Bob Stoddard interview
Item
Title
eng
Bob Stoddard interview
Description
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Long time water engineer with Provost and Pritchard who helped design many of the irrigation systems for districts and towns all over the San Joaquin Valley.
Creator
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Stoddard, Bob
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Holyoke, Thomas
Relation
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Water Archive Oral Histories
Coverage
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California State University, Fresno
Date
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6/30/2015
Format
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Microsoft Word document, 16 pages
Identifier
eng
SCMS_waoh_00044
extracted text
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Talking to Bob Stoddard here about water
engineering, and he comes from a family who's been involved in this. So
maybe we should start with a bit of family history first.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I can start there. We; my dad started his water
career with the Bureau of Reclamation probably -- oh, I would say,
probably around 1940. And he was stationed at Friant and then Merced and
was dealing mainly in the quantification of water rights and ground water
issues for the Central Valley Project and the transfer of the exchange
water contract. And this is when they were going to do the, you know,
build the Delta-Mendota Canal and Friant Dam and develop the water on the
west side and he saw the opportunity to, to branch out on his own and, and
work on the delivery of water from the Delta-Mendota Canal to the various
federal water districts or irrigation districts. So that's how the firm
got started. It grew pretty big for a while. He, he associated with Henry
Carr in Fresno. You probably have heard that name. I know Jim certainly
has. And that went on for quite some time. And they, they developed
irrigation systems for the Chowchilla Water District, Solano Irrigation
District, San Luis Water District, and these are all, all new facilities,
and there's, there's probably others in there that don't come to mind. So
that was, I guess, kind of the first wave of, of, of development of water
on the west side. Prior to that it was all ground water pumping, no
significant local streams of any, of any significance. Then, I guess
another, a second wave hit when they decided they were going to build the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. This brought an additional supply at a
much higher elevation to the, to the west side. So this meant that there
was additional lands to be developed and, and served with water from the
Central Valley Project. So that meant expanding a lot of the existing
water districts on the west side, including those that I mentioned, plus
the Panoche Water District, the Pachuca Water District, the Eagle Field
Water District, several little small districts. So that, that went on
through the early '70s. And, and I, I joined the firm in, in 1972, so I
was involved in, in some of that later development of the water from the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. Then we, we actually, our little firm,
branched out and started doing some municipal engineering on the west side
for the little communities out there. And, and continued to do some
expansion and, and, and modernization of, of existing irrigation
facilities. And the; relatively recently, we did the modernization of the
Central California Irrigation District, the modernization of the West
Stanislaus Irrigation District; these are pretty major multi, multimillion dollar projects that take, oh, many years to complete from the
time you begin the initial feasibility and talking about what we're trying
to achieve and go through and do the evaluation of what the various
options were in terms of modernization. Go through the permitting and so
forth and then into preliminary design and, and design and, and
construction and, and startup. So we did that on some major projects. So
that's I guess is kind of a, a somewhat brief history of, of where the
firm has been and where I have been from 1972. I might say that we were -in 2005; well, let me back up a little bit. We, I guess the next thing
that hit pretty big was the drainage problem on the west side when they,
when they had, when they saw the, when selenium was discovered as being a
problem with, with wild foul on the Kesterson Reservoir, there was a, a;
there was a, a, a big crisis because there was a lot of Ag drainage from
the west side which contained selenium was being routed through the grass
lands water district and water conservation district. Those -- that area
was the largest contiguous wet lands in, I think in California, certainly,
and maybe in the west. And so that was, that started another real flurry
to do a lot modification of existing facilities and connecting and
rerouting in order to separate the drainage flows containing the salt and
the selenium from the fresh water flows that were being delivered to the
wet lands. Prior to that, they, they had always thought that the drainage
water was, was, was a good source of water for the, for the wetlands and
that the salinity wasn't too high, did not, to not, to render not a, a
beneficial supply. So they, that, that, so, so that district had developed
with that being a component of the supplier, that's the Grassland Water
District. When the selenium thing hit and they decided they needed to get
rid of this, this water -- well, I might add in there, too, that there was
some reports by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service back in the '50s, I
believe, talking about, or supporting the fact that that Ag drainage water
was, was good source of water for the, for the, for the grasslands. And so
they ended up with a contract of, of -- oh, 50 to 55 thousand acre feet to
serve the, to serve the wetlands, a Central Valley Project Water Service
Contract when their, when their demand was on the order of 180,000 acre
feet per year. I know that number fairly well because our firm did the,
did the water supply study for the Grassland Water District in, in support
of their water that they ended up receiving upon the passage of the
Central Valley Project Improvement Act which happened in 1992. I might be
rambling a little bit here. [Inaudible Crosstalk]
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's sort of giving us a nice overview. And I have a
few questions in mind now, so, let's just go with those. Let's just kind
of go back to your father a bit. Howard, right?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And the work that he did for the Bureau of Reclamation
back in the 1940s. I mean this is the beginning of I guess what at the
time was the, you know, world's biggest, you know, water capture and
conveyance project. Did he ever, did he talk a lot about, about his time
working with the Bureau back then and on, on a project of such scale.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I don't, I don't, no, I don't recall that he did. The
-- his, his real passion was, was on the water resource end of things and
not on the civil design end of things and, so he was involved as I say in
the, in quantification of rights and, and the development of the exchange
contract numbers I believe. And, and also looking at, at what the ground
water situation was prior to project and what it might be after the
project, those sorts of things.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So the quantification of water rights. He was
doing that because I understand it was necessary for the Bureau to
purchase water rights from existing holders in order build the system.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They purchased them from Miller and Lux.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So did he ever talk at all about the, the kind of
experiences there dealing with the people who own the Miller and Lux
lands, because that became a major piece of the CVP?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. It was the, it was the Kings River San Joaquin
River or Canal Company, I'm not sure exactly what the name of the, that
was kind of a predecessor for Miller and Lux when they really, when they
first built the, the major canals on the west side. Those, those were
originally built to take water out of the San Joaquin River into, and
deliver it to the west side. This is, obviously, before [inaudible] river
delivery and their, Miller and Lux priority was to deliver water to their
agricultural lands and any excess water would go to the Grassland and this
is, this was the start of the, this is the major waterfowl area that I
mentioned earlier and a major wintering ground for the, for water, for
migrating water fowl. And, so Miller and Lux would deliver water to their
Ag lands, and then all the excess would go into the, into the, into the
Grasslands. The way; it's kind of interesting back in those days the way
the, the systems would work. They'd fill the, they'd fill the systems,
they'd always have them running, and they’d have, have operational spill
exiting the systems in various locations pretty much all the time. This
would be, this would end up being the source of the, of the Grassland
supply, so it made, but it made water available to the Ag community, made
it very dependable because there was always water in the system. So the,
so the, the, the diverters or the Ag users would take, would take delivery
water. Anything they didn't take would continue in the system and if there
was stuff remaining in the system, that would be delivered back into the
river and then any tail water that came off the fields at the end would go
into drainage ditches and meander down and [inaudible] the same Grasslands
area. So the use on the system, on the use was obviously the net, you
know, the inflow less the outflow. But there was, there was certainly a
lot of ground water recharge that was occurring as a result of that sort
of operation.
>> Jim Provost: The, the Grasslands you're referring to, where are those
at?
>> Bob Stoddard: It's, it's in the Los Banos area. It's in Merced County
in the, it's, there's a major portion of it south of the Los Banos and
another major portion north of Los Banos. And it's about 60; I think about
60,000 acres in the Grassland Resource Conservation District and about
40,000, 40 to 50,000 in the Grassland Water District.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So after your father left the Bureau of
Reclamation, you say he went into private practice as an engineer?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Was, was he a formally trained engineer? Where
did he get his education at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Berkley.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And his, I understand he was responsible for developing
a lot of the irrigation district's conveyance systems hooking into the
Delta-Mendota Canal, I assume.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. And then, then after that, and hooking into the San
Luis Canal, you know, in the second phase that I talked about earlier.
>> Thomas Holyoke: How much of the infrastructure development was he
involved with for, out there on the west side?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure of how you'd like that quantified.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Chuckles] It doesn't have to be too precise. All of
it? Most of it? Much of it?
>> Bob Stoddard: A substantial portion. I couldn't tell you percentage
wise, but a lot of the districts on the west side, he was involved with.
In fact, I think that this is prior to my time that he was the, that we
started initially the work on the concept of development of the Westlands
Water District, which was, you know, 600 thousand acres of major system.
But that, you know, like, so he was involved in that in the initial
development of that project.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, you know, people who are watching these oral
histories may not really understand what it even means to be building a
conveyance system for any irrigation district. What kind of facilities are
we talking about? I mean what was, what was it that was being built?
>> Bob Stoddard: Canals and pipelines, to you know, depending on, on the,
on the topography. To, and I would say typically, to serve large acreages
in, in 160-acre blocks. You know, that's a whole other story about the
Reclamation Reform Act and the, and the acreage limitation and the, you
know, initially, the Reclamation Reform Act required, was for small
development of, and for service of 160-acre farms and that's, then it went
to 960, and then there was all sorts of different ways that they, that the
owners would get together or at least distribute the ownership amongst
family members so they could actually do major, much, major farms under
that Act.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually it's; I'm glad that you brought that up. In
designing irrigation systems for, you know, irrigation districts, that
were going to hook into water from the Bureau of Reclamation, were there,
were there limits imposed on the way you could, that these systems could
be designed to ensure that water was not delivered to land more than in,
in a 160 acres?
>> Bob Stoddard: No. The, the, the design capacity were based on cropping,
you know, anticipated cropping patterns, and developed that way and not
really with respect to the, what might be that, that legal limitation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Then you also mentioned your father was involved
with the development of the systems in the, what became then the Westlands
Water District, which I believe is quite possibly the biggest water
district in the United States. That must have been a project of some
significant undertaking at the time.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think he was just involved; we'd, we'd done other
projects, other districts prior to that and so there was, you know, there
was a lot of experience in the organization that Westlands was going to
take advantage of, but then they ultimately went to -- and I don't
remember the, Jim might remember, the different types of contracts, a 9D
contract or something like, where there were, you know, depending on
whether the Bureau of Reclamation was going to actually do the, the design
of the facilities themselves, or whether it was going to be a private
organization such as, such as ours. In that case, the Bureau of
Reclamation did all the, did all the design of the facilities. So, you
know, I don't know whether, you know, this somewhat before my time,
whether we would have still been involved if they had gone their private
engineering root, versus the public engineering or Bureau of Reclamation
route.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Which, do you happen to know what was more typical?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think probably the private -- well, I don't know. I
guess I shouldn't; I think probably the, the private. Jim's nodding a
"Yes" over there, so.
[ Laughter ]
>> Bob Stoddard: I feel more confident in that answer.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So you became involved with your father's
business, you said it was 1972.
>> Bob Stoddard: '72, yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Is that what you always wanted to do, become an
engineer like your father?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I guess. That's where I ended up. Well, I, you
know, obviously, I mean, I was, there's some pictures of myself and my
brother out on construction projects when I was 6 or 7 years old, you
know. So, been involved one way or another. Actually that was a 1955 flood
that caused major damage in a lot of facilities that were under
construction at the time.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where did you get your training at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, that's a story. I actually started at Berkley, but
I was goofing off. [Laughter] And so then I actually, I quit while I was a
junior. Then, that was in 1966, I guess. Took, got drafted. Spent three
years in the Army.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually in Vietnam.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I, actually the reason I spent three years, instead
of two, is that if you put in an extra year, you could, you could select
the, you know, the occupation you were going to be in at the, in the Army
and I selected Nike Hercules Missiles. They were, air defense systems
that, they didn't have any of those in Vietnam, I guess I was chicken.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where, where did that take you?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I, that took me to, that took me to Fort Ord for
basic training, took me to Fort Bliss, Texas, for missile training. Took
me to Maryland -- Rockville, Maryland, which is right outside of
Washington, D.C., in the Washington, Baltimore defense area where we,
where we, you know, protected the Washington area with, with Nike Hercules
Missiles and I guess it's, in that, in that case, they were all nuclear
warheads, which was kind of interesting because they also had high, high
explosive warheads. I guess they figure if they got, the enemy got, got
that close, they'd, you know, they'd throw everything they could at them.
So I spent a year and a half there and then about a year in [inaudible],
year in Germany. That was; I've got a lot of stories about, about that
whole situation, too, in terms of, well in terms of the, the, the things
that we did as far as the target tracking radar systems which I was
involved with. But I won't go on with that, but it's, you know, tracking
distressed aircraft, tracking UFOs tracking, running, running, running
competitions with the Air Force see who could, see whether they could
break us, break into us, or whether we could shoot them down. Anyway,
yeah. So then I got out of that. Then, I actually came Fresno, stayed
after that, in '60, 1970 I guess, and finished up here. And it was; I
imagine, just had some friend here, and that's was I guess why, you know,
it was, kind of an easy from a living standpoint. And it, it worked out
well. I was much more of a student. I mean I, when I got back, here I'm
going back into; here I'd been away from academics for three years and,
and, and entered into junior engineering classes, you know.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Came back a little more mature -- Berkeley.
