jim Provost: In Los Banos.
>> Jim Nickel: So they would, every once in a while the canal man would
catch us water skiing and take our ski away or, then we'd have to go beg
them to give them back to us, but. So we grew up doing all of that. I don't
know, for some reason we liked swimming in the canals better than the pool
sometimes but, so we grew up doing that. My father flew as a pilot and we
also had operations in Kern County so, and for, the flight was probably only
an hour if you went straight but took my father 2 hours because he had to
fly over every canal and every lake and farm and so we, so I got to know
fairly well the water system in the valley because of that, so. I did a lot
of that.
>> Jim Provost: And you're quite active now, I know, in the Kern River. Can
you tell us anything about the Kern?
>> Jim Nickel: Well, what partly brought us to Kern County was my father
purchased what we call the Hacienda Ranch, which is on the south bed of the
Tulare Lake and it was a 16,000 acre ranch and when they were building
Isabella Dam on the Kern River my father saw that that property probably had
some rights on the river because on high flows it would flow into that
property and on into to Tulare Lake. So he kind of said wait a minute boys,
when they were building, and said wait, I have a right here. So he got them
what was the 1962 Water Rights and Storage Agreement on the Kern River,
which gave us what we call the high flow rights or the lower river rights on
the Kern River and they yielded water on an average once every 4 years and
yielded on an average 40 to 50,000 acre feet. But, unfortunately, the water
would come in huge, sometimes 700,000 acre feet 1 year and then we'd have 4
years of none and so it was unregulated supply and it came in flood years.
So we, and then also at that time my father was starting to do some
development on what we call the Rio Brava Ranch. They needed a water supply
so he transferred those rights, those lower river rights to our ranch in
Kern County. They were appropriative right, they could be transferred, pre1914 appropriative right. So we had those and then we had to find a banking
place to store that water and he kind of promoted the Water Banking in Kern
County and he was, we were some of the first ones to put banking facilities
and wells in actually on city property, what they called the city, 2800
acres. And so that, I mean, that was kind of our, while we were in Kern
County. We also moved down there to Kern County when state aqueduct water
came down. We, the Hacienda Ranch in 69. It had an entitlement of 85 acre
feet but we, it was flooded so, because of the flood, so we talked the state
into allowing us to move our water to lost hills water district and we
started farming cotton there and kept expanding that. By the time we
finished we probably had about 16,000 acres along the aqueduct on the west
side of the aqueduct in Well Ridge and Lost Hills. So, and I grew up, you
know, farming that and being part of that involvement but that's how we kind
of got to Kern County. Subsequently with the water, on the lower river water
rights we had to figure out how to regulate it. We did have, as I said, the
banking facilities but we also had 20% of the storage in Lake Isabella,
which amounted to a carryover storage about 50,000 acre feet a year. But to
really regulate it we need something else. I tried to do a deal, I did 1
with Piermont. They had an option to do it. They bought some water from me,
future water because I didn't have it, but I owed them some future water,
25,000 acre feet and, but, and they got an option to take it on a long-term
basis. They didn't exercise that option so I started looking for another
home for the water and I was talking to Rosedale and some other people about
banking and Tom Clark from the Kern County Water Agency came to me and said
Jim, why don't you just, I have some prop 13 money. I'll buy this storage
from you in Isabella and I'll give you an assured supply on the aqueducts,
so that's what we did. I, we sold, we got some cash and we have 10,000 acre
feet on the aqueduct guaranteed in perpetuity. No cuts so that's where our
lower river water rights went.
>> Jim Provost: Sounds like a good investment.
>> Jim Nickel: It's worked out very well.
>> Jim Provost: Yes. Jumping subjects just slightly but, as time has gone by
and our surface water supplies are in a 4-year drought and we're
experiencing new issues on ground water and we were all on top of all that
and now the state is proposing to regulate the ground water in contrast to
going unregulated, so on the subject of groundwater the first thing that you
probably were involved with besides the extraction was probably storage of
groundwater or storing water in the groundwater, surface waters. Have you,
what's your experience in those areas or what have you seen happen?
