Water Archives · Lloyd Carter interview

Title

eng Lloyd Carter interview

Description

eng Local environmental activist. Talked about being inspired to be an activist on water after covering the Kesterson environmental disaster. Talked about the work he has done on water and the environment.

Creator

eng Carter, Lloyd

eng Holyoke, Thomas

Relation

eng Water Archive Oral Histories

Coverage

eng California State University, Fresno

Date

eng 2/14/2014

Format

eng Microsoft Word 2013 document, 32 pages

Identifier

eng SCMS_waoh_00040

extracted text

>> Thomas Holyoke: Today we are talking with area water activist, if
that's how you wish to be described, Lloyd Carter.
>> Lloyd Carter: That's as good as any.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let's just start off with a little bit of biographical
information. Who are you and where are you from?
>> Lloyd Carter: Okay, I'm a -- I'm a local boy, born and bred. I was
born at the old Community Hospital, May 30, 1948, which is eons ago. Grew
up in South East Fresno, just off of Barton Street, on Illinois. I was
about a three-minute walk to Roosevelt High School. I went to John
Burroughs Elementary School, Yosemite Junior High, graduated from
Roosevelt in '66. Took a semester off. And then in the spring of January
of '67, I went to City -- started City College. Went for two years and
then transferred to Fresno State. By that time, I was married and had one
child and another child on the way, two boys, when I graduated in '72. I
actually started my journalism career in '69, when I was at Fresno State
in the local office of United Press International. They had a slot open
for a weekend reporter, eight hours on Saturdays and three hours on
Sunday morning. And they traditionally hired a promising journalism
students from Fresno State. So, that got my foot in the door. Well I
should back up and say that, I got involved in high school on the school
newspaper and I had an English teacher, Margaret Kempfer [assumed
spelling], who thought that I had some talent. So, when I went to City
College, I was also on the student newspaper, regular beat reporter and I
did a column. And then I got a job at UPI on May 31, 1969, the day after
I turned 21. And that evolved within a year into a full time job. The
other -- there -- they used to -- UPI used to have two reporters in
Fresno and when the other guy left, he actually transferred back to the
office in Salt Lake City, the UPI office. Then I -- then I was second
chair at -- in the Fresno office of UPI, covering all kinds of news.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Actually, by the time people start to watch this
video, since UPI has been gone for a little while, people might not know
what it actually is.
>> Lloyd Carter: No. Right. Well I should explain. In those days there
was two major wire services, Associated Press, which was the AP, and
United Press International, which was UPI. They were the two sources of
news for virtually every newspaper, daily newspaper, and one or the
other, or the big papers would have both wire services. But over the next
20 years, UPI ran into a lot of financial problems and -- and actually
then end -- they went through several ownership changes, they are now
owned by the king of -- excuse me, the cousin of the king of Saudi
Arabia. His cousin owns UPI. And it -- but it's a shell of its former
self. When I was working for them -- that was in 50s and 60s were the
heydays of UPI and the wire service. We had like 900 reporters in the
United States. And then I forget what the numbers worldwide, but, you
know, we were a worldwide news agency. And a fair match for the AP in
those days.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So what was sort of your range of responsibility as a
UPI writer?

>> Lloyd Carter: Basically, the San Joaquin Valley. Anything that
happened in the San Joaquin Valley. So, natural disasters, naturally, or
shootings, where several people got killed, or a, a big percentage of it
was agriculture issues, and water. You know, the first ten years of my
journalism career, I didn't know what I was talking about, I just took
the kind of the media in the valley kind of takes the press release from
the water agencies, in whatever the controversy is. And they didn't
really do a lot of investigative reporting. And it was the same with me,
I can remember a specific incidents. Where there had been about 1970 or
'71. And I would have only been in the office for a year or two. Anyway,
Ronald Reagan, who was then Governor, was going to dedicate the A.D.
Edmonston Pumping Plant, which you haven't heard of, but I know that
you've seen. Because when you're heading up to Grapevine, you see those
pipes going uphill. That was the -- that was the combination of the state
water project. And the state aqueduct flows over the Tehachapi Mountain
Range. And pretty sure -- I'm pretty sure to this day it remains the
biggest water moving operation in the world, over a mountain range.
Which, of course, costs enormous electricity to pump that water uphill.
The Department of Water Resources in California, which runs the pumps
down there -- I think they're one of the, if not the biggest, they're one
of the top 10 electricity users in California to be -- you know, all the
water that comes out of the Sacramento Valley, and the Cascades, and
Mount Shasta, and all those Northern California [inaudible], when it gets
to the Delta, that's sea level, then we have some giant pumps at Tracy,
then we start pumping it uphill. Well, you get part way down the valley
and you get the Dos Amigos Pumping Plant if you've been on there, at I5.
There's a -- there's two giant canals on the West Side, the Delta-Mendota
Canal that was completed in 1951, and then the State Aqueduct San Luis
Canal, which is a joint federal/state venture. Anyway, so I'm down there
with Reagan inside this plant -- this pumping plant and they had these
giant turbines, that had apparently been built in Japan. And I did the
same as the rest of the media, you know, presented the story as a
engineering marvel, which it is. About, you know, how many cubic yards of
cement they poured and how much this -- that kind of a story, about look
at this great technological achievement. It was like putting the man on
the moon, right? What never crossed my mind was, you know, is it a good
idea to put 25 million people in the Southern California desert, and hope
for rain. That question never occurred to me at that time. The events at
the Kesterson National Wildlife, where they had the poisoning, that was
the triggering event that made me start to look at things completely
differently.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, just before we sort of pick up at the Kesterson
event, any other, you know, anecdotes from the -- your work in the '70s
on water or anything you wish to records.
>> Lloyd Carter: You know, I'm not -- in the '70s I don't remember too
much. But about two or three months before the Kesterson thing hit the
news, which I -- everybody thinks that I broke the first story, but I did
not, it was Deborah Blum, of "The Fresno Bee" who went on to Sacramento
being -- won a Pulitzer Prize prize, and now teaches at a university back
east. She was the first. But what I wrote, was a story, which every
person that walks into a grocery store thinks nowadays, which is -- you

bite into a piece of fruit, it's not sweet. And what is that? Well, you
know, we discover over the last 50 years, the University of California
system, private enterprise, they've been breeding, let's say tomatoes or
peaches, for shipping purposes, how not to bruise it up. And in fairness
to the agriculture industry, we have -- the citizenry wants flawless
fruit, not the slightly blemish, right? So they'll pick through. I know
on a trip I took to Italy, here 10, 15 years ago, the grocers over there,
or the fresh fruit -- you know, they have stalls in a lot of European
cities you can walk around. You don't -- the customers does not touch the
fruit. The gentleman that runs the fruit stand, he asks what you want and
he will pick fruit out for you. Which is an interesting -- in America, we
paw over, you know, everybody's handled everything on the top, there's
people that will dig down to get something off the bottom. So, it was a
rather abrupt transformation for me to, you know, generally write stories
from agriculturist position alone, without realizing, well are there
other players in this or, you know, the environmentalists, who basically
got ignored until the last 10 or 15 years because the world is falling
apart. So that's how, in terms of stories from the '70s, I distinctly
remember the one about no fruit. The other one I wrote, too was the Kern
National Wildlife Refuge in Kern County, it was supposed to be a
wetlands, but they never gave it any water. You know, it was sagebrush,
you know, and tumbleweeds out there. And I remember doing a story about
that. But then, like I say, Kesterson changed everything.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well and sort of getting into the Kesterson story
though. I mean, could you just give us sort of the background, as to,
basically, I guess on drainage and...
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah. Well basically, the West Side of San Joaquin
Valley, unlike the East Side -- and if you think about it, their soils
are completely different. East Side soils are eroded materials from the
Sierra, over eons of time washed out -- you know, the valley is about
5,000 foot deep, then you're down to bedrock. And sediments from both
sides over millions and millions of years. On the East Side, it was the
coast range material that eroded and -- or when they'd have flash floods
on these little creeks that are normally dry, they'd send a lot of stuff
down, and they filled the valley up. The East Side soils are based -- the
coast range is shale, it was at the bottom of the ocean. You know, you go
back far enough, and San Francisco Bay was actually from Redding to
Bakersfield. The Bay was much, much bigger and there is -- in shale you
will find selenium and some other trace elements. The belief is,
generally, that selenium gets out into the environment by being blown out
of volcanoes. It's created underneath the earth somewhere, and then when
a volcano blows it goes out. So those soils out there had selenium. When
they decided in the 1950s, actually in 1960, they passed a law in
congress and the voters in California passed a law, to build a state
aqueduct. That was to bring water to the West Side of the San Joaquin
Valley, and more importantly, take water over the hill to Southern
California, because the population was exploding down there. So selenium
is a trace element. A little tiny bit of it, you need it. It's a micronutrient, if there -- there are places in the world where there are
deficiencies and you have to add it to the diet; not only of humans, but
of livestock. But if you get a little more than you need, it causes very
damaging effects. So they say, as the micro-nutrient, the range of

nutritional necessity is more narrow than any other element that you take
or require to maintain the human body. Now, they didn't know this at the
time, but what they did know, is because it used to be a great inland
lake here, clays form under lakes and clays can be impermeable, or maybe
only semi-permeable. So, when they started irrigating on the West Side,
the water would hit the sub-terrain clay layers and then start to back
up. And that water would become salty. When you apply irrigation water to
a crop, about one-third evaporates in our valley heat, one-third goes
into the plant. And the intake of the plant is very little in terms of
minerals and trace elements and things like that. And the remaining third
of the water goes into the ground water, then shallow groundwater, and
it's now triple the salt load that it was of the -- when you first
applied that irrigation water. Only one-third of it’s left in your
shallow ground water, and it's three times as salty. So ocean water is
about 33,000 parts per million, salt. And they had places on the West
Side -- particularly where they would get rid of this excessive water by
building ponds, it would be 100,000 TDS. And the selenium levels would be
very high. Well, the solution to that, which was pushed by the West Side
folks, was to build a drainage canal up to the Delta and then flush the
toxins; which was not always selenium, but there was elevated levels of
arsenic, mercury, lead, some pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, anything
that ends in c-i-d-e. And so, the theory was, in those days, dilution is
the solution to the pollution. Well, prove-ably untrue. What was
happening, what they did, was the Bay Area said, "No. You don't get to
dump your dirty water on us, unless you can absolutely prove that it's
safe." This happened in the late '70s. Carla Bard, who's now deceased,
was the chairwoman of the State Water Board and that was the Board that
told the Bureau of Reclamation, which is the federal agency that supplies
water to Westlands, they had to show that all this water can be run up to
the Delta and safely disposed. Well they couldn't. So, in the meantime,
as a stopgap measure, because the farmers were saying, "Hey, you know,
our shallow ground water is coming up into the root zone and it's killing
our crops." So they said, "Okay, we'll have a stop gap measure, we'll go
half way to the Delta and we'll build some evaporation ponds." Above
ground, they just create little four- five-foot levy walls. And they
created these 100 acre, what they call cells, c-e-l-l. They had a 1,300 -1,280-acre piece of land. They built all these levies and they started
pumping the dirty water into these. One way to get rid of dirty water is
to evaporate it. But of course, remembering that all of the pollutants,
and toxins, and metals, and salts get left behind. So, they start -- the
problem one; where they located Kesterson, was in the middle of the
wintry grounds of the Pacific Flyway. Western Merced County up north of
Los Banos around there. There's about 50,000 acres of duck -- what they
call duck clubs, because people hunt ducks. And they do that in the
winter, and then in the summertime you can actually grow crops or graze
cattle, you know, so, as old Martin Linton [assumed spelling] used to
say, "You can have your ice cream and your cake, both." You get to use it
as hunting and then -- well what happened to Kesterson, this is about -they started running some drain water into Kesterson in 1979. But it was
mixed with -- they diluted it with some fresh water, flushed it out. And
if you remember in '77-'79 was when we had that real severe drought. Well
then, in 19 -- it was either 1980 or 1981, they started running fullstrength drainage water up to the ponds at Kesterson. Which they had
built a few years earlier and had filled with fresh water, so it was like