>> Bob Stoddard: Quite a bit more, yeah. Yeah. I was the top, top guy in
the water resources end of the, you know, in the civil engineering school
here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So you start working for your father then, and it's his
firm in 1972. And is he's still involved in developing irrigation systems
for west side irrigation districts.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yeah, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, we started
that in, that, that's when the San Luis Canal was built, the San Luis Damn
and they built the; there was a whole new major conveyance came in, so we
expanded a lot of the existing districts, that, especially those that lay,
that lay upstream of the, of the, of the Delta-Mendota canal where all
their delivery had to be, were pumped diversions. So obviously they had to
rely on, on more temperamental systems than gravity diversions. When the,
when the new canal came in it was -- trying to think of the elevations of
the two now, but I don't know if I can do that. It was, it was above both
of these districts, so they all wanted to take their water out of the
upper canal rather than the lower canal, because then they could it all by
gravity. So we, you know, we ended up doing a lot of systems where we put
new facilities in to run the water downhill, rather than to replace those
facilities that we had done 30 years prior, you know, running uphill for
20 years, 25 years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So a lot of the work going on out there was actually
expanding, in some sense redoing work that your father had several decades
earlier.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. You know, and then, and then we, you know, we didn't
-- here recently, we're getting involved in, in another layer of
modernization of facilities.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, any particular interesting stories you can remember
back in those times, you know, develop those kinds of, those kinds of
districts, and there's, there's conveyance systems.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I can't. I don't know. Nothing really specific comes
to mind.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean, do you recall of sort of how many irrigation
districts you were doing this for?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think that's similar to that question you asked me
earlier. Well let me, let me, let me; the other, the other; I mentioned
earlier the Reclamation Reform Act; well that was amended in 1992. I don't
remember the first year. When they amended it in 1992, that was the first
time that the Bureau was mandating water conservations plans to be done by
all these federal districts. So we were involved heavily in development of
these districts and quantification of demands and that sort of thing and,
and obviously, had a great understanding of conveyance system and, and so
we were, that moved us into doing a lot of the water conservation plans in
1992 for these -- no it wasn't no -- yeah. I think is that -- let's see,
maybe it was '82 I think. Because, and then '92 was when the Central
Valley Project Improvement Act came in, and they expanded the requirements
under, under water conservation plans. So we were doing a lot of that sort
of work which moved us into, into, or moved the districts into, starting
to think about the way they were doing business and how they might be able
to improve them. So, those plans at least got them started thinking about
how they might be better stewards of the water supply.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So how did that change your business then? I mean, what
were you doing differently now?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well we, we, that's was the whole, early -- as I
mentioned earlier, the real early way water was delivered just especially
in the gravity systems through like the Miller and Lux developed. You
know, they, they, and I talked about the net deliveries. They, they'd take
water into systems and they'd deliver the water, the excess water would go
out the end of the system or it would go, the tail water would run out, it
all go down stream. In that case, the -- in a lot of cases on the West
side into the, into the wetlands areas and was used for supply there.
That, that, that, that sort of way of doing business was not considered to
be I guess, proper, and they wanted to better measurement systems and
better, better ways to account for the water, and all that was covered in
the water conservation plan at work.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So the, the -- so the emphasis now was on, you know,
trying to minimize water use, conserving water to use as little as
possible.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, yeah, well, not yeah, it'd be efficient users of
the supply I guess would be a better way to put. The amount you use is
depending on what your cropping patterns are and that sort of thing.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do you actually design an irrigation system for, to be
used for certain kinds of crops rather than other kinds of crops, like row
crops versus permanent crops, and...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you have, you have a general idea of what the, what
the cropping patterns are and compute what the, you know, what the demands
were in the peak months, and make sure you can make those deliveries.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Were you also involved with the development of
irrigation systems on the east side of the Valley?
>> Bob Stoddard: I did, just did some, did some work on planning of
modernization of some facilities for the Turlock Irrigation District and
the Modesto Irrigation District. Did some work for the little district,
Ballico Cortez which is east of the Turlock Irrigation District as far as
there is some idea of, or proposal to maybe they could get some, get some
surface supply from Turlock Irrigation District, so we did some planning
on, on the, and feasibility study of the, of expanding systems to, to
deliver water to those, those acreages. And there might be some other, we,
we did, just when I first, when I first started, we did a major project
for the Stockton East Water District, but that was to deliver some of
their surface water out of the Calaveras River to the, to a new water
treatment plant for the city of Stockton and so that was a major -- I
think it was about 13, 15 miles of large diameter pipeline. And that was
all, that was, that was to get more surface water. You probably heard
about all the, the chronic overdraft that happens in that, in the Stockton
area. This is one of the first projects to, to, to get more surface water
into the area.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So they wouldn't have to rely on the ground water so
much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Right, right. To decrease the, the demand on the ground
water.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wow. Okay. So in what ways has, has your business then
really changed over, over the decades. I mean, certainly [inaudible] bear
emphasis on some water conservation as a result of CVPIA.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, initially, as [inaudible] I think it was the '82
Reclamation Reform Act which had started and then the, in the, the 1992
CVPIA was a, a much more rigorous requirements for the, for the water
conservation planning by the districts. There was a lot of criticism by
third parties, I guess, for lack of a better term to, about they did all
these, these water conservation plans responding to the '82 amendment to,
that got done, and then submitted to the Bureau and were thrown on the
shelves. You know, so they, when they into '92, they, they, they set it up
so you had to do annual updates and be able to report on how, on how, on
progress you've made on your, on your various activities you had
identified in your initial plan, as far as improvements to your systems,
both physical improvements, and, and, you know, management or operational
improvements.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So did you have to deal a lot with, directly with the
Bureau, or was it mostly through the irrigation districts that were
contracting you?
>> Bob Stoddard: No we dealt, we dealt especially with the, with the, on
the water conservation side of things, we dealt directly with the Bureau
quite a bit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Especially, I guess, during some of the earlier years.
I'd say back in the 1970s, was there a kind of a big sense that you were - well, let's think about that a different way. And I guess a lot of
agricultural expansion had already taken place along, on, on the west
side. But was there sort of, sort of a sense that, you know, this was a
you know, a, a, your, you know, big, you know, big projects, you know,
contributing to, you know, you know, really large scale, from the large
scale agriculture in United States and that this was, well that, that,
that any sense that, that, that the problems that came along later -- was
any of that anticipated in the 1970s, or even the 1980s, you know, the,
the, the, all the restriction and water and [inaudible]...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the drainage, the drainage problem was certainly
identified in those times.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let's, let's talk a little bit about that. What
actually is the drainage problem?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, there's a, it's, it's the tight soils on the west
side perch the, the, the, the water that's, percolates past the, the root
zone, and there has to, they needed a way to remove it, so they, they put
in, under, tile drainage systems, these buried pipelines to collect that
water, and then they discharge it into the same conveyances. This is, this
is going back [inaudible] I talked about the drainage water and the
grassland supply. It was both surface drainage, or tail water and
operational spill, together with subsurface drainage, which is water
collected in these drainage systems. But that they, that they, it was
required that they do that in order to keep the, keep the water from
raising up into the root zones and, and damaging crop production.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wouldn't the water normally just percolate down through
the soil.
>> Bob Stoddard: It couldn't. It was, it, it, it was, it was, there was
different clay layers in there that inhibited the, the, the percolation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. And, originally, the Bureau of Reclamation was
supposed to build a drainage system for a lot of the, the west side
districts, wasn't it.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They had an obligation to do that.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What happened?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, they got the, the, the drain built to Kesterson
Reservoir which was going to be ultimately a regulating reservoir, but was
an evaporation reservoir because they hadn't built a drain from Kesterson
to the, I think, Chips Island or I think, some place in the Delta where,
where it was going to discharge and, and, it was that evaporation and that
Kesterson Reservoir that concentrated the selenium that caused the, the
deformities in the wildlife out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I think you had said earlier that there, there'd been
an assumption that, you know, that a lot of the water coming through the
drainage system was actually not going to be dangerous to wildlife?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I mentioned earlier that, that back in the, and, I,
I think it was in the '50s that I ran across, I mean I ran across, not in
the '50s, but I ran across a report in the, probably in the '80s of, of,
done by a fish and wildlife service that concluded or supported the use of
that drainage for, for the wildlife benefit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So apparently, someone made a mistake somewhere.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. Well, [inaudible crosstalk]. Well, they're looking
I think at the, at the, at the salinity of the, of the water, not the
constituents, so to speak.
>> Thomas Holyoke: In fact this is a problem essentially still unsolved
today.
>> Bob Stoddard: It certainly is. But the shortage of
that water more, the, the, the drainage more valuable
there's, you know, there's, there's treatment methods
have been too expensive. They're now being considered
and make the water available.
supply is making
and there's,
which heretofore
to remove the salts
>> Thomas Holyoke: Recycling all, all the water we can. So what's, what
has your business practice been like in the '90s, and into the 21st
century? Still working on and developing and refining, you know,
irrigation systems?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I'm retired, now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh. When did you retire?
>> Bob Stoddard: I retired at the end of the year. End of last year. Just
turned 70. I thought that was probably enough. I'm not like this guy over
here to go forever.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Are you still not retired?
[ Laughter ]
Now what kind of work were you, were you, have you been doing in the last
[inaudible crosstalk] fifteen years?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well I, Los Banos is a fairly small community and it's a
little, it's a little bit difficult to attract good engineers, you know,
to, to, for our business, and in 2005, we ended up merging with Boyle
Engineering Corporation. They were actually a subcontractor to me on a
major municipal development of water plants, sewer plants, and collections
systems, and drainage systems to take out in the Santa Nella are to build
a community out there that started as a trailer park into a community of
about 18,000 people, I think was the, was the plan. And they, they got
the, they'd gone through the county of Merced and got the approvals for
the, for the specific urban development plan to have, have that happen.
But, and we were; while we started doing; our; the business started in,
in, in the agricultural water arena, we, we decided we'd branch into the
municipal -- you know, broaden our, our capabilities and, so we began
doing municipal engineering and we, we ultimately were contract city
engineers for Los Banos and Gustine and Patterson and Newman and
Firebaugh, and you know... So we were; these, these cities were too small
to have big engineering staffs, so we were kind of contract city
engineering staffs for them. And I mentioned the Santa Nella project, that
was a, that was major municipal project. So we were doing a lot of; back
in the early 2000s we were doing more municipal work than we were
agricultural work because agricultural work was pretty well done, I guess
I should say, except for maybe a lot of this, a lot of this water
conservation planning and, and, and that sort of thing. But we were, we
were, I think we had about 22 people at that time and we were, you know,
we were killing ourselves. Couldn't, couldn't get any, couldn't, couldn't
get any help and, you know, and you had these clients that you'd had for - and Jim knows this. You have these clients for, that you've had for 30
years or so, and they come in the door, you don't tell them to go
someplace else, you figure out how you're, you know, you figure, you, you
go ahead and do what you can to get, get their, respond to them, you know.
So I, I was looking, I was searching countrywide to find, find engineers.
But back in, in those days, everybody was. You know, there was a, there
was a, a severe shortage of, of engineers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is that the case today?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure. It's -- Jim's nodding yes, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Laughter] Still a shortage of engineers.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I don't, I don't know that it's quite as bad as it
was back then because, you know, I don't think there's such a demand. You
know, the amount of work going on now not's quite as much as it was back
then, at least, you know, where I, where, where I was. So that's what, as
I say, you know, I started to say, Boyle was a, was a subcontractor to me
on this major project and we started talking and the... And the, actually
of the head of the Los Banos -- or excuse me, the Fresno office of Boyle
Engineering started his career in Los Banos. He was, he, right after, he
was another Fresno Stater and he, he -- the first five years or so of his
career was, was with us so I knew him real well and so that's, you know.
Anyway, we started talking and ultimately the way to, to meet your
client's demands was to merge with somebody so you had a lot more
horsepower. So we went from somebody; we went from people; went from about
20 some odd people to a firm of about 700, which was, which were, you
know, big in California and Florida, actually, and a little bit in, in
Colorado. And then, oh 2000 and, so we merged with Boyle in 2005, and in
2008 -- about 2008 -- they, they got gobbled up by, by AECOM, which was 40
some thousand people. So here I'd been, had this little organization of 20
some, and then we went to 700, that was okay, but then we went to 40 some
thousand and that, that bureaucracy I just couldn't, couldn't handle. So
that's started, that's started me thinking well it's probably, you know, I
mean I can't do this any longer. I knew these guys -- I've known this guy
for a, for a while now, all my career, and, and, and his, you know, the
other guys in his organization. And they, they kept trying to urge me to,
you know, so anyway. Well, when I, when I quit AECOM, which was in 2012,
I, I went to work for, for Provost and Pritchard with the understanding if
they, if they hired me, they'd have to hire all the, all the, all the
employees in the Los Banos office. In other words, just take over the
office. And...
>> Thomas Holyoke: How many people was that at that point?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, it was always only half a dozen I think, if that. I
mean the recession hit pretty hard. You know the, we were doing, I
mentioned we were doing all this work for these municipalities and then,
so then the, the, when the, when the recession hit, you know, all that
just dried up and the Ag side of things was, was, was pretty slow, too, so
that, that slowed everything down.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do serious droughts, well, like we're in now, the one
back in '77, does that take a pretty big toll in your industry?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, actually, you know, droughts and floods are good
for engineers. It's the normal years that aren't any good. But, but in
this case, this prolonged drought, all these districts -- the way they
make their money is to, is to sell the water to their, you know, they,
they buy the water from the Bureau, they sell it to their, to their
constituents, and they get, you know, that's how they get money to, to, to
run their business or run their districts. And after the, when they have
no, no water to sell, they have no revenue, except for standby charges.