>> Jim Nickel: Well we did, Kern County, you know, started that, what we
were doing with the lower river water and then they eventually, which we
were out by then, but did the water bank, which was fantastic. It's enabled
Kern County to survive through these dry years and the regulatory droughts
that we now are faced with. But, so it's been a great success for them. I,
we, we kind of got out of that now in Kern County but it's worked out very
well.
>> Jim Provost: I think of that as the city of Bakersfield's groundwater
bank but it started with the involvement of agriculture.
>> Jim Nickel: No, it was their bank but they weren't using, they weren't
banking water there.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: They owned the 2800 acres but.
>> Jim Provost: Oh, I see.
>> Jim Nickel: And I think they were storing it but we put the first 3 wells
in at our expense for our domestic, we thought, we were using it for our
domestic supply on our Rio Brava Ranch, or going to use it.
>> Jim Provost: And then directly related to water, you already said you've
been pretty involved with the Kern River because of your riparian land and
appropriative land I think I heard that you're also involved with energy
production on the river.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, we have a hydroelectric project. It's a 14-megawatt
plant. It has a canal that runs up to 1600 cubic feet per second. It
generates on the average, well it was supposed to, about 50 million
kilowatts a year. It's probably, for a variety of reasons, more like 40
million kilowatts per year on an average. We actually just conceived of the
idea. We had the FERC license and we got the PG&E contract but we leased it
out to a, not Synergy, I'll think of their name in a minute but, yeah,
there's another group that came in and operated it and some of it's gotten
sold but recently the economics of hydro changed. We thought power rates
would go up higher quicker than they did and these people, well, we weren't
maintaining the project and they were running out of money, so we just
recently took it over last year, last May, and so we're operating the hydro
ourselves now. It's actually our district's but we own the, or control the
district but.
>> Jim Provost: And who's buying the electricity?
>> Jim Nickel: It's contracted to PG&E. We've been facing a lot of issues
there with sand, being a lot of sand build up behind the dam and in the
canal and so last year we had to actually put a barge in and dredge out the
sand. We dredged out 40,000 yards of sand and then we take about 10,000, I
mean 100,000, no 10,000 yards out of our canal about every 5 years so it's,
the sand's been a real problem for us, which has caused a lot of maintenance
problems on the turbines. But it's, we think, operate it properly it can
run. Unfortunately, we've had 2 dry years since we took it over so it's been
a negative cash flow.
>> Jim Provost: And what's your historic observations of the ground water
situation in areas you farm in? I mean, I'm sure they've declined but you
probably have more firsthand knowledge of problems and issues there.
>> Jim
really
supply
supply
years,
Nickel: Well, in the exchange contract area there are some wells. We
don't need wells too much there in a normal year because of our water
but we use them for peaking or capacity issues, not necessarily for
except in a dry year. But, and, but our wells, even in these dry
have held up partly because we have a surface supply and we have a
lot of underlying canals so we recharge underground. What we're seeing,
though, is that people to the east of us, east of the San Joaquin River have
started more intensively farming that area and they started drilling below
the cork and clay for quantity and quality purposes, which has caused
subsidence and we actually, the San Luis Canal Company has the dam that I
mentioned earlier, the Sac Dam, which diverts water out of their river into
our headworks, it's sinking at the rate of 6 inches a year. So when they
were doing, started, the Bureau was supposed to be doing the San Joaquin
River Restoration Project they discovered this that it's pretty hard to
design a dam when you're sinking 6 inches a year. Well, we went, we started
investigating it because nobody appreciates just how bad and we went out to
people familiar with like red top area, which is along 152 between Los Banos
and Madera and they're sinking at the rate of over a foot a year and that's
kind of the center spot. But as, as you see now that, the depression, that
subsidence has grown where it's now heading east all the way, it goes all
the way to 99 and around the Chowchilla area and people are, their, you
can't blame them because their commodities, prices are good. They're making
money farming, they want to keep farming but they're not getting any surface
water to recharge the underground and we, as exchange contractors, saw this
problem and instead of suing, which you know you never know the results of
that and it could get drug on, we tried the cooperative method or working
with the farmers over there and trying to help them with the supplemental
supply, helping them build, get ground water banking facilities in in case
they do get some flood waters. Unfortunately, we haven't had any since then
but hopefully that'll work and the other thing we've asked them to do is
pump above the cork and clay and quit pumping below it and we think with
recharging their quality will go up a little better and maybe their quantity
but otherwise they're going to kill themselves too. We hope that approach
works rather than litigation but, on the other hand, we embrace the
groundwater ordinance because the state's going to do something that we
wanted done and they can probably do it quicker than we can. So, if they can
enforce that maybe it'll help stop it but in the meantime we're stuck with a
dam that's sinking and we don't know when it's going to quit even if they
stop pumping because we don't know how long it takes to do it. So we're
faced with a huge problem of getting water to our, down our canal.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, when your intake is lower than your-- a lot of your
canals it makes it hard to deliver.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Then also, you noted the river itself is, since there's
overall sinkage the river itself is in a steeper grade.