a magnet for wildlife. Guys said -- the hunters would say -- and you
could hunt on the Kesterson Reservoir too, there were birds everywhere.
Well, when they started with the full strength drain water in '81, first
thing that happened was all the fish in the ponds died. That should have
been enough of a warning. But then they launched another study. The
government loves studies, as long as they can put off making hard
decisions. And they did a study of the birds that were nesting around the
ponds. And they cracked open an egg, Felix Smith, who was the whistleblower on all this for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He opened an
egg, and there was this little crippled, deformity birds. No wings. They
opened a bunch of the eggs. No wings, no feet. The brain protruding out
of the skull case, grotesque deformities. They called it the thalidomide
scandal of the animal world. Thalidomide being the fertility drug that
caused infants to lose their arms and legs. So, when they first
discovered that the -- all the fish had been killed and that the birds
were poisoned, James Watt was our Secretary of Interior at that time,
older people will recognize his name as the anti-environmentalist. He
thought that Jesus was going to beam down anyway, any day, so that we
could go, you know, go ahead and trash the planet because we were going
to -- we were going to go sky-ward. So they kept it -- this was the
spring of '83 when they discovered -- and then they went and did lab
tests and everything. These birds were loaded with selenium. Well, it’s
bio-accumulative. I learned a lot of new terminology, you start, it moves
into the algae and little tiny plant and then it moves -- and pretty soon
it's in through the insects. Then it gets into the small fish, then it
gets into the small animals. And each level that goes up the food chain,
it gets stronger. So -- actually the, Deborah Blum, September 21, 1983,
she writes this story. Felix Smith had leaked her on the information,
because Watt had ordered a clampdown. Remember, the bird's deformities
were discovered in the spring of '83. She wrote her story several months
later, when Felix Smith was so frustrated that his -- first of all, they
knew they had a poison environment down there around Kesterson. People
used to actually fish there, and in the ponds and stuff, you know, you
needed to let the public know. This is a scary and dangerous place, don't
go near there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Felix Smith was, you said he was a biologist at the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?
>> Lloyd Carter: Correct. Yeah. He and Harry Ohlendorf, who was another
biologist; they're the ones that discovered the bird deformities. And the
Reagan Interior Department tried to suppress that information, until
Felix leaked it to Deborah. So she wrote a story in "The Bee." And then
the Bureau spokesman said, "Well, you know, it's just a minor technical
problem, we'll get it all straightened out." And then on Thanksgiving
weekend of that year, the "San Jose Mercury News" did a big -- huge front
page story and showed pictures of these deformed embryos -- bird embryos.
I think I need a shot of water [Laughter]. This is a long story.
>> Thomas Holyoke: It is a long story. Good story.
>> Lloyd Carter: Cut me off.

>> Thomas Holyoke: No. This is -- we'd like to get as much of the story
as is actually -- as we possibly can.
>> Lloyd Carter: It’s history, yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah. It's -- I think it's -- we still not wellremembered or even well...
>> Lloyd Carter: Hey. I speak all the time at college classes and
sometimes high school. And I ask -- I spoke at Davis, Tuesday. UC Davis,
that's two environmental science classes. I asked them, how many of you
have heard of Kesterson? Out of a room of about 35 students, two -- two
of them knew. I was surprised at that, because sometimes I go speak, and
not a one. Then I realize, well, they weren't even born, you know, this
is like what happened? Do I know what happened in 1938, which is 10 years
before I was born? I don't have a clue. So anyway, the "San Jose Mercury
News" did a big, huge story and the feces hit the fan and all of the
sudden the media was a rush. I still had not got -- and I can't remember
why, but I hadn't got very involved in the story. We had a two-man
office. And what the wire service will do a lot of times is rewrite a
newspaper story, give the newspaper credit, but rewrite it and condense
it and put it on the wire. Well, in the spring of 1984, I met Jim and
Karen Klaus, both Stanford PhD's. They had -- as fate would have it, they
had a cattle ranch, immediately next door to Kesterson. And they raised
these prize bulls, which cost a fortune. And a couple of their animals
died. And they -- and there's a -- when you get selenium poisoning in
livestock and cattle, they develop symptoms of what they call the blind
staggers. It's like whatever's poisoning them, they can't -- you know,
they stagger around and they can't see. And Jim Klaus talked to his
neighbors, the Schwab [assumed spelling] brothers on one side, and Frank
and Jeanette Freitas [assumed spelling] were on another side of the
ponds, and they were having cattle get sick. And Jeanette Freitas told me
that her lambs, she had some lambs that she was raising -- I mean she had
some sheep that were pregnant and the sheep aborted their pregnancies.
And she said the one thing [inaudible]. So anyway I meet Jim Klaus and
they've already been in to this for several weeks, and they realizing the
government's got a huge, giant toxic waste pit out here and there's -there not -- there's no standard, it's moving down into the groundwater,
which moves to the low spot in the valley, which is the San Joaquin
River, obviously. So, I drove out there. And I think the first time I
talked to Jim Klaus, I remember, it was April Fool's Day. So I think
within a day or two I drove -- I drove out to Kesterson. And the first
thing, when I got out of my car, was the overwhelming smell of sulfur, or
rotten eggs. Because selenium exudes a sulfurous smell. And the other
thing I noticed was there was dead birds everywhere on the ponds. I mean
hundreds.
>> Thomas Holyoke: It was that obvious?
>> Lloyd Carter: Oh yeah. Absolutely it was a -- so then I get out of my
car, there's dead birds laying on the ground around their front yard, the
Frietas's front yard. Because they're only like, maybe 125 feet from the
ponds. And I got -- I walked up to the door and there was a dead bird on
the porch. I'll never forget it. It was a scene right out of Hitchcock's

"The Birds" movie. I'm looking at this thing, and it's surreal. That was
my "ah-ha" moment. And Jeanette opened the door and she said "Welcome to
my world." And I said, "This is unbelievable." I said, "I had no idea."
And I was at UPI at that time, right? Now I've got -- I've already been a
newsman for 14 and a half years. And I said -- and I talked to the
Klaus's they said, "The government's trying to cover this up. Here's the
documents." So I started writing stories, virtually every day. I'll go
back and some time, you know, and look through my anchor's box of clips
and I said, "We've got to do more on this." You know? "We need a national
perspective." So UPI in those days, had an investigative team of their
crack reporters in Washington, DC. And there was a guy named Gregg
Gordon, big tall guy, and a great investigative journalist. Which, when
people say investigative journalist, I always say, "A journalist should
be an investigator." [Laughter] This is redundant, man -- you can -- you
know, you don't have to -- because he's already -- a good reporter is
already an investigator, that's a basic premise. So, over the next few
months, the pressure kept building, building, building. And there was -we -- I was doing these stories, showing how they tried to cover it up,
and they suppressed data and all of these things. Well then, Greg and I,
in August of 1984, we did a five-part series called, "Poison in the
Valley." All about the West Side, and basically what they had been doing
is washing their soils clean of toxins and sending them north, either in
the San Luis Drain, which in those days, they let them dump -- when the
ponds got full one year, they let them -- and there was a big rain event
and they were in danger of overflowing, they let them dump a big slug of
poison into the river. And they didn't tell anybody, there was no press
release. They were doing all of this under the cover of darkness.
>> Thomas Holyoke: That would be the San Joaquin River?
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh.
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah, well there's a connector link at the end of where
the ponds are, there's an old slough that runs over to the river, about
two miles away. And the Freitas ranch was sandwiched in between the
eastern side of the Kesterson ponds and the river. So all of that
poisonous water in the ponds that had percolated down into the soil was
migrating, you know, water follows the law of gravity, always seeks the
lowest spot. And their cattle were dying. Jim Klaus said he went to the
government to complain and they told him, "It's your farming practices
that are causing your cow -- your bulls to die." So after that, in the
September of '84, after our series -- oh, that five-part series, front
page in a lot of newspapers around the country. They ran the whole
series. Here's who didn't run it, the "Los Angeles Times" didn't run it,
"San Diego Tribune" didn't run it, "The Fresno Bee" didn't run it. It was
all groundbreaking stuff and -- and so the cat was out of the bag. Well,
then Congress gets involved and they're going to -- and the State Water
Board, the Klaus, Jim and Karen Klaus, the cattle ranchers, they filed a
complaint with the Regional Board and, you know, that this was a public
nuisance and that they had to shut it down. Well, here's a typical trick
of the Regional Board, when they have a hot issue, here in the valley,
they hold their hearing on it in Redding [Laughter]. And when something's