And then that, then you take that one step farther, that they get their
revenue from the farmers who get, who, who grow crops with the water. If
they're not getting any water, they don't grow many crops, and so there's
no revenue coming, and there's no; so anyway, the revenue stream is, is,
is, is pretty thin these days in a lot of these districts, and that, that
has an effect on the, on the engineering community.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So does that mean that you've picked a, a good time to
get out of the business?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
[ Laughter ]
>> Thomas Holyoke: What else should we ask?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you know, the other thing, you bring, we talked
about this water conservation and the water supply in effect now that, you
know, the, the last two or three years or four years the, the water,
there's been zero allocations for the federal contractors. And it's been,
it, it's pretty amazing how they've taken these limited supplies and done
transfers and, and other ways, and, well obviously, they've developed
ground water, which, which is, may end up causing problems if this
continues on by, because of overdraft and, and subsidence. But, but, I
think there's been a drastic change in the water supply situation. And I
think there was a, there was drought from '86 to '92. Prior to that, the
federal contractors haul, they had a limit of water available in their,
you know, in their contract, they had a limit. But the Bureau would sell
them any water, as much as water as they wanted. You know, the San Felipe
project, which is the, you know, the pipeline over Pacheco Pass over to
Santa Clara and San Benito hadn't been built yet, so there, there was a
lot of supply there. There weren't the restrictions in the Delta for, for
pumping, and so they could, they could, you know, they could order
whatever they wanted. And then, after '89 I think it was, all of a sudden
the, the, because of that drought, things started getting bad, and they've
been getting worse every year, as far as water supply availability.
Primarily, I guess because of the restrictions and diversions out of the
Delta.
>> Jim Provost: Where do you see the San Joaquin Valley going
economically, farming wise?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, if you know, I think the senior water right holders
are probably going to do fine. You know, the, the river diverters, and the
exchange contractors. The, the, those who rely primarily on the, the
Central Valley Project and the State Water Project are probably going to
be in trouble, and you know, they're going to continue pumping ground
water. But now we have this recent legislation, or recent laws that are
going to require that you, you manage your ground water for, for
sustainability, that you know, that's, I think ultimately 20 years down
the road till that, that actually happens. But that's going to be; that
may or may help, but it may be too late, also, because of the amount of
ground water pumping going on. I, I don't, I'd be surprised if we don't
really start seeing some, some repercussions from water quality
deterioration, ground water quality deterioration, and subsidence as a,
with all the pumping that's going on. I just hear about the number of
wells they're putting in, that, that they put in at the west lands, for
instance. You know, I guess there's hundreds of them out there now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is it the sheer number of wells their expanding out
there because they're relying entirely on ground water?
>> Bob Stoddard: Entirely, entirely on ground water. Maybe a little bit of
surface supply and transfers. That's the other thing we've been doing, or
that we've been doing over the last, oh, probably the last ten years or
so, is working on both, both ground water transfers and fallowing
transfers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Fallowing transfers?
>> Bob Stoddard: Where people are; in the; this is primarily in the
exchange contract or service area where they've allowed growers to fallow
some of their land and then as a result of the fallowing be able to
transfer that, a portion of that supply to, to the federal, the CVP
contractors to, to assist them in their supply side. There is; so we're
doing both those fallowing transfers and ground water transfers. So our
work in the fallowing transfers was to calculate the, the, the amount of
water that was... Essentially, the, the amount that was actually
consumptive used from the, used out of the delivery could be transferred,
and the rest would have to remain. And the -- on the ground water
transfers, it was looking at what the, how the pumping might impact
overdraft or, or how it may impact through, through draw down impacts to
neighboring wells.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And there, there's enough information out there to
calculate that sort of thing.
>> Bob Stoddard: Pardon me.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean there's, that, that can be calculated.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yes. Well, I mean, it's there, there, it's, it's to
the best you can, yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, [inaudible], I don't know if you actually
know this, but you, you were talking about all the wells going in over on
the west side, any sense as to how deep those wells are going now to hit
the water table?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'd say there, I guess their over a thousand feet now. I
don't know. I have really have not been involved in the, in the well
drilling out in that area at all. So that's, you know, that's; what I
understand is happened out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Anything else?
>> Jim Provost: We covered the base.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Well, any other comments you'd like to make?
Thoughts about the future? Predictions? Regrets?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the only regret I have, I worked too hard.
[ Laughter ]
I don't think I took a week off in thirty years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Really?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think it was about 30 years until I actually took
a, a -- you know, I'd grab a day here and there sort of thing, but, you
know, actually take a, take a week's vacation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I heard you were duck hunter. You must have taken a
little time off for that.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. On a weekend.
[ Laughter ]
So; and that's only, you know, fifteen miles away from where I live, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Well, retirement gives you the opportunity to go
do those sort of things.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Okay. Thank you very much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Okay. I hope I did okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Of course you did. Of course you did.
engineering, and he comes from a family who's been involved in this. So
maybe we should start with a bit of family history first.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I can start there. We; my dad started his water
career with the Bureau of Reclamation probably -- oh, I would say,
probably around 1940. And he was stationed at Friant and then Merced and
was dealing mainly in the quantification of water rights and ground water
issues for the Central Valley Project and the transfer of the exchange
water contract. And this is when they were going to do the, you know,
build the Delta-Mendota Canal and Friant Dam and develop the water on the
west side and he saw the opportunity to, to branch out on his own and, and
work on the delivery of water from the Delta-Mendota Canal to the various
federal water districts or irrigation districts. So that's how the firm
got started. It grew pretty big for a while. He, he associated with Henry
Carr in Fresno. You probably have heard that name. I know Jim certainly
has. And that went on for quite some time. And they, they developed
irrigation systems for the Chowchilla Water District, Solano Irrigation
District, San Luis Water District, and these are all, all new facilities,
and there's, there's probably others in there that don't come to mind. So
that was, I guess, kind of the first wave of, of, of development of water
on the west side. Prior to that it was all ground water pumping, no
significant local streams of any, of any significance. Then, I guess
another, a second wave hit when they decided they were going to build the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. This brought an additional supply at a
much higher elevation to the, to the west side. So this meant that there
was additional lands to be developed and, and served with water from the
Central Valley Project. So that meant expanding a lot of the existing
water districts on the west side, including those that I mentioned, plus
the Panoche Water District, the Pachuca Water District, the Eagle Field
Water District, several little small districts. So that, that went on
through the early '70s. And, and I, I joined the firm in, in 1972, so I
was involved in, in some of that later development of the water from the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. Then we, we actually, our little firm,
branched out and started doing some municipal engineering on the west side
for the little communities out there. And, and continued to do some
expansion and, and, and modernization of, of existing irrigation
facilities. And the; relatively recently, we did the modernization of the
Central California Irrigation District, the modernization of the West
Stanislaus Irrigation District; these are pretty major multi, multimillion dollar projects that take, oh, many years to complete from the
time you begin the initial feasibility and talking about what we're trying
to achieve and go through and do the evaluation of what the various
options were in terms of modernization. Go through the permitting and so
forth and then into preliminary design and, and design and, and
construction and, and startup. So we did that on some major projects. So
that's I guess is kind of a, a somewhat brief history of, of where the
firm has been and where I have been from 1972. I might say that we were -in 2005; well, let me back up a little bit. We, I guess the next thing
that hit pretty big was the drainage problem on the west side when they,
when they had, when they saw the, when selenium was discovered as being a
problem with, with wild foul on the Kesterson Reservoir, there was a, a;
there was a, a, a big crisis because there was a lot of Ag drainage from
the west side which contained selenium was being routed through the grass
lands water district and water conservation district. Those -- that area
was the largest contiguous wet lands in, I think in California, certainly,
and maybe in the west. And so that was, that started another real flurry
to do a lot modification of existing facilities and connecting and
rerouting in order to separate the drainage flows containing the salt and
the selenium from the fresh water flows that were being delivered to the
wet lands. Prior to that, they, they had always thought that the drainage
water was, was, was a good source of water for the, for the wetlands and
that the salinity wasn't too high, did not, to not, to render not a, a
beneficial supply. So they, that, that, so, so that district had developed
with that being a component of the supplier, that's the Grassland Water
District. When the selenium thing hit and they decided they needed to get
rid of this, this water -- well, I might add in there, too, that there was
some reports by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service back in the '50s, I
believe, talking about, or supporting the fact that that Ag drainage water
was, was good source of water for the, for the, for the grasslands. And so
they ended up with a contract of, of -- oh, 50 to 55 thousand acre feet to
serve the, to serve the wetlands, a Central Valley Project Water Service
Contract when their, when their demand was on the order of 180,000 acre
feet per year. I know that number fairly well because our firm did the,
did the water supply study for the Grassland Water District in, in support
of their water that they ended up receiving upon the passage of the
Central Valley Project Improvement Act which happened in 1992. I might be
rambling a little bit here. [Inaudible Crosstalk]
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's sort of giving us a nice overview. And I have a
few questions in mind now, so, let's just go with those. Let's just kind
of go back to your father a bit. Howard, right?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And the work that he did for the Bureau of Reclamation
back in the 1940s. I mean this is the beginning of I guess what at the
time was the, you know, world's biggest, you know, water capture and
conveyance project. Did he ever, did he talk a lot about, about his time
working with the Bureau back then and on, on a project of such scale.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I don't, I don't, no, I don't recall that he did. The
-- his, his real passion was, was on the water resource end of things and
not on the civil design end of things and, so he was involved as I say in
the, in quantification of rights and, and the development of the exchange
contract numbers I believe. And, and also looking at, at what the ground
water situation was prior to project and what it might be after the
project, those sorts of things.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So the quantification of water rights. He was
doing that because I understand it was necessary for the Bureau to
purchase water rights from existing holders in order build the system.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They purchased them from Miller and Lux.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So did he ever talk at all about the, the kind of
experiences there dealing with the people who own the Miller and Lux
lands, because that became a major piece of the CVP?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. It was the, it was the Kings River San Joaquin
River or Canal Company, I'm not sure exactly what the name of the, that
was kind of a predecessor for Miller and Lux when they really, when they
first built the, the major canals on the west side. Those, those were
originally built to take water out of the San Joaquin River into, and
deliver it to the west side. This is, obviously, before [inaudible] river
delivery and their, Miller and Lux priority was to deliver water to their
agricultural lands and any excess water would go to the Grassland and this
is, this was the start of the, this is the major waterfowl area that I
mentioned earlier and a major wintering ground for the, for water, for
migrating water fowl. And, so Miller and Lux would deliver water to their
Ag lands, and then all the excess would go into the, into the, into the
Grasslands. The way; it's kind of interesting back in those days the way
the, the systems would work. They'd fill the, they'd fill the systems,
they'd always have them running, and they’d have, have operational spill
exiting the systems in various locations pretty much all the time. This
would be, this would end up being the source of the, of the Grassland
supply, so it made, but it made water available to the Ag community, made
it very dependable because there was always water in the system. So the,
so the, the, the diverters or the Ag users would take, would take delivery
water. Anything they didn't take would continue in the system and if there
was stuff remaining in the system, that would be delivered back into the
river and then any tail water that came off the fields at the end would go
into drainage ditches and meander down and [inaudible] the same Grasslands
area. So the use on the system, on the use was obviously the net, you
know, the inflow less the outflow. But there was, there was certainly a
lot of ground water recharge that was occurring as a result of that sort
of operation.
>> Jim Provost: The, the Grasslands you're referring to, where are those
at?
>> Bob Stoddard: It's, it's in the Los Banos area. It's in Merced County
in the, it's, there's a major portion of it south of the Los Banos and
another major portion north of Los Banos. And it's about 60; I think about
60,000 acres in the Grassland Resource Conservation District and about
40,000, 40 to 50,000 in the Grassland Water District.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So after your father left the Bureau of
Reclamation, you say he went into private practice as an engineer?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Was, was he a formally trained engineer? Where
did he get his education at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Berkley.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And his, I understand he was responsible for developing
a lot of the irrigation district's conveyance systems hooking into the
Delta-Mendota Canal, I assume.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. And then, then after that, and hooking into the San
Luis Canal, you know, in the second phase that I talked about earlier.
>> Thomas Holyoke: How much of the infrastructure development was he
involved with for, out there on the west side?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure of how you'd like that quantified.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Chuckles] It doesn't have to be too precise. All of
it? Most of it? Much of it?
>> Bob Stoddard: A substantial portion. I couldn't tell you percentage
wise, but a lot of the districts on the west side, he was involved with.
In fact, I think that this is prior to my time that he was the, that we
started initially the work on the concept of development of the Westlands
Water District, which was, you know, 600 thousand acres of major system.
But that, you know, like, so he was involved in that in the initial
development of that project.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, you know, people who are watching these oral
histories may not really understand what it even means to be building a
conveyance system for any irrigation district. What kind of facilities are
we talking about? I mean what was, what was it that was being built?