>> Jim Nickel: It's shaky and there's just a hole there all the way from,
well starting north of Fireball all the way up to Washington Avenue, which
is north of 152. It's all sinking and the bypass, which was built for flood
purposes, it has sunk to the degree where it's lost about 25% of its
capacity. It was supposed to carry about 15,000 cubic feet per second in a
flood and it's probably can only carry 10, maybe 9, now. So the next big
flood we have a lot of country is going to go under water unless somebody
builds up those levies because there's just nothing you can do about it.
>> Jim Provost: Seems to me that's going to ripple back up into the other
tributaries to the San Joaquin too, like on Kings will probably have to send
more water to Tulare Lake Basin then they have been sending out to North
Fork because North Fork because North Fork...
>> Jim Nickel: I hope you talk to them about that because when the lake
starts to flood they exercise their right to send it to us and our only way
to move it is through the San Joaquin. We can't get it in the bypass so, and
nobody maintains the San Joaquin River anyhow. The channel hasn't been
cleaned and so it's silted up and, you know, it's supposed to hold 4500
cubic feet per second but I don't, in spots it won't do that. So, yeah, we,
I think we can work with them. If we can just get both the Kings River and
the San Joaquin River when they have a flood stage to anticipate it and
start releasing water sooner than holding it later and then giving us a big
slug would maybe help but, yeah, we're going to have problems. Somebody's
going to have problems. My only hope is it happens upstream of us.
>> Jim Provost: The restoration of the river for fishery is directly related
to these issues that we're talking about right now, the fish need a clear
passage like agriculture needs a clear passage but it looks very difficult
to achieve.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, that's a huge story. That, the settlement agreement,
which we weren't a part of, we were part of the litigation, I mean the
legislation but not the settlement, not the litigation. But they developed a
plan to restore the river without having any factual knowledge of the river,
is my opinion. They set flow rates and time schedules that were unrealistic
and dollars that were unrealistic. They thought, they told, it's in the
congressional record, that they could do that for $250 million, knowing full
well it was going to cost more. We had an engineering firm give us an
estimate at that time and they said it was 1.2 billion. This was 6 years
ago. Today the Bureau thinks the first phase is going to cost 1.2 billion
dollars and the total is going to cost more like 2.4 billion and the Bureau
is always wrong so it's probably a lot more than that. So we've been trying,
we don't want to kill that project. What we want to do is see it done in a
realistic manner based on the funds they have and their budget only has $35
million a year for a while and they need, and they need to spend $1.2
billion before they're supposed to have fish and flows. Well, they're trying
to put the fish and flows in before they've done anything. They've spent
$150 million so far and not done 1 project. The only project they did is the
1 I did. I went in, they were going to put a tidal lane on my property and I
didn't trust them because they had to do all these reports first, so I put
it in myself first and then I filed a claim and then they also did some crop
damage that I was able to, you know, verify and document and so I had a
claim and I settled but the only way I got the money is I had to actually
sit in Senator Feinstein's office with the Bureau and the Senator turned to
the Bureau and said if you owe Mr. Nickel pay him and that's the only
project money they've spent on any physical project. The rest they've done
nothing. It's a crying shame what they've done to the public and it's, it's
a project that we all could be proud if they do it but it's going to be a
30, 40 year project, not a 5 year project like this so it's kind of sad.