going on in the Northern Sacramento Valley, they hold the hearing in
Bakersfield. So the hearing for Kesterson was in Redding. And UPI still
had some money in those days, so they flew me to Redding to cover the
Regional Board Meeting on the Klaus's. And I was the only reporter there.
No one else in the media would even bothered. The Klaus's got up and put
on a one to two hour presentation; documentation, just boxes of
materials. I thought you cannot argue with these people, everything they
say is backed up by -- well, I'm looking around at the board members -at the Regional Board members. There's two of them that dozed off during
the Klaus presentation. Now, we've all dozed off at certain points, maybe
in a boring meeting, but you know that really bothered me. So when the
Klaus's finished their presentation, the lawyers for the West Side guys;
both Westlands and the water districts to the north said, "You can't halt
our drainage, this will cost us money." That was their argument. That it
would be -- it would cost money. And so the Regional Board voted
unanimously to back the growers. They just -- they shut the Klaus's down.
Well, the remedy is to appeal to the next level. So they went to the
State Board. The State Board held a series of hearings and on February
5th they issued a -- of 1985, they issued a cleanup order for Kesterson.
The bureau had three years to clean it up, or they were going to shut it
down. In the meantime, there is a -- by now its national news. And they
got a hold of -- the Klaus's got in touch with Ed Bradley of "60
Minutes," who I talked to and met. In fact, Ed Bradley called me and he
said, "Is this guy Klaus, you know, on the level? Because he's making
some pretty wild charges." I said, "He's right on the money." So the
weekend before -- well the big deal with the -- Donald Hodel, who then
was Secretary of Chair, they shut down the ponds. They shut down
Kesterson on March 15, 1985, The Ides of March -- which had always struck
me that was -- but the weekend before that they did that, "60 Minutes,"
"The New York Times," and "The Washington Post," well the newspapers had
front page stories. And "60 Minutes" did a, Ed Bradly did a devastating - they showed the government -- the Regional Director of the Fish and
Wildlife Service. The said -- now at this time there was only about 240
growers in Westland's and Ed Bradley he had, David Houston was the name
of the Regional Director of the Bureau. He was beating up this redhead;
Ed was really punching at him. He said -- now he said, "How much is it
going to cost to solve this drainage problem?" He -- Ed Bradley asked
that of David Houston. And David Houston says, "Well only between $1 and
$13 billion.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Billion dollars?
>> Lloyd Carter: And Ed Bradly says, "Now I know, and, you know, these
240 farmers ain't going to come up with $13 billion." Houston just kind
of shrugged. Well the irony of course -- that was 29 years ago. They now
have a proposal after, literally, three decades of stall and delay. And,
you know, when, on March 15 of '85 when the Secretary of the Chair closed
Kesterson, he ordered it shut down and water deliveries cutoff. Then,
they negotiated a compromise, they agreed to give them more time to come
up with a solution. Well they've now had 29 years working on the problem.
And the current price tag of drainage -- how to handle this drain water,
that's generated by these West Side irrigation districts is, $2.7
billion. There's now about 600 growers in Westland's, although nobody's
ever seen a list of who the growers are. Well, they're not going to --

the federal government is not going to fork over $2.7 billion to help 600
guys. It's a problem that in -- Floyd Dominy who was the legendary leader
of the Bureau of Reclamation in the '50 and '60s, Mark Reisner talks
about him in the best book on water, "Cadillac Desert," which they later
did a documentary on public television and they interviewed Floyd Dominy
and he said that, "Kesterson" -- or not Kesterson "The Westlands was the
worst mistake he'd ever made in allowing them to get water before they
had the drainage thing worked out.
>> Thomas Holyoke: The Bureau of Reclamation was supposed to build both
the -- San Luis unit.
>> Lloyd Carter: Well they did yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: With the reservoir, and the canal system, and the
drainage system? That was all supposed to be built at the same time?
>> Lloyd Carter: Right. Yeah -- or -- actually with the exact language of
the San Luis Act, and the godfather of that was our late Congressman,
Bernie Sisk. He was in Congress from '54 -'78. He -- and by the way, when
he was pitching this project on the floor of Congress, you know, I'll
send you the Congressional Record if you want. He said that there would
be 6,000 family farmers. You know, the idea was to break-up the
Westlands. They had, the Giffens had 100,000 acres. There was mega-farms
out there. And for getting the chief water, they were supposed to sell
off excess land, and everybody got cheap water for 160 acres. You can
make a living on 160 acres; believe me, as a farmer. So, well anyway it
was a long battle and The National Land for People, and George Ballis
fought these guys, because they didn't want to break up their holdings.
Southern Pacific Railroad had 106,000 acres in Westlands. They were
always buying the same -- which they leased out to the farming interest.
Eventually, that got sold off. But anyway, there were supposed to be
6,000 family farms out there. And now we have, supposedly, 600. At the
time I was writing in Kesterson, there was 240 and 40 people controlled
the district. Because the voting patterns in those districts, they elect
directors and they have taxing powers. They're actually a form of
government, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So I understand it in a water district, political
power is based on assessed value of property?
>> Lloyd Carter: Correct, now here's a little distinction I would have
never noticed. If it says Fresno Irrigation District, that's one man, one
vote. If it says X water district, Westland Water District, when you have
the word water in the title, that was the forces that fought back and
wanted to keep the big holdings going. And in Westlands, the richest
people get the most votes. That's why you rarely see a lot of turnover,
and, you know, anybody, a renegade that wants to run, if he's bucking the
system, he has no chance. Because amongst the people in Westlands, was
the legendary J.G. Boswell, who had 23,000 acres in Westlands, and
175,000 in the Tulare Basin. Our local author, Mark Arax wrote a book
about Boswell, called "The King of California." Very fascinating.

>> Thomas Holyoke: You know, we're actually in the process of trying to
get Mark to do what you're doing right now.
>> Lloyd Carter: Oh. Good. Yeah, yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Just to kind of get back to drainage. The Bureau of
Reclamation was supposed to build a drainage system at the same time it
builds, you know, the San Luis Reservoir and the distribution.
>> Lloyd Carter: Oh yeah. And I was going to tell you about the exact
language of the act said, "Construction shall not commence until the
Secretary has received adequate assurances that there's a comprehensive
drainage plant. And the courts ruled that that was okay, even though the
drainage system, as it was, should have been built in the early '60s,
which is 50 years ago now. So even in the wake of Kesterson, now it's
been, what? 30 years and they still have no drainage solution. I mean
it's like Dickson's, "Bleak House." You know, the lawsuit goes on
forever.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, why did the Bureau settle on Kesterson in the
first place, I understand they were legally forbidden from dumping the
water all the way...
>> Lloyd Carter: Right and they had to get -- and they were already -- it
was already impacting crop production. They were already getting some
water-logged lands. So they needed a stopgap measure and they came up
with this idea of drainage ponds -- evaporation ponds, I should say. And,
you know, what part of their current solution is, the $2.7 billion plan,
more evaporation ponds. I can't make this up, man, it's like "Alice in
Wonderland." Now the federal -- because of a historical accident, the
Federal Water Districts that I mentioned that Delta-Mendota Canal built
in 1951. They were always allowed to dump their drain water, you know,
they'd irrigate whatever ran off the top of the fields, which would
usually pick up the pesticides and herbicides, would just flow -- they'd
find the nearest ditch, all the ditches head to the river and then they
were pumping out their shallow groundwater, which was not quite as toxic
as the Westlands, but still toxic. They were dumping that in the river.
So to this day, here we are in 2014, the grasslands -- so-called
grasslands drainers north of the Westlands are still dumping in the
river. But supposedly by 2019, which will have given them a 30 year pass
on solving their problem and -- you know, not polluting the river.
They're not -- children and women -- and pregnant women are not supposed
to eat fish caught in that river -- in Merced County. Well, so the
grasslands drainers, just last week, they wrote the Regional Board, said,
"Well, what we'd like to do -- we know we have to cut-off all flows into
the river by 2019." And you mark my words in 2019, they'll get another
five or ten year extension, which is what the Regional Board always does
with polluters, it gives them a-- it -- oh, and they want to dump their
water onto the Broadview Water District. Now Broadview is part of the San
Luis unit. You know, the gorilla -- the 800-pound gorilla was the
Westlands. Then you had the San Luis, Panoche, Petacko [assumed
spelling], and Broadview -- I'm pretty sure, though I might have missed
one in there. Well, Broadview went out of production years ago, because
it got salted up. And the Westlands actually incorporated it because then

they wanted the west -- they wanted Broadview's water contract. So these
drainers in the grasslands area now, the Delta-Mendota service areas -farmers, they want to run their water down to Broadview and dump it
there. And that -- well, there'll be standing water on the ground, which
will attract birds. You have -- you have the same phenomenon. They want
to dump it somewhere, where it will accumulate and they will evaporate
the water off, that Broadview will become a dead zone, because all the
minerals and toxins are being left behind when you evaporate the water.
And so these ponds, these evaporation ponds, which are operating in the
Tulare Basin by Boswell, you know, you'll get a three foot thick layer of
salt over the years. And they said if you keep bringing in the water from
Northern California, which in the Delta it picks up because sea water can
intrude into -- you know, when you cut down the flows, the seawater comes
in. People always say water's being wasted to the sea. That water is
necessary to push the saltwater coming from the bay, San Francisco Bay
and the ocean out, or else it will come in and everybody, or all the
farmers around here kicking and screaming about their water. There's
500,000 acres of farmland in the Delta. Those farmers have a superior
claim to that water. You never hear of -- you know, the only discussion
you hear here is the two inch smelt -- they call it a bait fish.
Congressman Nunes and that, you know, this battle is about farmers trying
to feed the world versus this bait fish. No mention of the salmon
industry, which it's also destroying, no mention of the Delta farmers, no
mention of the tribes in Northern California that have seen their lands,
you know, taken away from them and their water stolen. That's one of the
things about here in the Valley, you know, they say they last thing a
fish discovers is water. People don't really think about this giant
agricultural dynasty we've built down here man, there's costs associated
with that. And no we don't have a right. All the farmers in the Westlands
have, is the ability to buy water from their water district, which is
Westlands. The way it works in the hierarchy is, the Bureau of
Reclamation has a permit from the State Water Board, to divert so much
water from the rivers, to supply all of its irrigation districts. So, the
Bureau sells the water that they get for free. You look at that Sierra
snowpack every winter -- well a normal one, not this year. And you -you've got a couple billion dollars' worth of water that's owned by the
public. That water flows into private hands by and large. And, so what
are you going to do? You know.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I just got a few questions to back up the Kesterson
matter.
>> Lloyd Carter: Sure, okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: When the whole disaster was unfolding, you sort of
talked a bit about what the Bureau's reaction was. What was -- what was
the reaction of the Westlands, how did they treat this whole incident, or
did they go hide?
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, you know, up to that point, Westlands pretty much
got their way. Whatever the issue is, they had enough political clout
that they would usually prevail. A good example, being The National Land
for People lawsuit, which said, "You've got to breakup these big
holdings. That's what the whole program was about." And so they took them