>> Bob Stoddard: Canals and pipelines, to you know, depending on, on the,
on the topography. To, and I would say typically, to serve large acreages
in, in 160-acre blocks. You know, that's a whole other story about the
Reclamation Reform Act and the, and the acreage limitation and the, you
know, initially, the Reclamation Reform Act required, was for small
development of, and for service of 160-acre farms and that's, then it went
to 960, and then there was all sorts of different ways that they, that the
owners would get together or at least distribute the ownership amongst
family members so they could actually do major, much, major farms under
that Act.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually it's; I'm glad that you brought that up. In
designing irrigation systems for, you know, irrigation districts, that
were going to hook into water from the Bureau of Reclamation, were there,
were there limits imposed on the way you could, that these systems could
be designed to ensure that water was not delivered to land more than in,
in a 160 acres?
>> Bob Stoddard: No. The, the, the design capacity were based on cropping,
you know, anticipated cropping patterns, and developed that way and not
really with respect to the, what might be that, that legal limitation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Then you also mentioned your father was involved
with the development of the systems in the, what became then the Westlands
Water District, which I believe is quite possibly the biggest water
district in the United States. That must have been a project of some
significant undertaking at the time.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think he was just involved; we'd, we'd done other
projects, other districts prior to that and so there was, you know, there
was a lot of experience in the organization that Westlands was going to
take advantage of, but then they ultimately went to -- and I don't
remember the, Jim might remember, the different types of contracts, a 9D
contract or something like, where there were, you know, depending on
whether the Bureau of Reclamation was going to actually do the, the design
of the facilities themselves, or whether it was going to be a private
organization such as, such as ours. In that case, the Bureau of
Reclamation did all the, did all the design of the facilities. So, you
know, I don't know whether, you know, this somewhat before my time,
whether we would have still been involved if they had gone their private
engineering root, versus the public engineering or Bureau of Reclamation
route.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Which, do you happen to know what was more typical?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think probably the private -- well, I don't know. I
guess I shouldn't; I think probably the, the private. Jim's nodding a
"Yes" over there, so.
[ Laughter ]
>> Bob Stoddard: I feel more confident in that answer.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So you became involved with your father's
business, you said it was 1972.
>> Bob Stoddard: '72, yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Is that what you always wanted to do, become an
engineer like your father?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I guess. That's where I ended up. Well, I, you
know, obviously, I mean, I was, there's some pictures of myself and my
brother out on construction projects when I was 6 or 7 years old, you
know. So, been involved one way or another. Actually that was a 1955 flood
that caused major damage in a lot of facilities that were under
construction at the time.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where did you get your training at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, that's a story. I actually started at Berkley, but
I was goofing off. [Laughter] And so then I actually, I quit while I was a
junior. Then, that was in 1966, I guess. Took, got drafted. Spent three
years in the Army.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually in Vietnam.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I, actually the reason I spent three years, instead
of two, is that if you put in an extra year, you could, you could select
the, you know, the occupation you were going to be in at the, in the Army
and I selected Nike Hercules Missiles. They were, air defense systems
that, they didn't have any of those in Vietnam, I guess I was chicken.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where, where did that take you?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I, that took me to, that took me to Fort Ord for
basic training, took me to Fort Bliss, Texas, for missile training. Took
me to Maryland -- Rockville, Maryland, which is right outside of
Washington, D.C., in the Washington, Baltimore defense area where we,
where we, you know, protected the Washington area with, with Nike Hercules
Missiles and I guess it's, in that, in that case, they were all nuclear
warheads, which was kind of interesting because they also had high, high
explosive warheads. I guess they figure if they got, the enemy got, got
that close, they'd, you know, they'd throw everything they could at them.
So I spent a year and a half there and then about a year in [inaudible],
year in Germany. That was; I've got a lot of stories about, about that
whole situation, too, in terms of, well in terms of the, the, the things
that we did as far as the target tracking radar systems which I was
involved with. But I won't go on with that, but it's, you know, tracking
distressed aircraft, tracking UFOs tracking, running, running, running
competitions with the Air Force see who could, see whether they could
break us, break into us, or whether we could shoot them down. Anyway,
yeah. So then I got out of that. Then, I actually came Fresno, stayed
after that, in '60, 1970 I guess, and finished up here. And it was; I
imagine, just had some friend here, and that's was I guess why, you know,
it was, kind of an easy from a living standpoint. And it, it worked out
well. I was much more of a student. I mean I, when I got back, here I'm
going back into; here I'd been away from academics for three years and,
and, and entered into junior engineering classes, you know.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Came back a little more mature -- Berkeley.
>> Bob Stoddard: Quite a bit more, yeah. Yeah. I was the top, top guy in
the water resources end of the, you know, in the civil engineering school
here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So you start working for your father then, and it's his
firm in 1972. And is he's still involved in developing irrigation systems
for west side irrigation districts.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yeah, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, we started
that in, that, that's when the San Luis Canal was built, the San Luis Damn
and they built the; there was a whole new major conveyance came in, so we
expanded a lot of the existing districts, that, especially those that lay,
that lay upstream of the, of the, of the Delta-Mendota canal where all
their delivery had to be, were pumped diversions. So obviously they had to
rely on, on more temperamental systems than gravity diversions. When the,
when the new canal came in it was -- trying to think of the elevations of
the two now, but I don't know if I can do that. It was, it was above both
of these districts, so they all wanted to take their water out of the
upper canal rather than the lower canal, because then they could it all by
gravity. So we, you know, we ended up doing a lot of systems where we put
new facilities in to run the water downhill, rather than to replace those
facilities that we had done 30 years prior, you know, running uphill for
20 years, 25 years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So a lot of the work going on out there was actually
expanding, in some sense redoing work that your father had several decades
earlier.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. You know, and then, and then we, you know, we didn't
-- here recently, we're getting involved in, in another layer of
modernization of facilities.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, any particular interesting stories you can remember
back in those times, you know, develop those kinds of, those kinds of
districts, and there's, there's conveyance systems.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I can't. I don't know. Nothing really specific comes
to mind.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean, do you recall of sort of how many irrigation
districts you were doing this for?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think that's similar to that question you asked me
earlier. Well let me, let me, let me; the other, the other; I mentioned
earlier the Reclamation Reform Act; well that was amended in 1992. I don't
remember the first year. When they amended it in 1992, that was the first
time that the Bureau was mandating water conservations plans to be done by
all these federal districts. So we were involved heavily in development of
these districts and quantification of demands and that sort of thing and,
and obviously, had a great understanding of conveyance system and, and so
we were, that moved us into doing a lot of the water conservation plans in
1992 for these -- no it wasn't no -- yeah. I think is that -- let's see,
maybe it was '82 I think. Because, and then '92 was when the Central
Valley Project Improvement Act came in, and they expanded the requirements
under, under water conservation plans. So we were doing a lot of that sort
of work which moved us into, into, or moved the districts into, starting
to think about the way they were doing business and how they might be able
to improve them. So, those plans at least got them started thinking about
how they might be better stewards of the water supply.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So how did that change your business then? I mean, what
were you doing differently now?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well we, we, that's was the whole, early -- as I
mentioned earlier, the real early way water was delivered just especially
in the gravity systems through like the Miller and Lux developed. You
know, they, they, and I talked about the net deliveries. They, they'd take
water into systems and they'd deliver the water, the excess water would go
out the end of the system or it would go, the tail water would run out, it
all go down stream. In that case, the -- in a lot of cases on the West
side into the, into the wetlands areas and was used for supply there.
That, that, that, that sort of way of doing business was not considered to
be I guess, proper, and they wanted to better measurement systems and
better, better ways to account for the water, and all that was covered in
the water conservation plan at work.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So the, the -- so the emphasis now was on, you know,
trying to minimize water use, conserving water to use as little as
possible.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, yeah, well, not yeah, it'd be efficient users of
the supply I guess would be a better way to put. The amount you use is
depending on what your cropping patterns are and that sort of thing.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do you actually design an irrigation system for, to be
used for certain kinds of crops rather than other kinds of crops, like row
crops versus permanent crops, and...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you have, you have a general idea of what the, what
the cropping patterns are and compute what the, you know, what the demands
were in the peak months, and make sure you can make those deliveries.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Were you also involved with the development of
irrigation systems on the east side of the Valley?
>> Bob Stoddard: I did, just did some, did some work on planning of
modernization of some facilities for the Turlock Irrigation District and
the Modesto Irrigation District. Did some work for the little district,
Ballico Cortez which is east of the Turlock Irrigation District as far as
there is some idea of, or proposal to maybe they could get some, get some
surface supply from Turlock Irrigation District, so we did some planning
on, on the, and feasibility study of the, of expanding systems to, to
deliver water to those, those acreages. And there might be some other, we,
we did, just when I first, when I first started, we did a major project
for the Stockton East Water District, but that was to deliver some of
their surface water out of the Calaveras River to the, to a new water
treatment plant for the city of Stockton and so that was a major -- I
think it was about 13, 15 miles of large diameter pipeline. And that was
all, that was, that was to get more surface water. You probably heard
about all the, the chronic overdraft that happens in that, in the Stockton
area. This is one of the first projects to, to, to get more surface water
into the area.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So they wouldn't have to rely on the ground water so
much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Right, right. To decrease the, the demand on the ground
water.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wow. Okay. So in what ways has, has your business then
really changed over, over the decades. I mean, certainly [inaudible] bear
emphasis on some water conservation as a result of CVPIA.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, initially, as [inaudible] I think it was the '82
Reclamation Reform Act which had started and then the, in the, the 1992
CVPIA was a, a much more rigorous requirements for the, for the water
conservation planning by the districts. There was a lot of criticism by
third parties, I guess, for lack of a better term to, about they did all
these, these water conservation plans responding to the '82 amendment to,
that got done, and then submitted to the Bureau and were thrown on the
shelves. You know, so they, when they into '92, they, they, they set it up
so you had to do annual updates and be able to report on how, on how, on
progress you've made on your, on your various activities you had
identified in your initial plan, as far as improvements to your systems,
both physical improvements, and, and, you know, management or operational
improvements.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So did you have to deal a lot with, directly with the
Bureau, or was it mostly through the irrigation districts that were
contracting you?
>> Bob Stoddard: No we dealt, we dealt especially with the, with the, on
the water conservation side of things, we dealt directly with the Bureau
quite a bit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Especially, I guess, during some of the earlier years.
I'd say back in the 1970s, was there a kind of a big sense that you were - well, let's think about that a different way. And I guess a lot of
agricultural expansion had already taken place along, on, on the west
side. But was there sort of, sort of a sense that, you know, this was a
you know, a, a, your, you know, big, you know, big projects, you know,
contributing to, you know, you know, really large scale, from the large
scale agriculture in United States and that this was, well that, that,
that any sense that, that, that the problems that came along later -- was
any of that anticipated in the 1970s, or even the 1980s, you know, the,
the, the, all the restriction and water and [inaudible]...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the drainage, the drainage problem was certainly
identified in those times.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let's, let's talk a little bit about that. What
actually is the drainage problem?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, there's a, it's, it's the tight soils on the west
side perch the, the, the, the water that's, percolates past the, the root
zone, and there has to, they needed a way to remove it, so they, they put
in, under, tile drainage systems, these buried pipelines to collect that
water, and then they discharge it into the same conveyances. This is, this
is going back [inaudible] I talked about the drainage water and the
grassland supply. It was both surface drainage, or tail water and
operational spill, together with subsurface drainage, which is water
collected in these drainage systems. But that they, that they, it was
required that they do that in order to keep the, keep the water from
raising up into the root zones and, and damaging crop production.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wouldn't the water normally just percolate down through
the soil.
>> Bob Stoddard: It couldn't. It was, it, it, it was, it was, there was
different clay layers in there that inhibited the, the, the percolation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. And, originally, the Bureau of Reclamation was
supposed to build a drainage system for a lot of the, the west side
districts, wasn't it.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They had an obligation to do that.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What happened?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, they got the, the, the drain built to Kesterson
Reservoir which was going to be ultimately a regulating reservoir, but was
an evaporation reservoir because they hadn't built a drain from Kesterson
to the, I think, Chips Island or I think, some place in the Delta where,
where it was going to discharge and, and, it was that evaporation and that
Kesterson Reservoir that concentrated the selenium that caused the, the
deformities in the wildlife out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I think you had said earlier that there, there'd been
an assumption that, you know, that a lot of the water coming through the
drainage system was actually not going to be dangerous to wildlife?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I mentioned earlier that, that back in the, and, I,
I think it was in the '50s that I ran across, I mean I ran across, not in
the '50s, but I ran across a report in the, probably in the '80s of, of,
done by a fish and wildlife service that concluded or supported the use of
that drainage for, for the wildlife benefit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So apparently, someone made a mistake somewhere.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. Well, [inaudible crosstalk]. Well, they're looking
I think at the, at the, at the salinity of the, of the water, not the
constituents, so to speak.
>> Thomas Holyoke: In fact this is a problem essentially still unsolved
today.
>> Bob Stoddard: It certainly is. But the shortage of
that water more, the, the, the drainage more valuable
there's, you know, there's, there's treatment methods
have been too expensive. They're now being considered
and make the water available.
supply is making
and there's,
which heretofore
to remove the salts
>> Thomas Holyoke: Recycling all, all the water we can. So what's, what
has your business practice been like in the '90s, and into the 21st
century? Still working on and developing and refining, you know,
irrigation systems?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I'm retired, now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh. When did you retire?