>> Jim Provost: It'd be a hard lesson to learn. So is there other subjects
that I haven't brought up or you can say more on in depth starting with the
Kern River is really your heart, I think.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, because, I live right on it so I see it.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, it'd be nice if we could get another flood year so we
could just what it's like [laughter]. But, it'd sure help my hydroelectric
out but.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, paying bills maybe instead of spending.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. But it, I just, we've just got to get back to building
things and instead of dividing up the resources we have among ourselves and
I, I just don't see the will of Congress to do that but this idea of just
now we're arguing over how many gallons an almond takes to grow. Why don't
we argue over how many gallons it takes to save a salmon? Why don't they
talk about that? It's crazy. They're willing to send 70 to 240,000 acre feet
down the San Joaquin River and they will admit, it's in the congressional
record, if they get 500 salmon back, returning, they'll be happy. And you
put it in dollars and just people's eyes glaze over it but they seem to be
focusing on how much water it takes to grow almonds, let's focus on how many
gallons it takes to raise these fish and how wasteful that is.
>> Jim Provost: Well, nothing like history.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: The subject of groundwater, is this the new [inaudible] I
believe in our valley is manage groundwater? What are your observations
there?
>> Jim Nickel: The good and bad is that farming is doing economically very
well, which is the reason why people are drilling wells and maybe it's,
maybe we've got to the point that my professors talked about when I was in
college is that the world's going to start starving and you have to go out
there and farm everything you can to save the world from starvation kind of
approach. Now, we're, maybe we're there, maybe we're getting there. But
we're, we're, we've cut off water. We're not developing more water projects
so the only choice is to go out of the groundwater and the old timers, when
they, they didn't want to sign up for water on the west side but they could
see their groundwater depleting so they had to keep going and then it
becomes a vicious circle. Then they, then they start making more money so
then they plant higher value crops and then they need more water to grow
those and it becomes kind of a vicious circle but I, I don't know where it's
going and I'm concerned about where we are because I don't see any will to
replace this groundwater and it's going to take a long time even if we did.
If we got some wet years some of these groundwater basins are so depleted
that it could take years of recharge to bring them back to where they were
and unless we get these people in a surface supplied irrigate I just don't
know where we're going to end up. I don't have a lot of optimism on
agriculture in California unless we get a change in people's, you know,
desire to see something good, productive happen.
>> Jim Provost: Well, the history books will tell us the story. Not looking
good to me either [laughter]. Do you have any other things I haven't asked
you about that are on your mind?
>> Jim Nickel: You know, I.
>> Jim Provost: Even as a boy growing up. Did you go fishing?
>> Jim Nickel: No I've never been too much of a fisherman. I mean, you know,
I went to Canada and did some of the fishing there but not around here
locally. I fish a little bit in the Kern River but that's not my real
passion. I did, you know, kayaked on the Kern River. I like doing that but
no, water's been good to us and I just kind of hate to see it become such a,
well, a villain in a way or ag's use of water such a villain. It seems kind
of misplaced. I don't know where people think they're going to get their
food but it's not going to--.
>> Jim Provost: Well rumor has it is the grocery stores have it.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah. Well, I'm going down to Mexico and look, watch them
farm down there and see if they really want that food, so. Life will change.
I hope I'm not too much of a pessimist. Farmers are usually optimistic, we
always see the glass half full but I don't know. I'm having a hard time
finding that now.
>> Jim Provost: Well, history is pointing the way you're suggesting. Any
other areas you can think of to tell me about?
>> Jim Nickel: Uh, no, I, we talked about the floods or you and I did a
little bit at lunch about the, like 69 went through the floods there on the
Hacienda Ranch and we, that's 1 of the, well, the Kern River’s a little
passed that but we didn't have the inter tide then that we do now but, so
the water had to come all the way from Bakersfield all into Tulare Lake so
we worked with Boswell at the time and started damming up and spreading
water so it wouldn't get into Buena Vista Lake. I was just out of college
then and so we, we would flood water, flood our land and other people's
lands and then as the water receded we'd disc it and plant barley and so we
had in that years we had over 60,000 acres of barley planted from highway 46
all the way to Tulare Lake and that's when Boswell, they built a big levy
across what was, what is the Hacienda Ranch, which we subsequently sold to
them and the Tulare Lake entrance. And syphoned some water, put these huge
syphons in and syphoned water that we couldn't stop into Tulare Lake rather
than letting it flood in the road. So that was, those were fun times. There
was a lot work, a lot of moving a lot of water around.