to court, well it's like they say, if some special interest industry
doesn't like a law, they legalize the crime. So what -- the agricultural
interest, not only in the Westlands and in California, but in the western
U.S., they went to Congress and they passed the Reclamation Reform Act in
-- 1982. What it did -- the two bedrock principles of the reclamation law
up to that time was that one; you had to live on your farm, residency
requirement. Two; you could only get 160 acres of water. Well, they had
actually changed that before by saying you get 160 acres for husband and
wife. Well, the '82 law, it got rid of the residency requirement and then
it bumped up the acreage limitation to 960 acres. And that -- and
everybody in the family gets to put in for 960. So like the Wolfe family,
very well known in the Westlands. There's the patriarch, Jack, who I
interviewed back in the day. And I think he had like six kids and there's
20 grand kids. They have a "family farm" of 26,000 acres. You know?
Anywhere else in the world, this would be like a giant estate right? So
they were panicked. They realized that without drainage -- and it's all
coming to pass anyway. The last 30 years they've had no drainage, well
they're low-lying lands, you know, the West Side is a slope up to the
coast range, down to the trough of the valley where the river runs. They
are, are -- have salted up 100,000 acres. You might remember it's been a
decade ago now, but four prominent families, including, the family of
Bill Jones, who is our local Assemblyman, State Senator. I served on the
Student Senate here at Fresno State in the early '70s with Bill. And when
that [inaudible] saw, you know, I've known these guys for 40 years now,
I've always like Bill, he was always fair with me, but some of his fellow
farmers out there weren't as reasonable as he was. Bill was always a
pretty calm guy. So they knew, without any drain, it's going to come to a
bad end just like Mesopotamia did. I told people during the Iraq war, I
said. "Look at that bleak, bleak desert out there." I said, "That's the
San Joaquin Valley of 3,000 years ago." [Laughter] And these great
desert empire civilizations, they salt up their land. Salinization is a
worldwide phenomenon. It's certainly not happening just in the Westlands.
They don't have a solution. You want to know what I think? They want to
get a long term contract for water. And the water is the new cash crop.
The water becomes more valuable than the crop produced in some cases. And
if their land keeps going out of production, they'll just start selling
water rights. We had a good example of that in the State Water Project
Service area, which is Kings County and Kern County. There was a little
water district, called Dudley Ridge? You probably never heard of it.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, I think I heard it in the context that you're
going to.
>> Lloyd Carter: Oh yeah. Well the one reason you might of heard of it
was because one of the "growers" in there, he's a Silicon Valley real
estate developer, named John Vidovich, he sold off 12 and a half thousand
acre-feet of his contract supply. Now there's a lot of misunderstanding
in the -- about rights -- water rights. You know, I taught water law.
It's very complicated. But what he -- what he was asking -- he wanted to
sell -- he has the right through his district's contract, to buy water
from the state if it's available. And there's some years when they only
get like 5 or 10%. Well, he sold 12 and a half thousand acre-feet
interest in the contract to buy water from the state to the Mojave Water
District, which is down in Riverside County, in San Bernardino County

where they're building one subdivision after another out on the desert.
They have to -- because of state law, they have to show that they have a
water supply for these new homes, that's last more than 3 years, you
know. They should -- if the government had any gumption, they'd say, "If
you're going to build a 500 home subdivision, you've got to show where
the water's coming from for the next 50 years. If you can't show it, you
don't get to build." So he sold, to them, which was front page news all
over the state, this block of water -- well it's actually, it's not water
at all, it's paper water, it doesn't really exist this year. He sold it
to Mojave for $73 million. The other prominent grower in this Dudley
Ridge Water District is Beverly Hills billionaire, Stewart Resnick,
Stewart and Lynda Resnick. Their interest in that contract is about
double -- or maybe even like two and a half more than Vidovich's was. So
Stewart Resnick, the billionaire, who controls the current water bank,
that's a whole other big long story. His water rights in Dudley Ridge
alone are worth about $175 million. And before they had the so-called
1994 Monterey agreements, which modified the state water contract, you
couldn't do that. But now, they're letting these guys cannibalize their
water contracts and selling off pieces and making big money.
>> Thomas Holyoke: You know.
>> Lloyd Carter: There is -- go ahead.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well I assume that, you know, 2014 when we're doing
this interview, during one of California's possibly most severe droughts
in quite a number of years.
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah, you know, speaking of droughts -- oh go ahead.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh, I was just going to say, I would think the, you
know, demand for water, would vastly increase the price for water, would
increase the incentive for people who have water to sell water, I would - is going to dramatically increase.
>> Lloyd Carter: There's a famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, he says,
"No one knows the worth of water until the well runs dry." You know, I'm
always kind of taking a big picture look at where's all this going? It's
coming to a bad end. Starting with our groundwater. It's both depleted,
and polluted. There are tens of thousands of people in this valley who
can't trust their drinking water. It's got a weird odors. You know, it
reminds me in the news last month has been that chemical spill in West
Virginia river, cutting off drinking water from 200,000. There's over a
million people in California that do not have clean drinking water. Now
does anyone notice how all the public drinking fountains have
disappeared. You can't find one. There's a few of them, but I mean,
they're not like they used to be. And there's a whole gigantic $40
billion worldwide industry of bottled water. We've got all these plastic
bottles that everybody -- and what are we going to do though? It's a
convenience thing, right? So what is the future for -- the one point that
nobody talks about, especially in the political world how bit -- how
large -- how many people do we want in California? Do we want to go 500
million? Oh people say, "Well that's too much." Well, where do you draw
the line? Nobody draws the line. We've already got -- we're like 37

million, 38 million people now right? It turns out that California is
about the same size as Japan. They're both about 100 million acres.
There's 160 million people in Japan. So we could, you know, 50 years from
now, maybe Fresno will be six million people. But and the...
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well it seems to be a simplistic growth -- I mean idea
that growth is good.
>> Lloyd Carter: Growth is good right.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Both in population and apparently in geographic scope
of cities.
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, my answer is that's cancer's motto, "Growth is
good." And that's, you know, but what's really shocking to me and we're
all so dulled by, I guess all of the chaos going on in the world is that
one out of six kids in this valley has asthma. And like the adult
population, it's like 30-40% of us have respiratory problems. I know
every time I leave the state, when I come back into the valley my -- I
start gunking up. And they talk on the local news about pollen. Well,
that's probably part of it, but that's not all of it. There's a lot of -there's a lot of stuff in our air. If you drive up in the Sierra and look
down on the valley you see this brown pall, you know, so we're guinea
pigs. This is the most chemically drenched valley in the history of the
world. We use phenomenal amounts of, of pesticides, fungicides,
herbicides. It's non-sustainable.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Some of the other activism work you do, let's sort of
get to that. Although, let's -- well I just have one other question about
Kesterson. Kesterson, you said, closed down in '85. The Department
Interior ordered it close in '85.
>> Lloyd Carter: Right.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, what's happened to Kesterson since?
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, in the immediate wake of Kesterson, they had to -first of all they got -- when they negotiated a compromise, remember
Secretary of the Chair shut it down and shut off their water. Well, all
chaos broke and they sent a contingent back to Washington. And the
Interior Department said, "Okay, we'll give you until next year to clean
it up." Well what -- they plan they decided on, was they brought in a
million cubic yards of fill dirt and they knocked down the levy walls and
then they covered it with a big mound of -- we always joked about it was
the cover-up of the cover-up. So what has happened in the intervening
three decades now -- so they finally shut of the flows to '86 and they
had the -- Jeanette Freitas was still living out there. They finally
moved into town. There was this huge dust cloud of these big tractors
trucks bringing in, you know, it was this out of this -- some science
fiction movie. They were covering -- well what happens in the fall, the
duck clubs who were guaranteed 50,000 acre feet of water flood -- what
they say, what the call a flood up their duck clubs. You know, they've
got vegetation going, they got these -- what do they call those little
things where they hide in that they shoot at the birds?

>> Thomas Holyoke: A blind?
>> Lloyd Carter: A blind, yeah. Which this was one of the premier areas
for duck hunting; Clark Gable [assumed spelling], and there was a lot of
famous people, Bing Crosby, they'd all fish -- fish -- they hunted ducks
in the grasslands area, so it was a lush terrain. And so they brought in
all the fill dirt. And what happens though is when they flood the
adjacent duck clubs, the groundwater raises, and so water can actually
become to the surface, not to be ponds, but, you know, moisture. Well,
it's still a lethal environment for small critters because of the
selenium. It's still there and it's going to be there for hundreds of
years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's a wildlife preserve though still right?
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah. Well, it started as Kesterson Reservoir, which was
a Bureau of Reclamation facility. Then somebody got the bright idea, "Hey
let's call it a wildlife refuge." You know, this pit from hell that
kills. So they did -- and so yes, it is now a national wildlife refuge
once again. But there was a period in there, where they were going to
change -- they were going to try to get rid of the name Kesterson, such
a, you know. So they were going to call it -- they had several refuges in
the area. They were just going to call them just the San Luis Refuge
Complex. But they still, locally, refer to it as Kesterson. But, you
know, one good thing that did come out of that was the federal government
acquired a lot of land in that area for a wetlands habitat. So they
actually ended up -- and they got a guaranteed water supply of fresh
water. But the drainage problem remains. You know, it won't go away and
you got to -- I think it's like 44 railroad cars of salt a day come into
the valley in the state Aqueduct of the Delta-Mendota Canal. And it's
water that -- when you're bringing the Sacramento River south and coming
through the Delta, it will pick up salts from the ocean. The water
quality is about -- can be up 3-400 parts per million TDS, which is total
dissolved solids. And for comparison, the San Joaquin River is 50 parts
per million TDS. Because it's basically pure snow melt and it's running
over granite, which doesn't -- and so it doesn't pick up a lot of salt.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I understand that before he retired, Federal Judge
Oliver Wanger ordered the Bureau of Reclamation to finish the drainage
project in one way or another.
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, yes he did and his opinion got appealed -- his
opinion got appealed. Part of it, and this is where the Ninth Circuit,
they affirmed Judge Wanger in part, and they overruled him on some other
points. But what they said was, "Look the Bureau of Reclamation should be
free to explore other alternatives." Actually what Judge Wanger ordered
was that the Bureau had an obligation to apply to the state for a permit
to finish building the San Luis Drain. Because, you know, they were back
from --since the 1950s, when the project was first conceived, they always
knew they were going to have a small river of poisonous water, and that
the way to get rid of it was to build a canal. Their original canal was
going to be Earthen, only like $7 million, in 1955 dollars, which still
wouldn't have been very expensive. If you bought a bile of land and you