>> Bob Stoddard: I retired at the end of the year. End of last year. Just
turned 70. I thought that was probably enough. I'm not like this guy over
here to go forever.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Are you still not retired?
[ Laughter ]
Now what kind of work were you, were you, have you been doing in the last
[inaudible crosstalk] fifteen years?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well I, Los Banos is a fairly small community and it's a
little, it's a little bit difficult to attract good engineers, you know,
to, to, for our business, and in 2005, we ended up merging with Boyle
Engineering Corporation. They were actually a subcontractor to me on a
major municipal development of water plants, sewer plants, and collections
systems, and drainage systems to take out in the Santa Nella are to build
a community out there that started as a trailer park into a community of
about 18,000 people, I think was the, was the plan. And they, they got
the, they'd gone through the county of Merced and got the approvals for
the, for the specific urban development plan to have, have that happen.
But, and we were; while we started doing; our; the business started in,
in, in the agricultural water arena, we, we decided we'd branch into the
municipal -- you know, broaden our, our capabilities and, so we began
doing municipal engineering and we, we ultimately were contract city
engineers for Los Banos and Gustine and Patterson and Newman and
Firebaugh, and you know... So we were; these, these cities were too small
to have big engineering staffs, so we were kind of contract city
engineering staffs for them. And I mentioned the Santa Nella project, that
was a, that was major municipal project. So we were doing a lot of; back
in the early 2000s we were doing more municipal work than we were
agricultural work because agricultural work was pretty well done, I guess
I should say, except for maybe a lot of this, a lot of this water
conservation planning and, and, and that sort of thing. But we were, we
were, I think we had about 22 people at that time and we were, you know,
we were killing ourselves. Couldn't, couldn't get any, couldn't, couldn't
get any help and, you know, and you had these clients that you'd had for - and Jim knows this. You have these clients for, that you've had for 30
years or so, and they come in the door, you don't tell them to go
someplace else, you figure out how you're, you know, you figure, you, you
go ahead and do what you can to get, get their, respond to them, you know.
So I, I was looking, I was searching countrywide to find, find engineers.
But back in, in those days, everybody was. You know, there was a, there
was a, a severe shortage of, of engineers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is that the case today?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure. It's -- Jim's nodding yes, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Laughter] Still a shortage of engineers.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I don't, I don't know that it's quite as bad as it
was back then because, you know, I don't think there's such a demand. You
know, the amount of work going on now not's quite as much as it was back
then, at least, you know, where I, where, where I was. So that's what, as
I say, you know, I started to say, Boyle was a, was a subcontractor to me
on this major project and we started talking and the... And the, actually
of the head of the Los Banos -- or excuse me, the Fresno office of Boyle
Engineering started his career in Los Banos. He was, he, right after, he
was another Fresno Stater and he, he -- the first five years or so of his
career was, was with us so I knew him real well and so that's, you know.
Anyway, we started talking and ultimately the way to, to meet your
client's demands was to merge with somebody so you had a lot more
horsepower. So we went from somebody; we went from people; went from about
20 some odd people to a firm of about 700, which was, which were, you
know, big in California and Florida, actually, and a little bit in, in
Colorado. And then, oh 2000 and, so we merged with Boyle in 2005, and in
2008 -- about 2008 -- they, they got gobbled up by, by AECOM, which was 40
some thousand people. So here I'd been, had this little organization of 20
some, and then we went to 700, that was okay, but then we went to 40 some
thousand and that, that bureaucracy I just couldn't, couldn't handle. So
that's started, that's started me thinking well it's probably, you know, I
mean I can't do this any longer. I knew these guys -- I've known this guy
for a, for a while now, all my career, and, and, and his, you know, the
other guys in his organization. And they, they kept trying to urge me to,
you know, so anyway. Well, when I, when I quit AECOM, which was in 2012,
I, I went to work for, for Provost and Pritchard with the understanding if
they, if they hired me, they'd have to hire all the, all the, all the
employees in the Los Banos office. In other words, just take over the
office. And...
>> Thomas Holyoke: How many people was that at that point?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, it was always only half a dozen I think, if that. I
mean the recession hit pretty hard. You know the, we were doing, I
mentioned we were doing all this work for these municipalities and then,
so then the, the, when the, when the recession hit, you know, all that
just dried up and the Ag side of things was, was, was pretty slow, too, so
that, that slowed everything down.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do serious droughts, well, like we're in now, the one
back in '77, does that take a pretty big toll in your industry?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, actually, you know, droughts and floods are good
for engineers. It's the normal years that aren't any good. But, but in
this case, this prolonged drought, all these districts -- the way they
make their money is to, is to sell the water to their, you know, they,
they buy the water from the Bureau, they sell it to their, to their
constituents, and they get, you know, that's how they get money to, to, to
run their business or run their districts. And after the, when they have
no, no water to sell, they have no revenue, except for standby charges.
And then that, then you take that one step farther, that they get their
revenue from the farmers who get, who, who grow crops with the water. If
they're not getting any water, they don't grow many crops, and so there's
no revenue coming, and there's no; so anyway, the revenue stream is, is,
is, is pretty thin these days in a lot of these districts, and that, that
has an effect on the, on the engineering community.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So does that mean that you've picked a, a good time to
get out of the business?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
[ Laughter ]
>> Thomas Holyoke: What else should we ask?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you know, the other thing, you bring, we talked
about this water conservation and the water supply in effect now that, you
know, the, the last two or three years or four years the, the water,
there's been zero allocations for the federal contractors. And it's been,
it, it's pretty amazing how they've taken these limited supplies and done
transfers and, and other ways, and, well obviously, they've developed
ground water, which, which is, may end up causing problems if this
continues on by, because of overdraft and, and subsidence. But, but, I
think there's been a drastic change in the water supply situation. And I
think there was a, there was drought from '86 to '92. Prior to that, the
federal contractors haul, they had a limit of water available in their,
you know, in their contract, they had a limit. But the Bureau would sell
them any water, as much as water as they wanted. You know, the San Felipe
project, which is the, you know, the pipeline over Pacheco Pass over to
Santa Clara and San Benito hadn't been built yet, so there, there was a
lot of supply there. There weren't the restrictions in the Delta for, for
pumping, and so they could, they could, you know, they could order
whatever they wanted. And then, after '89 I think it was, all of a sudden
the, the, because of that drought, things started getting bad, and they've
been getting worse every year, as far as water supply availability.
Primarily, I guess because of the restrictions and diversions out of the
Delta.
>> Jim Provost: Where do you see the San Joaquin Valley going
economically, farming wise?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, if you know, I think the senior water right holders
are probably going to do fine. You know, the, the river diverters, and the
exchange contractors. The, the, those who rely primarily on the, the
Central Valley Project and the State Water Project are probably going to
be in trouble, and you know, they're going to continue pumping ground
water. But now we have this recent legislation, or recent laws that are
going to require that you, you manage your ground water for, for
sustainability, that you know, that's, I think ultimately 20 years down
the road till that, that actually happens. But that's going to be; that
may or may help, but it may be too late, also, because of the amount of
ground water pumping going on. I, I don't, I'd be surprised if we don't
really start seeing some, some repercussions from water quality
deterioration, ground water quality deterioration, and subsidence as a,
with all the pumping that's going on. I just hear about the number of
wells they're putting in, that, that they put in at the west lands, for
instance. You know, I guess there's hundreds of them out there now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is it the sheer number of wells their expanding out
there because they're relying entirely on ground water?
>> Bob Stoddard: Entirely, entirely on ground water. Maybe a little bit of
surface supply and transfers. That's the other thing we've been doing, or
that we've been doing over the last, oh, probably the last ten years or
so, is working on both, both ground water transfers and fallowing
transfers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Fallowing transfers?
>> Bob Stoddard: Where people are; in the; this is primarily in the
exchange contract or service area where they've allowed growers to fallow
some of their land and then as a result of the fallowing be able to
transfer that, a portion of that supply to, to the federal, the CVP
contractors to, to assist them in their supply side. There is; so we're
doing both those fallowing transfers and ground water transfers. So our
work in the fallowing transfers was to calculate the, the, the amount of
water that was... Essentially, the, the amount that was actually
consumptive used from the, used out of the delivery could be transferred,
and the rest would have to remain. And the -- on the ground water
transfers, it was looking at what the, how the pumping might impact
overdraft or, or how it may impact through, through draw down impacts to
neighboring wells.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And there, there's enough information out there to
calculate that sort of thing.
>> Bob Stoddard: Pardon me.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean there's, that, that can be calculated.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yes. Well, I mean, it's there, there, it's, it's to
the best you can, yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, [inaudible], I don't know if you actually
know this, but you, you were talking about all the wells going in over on
the west side, any sense as to how deep those wells are going now to hit
the water table?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'd say there, I guess their over a thousand feet now. I
don't know. I have really have not been involved in the, in the well
drilling out in that area at all. So that's, you know, that's; what I
understand is happened out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Anything else?
>> Jim Provost: We covered the base.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Well, any other comments you'd like to make?
Thoughts about the future? Predictions? Regrets?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the only regret I have, I worked too hard.
[ Laughter ]
I don't think I took a week off in thirty years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Really?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think it was about 30 years until I actually took
a, a -- you know, I'd grab a day here and there sort of thing, but, you
know, actually take a, take a week's vacation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I heard you were duck hunter. You must have taken a
little time off for that.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. On a weekend.
[ Laughter ]
So; and that's only, you know, fifteen miles away from where I live, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Well, retirement gives you the opportunity to go
do those sort of things.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Okay. Thank you very much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Okay. I hope I did okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Of course you did. Of course you did.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Talking to Bob Stoddard here about water
engineering, and he comes from a family who's been involved in this. So
maybe we should start with a bit of family history first.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I can start there. We; my dad started his water
career with the Bureau of Reclamation probably -- oh, I would say,
probably around 1940. And he was stationed at Friant and then Merced and
was dealing mainly in the quantification of water rights and ground water
issues for the Central Valley Project and the transfer of the exchange
water contract. And this is when they were going to do the, you know,
build the Delta-Mendota Canal and Friant Dam and develop the water on the
west side and he saw the opportunity to, to branch out on his own and, and
work on the delivery of water from the Delta-Mendota Canal to the various
federal water districts or irrigation districts. So that's how the firm
got started. It grew pretty big for a while. He, he associated with Henry
Carr in Fresno. You probably have heard that name. I know Jim certainly
has. And that went on for quite some time. And they, they developed
irrigation systems for the Chowchilla Water District, Solano Irrigation
District, San Luis Water District, and these are all, all new facilities,
and there's, there's probably others in there that don't come to mind. So
that was, I guess, kind of the first wave of, of, of development of water
on the west side. Prior to that it was all ground water pumping, no
significant local streams of any, of any significance. Then, I guess
another, a second wave hit when they decided they were going to build the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. This brought an additional supply at a
much higher elevation to the, to the west side. So this meant that there
was additional lands to be developed and, and served with water from the
Central Valley Project. So that meant expanding a lot of the existing
water districts on the west side, including those that I mentioned, plus
the Panoche Water District, the Pachuca Water District, the Eagle Field
Water District, several little small districts. So that, that went on
through the early '70s. And, and I, I joined the firm in, in 1972, so I
was involved in, in some of that later development of the water from the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. Then we, we actually, our little firm,
branched out and started doing some municipal engineering on the west side
for the little communities out there. And, and continued to do some
expansion and, and, and modernization of, of existing irrigation
facilities. And the; relatively recently, we did the modernization of the
Central California Irrigation District, the modernization of the West
Stanislaus Irrigation District; these are pretty major multi, multimillion dollar projects that take, oh, many years to complete from the
time you begin the initial feasibility and talking about what we're trying
to achieve and go through and do the evaluation of what the various
options were in terms of modernization. Go through the permitting and so
forth and then into preliminary design and, and design and, and
construction and, and startup. So we did that on some major projects. So
that's I guess is kind of a, a somewhat brief history of, of where the
firm has been and where I have been from 1972. I might say that we were -in 2005; well, let me back up a little bit. We, I guess the next thing
that hit pretty big was the drainage problem on the west side when they,
when they had, when they saw the, when selenium was discovered as being a
problem with, with wild foul on the Kesterson Reservoir, there was a, a;
there was a, a, a big crisis because there was a lot of Ag drainage from
the west side which contained selenium was being routed through the grass
lands water district and water conservation district. Those -- that area
was the largest contiguous wet lands in, I think in California, certainly,
and maybe in the west. And so that was, that started another real flurry
to do a lot modification of existing facilities and connecting and
rerouting in order to separate the drainage flows containing the salt and
the selenium from the fresh water flows that were being delivered to the
wet lands. Prior to that, they, they had always thought that the drainage
water was, was, was a good source of water for the, for the wetlands and
that the salinity wasn't too high, did not, to not, to render not a, a
beneficial supply. So they, that, that, so, so that district had developed
with that being a component of the supplier, that's the Grassland Water
District. When the selenium thing hit and they decided they needed to get
rid of this, this water -- well, I might add in there, too, that there was
some reports by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service back in the '50s, I
believe, talking about, or supporting the fact that that Ag drainage water
was, was good source of water for the, for the, for the grasslands. And so
they ended up with a contract of, of -- oh, 50 to 55 thousand acre feet to
serve the, to serve the wetlands, a Central Valley Project Water Service
Contract when their, when their demand was on the order of 180,000 acre
feet per year. I know that number fairly well because our firm did the,
did the water supply study for the Grassland Water District in, in support
of their water that they ended up receiving upon the passage of the
Central Valley Project Improvement Act which happened in 1992. I might be
rambling a little bit here. [Inaudible Crosstalk]
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's sort of giving us a nice overview. And I have a
few questions in mind now, so, let's just go with those. Let's just kind
of go back to your father a bit. Howard, right?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And the work that he did for the Bureau of Reclamation
back in the 1940s. I mean this is the beginning of I guess what at the
time was the, you know, world's biggest, you know, water capture and
conveyance project. Did he ever, did he talk a lot about, about his time
working with the Bureau back then and on, on a project of such scale.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I don't, I don't, no, I don't recall that he did. The
-- his, his real passion was, was on the water resource end of things and
not on the civil design end of things and, so he was involved as I say in
the, in quantification of rights and, and the development of the exchange
contract numbers I believe. And, and also looking at, at what the ground
water situation was prior to project and what it might be after the
project, those sorts of things.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So the quantification of water rights. He was
doing that because I understand it was necessary for the Bureau to
purchase water rights from existing holders in order build the system.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They purchased them from Miller and Lux.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So did he ever talk at all about the, the kind of
experiences there dealing with the people who own the Miller and Lux
lands, because that became a major piece of the CVP?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. It was the, it was the Kings River San Joaquin
River or Canal Company, I'm not sure exactly what the name of the, that
was kind of a predecessor for Miller and Lux when they really, when they
first built the, the major canals on the west side. Those, those were
originally built to take water out of the San Joaquin River into, and
deliver it to the west side. This is, obviously, before [inaudible] river
delivery and their, Miller and Lux priority was to deliver water to their
agricultural lands and any excess water would go to the Grassland and this
is, this was the start of the, this is the major waterfowl area that I
mentioned earlier and a major wintering ground for the, for water, for
migrating water fowl. And, so Miller and Lux would deliver water to their
Ag lands, and then all the excess would go into the, into the, into the
Grasslands. The way; it's kind of interesting back in those days the way
the, the systems would work. They'd fill the, they'd fill the systems,
they'd always have them running, and they’d have, have operational spill
exiting the systems in various locations pretty much all the time. This
would be, this would end up being the source of the, of the Grassland
supply, so it made, but it made water available to the Ag community, made
it very dependable because there was always water in the system. So the,
so the, the, the diverters or the Ag users would take, would take delivery
water. Anything they didn't take would continue in the system and if there
was stuff remaining in the system, that would be delivered back into the
river and then any tail water that came off the fields at the end would go
into drainage ditches and meander down and [inaudible] the same Grasslands
area. So the use on the system, on the use was obviously the net, you
know, the inflow less the outflow. But there was, there was certainly a
lot of ground water recharge that was occurring as a result of that sort
of operation.