>> Jim Provost: And if you remember going out and seeing flooding and flood
damages and Tulare Lake basin, especially? What did it look like? What was
going on? There were... a levy, was it all levies then or was it all?
>> Jim Nickel: Well Tulare Lake was levies and that's when to save their
levies from erosion, wind erosion mostly they, Boswell would buy junk cars
and line their levies with them to keep the erosion from eating away their
levies. There were always stories about Boswell and Salyer [phonetic] trying
to cut each other's levies so that it would flood the other guy's land and
supposedly somebody got 1 partly cut but it didn't erode enough to really
wipe it out. But yeah, there was, I remember, thousands of ducks dying from
botulism from the decaying barley straw, you know, it’d be... was anaerobic
and the ducks would die or get sick and so there were people all around
trying to save the ducks, which is kind of sad but it was lots of shallow,
warm water, so it was quite something.
>> Jim Provost: Would you see flooding in the town of Bakersfield?
>> Jim Nickel: No, I've never seen that. They say it will but I've never
seen that.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: We've never, they've never really had a real huge release
out. We have, it could, it will happen but it hasn't happened yet.
>> Jim Provost: Probably off of the local creeks there.
>> Jim Nickel: I remember as a kid when I grew up in Los Banos out at the
ranch, before the bypass was built that the San Joaquin would flood. My
father, my sisters had some, a date 1 night and my father says you're not
going on the date. I'm taking your date and he's going to help me fill
sandbags. We're going to sand bag the levies. So the date got to do that
instead of take my sister out.
>> Jim Provost: You had a smart dad.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah [laughter]. Or a dumb date [laughter].
>> Jim Provost: One of the 2, huh?
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, that, people seem to overlook flooding and the impacts
it has on our environment and ag big time. Can't grow crops sometimes.
>> Jim Nickel: I know and that's going to be the, I know that's going to be
the next challenge. It usually goes from a drought to then we get a big
year.
>> Jim Provost: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Nickel: And things are going to happen and we're not prepared for it.
We haven't maintained our channels so I think like Bakersfield itself,
they've allowed in all, a lot of these channels, they've allowed lots of
stuff to grow up and everybody wants to see the river run year around and
all it does is builds up growth with growth then you get water gets backed
up and the levies can't hold it. I mean, I understand it's people's desire
to have a nice, beautiful, running river but it doesn't work good for
floods.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, I see a, like you just said, I could see major
problems on the King/San Joaquin confluence areas. There hasn't been
flooding, like you said, the bypass you say, has capacities limited?
>> Jim Nickel: Just--yeah.
>> Jim Provost: That means more has got to be forced down the river, which
means Mendota's going to get in trouble and Fireball and then, yeah.
>> Jim Nickel: Correct.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, they're going to get flooding problems.
>> Jim Nickel: Well, the San Joaquin, as I think I said earlier, from the
bifurcation structures at Mendota it only holds 1200 second feet so that's,
it's going to go before anything unless somebody...
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, it's going to be terrible.
>> Jim Nickel: So it's not going to get to us. The King's River water could
still get to us, which will, yeah, get the Mendota, Fireball.
>> Jim Provost: Right. It's either there or flood more Tulare Lake Basin.
>> Jim Nickel: Yeah, yeah.
>> Jim Provost: Not a good future.
>> Jim Nickel: But, you know, some, with some innovation, maybe taking that
water and getting it back up, somehow pumping it back into the aqueduct and
moving it to some spreading area would work.
>> Jim Provost: I'm personally aware of some of those projects being
proposed now.
>> Jim Nickel: Mmhmm.
>> Jim Provost: I think they will be in place but really when you talk about
floods you usually talk about large quantities of water, far exceeding what
pumps can pump.
>> Jim Nickel: Oh sure.
>> Jim Provost: So. So you have any other memory that you can keep on our
records?
>> Jim Nickel: No, that's about it really.
>> Jim Provost: Unfortunately, if you're like me it's until you walk out the
door [laughter].
>> Jim Nickel: That's right, yeah. Should've said that.
>> Jim Provost: Yeah, right. Well, looks like that wraps it up.
>> Jim Nickel: Okay. Good. Enjoyed it.