got -- well you can't have poisonous water leaking out of a dirt canal
onto the adjacent property. So then they decided to make the canal -- the
San Luis Drain, make is cement canal. Which bumps up, I don't know, they
spent like 70-$80 million to build a drain and they -- of course they
abandoned it -- they abandoned most of it. There's a portion of it that
the grasslands drainers that I told you about, they use that to funnel
their water toward the river. But from that portion back all the way down
south for 50 miles, the drain, pretty much sits empty. What it does do is
-- I forget the term, like hydrostatic action or something. It's these -the sides of the drain canal are these eight-foot cement plates. Well,
when they irrigate the fields adjacent, the lateral -- the lateral
pressure from -- hydrostatic pressure, whatever the term they use, those
plates buckle and break. So they built this magnificent little canal that
you'd think they could use for fresh water, if nothing else. But on the
bottom of the San Luis Drain, there's sediments that accumulate, and they
did tests at the time of Kesterson, and it was -- exceeded the threshold
of toxic waste, whatever they had it. You know, it’s dangerous, its why
if you drive -- when you drive through Firebaugh and cross the big canals
out there. There's two big canals and then there's this smaller one where
there's a lot of vegetation growing and it looks like it's empty, except
there's birds down in there. I've got photos of big egrets and birds
utilizing that poisonous canal. And so here we are 30 years down,
nobody's monitoring that San Luis Drain canal. It just sits out there,
it's toxic. It's a linear toxic waste pit that runs for 50 miles. And I
ran into a person from the Bureau the other day, I said, "What are you
guys going to do with the drain?" I said "You're just letting it
crumble." He said "Well, we can't afford the water to keep," -- and
that's the way you prevent the plates from buckling, if you've got water
in the canal, it neutralizes that pressure from lateral movement and, you
know, of applied irrigation water.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Sure.
>> Lloyd Carter: But it was a mess from the start to the finish. And
another portion that I haven't told you about, was the original project
boundaries were about 150,000 acres smaller than the current Westlands.
They went out there and analyzed the soils and they -- the federal
government, they said, "Okay, we're going to provide for this land, this
land up here," which is basically up toward I5 and the coast range. All
that land right there was classified by the government in the '50s as
non-irrigable, meaning too salty of land. Well, the landholders up there,
which included the Southern Pacific Railroad, they didn't like that at
all, so they organized a water district under California law, the West
Plain's Storage District, and then they merged with the Westlands Water
District. And they called, the original Westlands was area one, this one
was area two. Well the land along the river, is always the land anywhere
in the world, right? So, Mendota for a hundred years had been an
incredible farming area. When they started irrigating those up-slope
lands, everything ground waters moving down toward the troth, so Mendota,
it ruined their groundwater. They couldn't use their groundwater for
drinking water and now they had to build a pipeline from the state
Aqueduct. The bigger irony to me is that if you've put enough water on
those soils -- area two up by the coast range, you'll flush out most of
the salts and, but you push them downstream. So what was originally the

prime farmland got salted out, and continues to be as I speak. And
they've made this crappy land that's up there on top, is now the best -you know, it's always good to be higher up on the hill if you've got that
kind of salinization thing going on.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, I gather that for you, personally, Kesterson was a
-- sort of a trans-formative moment.
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah. It was. It made me realize, where does this all
end? Where is it all going? Are we going to trash every river in
California? I mean Congressman Nunes' bill said, that is in the news
right now, said they can drain the Delta dry. Now that's a -- you know, I
used to tell people from back east, talking about the San Joaquin River,
which we haven't mentioned it -- I said, "You know, out west, when they
diverted the second biggest river in California for farmers." You know,
these are people picturing the Mississippi River. They're saying, "No,
you don't mean they took -- they didn't take the whole river, they take,"
I said, "No, they took the whole river." Not only did they take the whole
river, think about it, every river coming out of the Sierra from the Kern
River, to the Kaweah, and the St. Johns', the Kings, the San Joaquin, the
Fresno, the Chowchilla, the Merced River, the Stanislaus River,
Mokelumne, all of those rivers are consumed in their entirety, which
basically takes care of agriculture on the East Side of the valley. So
even though there's a lot of kicking and screaming about our drought, as
there probably should be, the East Side guys, are -- can pump their
ground water this year. But what we can do, in those last two years the
drought -- Westlands is pumping 500,000 acre feet of water, we know we're
over drafting our aquifer in this valley. We're taking out more than
nature puts back in, which, by the way, is causing a subsidence problem.
When you pump groundwater out, the soil particles compact. And then you
reduce your storage space in the ground. And that -- that's what's going
on and it's going to -- when you have -- we've already had, there's a
famous photo, I think I've got it on my website, of some guys holding a
sign where the water table -- where the land was in 1925 and where it was
in the '60s and it had dropped 30 feet. The whole countryside. This is
the greatest subsidence in the history of the world.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I've got that picture too.
>> Lloyd Carter: And now they're afraid of -- it's going to break the -it's going to cause problems for the state Aqueduct and the Delta-Mendota
Canal. When the land drops, you know, your canal cracks and you get
leakage and all kinds of things happens. You can disrupt underground gas
pipelines and oil pipelines. It's a mess. But, you know, nobody thinks -in America when nobody thinks past this year, next year. The long -what's the long range planning? How many people do we put in California?
You know, how much water, how -- do we kill every river? What we're doing
in California is we're exporting our rivers, we turn them into almonds,
or we turn them into some other crop. Break time.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And a lot of those almond stuff are -- rather than
stay here, a lot of that's primarily exported to China, I believe, or
Asia generally.

>> Lloyd Carter: Right. Well, the starving people in Africa and other
parts of the world aren't buying $4.00 a pound almonds. But, you know
what -- in the Westlands, knowing -- I remember when I was just -- when I
was a kid out there, first getting in Kesterson, I had an old Westlands
guy tell me, he said, "You know, this is all coming to an end." He said,
"This will not last." He said, "There's going to be a 10 year drought."
Well then that story came out in the paper a couple of weeks ago, "The
Bee" picked up from the "San Jose Mercury News," we had a drought for 200
years that began in 850 A.D. and then that followed-- there followed 50
years of higher than average, which would have caused flooding, this is
from tree ring studies, then following that 50 years of too much, then
when they had another 150 years of drought. That story said that this
past century, in which we've made all our water allocation calculations,
you know, about how much do we have in the system? How much can we take
out? This century was the wettest century in California in the last 7,000
years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh.
>> Lloyd Carter: So it's going to -- you know, here we are. I don't know
what the percentage is, it's a significant percentage, still flood
irrigates in this valley like the Mesopotamians did. You have massive
evaporative loss of water when you put it on the ground and its 109
degrees outside. I got curious, and this would be a great project for
some kids at Fresno State, what's the evaporative loss off of Millerton
Lake.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I've asked that question myself, and have not been
able to get a straight answer, even from the Bureau of Reclamation. I
asked them.
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, I got an answer somewhere and the guy told me how
they calculate it. Obviously it depends what the temperature is on a
given day. You can evaporate an inch of water off that lake then you can
calculate with all the [inaudible], anyway they said that there was
enough water to meet the needs of a -- domestic needs of a city of 75,000
people. Goes up into the air as vapor. Now think about all of the dams up
and down the foothills of the Sierra, Lake Isabella, you've got the, I
don't know what they call the dams on the Kaweah, and the Tule Rivers,
Pine Flat Dam, what's the -- hidden, there's the hidden dam in Madera
County, there's dams on the, you know. What is the evaporative loss just
in this valley and including the surrounding mountain ranges?
>> Thomas Holyoke: Which kind of suggests that when a lot of interests
around here call for more storage, when they say more storage, I gather
they tend to mean a dam, a temperance flat on the San Joaquin, build
another reservoir which sounds like it would -- for the reasons you just
give would be an exceptionally foolish thing to do.
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, what they don't say is, "Hey we want more dams,
but we want the public to pay for them."
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah.

>> Lloyd Carter: Even though they're going to benefit us directly. They
don't say that part about who should fund it, but -- yeah, well, and the
answer to that is most of the time, including this year, those reservoirs
just sit empty. You know, there's storage coming out now that both, the
Bureau and the Department of Water Resources, which runs the state water,
they’ve emptied their aquifers last year, or took them to dangerously low
levels, betting that we would have a big winter. So, they're not -- you
know, you've got to be very cautious. And look at our society, 70% of
domestic water use is landscaping. We all got Bermuda grass lawns,
actually now it's these more exotic varieties, which take even more
water. And we waste. You know, you go to Israel and everything's dripped.
And they're moving and I give credit to -- the East Side guys did it
first because tree crops, you know, but you can drive around here
anywhere in the summertime and see flood irrigating.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What do you call...?
>> Lloyd Carter: And -- and...
>> Thomas Holyoke: ...sorry go ahead.
>> Lloyd Carter: ...well I was going to say, you know, not that we just
want to force another big expense on farmers, I'm not unsympathetic to
farmers. I say, instead of all these subsidies for crops, they pay them
not to grow things. Let's spend the money on -- if a farmer puts in
$20,000 investment for his drip system, write that off, that's a writeoff, you get that off your taxes, so we'll subsidize it, because in the
long run, it's better for all of us if agriculture is as efficient as
possible. But, you know, we all have to -- we let the water run while
we're brushing our teeth, we take 20 minute showers, although remember
80% of this surface water in California goes to agriculture, so they're
going to have to be the ones who give it up.
>> Thomas Holyoke: If more storage is seen as a solution, what are your
thoughts about the ground banking of water?
>> Lloyd Carter: I absolutely think groundwater banking is the answer and
that's we should-- there's several reasons. First of all, you don't have
the evaporative loss. Secondly, it's much – it’s not nearly as vulnerable
to terrorist attack as surface reservoirs are. You know, some nutcase is
going dump 15 barrels of some highly toxic chemicals into one of these
lakes, or into one of these canals and so. Yeah, you know who -- who's
really, I questions maybe the economics of it, but who's really done a
great job is Kern, Kern County. They've got a huge water bank. And
unfortunately, they're using it to -- regain the system and Stewart
Resnick, who I spoke about earlier, he has a controlling interest in the
Kern County Water Bank. So they're making all kinds of water deals. You
know, he buys cheap through his government contracts, then sells high.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, could you explain a bit more about how the
Kern County Water bank actually works?
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah. Any -- you can park your water. A good example
would be Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. They're the