>> Jim Provost: The, the Grasslands you're referring to, where are those
at?
>> Bob Stoddard: It's, it's in the Los Banos area. It's in Merced County
in the, it's, there's a major portion of it south of the Los Banos and
another major portion north of Los Banos. And it's about 60; I think about
60,000 acres in the Grassland Resource Conservation District and about
40,000, 40 to 50,000 in the Grassland Water District.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So after your father left the Bureau of
Reclamation, you say he went into private practice as an engineer?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Was, was he a formally trained engineer? Where
did he get his education at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Berkley.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And his, I understand he was responsible for developing
a lot of the irrigation district's conveyance systems hooking into the
Delta-Mendota Canal, I assume.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. And then, then after that, and hooking into the San
Luis Canal, you know, in the second phase that I talked about earlier.
>> Thomas Holyoke: How much of the infrastructure development was he
involved with for, out there on the west side?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure of how you'd like that quantified.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Chuckles] It doesn't have to be too precise. All of
it? Most of it? Much of it?
>> Bob Stoddard: A substantial portion. I couldn't tell you percentage
wise, but a lot of the districts on the west side, he was involved with.
In fact, I think that this is prior to my time that he was the, that we
started initially the work on the concept of development of the Westlands
Water District, which was, you know, 600 thousand acres of major system.
But that, you know, like, so he was involved in that in the initial
development of that project.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, you know, people who are watching these oral
histories may not really understand what it even means to be building a
conveyance system for any irrigation district. What kind of facilities are
we talking about? I mean what was, what was it that was being built?
>> Bob Stoddard: Canals and pipelines, to you know, depending on, on the,
on the topography. To, and I would say typically, to serve large acreages
in, in 160-acre blocks. You know, that's a whole other story about the
Reclamation Reform Act and the, and the acreage limitation and the, you
know, initially, the Reclamation Reform Act required, was for small
development of, and for service of 160-acre farms and that's, then it went
to 960, and then there was all sorts of different ways that they, that the
owners would get together or at least distribute the ownership amongst
family members so they could actually do major, much, major farms under
that Act.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually it's; I'm glad that you brought that up. In
designing irrigation systems for, you know, irrigation districts, that
were going to hook into water from the Bureau of Reclamation, were there,
were there limits imposed on the way you could, that these systems could
be designed to ensure that water was not delivered to land more than in,
in a 160 acres?
>> Bob Stoddard: No. The, the, the design capacity were based on cropping,
you know, anticipated cropping patterns, and developed that way and not
really with respect to the, what might be that, that legal limitation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Then you also mentioned your father was involved
with the development of the systems in the, what became then the Westlands
Water District, which I believe is quite possibly the biggest water
district in the United States. That must have been a project of some
significant undertaking at the time.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think he was just involved; we'd, we'd done other
projects, other districts prior to that and so there was, you know, there
was a lot of experience in the organization that Westlands was going to
take advantage of, but then they ultimately went to -- and I don't
remember the, Jim might remember, the different types of contracts, a 9D
contract or something like, where there were, you know, depending on
whether the Bureau of Reclamation was going to actually do the, the design
of the facilities themselves, or whether it was going to be a private
organization such as, such as ours. In that case, the Bureau of
Reclamation did all the, did all the design of the facilities. So, you
know, I don't know whether, you know, this somewhat before my time,
whether we would have still been involved if they had gone their private
engineering root, versus the public engineering or Bureau of Reclamation
route.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Which, do you happen to know what was more typical?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think probably the private -- well, I don't know. I
guess I shouldn't; I think probably the, the private. Jim's nodding a
"Yes" over there, so.
[ Laughter ]
>> Bob Stoddard: I feel more confident in that answer.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So you became involved with your father's
business, you said it was 1972.
>> Bob Stoddard: '72, yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Is that what you always wanted to do, become an
engineer like your father?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I guess. That's where I ended up. Well, I, you
know, obviously, I mean, I was, there's some pictures of myself and my
brother out on construction projects when I was 6 or 7 years old, you
know. So, been involved one way or another. Actually that was a 1955 flood
that caused major damage in a lot of facilities that were under
construction at the time.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where did you get your training at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, that's a story. I actually started at Berkley, but
I was goofing off. [Laughter] And so then I actually, I quit while I was a
junior. Then, that was in 1966, I guess. Took, got drafted. Spent three
years in the Army.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually in Vietnam.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I, actually the reason I spent three years, instead
of two, is that if you put in an extra year, you could, you could select
the, you know, the occupation you were going to be in at the, in the Army
and I selected Nike Hercules Missiles. They were, air defense systems
that, they didn't have any of those in Vietnam, I guess I was chicken.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where, where did that take you?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I, that took me to, that took me to Fort Ord for
basic training, took me to Fort Bliss, Texas, for missile training. Took
me to Maryland -- Rockville, Maryland, which is right outside of
Washington, D.C., in the Washington, Baltimore defense area where we,
where we, you know, protected the Washington area with, with Nike Hercules
Missiles and I guess it's, in that, in that case, they were all nuclear
warheads, which was kind of interesting because they also had high, high
explosive warheads. I guess they figure if they got, the enemy got, got
that close, they'd, you know, they'd throw everything they could at them.
So I spent a year and a half there and then about a year in [inaudible],
year in Germany. That was; I've got a lot of stories about, about that
whole situation, too, in terms of, well in terms of the, the, the things
that we did as far as the target tracking radar systems which I was
involved with. But I won't go on with that, but it's, you know, tracking
distressed aircraft, tracking UFOs tracking, running, running, running
competitions with the Air Force see who could, see whether they could
break us, break into us, or whether we could shoot them down. Anyway,
yeah. So then I got out of that. Then, I actually came Fresno, stayed
after that, in '60, 1970 I guess, and finished up here. And it was; I
imagine, just had some friend here, and that's was I guess why, you know,
it was, kind of an easy from a living standpoint. And it, it worked out
well. I was much more of a student. I mean I, when I got back, here I'm
going back into; here I'd been away from academics for three years and,
and, and entered into junior engineering classes, you know.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Came back a little more mature -- Berkeley.
>> Bob Stoddard: Quite a bit more, yeah. Yeah. I was the top, top guy in
the water resources end of the, you know, in the civil engineering school
here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So you start working for your father then, and it's his
firm in 1972. And is he's still involved in developing irrigation systems
for west side irrigation districts.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yeah, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, we started
that in, that, that's when the San Luis Canal was built, the San Luis Damn
and they built the; there was a whole new major conveyance came in, so we
expanded a lot of the existing districts, that, especially those that lay,
that lay upstream of the, of the, of the Delta-Mendota canal where all
their delivery had to be, were pumped diversions. So obviously they had to
rely on, on more temperamental systems than gravity diversions. When the,
when the new canal came in it was -- trying to think of the elevations of
the two now, but I don't know if I can do that. It was, it was above both
of these districts, so they all wanted to take their water out of the
upper canal rather than the lower canal, because then they could it all by
gravity. So we, you know, we ended up doing a lot of systems where we put
new facilities in to run the water downhill, rather than to replace those
facilities that we had done 30 years prior, you know, running uphill for
20 years, 25 years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So a lot of the work going on out there was actually
expanding, in some sense redoing work that your father had several decades
earlier.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. You know, and then, and then we, you know, we didn't
-- here recently, we're getting involved in, in another layer of
modernization of facilities.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, any particular interesting stories you can remember
back in those times, you know, develop those kinds of, those kinds of
districts, and there's, there's conveyance systems.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I can't. I don't know. Nothing really specific comes
to mind.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean, do you recall of sort of how many irrigation
districts you were doing this for?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think that's similar to that question you asked me
earlier. Well let me, let me, let me; the other, the other; I mentioned
earlier the Reclamation Reform Act; well that was amended in 1992. I don't
remember the first year. When they amended it in 1992, that was the first
time that the Bureau was mandating water conservations plans to be done by
all these federal districts. So we were involved heavily in development of
these districts and quantification of demands and that sort of thing and,
and obviously, had a great understanding of conveyance system and, and so
we were, that moved us into doing a lot of the water conservation plans in
1992 for these -- no it wasn't no -- yeah. I think is that -- let's see,
maybe it was '82 I think. Because, and then '92 was when the Central
Valley Project Improvement Act came in, and they expanded the requirements
under, under water conservation plans. So we were doing a lot of that sort
of work which moved us into, into, or moved the districts into, starting
to think about the way they were doing business and how they might be able
to improve them. So, those plans at least got them started thinking about
how they might be better stewards of the water supply.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So how did that change your business then? I mean, what
were you doing differently now?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well we, we, that's was the whole, early -- as I
mentioned earlier, the real early way water was delivered just especially
in the gravity systems through like the Miller and Lux developed. You
know, they, they, and I talked about the net deliveries. They, they'd take
water into systems and they'd deliver the water, the excess water would go
out the end of the system or it would go, the tail water would run out, it
all go down stream. In that case, the -- in a lot of cases on the West
side into the, into the wetlands areas and was used for supply there.
That, that, that, that sort of way of doing business was not considered to
be I guess, proper, and they wanted to better measurement systems and
better, better ways to account for the water, and all that was covered in
the water conservation plan at work.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So the, the -- so the emphasis now was on, you know,
trying to minimize water use, conserving water to use as little as
possible.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, yeah, well, not yeah, it'd be efficient users of
the supply I guess would be a better way to put. The amount you use is
depending on what your cropping patterns are and that sort of thing.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do you actually design an irrigation system for, to be
used for certain kinds of crops rather than other kinds of crops, like row
crops versus permanent crops, and...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you have, you have a general idea of what the, what
the cropping patterns are and compute what the, you know, what the demands
were in the peak months, and make sure you can make those deliveries.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Were you also involved with the development of
irrigation systems on the east side of the Valley?