wholesaler of water in the Southland. They serve about 30 local
municipalities and water districts. They're the biggest customer for the
State Water Project Water. Well, there's occasions when they can't take
anymore, their system's okay. But they don't want to lose it, because
they're paying for it anyway, so they tell the Kern Water Bank, "Can we
park our water in your groundwater storage facilities?" And they say,
"Yeah," you know, it's for -- and it's for a fee. And Boswell will also
buy water from the state, and not necessarily use it to farm, keep it in
the bank. I said Boswell, I meant Resnick. And so they do it that way.
And there's exchanges where Lois Henry, who's a reporter, columnist for
"The Bakersfield Californian" they're selling water from the Kern County
on the east side of Kern County, Arvin-Edison, I think it is. And don't
hold me to these details, because Lois did a great column, but they're
making some kind of a water switch to fund these developments that are
going into the foothills now, like around Friant. They're starting to -you know, they want to push some big projects. Well, where's the water?
The farmers will block them from getting any water out of Friant because
that cut -- you know. So just, that's basically. There's a group called
Public Citizen that did a white paper on the current water bank. They
sold -- the State of California sold Resnick water cheap and then the
government decided to start a fish and wildlife program to buy water for
fish and wildlife. So, they -- I forget the prices, but they sold it to
Resnick for a for -- at a fraction of what he sold it back to the state.
The state sold him water and then the state buys that water back at four
or five times what he paid for it. So that's how it -- it's a scam.
That's how it works. I'm not doing a good job of explaining it, but go on
the internet about the Kern Water Bank and you'll find. Environmental
groups have been enraged, you know, because the purpose -- originally,
the Kern Water Bank was publicly owned. And then in 1994 the State Water
Project, remember we had that long dry spell in the late '80s. I think it
was about '86 to '92 and in '94, they modified this state water contracts
giving these guys an ag portion, putting them on a parody with
Metropolitan. Because prior to that -- well, actually in the final
analysis state water law, you're always going to have domestic water use
as your highest priority. You've got to have water for people to drink
and basically to live, to drink, to cook with, and to take a -- before
you give. But, you know, what are the numbers now? 80-83% goes to
agriculture. So they're going to have to be the ones that cutback. We're
still growing surplus crops. These farm -- this big farm bill that
everybody just praised, it's a big welfare program for the rich, that's
what it boils down to. And that's -- that's not just me, you know,
liberal and viral, Lloyd Carter, that's these taxpayer lobbies. They see
that the government's just pouring money on people who don't need it.
Farm subsidies is a whole area.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah. I actually read some of these.
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Environmental working groups, done a lot of papers and
research on this area, so.
>> Lloyd Carter: But even like, I forget the tax -- oh there's a national
website, called Taxpayers for Common Sense.

>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh, yeah.
>> Lloyd Carter: They've had some of the greatest stuff on these. I don't
mind helping farmers that need help. But, you know, they've got hobby
farmers and celebrities that are getting these huge subsidy checks and
that's because the original, 1930s FDR programs, when farmers were really
hurting, over the decades, they've been morphed into, you know, hogs in
the trough, man [laughter] that's what it is nowadays.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, let's get back to some, sort of back into
your own time line here.
>> Lloyd Carter: Okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Now, is it in the '80s that you decide to stop being a
reporter and go to law school, or is that?
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, what happened was UPI had been going down -- I
joined the Fresno -- I went over to the "The Fresno Bee" in September of
1984, following that big series we'd written. That next year was the
highpoint of my journalism career, because Kesterson closed, it was front
page news. And I won several awards for my coverage. The San Francisco
Press Club Environmental Award, they -- in their announcing me as the
winner, they said I was extraordinarily thorough, which was a nice
compliment as a journalist, you know, you want some feedback. Well,
here's a story, I'll be dead and gone when you play this. So, I wanted to
go to San Francisco to accept the award. They have a banquet for their
awards -- banquet for their journalists. And I expected "The Bee" to pay
my way. So, "The Bee" did not want to pay my way. I said, "Well, the hell
with it then, I'm not -- you know, you," so my city editor boss, who
shall remain nameless and who I battled -- I had to fight with my own
editors to cover this stuff. They didn't understand it. And they said,
they'd say, "Didn't you write something about this last week?" I said,
"No, it's completely different, there's new developments." You know. Well
when I get all the awards and they can hardly say, you know, you were
right in this. So I ended up quitting "The Bee." The short version is, my
boss, who I fought every step of the way to get to cover this thing, he
goes and accepts the award on my behalf.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What?
>> Lloyd Carter: And they -- but they wouldn't pay for me to go, you
know, it's going to have to be out of my own pocket. Can you believe
that?
>> Thomas Holyoke: And your boss, I assume, his travel was covered by
"The Bee?"
>> Lloyd Carter: Oh yes -- no. Yeah, his trip was covered. That's a true
story. Well, by '87, I got fed up, I was constantly banging heads with
these -- you know, I'm speculating now, but it's like, newspapers in the
valley generally want to be perceived as sympathetic to agriculture. Not
only sympathetic, but cheer leading. And so I kept banging -- oh I got an

invitation to help produce a documentary called "Further Down the Drain."
KQED is the public television station services. In '84 Gray Brechin
[assumed spelling] and Joe Kwan [assumed spelling] did a fabulous
documentary on the whole Kesterson mess. There's a very famous scene it
in where one of these two scientist that I told you, discovered the
deformities. He's got chest-high waders like fisherman, he wades into
this pond, this murky mulk and there's a mud hen covered in -- he -- so,
Harry Ohlendorf wades out there and picks up the bird and he's looking at
her, and he says, "Well, there doesn't appear to be anything outwardly
noticeable about it." And then he clears his throat, "Except it's dead."
[Laughter] I shall never -- if you ever get a chance, I think through
KQED they actually sell the -- so anyway, three years go by, and Joe Kwan
calls me and says, "Lloyd," he says, "You want to help me do a --" I had
met him when they were making the first one. He said, "You want to help
me make a sequel to "Down the Drain'?" I said, "Yeah that sounds great."
I said, "You know, I want to see if I can get a leave of absence from
"The Bee" which they had done for other people, right? Well, apparently
there were some technical rule that said that you had to be there five
years before you could request a sabbatical, but they'd bent the rules
for several people, so I was pretty confident. So I go to this boss that
I don't get along with and he tries -- he says, "No. we need you here,
you're too valuable." I mean a few months ago you told me that I was
wasting everybody's time writing about this water stuff, and now I'm too
valuable. So I went over his head to George Gruner, who was the executive
editor of "The Bee." Who always liked me, knew I was a hard worker. And
George said, "Well," he says, "I'll take care of it." So he said, "You
let Carter have this time off. It's going to be about three months to
shoot this video." So he says, "Okay well," he says, "That I want you
to," he says if I'm going to do it, I want you to work weekends. And I
said -- before he wanted me to work the four to midnight shift. I says
"Wait a minute I get off of here on midnight on Sunday night, I've got to
be in San Francisco at 8:00 a.m. in the morning, and when do I sleep?
What, do you want me to get by on four hours?" So I couldn't take it
anymore. It was just -- so I quit. I said, "That's it. I've had it." So I
put a -- they had a guild board, a union board, in the -- which
management couldn't touch. So I put a notice, like Martin Luther on the
door of the church and I said, "Hey, I got an idea," I said, "Let's put
it to a vote of the staff, who's the better newsman you or me." Well, in
retrospect, I should have been much more different, but they pushed me
beyond, you know, it's like here's these three incompetent people at the
city editor level. And those -- if you've been in the newspaper business,
usually the guys that aren't real good writers, they end up as the midlevel managers, right? And making life miserable for people. So I quit.
And some people put -- in the newsroom, they wore some -- they wore black
armbands in protest. And they went to George Gruner the top guy. And he
says, "Well, Carter quit," he said, "There's nothing I can do about
that." Which was true, I burned my bridge. So then I went and did the
documentary, called "Further Down the Drain." I'll get you a copy if
you'd like.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I'd love to see it.
>> Lloyd Carter: And then I went back to work for UPI. They hired me back
in a second and unfortunately, they were going under. So in the spring of

1990 they went into bankruptcy, laid off about 800 reporters nationwide.
I said, "Oh Jeez, what do I do now", you know, I was single again in my
life, but I had two kids and obligations and. Martin Winton [Assumed
spelling] who was the legendary manager of the grasslands -- not manager,
the head of the Board of Directors of the grasslands. He said -- he said,
"You need to quit wearing diapers." I said, "What? What does that mean?"
He says, "If you're going to fight for clean water," he said, "You need
to go to law school." So -- and, well there's a thought. Well I did. And
I looked into it and I signed up for San Joaquin College of Law, started
in fall of 1990. They had a three-year program and a four-year program.
Well, I took the four-year program. I was a lot better, a lot more
studious than I was in my college days, being, I think I was 42 when I
started. So, I then, my third year of law school, I got invited to apply
at the Attorney General's Office, their Fresno office, State Attorney
General, California Attorney General. Because they would hire some
interns in the summertime, so I worked there all summer. And Ed Carey
[assumed spelling] who was my boss, really liked. One, I was fast -- and
we mostly did appellate work, I should say, and criminal appeals we wrote
the response on behalf of the government. And so I put in the summer and
at the end of the summer, they said, "How would you like to work through
the winter?" I said, "Great." You know, because that was my only source
of income. Well, I had gotten some student loans. And then in '94, the
summer of '94. Well, in May I graduated and then I took the bar exam in,
I think it was August. Then in September 1st, I went to work full time
for the Attorney General where I stayed for 17 years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: You're not working on water issues or environmental
issues for the Attorney General.
>> Lloyd Carter: No. Yeah, it was criminal law, stuff that I did. Well,
you know, when I started law school, I wanted to be a crusading
environmental lawyer, right?
>> Thomas Holyoke: Did San Joaquin Law School even have an environmental
law program?
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, you know, here's the first thing I find out if you
look in the environmental section of the state bar, it's these guys from
the oil companies, man. Every polluting industry, they're all in that
environmental law section. So, I said, "Well I don't want to go work for
some polluting industry." And so I stayed with the criminal law. But
then, you know, to satisfy my journalistic, I did free lancing and op eds
and articles for magazines and stuff like that. Then about, jeez I don't
know it might be eight or nine years now, I started my website.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What are some of the organizations that you've done
some work with, like Save Our Streams is that one of them, or?
>> Lloyd Carter: Save our Streams was -- yeah, just a little group. We've
dwindled down now. But I inherited that from a -- I have a cabin up by
North Fork and I had a neighbor named Jerry Bishop, he's passed on now.
He started that in 1981. When Reagan came into office there was a big
push to put small hydro on all these virgin creeks up in the mountains.
Well, you know, in addition to putting pipelines and stuff, and power

lines, it increased the fire risk. It's not worth it for the public to
see streams removed. So anyway, he launched this organization to fight
them and was highly successful and, you know, it was also dependent upon
rain. And so -- it didn't pencil out in final analysis. So when Jerry
literally was dying on his deathbed, he said "Lloyd would you take over?"
well, I said, "Well, you know, I'm still -- I got to finish law school
first and pass the bar, but yeah I'll do it." So, we have a small board.
Well, I told Jerry though, I said, "Now I want to broaden the scope of
the organization, not just small hydro and the Sierra, but water issues,
basically statewide, but mostly centered locally in central California
and the battle for the San Joaquin River," because I -- you know, I
realized once I read the law, you can't dry up a river, if it has fish in
it, you're supposed to keep -- and that was legal theory on the San
Joaquin River litigation that's now, 20 -- let me see, from -- since '88,
what is that 24 years, 22 years. These lawsuits are lifetimes. You know,
and this one -- and I wanted to -- in 1988, I wanted to file a lawsuit
too, NRDC had filed. And Hal Candee -- who was their lawyer he said,
"Lloyd don't -- I wanted to file a state suit under 5937, of the Fish and
Game Code," which says any operator of the dam in California has to let
enough water over, around, or through the dam, to keep the fish flow in
good condition, which means, basically, you can't kill a river. You've
got to leave enough water in there, which I think is a very good
principal. We've killed all of our rivers here in the valley. Even the
San Joaquin, you know, all the kicking and screaming from farmers, no
water is getting passed -- is going -- flowing down to the Delta. They've
created this illusion that the San Joaquin River restoration is about
fish. But what they're doing, like there's a dam at Mendota, they want to
rebuild that, restructure that, that's a $200 million project. And then
downstream from there, there's a place called Sac Dam back from the Henry
Miller days. Yeah, well it used to be literally gunnysacks, it would wash
out every winter, and then they would rebuild it in the spring to hold
water. Well, now it's a cement structure. But they want to rejigger that
for 300 million. So when Devin Nunes talks about a million dollar salmon
that's because they want to spend $500 million on farmers, you know, some
of these guys -- land owner, when water goes down a river, it percolates
down through the sand, then it starts moving laterally, depending on how
much pressure and how much the water -- well, these guys farmed right up
to the end, low water mark in the river so, when they did send some
experimental flows down the river to see what would happen, these
adjacent farmers would say, "Well your water from your river is ruining
my crop, or is affecting, water logging my crops." So, and so it goes,
you know, and this goes on forever. I don't think I'll ever see salmon in
my lifetime, spawning below Friant Dam. It may happen, I hope it happens,
but, you know, if we're having a mega-drought, that will resolve all the
issues.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What kind of water battles have you been involved with
then since you completed law school, or in the last 20 years.
>> Lloyd Carter: Well one of the things I did, this was while I was a law
student was a guy name Patrick Porgans and I, he joined me, I filed -any citizen can file a complaint with the Regional Water Board. And in
the wake of Kesterson, there were several thousand acres of evaporation
ponds that were not on federal property, you know, and on the West Side.

The specific biggest one being the 3,000 acres that the Boswell property,
but there were several other smaller operators that had evaporation ponds
for their own waste. And Patrick and I filed a petition with the Regional
Board. Well, then I dropped out because of a concern that there might be
a conflict, because I was a State Attorney General, right. Even though I
was in a criminal division, didn't have anything to do with water. But I
-- so Patrick ended up carrying the ball. Well we got all the ponds, but
Boswell's shut down. You know, the Regional Board said, "Look you've
either got to make the ponds bird proof, and if you've got a lot of
leakage down in the groundwater, then you're going to have to put some
kind of impermeable barrier," those big plastics shoots like that. That
was a big battle and then I -- I don't know, you know, the last 10 years,
I just pick and choose. I don't think any human being could keep track of
all the water issues going on statewide. Just the Bay -- the Bay Delta
Conservation Plan to bring us current, which is this proposal to build
these two giant tunnels, put them in upstream of Sacramento and go around
the Delta, which is -- the price tag now is up around $50 billion. That's
total madness.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, now, since the Schwarzenegger Administration,
there's been this -- these big huge plans and proposals, that, you know,
I guess they're going -- what they call them? The Co-Equal Goals of Water
Reliability, and Delta Ecosystem Restoration.
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is that a pipe dream, or?
>> Lloyd Carter: It's absolutely a pipe dream, it's not possible. What do
they mean by co-equal? You know, the estimates of the Bay Delta
Conservation Plan Environmental Impact Statement, the EIS is somewhere
between 33,000 and 40,000 pages. That's the --, as one of my colleagues
in the environmental community pointed out, that's bigger than the
Encyclopedia Britannica. And they gave the public, it was either three
months or four months to comment -- the comment period. They issued it -I think it was right around Christmas time, maybe a little, anyway we got
until I think the deadline is April 14. So you're asking people to
absorb, critique, and make comments on the Encyclopedia Britannica, you
know, they're trying to shove this thing through. Believe it or not
there's has never -- there's no cost benefit analysis. On, is the Bay
Delta Conservation Plan, which is, you know, the federal government and
the state government require habitat management planning, you know, how
are you going to treat this area? The federal government. So it's a -how does the -- so it's - how does these big two tunnels, they're here to
divert five or six acre-feet of fresh water a year. They're going to take
that away from the Delta, which is already a cesspool because we dump our
agricultural wastewater, which is toxic. The cities in the Delta,
themselves, frequently -- like the city of Sacramento dumps 200 million
gallons a day into the Delta, which has a huge ammonia load. You know, I
always think of the arguments of the farmers, I respect their right
because there's more -- there's not just a good guy and a bad guy here.
We're all the bad guy. We're all contributing to it. But we're engaged in
non-sustainable activity. I've watched the State Water Board for 30
years, drag its feet on cleaning up all the messes all over the state. It

is an outrage that we've got a half a million or a million people in this
valley, that can't drink safe water. I just got a technical journal
review of selenium -- or, no I take it back, it wasn't selenium. It was
about these chemicals, remember I mentioned baby's brains. Well our
current state of the -- our water supplies for drinking in this state,
are undoubtedly in some cases, causing brain damage to infants, to fetus'
and we're all, we've all got blinders on, we're sleeping walking through,
you know, where's the out- rage?
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, there's been all that talk about Kettleman City
about all the deformities down there?
>> Lloyd Carter: Kettleman City, I remember in my journalism career, now
it's coming back to me, the city of McFarland had a cancer scare. And,
you know, what, it's because over the 30 years now. And I -- the first
thing I did with Kesterson was, you know, that any scientist would do,
you do a literature survey. What do we already know about this subject?
The Bureau of Reclamation should have known plenty about it, but they
said, "There's not much information." There was a ton of material. Well,
in the last 30 years I've watched now. They've got mountain top removal
mines -- you know, coal mining where they take the whole top of the
mountain off. Well, when it rains, that washes down in the creeks and all
these creeks around this one particular mine, have -- all the creeks -all the fish have died in the ponds. And I look at the institutional
reaction, because coal mining dominates politics. You don't survive in
West Virginia unless you're pro coal. And so, I, you know, I read these
stories, I do a Google alert for selenium every day. It's a -- I've
learned it's a computer program, selenium, that's what they call it. And
then there's a bunch of promo commercials about how selenium's a miracle
cure. Because it is -- a micronutrient, we do need it. If you don't have
selenium in your body you can have some problems, but if you get a little
more than you should have, then you have even bigger problems. So these
State Department of Environmental Equality in West Virginia would say,
"Well, you know, we really don't know too much about selenium." Hey, wait
a minute, I'm in a time warp here man, this is --I was hearing the same
stuff 30 years ago. I did my radio show yesterday, these two selenium
experts, the EPA has established, in the wake of Kesterson, established
an aquatic life protection, which was five parts per billion of selenium
that you're dumping into a water system, you can't exceed that. Well the
scientists came back and said, "Wait a minute, there's solid evidence
that even two parts per billion will damage fish reproduction, you need
it under two parts." Well, that's been sitting there waiting to be
resolved now for 25 years, over 25 years. And they say they're going to
come out with a proposal next year. The EPA is not protecting us. They
really aren't. You know?
>> Thomas Holyoke: The chemical spill in West Virginia proved that.
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah, and then I mean -- it's amazing. And then they
say, "Well what -- you know, what devices are for the public?" "Well, use
your own judgment." [Laughter] This is the "Twilight Zone," man, okay
maybe it's good for me, maybe I'll keel over. This is the best government
can do, they tell people to use your own judgment [Laughter]. Then they - then they gave the all clear, okay, you know, it's all migrated down --

down river. It's going to bothering someone else. And then this -- I saw
on the news last week, this woman turned on the faucet at a grammar
school right nearby. And she could -- it apparently had a real peculiar
smell, and it smelled like licorice. Well then they shut -- within a day,
they shut down all the five grammar schools. They don't know -- they
don't know what they're doing. They absolutely do not know what they're
doing. Then you've got the bureaucrats that are trying to do the right
thing, but the boss says, "Hey, you know, the governor says get this
resolved, man, you know, we don't want to shut down a coal mine."
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well you're talking about the politics of water and
the environment out in West Virginia. Maybe we kind of have a couple
minutes here on the politics here in the central valley? You've mentioned
Congressman Nunes on a couple occasions. You've see the signs around the
valley that Congress created dust bowl, you've heard the arguments that,
you know, the government's prioritizing fish over people. What do you
think about this?
>> Lloyd Carter: Well first of all, the farmer versus fish thing, the
reason there's a crisis today. The reason the President is coming today
is no doubt in my mind because of the drought. Not because of all these
vast protections for wildlife, which basically isn't happening, because
the Delta Fishery continues to plunge, populations -- and furthermore,
it's not just about the Delta Smelt, it's about salmon, which is a
billion dollar industry. And it's about farming in the Delta, having good
enough quality water to be able to grow things in the Delta, which is a
half a million acres, same size as Westland's. But water rights, I don't
want to bore people, but you have a pecking order, a hierarchy of water
rights. At the very top are the riparians. Those are people that own land
along the river. And this is all imported from English common law. They
get -- they have to share with their fellow riparians, but they all get a
portion of the river to -- as long as they use it reasonably on their
adjacent land. Then you have the pre-1914 appropriators. Well, what
happened in the Gold Rush, of course, is these mining companies started
washing away mountainsides to get to the gold. And they also used mercury
to help extract the gold. And of course all of this sediments and the
mercury washed down into the Delta. This is, you know, 130 years ago now.
And that mercury is a problem to this day. In the Delta, if you're
pregnant, or if you're a child, they don't want you to eat the fish. So
after the pre-1914 appropriators, the guys who were taking water out of
the creeks, they'd get these big fire hoses, they'd just blast away on a
mountainside. You know, the irony is all that sediments, millions and
millions, and tons of sediments washing down is they -- they made the
riverbeds much shallower. And so the river would spread out more and to
counteract that, the farmers would start building levies, 1860s and so
this was a back and forth battle. More stuff comes into the riverbed.
Well today, the riverbed. The American River is 30 feet above the
surrounding countryside, and the levy walls are at 60 feet. Now, you
know, one of the arguments for the Bay Delta plan is that it would
prevent earthquake -- I mean in the event of an earthquake, collapse of
the levies would be catastrophic, blah, blah, blah, which is true. But
let's remember those levies survived the 1906 earthquake and the 1989
earthquake. Anyways, so I'm digressing. I get back to my hierarchy. And
then in 1914 they established like a water commission to manage water