>> Bob Stoddard: I did, just did some, did some work on planning of
modernization of some facilities for the Turlock Irrigation District and
the Modesto Irrigation District. Did some work for the little district,
Ballico Cortez which is east of the Turlock Irrigation District as far as
there is some idea of, or proposal to maybe they could get some, get some
surface supply from Turlock Irrigation District, so we did some planning
on, on the, and feasibility study of the, of expanding systems to, to
deliver water to those, those acreages. And there might be some other, we,
we did, just when I first, when I first started, we did a major project
for the Stockton East Water District, but that was to deliver some of
their surface water out of the Calaveras River to the, to a new water
treatment plant for the city of Stockton and so that was a major -- I
think it was about 13, 15 miles of large diameter pipeline. And that was
all, that was, that was to get more surface water. You probably heard
about all the, the chronic overdraft that happens in that, in the Stockton
area. This is one of the first projects to, to, to get more surface water
into the area.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So they wouldn't have to rely on the ground water so
much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Right, right. To decrease the, the demand on the ground
water.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wow. Okay. So in what ways has, has your business then
really changed over, over the decades. I mean, certainly [inaudible] bear
emphasis on some water conservation as a result of CVPIA.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, initially, as [inaudible] I think it was the '82
Reclamation Reform Act which had started and then the, in the, the 1992
CVPIA was a, a much more rigorous requirements for the, for the water
conservation planning by the districts. There was a lot of criticism by
third parties, I guess, for lack of a better term to, about they did all
these, these water conservation plans responding to the '82 amendment to,
that got done, and then submitted to the Bureau and were thrown on the
shelves. You know, so they, when they into '92, they, they, they set it up
so you had to do annual updates and be able to report on how, on how, on
progress you've made on your, on your various activities you had
identified in your initial plan, as far as improvements to your systems,
both physical improvements, and, and, you know, management or operational
improvements.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So did you have to deal a lot with, directly with the
Bureau, or was it mostly through the irrigation districts that were
contracting you?
>> Bob Stoddard: No we dealt, we dealt especially with the, with the, on
the water conservation side of things, we dealt directly with the Bureau
quite a bit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Especially, I guess, during some of the earlier years.
I'd say back in the 1970s, was there a kind of a big sense that you were - well, let's think about that a different way. And I guess a lot of
agricultural expansion had already taken place along, on, on the west
side. But was there sort of, sort of a sense that, you know, this was a
you know, a, a, your, you know, big, you know, big projects, you know,
contributing to, you know, you know, really large scale, from the large
scale agriculture in United States and that this was, well that, that,
that any sense that, that, that the problems that came along later -- was
any of that anticipated in the 1970s, or even the 1980s, you know, the,
the, the, all the restriction and water and [inaudible]...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the drainage, the drainage problem was certainly
identified in those times.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let's, let's talk a little bit about that. What
actually is the drainage problem?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, there's a, it's, it's the tight soils on the west
side perch the, the, the, the water that's, percolates past the, the root
zone, and there has to, they needed a way to remove it, so they, they put
in, under, tile drainage systems, these buried pipelines to collect that
water, and then they discharge it into the same conveyances. This is, this
is going back [inaudible] I talked about the drainage water and the
grassland supply. It was both surface drainage, or tail water and
operational spill, together with subsurface drainage, which is water
collected in these drainage systems. But that they, that they, it was
required that they do that in order to keep the, keep the water from
raising up into the root zones and, and damaging crop production.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wouldn't the water normally just percolate down through
the soil.
>> Bob Stoddard: It couldn't. It was, it, it, it was, it was, there was
different clay layers in there that inhibited the, the, the percolation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. And, originally, the Bureau of Reclamation was
supposed to build a drainage system for a lot of the, the west side
districts, wasn't it.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They had an obligation to do that.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What happened?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, they got the, the, the drain built to Kesterson
Reservoir which was going to be ultimately a regulating reservoir, but was
an evaporation reservoir because they hadn't built a drain from Kesterson
to the, I think, Chips Island or I think, some place in the Delta where,
where it was going to discharge and, and, it was that evaporation and that
Kesterson Reservoir that concentrated the selenium that caused the, the
deformities in the wildlife out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I think you had said earlier that there, there'd been
an assumption that, you know, that a lot of the water coming through the
drainage system was actually not going to be dangerous to wildlife?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I mentioned earlier that, that back in the, and, I,
I think it was in the '50s that I ran across, I mean I ran across, not in
the '50s, but I ran across a report in the, probably in the '80s of, of,
done by a fish and wildlife service that concluded or supported the use of
that drainage for, for the wildlife benefit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So apparently, someone made a mistake somewhere.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. Well, [inaudible crosstalk]. Well, they're looking
I think at the, at the, at the salinity of the, of the water, not the
constituents, so to speak.
>> Thomas Holyoke: In fact this is a problem essentially still unsolved
today.
>> Bob Stoddard: It certainly is. But the shortage of
that water more, the, the, the drainage more valuable
there's, you know, there's, there's treatment methods
have been too expensive. They're now being considered
and make the water available.
supply is making
and there's,
which heretofore
to remove the salts
>> Thomas Holyoke: Recycling all, all the water we can. So what's, what
has your business practice been like in the '90s, and into the 21st
century? Still working on and developing and refining, you know,
irrigation systems?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I'm retired, now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh. When did you retire?
>> Bob Stoddard: I retired at the end of the year. End of last year. Just
turned 70. I thought that was probably enough. I'm not like this guy over
here to go forever.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Are you still not retired?
[ Laughter ]
Now what kind of work were you, were you, have you been doing in the last
[inaudible crosstalk] fifteen years?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well I, Los Banos is a fairly small community and it's a
little, it's a little bit difficult to attract good engineers, you know,
to, to, for our business, and in 2005, we ended up merging with Boyle
Engineering Corporation. They were actually a subcontractor to me on a
major municipal development of water plants, sewer plants, and collections
systems, and drainage systems to take out in the Santa Nella are to build
a community out there that started as a trailer park into a community of
about 18,000 people, I think was the, was the plan. And they, they got
the, they'd gone through the county of Merced and got the approvals for
the, for the specific urban development plan to have, have that happen.
But, and we were; while we started doing; our; the business started in,
in, in the agricultural water arena, we, we decided we'd branch into the
municipal -- you know, broaden our, our capabilities and, so we began
doing municipal engineering and we, we ultimately were contract city
engineers for Los Banos and Gustine and Patterson and Newman and
Firebaugh, and you know... So we were; these, these cities were too small
to have big engineering staffs, so we were kind of contract city
engineering staffs for them. And I mentioned the Santa Nella project, that
was a, that was major municipal project. So we were doing a lot of; back
in the early 2000s we were doing more municipal work than we were
agricultural work because agricultural work was pretty well done, I guess
I should say, except for maybe a lot of this, a lot of this water
conservation planning and, and, and that sort of thing. But we were, we
were, I think we had about 22 people at that time and we were, you know,
we were killing ourselves. Couldn't, couldn't get any, couldn't, couldn't
get any help and, you know, and you had these clients that you'd had for - and Jim knows this. You have these clients for, that you've had for 30
years or so, and they come in the door, you don't tell them to go
someplace else, you figure out how you're, you know, you figure, you, you
go ahead and do what you can to get, get their, respond to them, you know.
So I, I was looking, I was searching countrywide to find, find engineers.
But back in, in those days, everybody was. You know, there was a, there
was a, a severe shortage of, of engineers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is that the case today?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure. It's -- Jim's nodding yes, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Laughter] Still a shortage of engineers.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I don't, I don't know that it's quite as bad as it
was back then because, you know, I don't think there's such a demand. You
know, the amount of work going on now not's quite as much as it was back
then, at least, you know, where I, where, where I was. So that's what, as
I say, you know, I started to say, Boyle was a, was a subcontractor to me
on this major project and we started talking and the... And the, actually
of the head of the Los Banos -- or excuse me, the Fresno office of Boyle
Engineering started his career in Los Banos. He was, he, right after, he
was another Fresno Stater and he, he -- the first five years or so of his
career was, was with us so I knew him real well and so that's, you know.
Anyway, we started talking and ultimately the way to, to meet your
client's demands was to merge with somebody so you had a lot more
horsepower. So we went from somebody; we went from people; went from about
20 some odd people to a firm of about 700, which was, which were, you
know, big in California and Florida, actually, and a little bit in, in
Colorado. And then, oh 2000 and, so we merged with Boyle in 2005, and in
2008 -- about 2008 -- they, they got gobbled up by, by AECOM, which was 40
some thousand people. So here I'd been, had this little organization of 20
some, and then we went to 700, that was okay, but then we went to 40 some
thousand and that, that bureaucracy I just couldn't, couldn't handle. So
that's started, that's started me thinking well it's probably, you know, I
mean I can't do this any longer. I knew these guys -- I've known this guy
for a, for a while now, all my career, and, and, and his, you know, the
other guys in his organization. And they, they kept trying to urge me to,
you know, so anyway. Well, when I, when I quit AECOM, which was in 2012,
I, I went to work for, for Provost and Pritchard with the understanding if
they, if they hired me, they'd have to hire all the, all the, all the
employees in the Los Banos office. In other words, just take over the
office. And...
>> Thomas Holyoke: How many people was that at that point?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, it was always only half a dozen I think, if that. I
mean the recession hit pretty hard. You know the, we were doing, I
mentioned we were doing all this work for these municipalities and then,
so then the, the, when the, when the recession hit, you know, all that
just dried up and the Ag side of things was, was, was pretty slow, too, so
that, that slowed everything down.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do serious droughts, well, like we're in now, the one
back in '77, does that take a pretty big toll in your industry?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, actually, you know, droughts and floods are good
for engineers. It's the normal years that aren't any good. But, but in
this case, this prolonged drought, all these districts -- the way they
make their money is to, is to sell the water to their, you know, they,
they buy the water from the Bureau, they sell it to their, to their
constituents, and they get, you know, that's how they get money to, to, to
run their business or run their districts. And after the, when they have
no, no water to sell, they have no revenue, except for standby charges.
And then that, then you take that one step farther, that they get their
revenue from the farmers who get, who, who grow crops with the water. If
they're not getting any water, they don't grow many crops, and so there's
no revenue coming, and there's no; so anyway, the revenue stream is, is,
is, is pretty thin these days in a lot of these districts, and that, that
has an effect on the, on the engineering community.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So does that mean that you've picked a, a good time to
get out of the business?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
[ Laughter ]
>> Thomas Holyoke: What else should we ask?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you know, the other thing, you bring, we talked
about this water conservation and the water supply in effect now that, you
know, the, the last two or three years or four years the, the water,
there's been zero allocations for the federal contractors. And it's been,
it, it's pretty amazing how they've taken these limited supplies and done
transfers and, and other ways, and, well obviously, they've developed
ground water, which, which is, may end up causing problems if this
continues on by, because of overdraft and, and subsidence. But, but, I
think there's been a drastic change in the water supply situation. And I
think there was a, there was drought from '86 to '92. Prior to that, the
federal contractors haul, they had a limit of water available in their,
you know, in their contract, they had a limit. But the Bureau would sell
them any water, as much as water as they wanted. You know, the San Felipe
project, which is the, you know, the pipeline over Pacheco Pass over to
Santa Clara and San Benito hadn't been built yet, so there, there was a
lot of supply there. There weren't the restrictions in the Delta for, for
pumping, and so they could, they could, you know, they could order
whatever they wanted. And then, after '89 I think it was, all of a sudden
the, the, because of that drought, things started getting bad, and they've
been getting worse every year, as far as water supply availability.
Primarily, I guess because of the restrictions and diversions out of the
Delta.
>> Jim Provost: Where do you see the San Joaquin Valley going
economically, farming wise?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, if you know, I think the senior water right holders
are probably going to do fine. You know, the, the river diverters, and the
exchange contractors. The, the, those who rely primarily on the, the
Central Valley Project and the State Water Project are probably going to
be in trouble, and you know, they're going to continue pumping ground
water. But now we have this recent legislation, or recent laws that are
going to require that you, you manage your ground water for, for
sustainability, that you know, that's, I think ultimately 20 years down
the road till that, that actually happens. But that's going to be; that
may or may help, but it may be too late, also, because of the amount of
ground water pumping going on. I, I don't, I'd be surprised if we don't
really start seeing some, some repercussions from water quality
deterioration, ground water quality deterioration, and subsidence as a,
with all the pumping that's going on. I just hear about the number of
wells they're putting in, that, that they put in at the west lands, for
instance. You know, I guess there's hundreds of them out there now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is it the sheer number of wells their expanding out
there because they're relying entirely on ground water?
>> Bob Stoddard: Entirely, entirely on ground water. Maybe a little bit of
surface supply and transfers. That's the other thing we've been doing, or
that we've been doing over the last, oh, probably the last ten years or
so, is working on both, both ground water transfers and fallowing
transfers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Fallowing transfers?
>> Bob Stoddard: Where people are; in the; this is primarily in the
exchange contract or service area where they've allowed growers to fallow
some of their land and then as a result of the fallowing be able to
transfer that, a portion of that supply to, to the federal, the CVP
contractors to, to assist them in their supply side. There is; so we're
doing both those fallowing transfers and ground water transfers. So our
work in the fallowing transfers was to calculate the, the, the amount of
water that was... Essentially, the, the amount that was actually
consumptive used from the, used out of the delivery could be transferred,
and the rest would have to remain. And the -- on the ground water
transfers, it was looking at what the, how the pumping might impact
overdraft or, or how it may impact through, through draw down impacts to
neighboring wells.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And there, there's enough information out there to
calculate that sort of thing.