rights in the state. So those are the -- 1914 is the pivotal date. Before
that, if you're an appropriator, you're right behind the riparians. And
then from 1914 on you had -- if you wanted to divert water out of a
river, you had to apply to the state and get a permit. And it evolved
into the State Water Resource Control Board, which sets the permit for
the Bureau's water. The Bureau is just like a raisin farmer on the
rushing river, or a wine farmer on the rushing river. They have to comply
with whatever the state tells them to do. So when the Westlands growers
gets on and says, "They're taking our water." He doesn't know what he's
talking about, legally, The Bureau of Reclamation gets what's available
to them, after the riparians in the pre-1914 appropriators. Well, when
you have a drought, everybody has to give some. But the Westlands is at
the end of the bucket line. So all the players -- then sometimes you've
heard about the exchange contractors. These are the people north of
Westlands on the San Joaquin River that gave up their riparian rights
back in the '30s. The federal government bought those because they were
building Friant Dam. And here's another little unknown fact that the
people ought to think about. We have county of origin laws in California.
Fresno County, Madera County are the counties of origin for the San
Joaquin River. That is a superior -- well, when they built Friant, 50% of
the San Joaquin River goes to Kern County, 25% goes to Tulare County.
They're both out of our watershed. And Fresno only gets 8% of the San
Joaquin River and Madera gets 17. That's the way it.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Because it all ships down to Friant.
>> Lloyd Carter: Kern County stole our river 80 years ago. Well, you
know, who was behind that? Mathias Warren. Have you ever heard of Mathias
Warren [Assumed spelling]?
>> Thomas Holyoke: No. No.
>> Lloyd Carter: He was the lands manager for the Southern Pacific
Railroad. He also happened to be the father of Earl Warren [Assumed
spelling]...
>> Thomas Holyoke: Ah! [Laughter]
>> Lloyd Carter: ...who was a rabid supporter of the Central Valley
Project. Which was to - because, you know, Kern County, it's dry down
there, they wanted water. So they took the -- all these farmers, God
bless them, in Fresno County that are complaining about water. We only
get 8% of the San Joaquin River. Well, they don't want to start a war on
the East Side, so it's been that way. But I've told the Westlands guys,
I've says, "You know what, you're in Fresno County, we have county of
origin statues. You should," -- well they tried that, they actually did
file with the state and that's when the Friant unit went nuts and they
called it a Pearl Harbor sneak attack, and Westland's put it on the back
burner. But the Westlands, in my view, legally -- of the law, deserves to
get some water from Friant, which of course they'd have to take away from
Kern and Tulare counties.

>> Thomas Holyoke: How would they do that? Would that require the
exchange contractors to reassert their San Joaquin River Rights and
therefore allow...
>> Lloyd Carter: Which they might do, they could do this winter, yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: ...they could do it anytime.
>> Lloyd Carter: They reserve that right. Yeah, well you'd have to have a
-- you'd have to -- either petition the State Water Board or you'd file a
suit in court, which they've done. There's public. They have what they
call watershed of origin and county of origin. And I -- you can make the
argument in Westlands is a little farther out of the -- but they're
really, they're not. They're part of the San Joaquin River Watershed. So
the thing is they just didn't want to upset the other agriculture groups
on the East Side, who are already suspicious of the Westlands. Their
imagery as the bad boy of -- you know, and that they use their muscle to
get their political will, etcetera, etcetera.
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's easier to blame it on fish.
>> Lloyd Carter: If this drought goes on for one or two more years, it's
going to be really interesting. Now, here's something you can question
the wisdom on. Westland's has known for many decades, it has very
precarious water rights. This isn't the first time they've made -- well,
they're saying now they're going to get zero, but they'll get five or
10%, but push is going to come to shove. And the irony, you know, the old
saying, "one farmer's misfortune is another farmer's good luck." Right?
So when you have a citrus freeze in Florida, our prices jump. And when we
have a freeze, like we did here a few weeks ago, then the Florida
industry jumps up. Well, Westlands is out looking to buy water from
people, right? They wanted to buy some water from the Oakdale Irrigation
District. Westlands pays about 80 bucks an acre foot for its water. Well,
Oakdale was offering to sell Westlands water for $400.00 an acre foot.
Nice little hefty profit. Well some of these districts. Actually the
farmers in the Oakdale District got all worked up and they said, "We
don't want you selling out water out of," well, it's kind of a use it or
lose it thing too, you know, it's going down the river, man. And the
manager -- there was a story in the paper up there, he said, "This is the
chance to make a lot of money for our district and then we can use that
money to make ourselves more efficient or lower our water rates." You
know how much they -- Fresno Irrigation District here, which is
basically, most of it now is within the city boundaries. They get their
water from the Kings River. Up until -- I don't know maybe it's been
three or four years now, they were paying $8.00 an acre foot, and they it
jumped -- I think it's about 20 or 30 now. Still, you know, one-third
what Westlands pays. And coastal, I'm told that coastal farms, where they
have water shortages, pay $350.00 an acre foot.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I imagine those, the price for water is just going to
keep going up and up and it's going to be tempting for...
>> Lloyd Carter: Water's the new cash crop.

>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah.
>> Lloyd Carter: Yeah. Water is a commodity. Which Stewart Resnick
understands very, very well. And, you know, the farmers, there's no
brotherhood of farmers, they're all capitalists competing with each
other. And if you can gouge the other guy, you'll do it. You know, there
are alliances are when it's to everyone's advantage, but a drought is a
kind of thing that will show how thin the brotherhood is, you know.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do you think the Delta Ecosystem is -- can be saved? A
lot of people seem to say it can't.
>> Lloyd Carter: I don't think it can either. Well, I should say, look
it, it's nothing like it was pre-Western European. First of all, you
know, they're farming on these -- in these islands that are levied up.
It's dangerous practice. It's not just sustainable in the long -- if
we're going to have a Delta that's free of agriculture and free of
pollution, the critters would come back. But I don't think that's going
to happen. We've introduced, you know, all these pest plants, invasive
plants, quad drillers, or something, I think that's the name of one of
them -- and look, we've introduced dried bass, which is very popular
fish, but it's an East Coast fish, they brought in 100 years ago. And -so we will never restore the Delta, but we can -- at least we can make
sure that clean water runs through it, and an adequate amount of clean
water. Otherwise that mixing zone that I talked about where in low tide,
or high tide the water -- the ocean moves in.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Right, sure.
>> Lloyd Carter: It's going to be -- it's going to move way up into the
Delta.
>> Thomas Holyoke: But at some point doesn't that actually hit pumping
plants themselves?
>> Lloyd Carter: The water that, remember I told you, the water coming
down the Sierra is 50 parts per million total dissolved solids, well the
water at the pumps can be seven or 800.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Just because of saltwater intrusion?
>> Lloyd Carter: And, you know, the water's traveling several hundred
miles, at three -- two, three hundred miles, it picking up some salts
that way. But it's mostly -- it pulls from that mixing zone where -- so
I, you know, the -- one way to look at it is humans think that they can
engineer nature better than God or Mother Nature, or whatever natural
processes and I haven't seen it. All I see is everywhere we go, we make a
mess.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, we're going to need to, see, kind of wrap up
here. Any final thoughts on the now or the future?
>> Lloyd Carter: Well, you know, I believe 500 years ago this valley was
as close as you can get on this planet to the Garden of Eden. This --

even in the early pioneers coming and talking about it, sounded like
rolling thunder when the geese took off from wherever they were -- the
wetlands, you know, if you'd startle them, it's be this rumble and it
sounded like thunder. I can only imagine. At the time of the Gold Rush,
you could take a ferryboat from San Francisco to Bakersfield.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah.
>> Lloyd Carter: It was the biggest lake west of the Mississippi in terms
of surface area. It's not as deep as Lake Tahoe, but it was much bigger.
Salmon runs of hundreds of thousands of fishes. Apparently there's some - what do they call that when they rock -- the writings on the rock from
ancient people?
>> Thomas Holyoke: Petroglyphs?
>> Lloyd Carter: Petroglyphs, exactly. There's petroglyphs on the Kings
River and this probably would have happened in high water years, because,
you know, Fresno slough is the link between the Kings System and the San
Joaquin system. Salmon spawned on the Kings. And we know this about. The
native people -- there was an estimated 50,000 people living in the
valley. Quite a few Native Americans. By in large, they lived in
paradigms they were rarely hungry. Tons of food. And the Americans came
in and wiped it all out in about 50 years. By -- by the turn of the 20th
Century, Tulare Lake was gone. You know, these incredible -- they had the
market hunters that shot the ducks. They'd have these big Gatling gun
things where they'd knock down 50 birds at a time and they'd fill
railroad cars with them -- they'd take them -- it was so cold that I
guess the birds stayed preserved, and take them by train up to San
Francisco and sell them to the restaurants for .10 cents apiece. There
was antelope; there was elk in this valley. It was -- it was a wildlife
paradise and it had humans. You know, who migrated into the foothills.
Well they'd go up into the mountains in the summertime and come down,
like the Monos, they'd come down in the foothills in the wintertime, get
above the fog, but below the snow. So yeah. You know, we've ruined it.
But I think that if you give nature a chance, a little bit of a chance it
comes back. So, you know, we have to start making some hard decisions
with some politics, where do we go in terms of population? Is it really a
good thing that your population expands forever? Can it actually expand
forever? At some point there's going to, you know, the planet can't take
it. We know we live on a planet of finite resources, but we act like the
merry-go-round goes on forever. And, you know, nature may just give us a
smack here and if this drought goes on. Or the floods they had like in
1873. Now, I've seen pictures of how much of the valley -- this valley
and Sacramento were under water.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah.
>> Lloyd Carter: All the cattlemen lost their herds -- so. You know, I
just hope we start thinking seven generations into the future about what
we're going to leave behind, because I don't believe that agriculture can
last in this valley for the next few centuries. For one thing we'll fill
it up with people. It'll be like the San Fernando Valley.

>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Thank you.
>> Lloyd Carter: Okay Tom, that's good. [Silence]

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