>> Bob Stoddard: Pardon me.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean there's, that, that can be calculated.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yes. Well, I mean, it's there, there, it's, it's to
the best you can, yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, [inaudible], I don't know if you actually
know this, but you, you were talking about all the wells going in over on
the west side, any sense as to how deep those wells are going now to hit
the water table?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'd say there, I guess their over a thousand feet now. I
don't know. I have really have not been involved in the, in the well
drilling out in that area at all. So that's, you know, that's; what I
understand is happened out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Anything else?
>> Jim Provost: We covered the base.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Well, any other comments you'd like to make?
Thoughts about the future? Predictions? Regrets?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the only regret I have, I worked too hard.
[ Laughter ]
I don't think I took a week off in thirty years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Really?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think it was about 30 years until I actually took
a, a -- you know, I'd grab a day here and there sort of thing, but, you
know, actually take a, take a week's vacation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I heard you were duck hunter. You must have taken a
little time off for that.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. On a weekend.
[ Laughter ]
So; and that's only, you know, fifteen miles away from where I live, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Well, retirement gives you the opportunity to go
do those sort of things.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Okay. Thank you very much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Okay. I hope I did okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Of course you did. Of course you did.
engineering, and he comes from a family who's been involved in this. So
maybe we should start with a bit of family history first.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I can start there. We; my dad started his water
career with the Bureau of Reclamation probably -- oh, I would say,
probably around 1940. And he was stationed at Friant and then Merced and
was dealing mainly in the quantification of water rights and ground water
issues for the Central Valley Project and the transfer of the exchange
water contract. And this is when they were going to do the, you know,
build the Delta-Mendota Canal and Friant Dam and develop the water on the
west side and he saw the opportunity to, to branch out on his own and, and
work on the delivery of water from the Delta-Mendota Canal to the various
federal water districts or irrigation districts. So that's how the firm
got started. It grew pretty big for a while. He, he associated with Henry
Carr in Fresno. You probably have heard that name. I know Jim certainly
has. And that went on for quite some time. And they, they developed
irrigation systems for the Chowchilla Water District, Solano Irrigation
District, San Luis Water District, and these are all, all new facilities,
and there's, there's probably others in there that don't come to mind. So
that was, I guess, kind of the first wave of, of, of development of water
on the west side. Prior to that it was all ground water pumping, no
significant local streams of any, of any significance. Then, I guess
another, a second wave hit when they decided they were going to build the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. This brought an additional supply at a
much higher elevation to the, to the west side. So this meant that there
was additional lands to be developed and, and served with water from the
Central Valley Project. So that meant expanding a lot of the existing
water districts on the west side, including those that I mentioned, plus
the Panoche Water District, the Pachuca Water District, the Eagle Field
Water District, several little small districts. So that, that went on
through the early '70s. And, and I, I joined the firm in, in 1972, so I
was involved in, in some of that later development of the water from the
California Aqueduct San Luis Canal. Then we, we actually, our little firm,
branched out and started doing some municipal engineering on the west side
for the little communities out there. And, and continued to do some
expansion and, and, and modernization of, of existing irrigation
facilities. And the; relatively recently, we did the modernization of the
Central California Irrigation District, the modernization of the West
Stanislaus Irrigation District; these are pretty major multi, multimillion dollar projects that take, oh, many years to complete from the
time you begin the initial feasibility and talking about what we're trying
to achieve and go through and do the evaluation of what the various
options were in terms of modernization. Go through the permitting and so
forth and then into preliminary design and, and design and, and
construction and, and startup. So we did that on some major projects. So
that's I guess is kind of a, a somewhat brief history of, of where the
firm has been and where I have been from 1972. I might say that we were -in 2005; well, let me back up a little bit. We, I guess the next thing
that hit pretty big was the drainage problem on the west side when they,
when they had, when they saw the, when selenium was discovered as being a
problem with, with wild foul on the Kesterson Reservoir, there was a, a;
there was a, a, a big crisis because there was a lot of Ag drainage from
the west side which contained selenium was being routed through the grass
lands water district and water conservation district. Those -- that area
was the largest contiguous wet lands in, I think in California, certainly,
and maybe in the west. And so that was, that started another real flurry
to do a lot modification of existing facilities and connecting and
rerouting in order to separate the drainage flows containing the salt and
the selenium from the fresh water flows that were being delivered to the
wet lands. Prior to that, they, they had always thought that the drainage
water was, was, was a good source of water for the, for the wetlands and
that the salinity wasn't too high, did not, to not, to render not a, a
beneficial supply. So they, that, that, so, so that district had developed
with that being a component of the supplier, that's the Grassland Water
District. When the selenium thing hit and they decided they needed to get
rid of this, this water -- well, I might add in there, too, that there was
some reports by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service back in the '50s, I
believe, talking about, or supporting the fact that that Ag drainage water
was, was good source of water for the, for the, for the grasslands. And so
they ended up with a contract of, of -- oh, 50 to 55 thousand acre feet to
serve the, to serve the wetlands, a Central Valley Project Water Service
Contract when their, when their demand was on the order of 180,000 acre
feet per year. I know that number fairly well because our firm did the,
did the water supply study for the Grassland Water District in, in support
of their water that they ended up receiving upon the passage of the
Central Valley Project Improvement Act which happened in 1992. I might be
rambling a little bit here. [Inaudible Crosstalk]
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's sort of giving us a nice overview. And I have a
few questions in mind now, so, let's just go with those. Let's just kind
of go back to your father a bit. Howard, right?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And the work that he did for the Bureau of Reclamation
back in the 1940s. I mean this is the beginning of I guess what at the
time was the, you know, world's biggest, you know, water capture and
conveyance project. Did he ever, did he talk a lot about, about his time
working with the Bureau back then and on, on a project of such scale.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I don't, I don't, no, I don't recall that he did. The
-- his, his real passion was, was on the water resource end of things and
not on the civil design end of things and, so he was involved as I say in
the, in quantification of rights and, and the development of the exchange
contract numbers I believe. And, and also looking at, at what the ground
water situation was prior to project and what it might be after the
project, those sorts of things.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So the quantification of water rights. He was
doing that because I understand it was necessary for the Bureau to
purchase water rights from existing holders in order build the system.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They purchased them from Miller and Lux.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So did he ever talk at all about the, the kind of
experiences there dealing with the people who own the Miller and Lux
lands, because that became a major piece of the CVP?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. It was the, it was the Kings River San Joaquin
River or Canal Company, I'm not sure exactly what the name of the, that
was kind of a predecessor for Miller and Lux when they really, when they
first built the, the major canals on the west side. Those, those were
originally built to take water out of the San Joaquin River into, and
deliver it to the west side. This is, obviously, before [inaudible] river
delivery and their, Miller and Lux priority was to deliver water to their
agricultural lands and any excess water would go to the Grassland and this
is, this was the start of the, this is the major waterfowl area that I
mentioned earlier and a major wintering ground for the, for water, for
migrating water fowl. And, so Miller and Lux would deliver water to their
Ag lands, and then all the excess would go into the, into the, into the
Grasslands. The way; it's kind of interesting back in those days the way
the, the systems would work. They'd fill the, they'd fill the systems,
they'd always have them running, and they’d have, have operational spill
exiting the systems in various locations pretty much all the time. This
would be, this would end up being the source of the, of the Grassland
supply, so it made, but it made water available to the Ag community, made
it very dependable because there was always water in the system. So the,
so the, the, the diverters or the Ag users would take, would take delivery
water. Anything they didn't take would continue in the system and if there
was stuff remaining in the system, that would be delivered back into the
river and then any tail water that came off the fields at the end would go
into drainage ditches and meander down and [inaudible] the same Grasslands
area. So the use on the system, on the use was obviously the net, you
know, the inflow less the outflow. But there was, there was certainly a
lot of ground water recharge that was occurring as a result of that sort
of operation.
>> Jim Provost: The, the Grasslands you're referring to, where are those
at?
>> Bob Stoddard: It's, it's in the Los Banos area. It's in Merced County
in the, it's, there's a major portion of it south of the Los Banos and
another major portion north of Los Banos. And it's about 60; I think about
60,000 acres in the Grassland Resource Conservation District and about
40,000, 40 to 50,000 in the Grassland Water District.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So after your father left the Bureau of
Reclamation, you say he went into private practice as an engineer?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Was, was he a formally trained engineer? Where
did he get his education at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Berkley.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And his, I understand he was responsible for developing
a lot of the irrigation district's conveyance systems hooking into the
Delta-Mendota Canal, I assume.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. And then, then after that, and hooking into the San
Luis Canal, you know, in the second phase that I talked about earlier.
>> Thomas Holyoke: How much of the infrastructure development was he
involved with for, out there on the west side?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure of how you'd like that quantified.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Chuckles] It doesn't have to be too precise. All of
it? Most of it? Much of it?
>> Bob Stoddard: A substantial portion. I couldn't tell you percentage
wise, but a lot of the districts on the west side, he was involved with.
In fact, I think that this is prior to my time that he was the, that we
started initially the work on the concept of development of the Westlands
Water District, which was, you know, 600 thousand acres of major system.
But that, you know, like, so he was involved in that in the initial
development of that project.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, you know, people who are watching these oral
histories may not really understand what it even means to be building a
conveyance system for any irrigation district. What kind of facilities are
we talking about? I mean what was, what was it that was being built?
>> Bob Stoddard: Canals and pipelines, to you know, depending on, on the,
on the topography. To, and I would say typically, to serve large acreages
in, in 160-acre blocks. You know, that's a whole other story about the
Reclamation Reform Act and the, and the acreage limitation and the, you
know, initially, the Reclamation Reform Act required, was for small
development of, and for service of 160-acre farms and that's, then it went
to 960, and then there was all sorts of different ways that they, that the
owners would get together or at least distribute the ownership amongst
family members so they could actually do major, much, major farms under
that Act.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually it's; I'm glad that you brought that up. In
designing irrigation systems for, you know, irrigation districts, that
were going to hook into water from the Bureau of Reclamation, were there,
were there limits imposed on the way you could, that these systems could
be designed to ensure that water was not delivered to land more than in,
in a 160 acres?
>> Bob Stoddard: No. The, the, the design capacity were based on cropping,
you know, anticipated cropping patterns, and developed that way and not
really with respect to the, what might be that, that legal limitation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Then you also mentioned your father was involved
with the development of the systems in the, what became then the Westlands
Water District, which I believe is quite possibly the biggest water
district in the United States. That must have been a project of some
significant undertaking at the time.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think he was just involved; we'd, we'd done other
projects, other districts prior to that and so there was, you know, there
was a lot of experience in the organization that Westlands was going to
take advantage of, but then they ultimately went to -- and I don't
remember the, Jim might remember, the different types of contracts, a 9D
contract or something like, where there were, you know, depending on
whether the Bureau of Reclamation was going to actually do the, the design
of the facilities themselves, or whether it was going to be a private
organization such as, such as ours. In that case, the Bureau of
Reclamation did all the, did all the design of the facilities. So, you
know, I don't know whether, you know, this somewhat before my time,
whether we would have still been involved if they had gone their private
engineering root, versus the public engineering or Bureau of Reclamation
route.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Which, do you happen to know what was more typical?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think probably the private -- well, I don't know. I
guess I shouldn't; I think probably the, the private. Jim's nodding a
"Yes" over there, so.
[ Laughter ]
>> Bob Stoddard: I feel more confident in that answer.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So you became involved with your father's
business, you said it was 1972.
>> Bob Stoddard: '72, yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Is that what you always wanted to do, become an
engineer like your father?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I guess. That's where I ended up. Well, I, you
know, obviously, I mean, I was, there's some pictures of myself and my
brother out on construction projects when I was 6 or 7 years old, you
know. So, been involved one way or another. Actually that was a 1955 flood
that caused major damage in a lot of facilities that were under
construction at the time.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where did you get your training at?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, that's a story. I actually started at Berkley, but
I was goofing off. [Laughter] And so then I actually, I quit while I was a
junior. Then, that was in 1966, I guess. Took, got drafted. Spent three
years in the Army.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually in Vietnam.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I, actually the reason I spent three years, instead
of two, is that if you put in an extra year, you could, you could select
the, you know, the occupation you were going to be in at the, in the Army
and I selected Nike Hercules Missiles. They were, air defense systems
that, they didn't have any of those in Vietnam, I guess I was chicken.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So where, where did that take you?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I, that took me to, that took me to Fort Ord for
basic training, took me to Fort Bliss, Texas, for missile training. Took
me to Maryland -- Rockville, Maryland, which is right outside of
Washington, D.C., in the Washington, Baltimore defense area where we,
where we, you know, protected the Washington area with, with Nike Hercules
Missiles and I guess it's, in that, in that case, they were all nuclear
warheads, which was kind of interesting because they also had high, high
explosive warheads. I guess they figure if they got, the enemy got, got
that close, they'd, you know, they'd throw everything they could at them.
So I spent a year and a half there and then about a year in [inaudible],
year in Germany. That was; I've got a lot of stories about, about that
whole situation, too, in terms of, well in terms of the, the, the things
that we did as far as the target tracking radar systems which I was
involved with. But I won't go on with that, but it's, you know, tracking
distressed aircraft, tracking UFOs tracking, running, running, running
competitions with the Air Force see who could, see whether they could
break us, break into us, or whether we could shoot them down. Anyway,
yeah. So then I got out of that. Then, I actually came Fresno, stayed
after that, in '60, 1970 I guess, and finished up here. And it was; I
imagine, just had some friend here, and that's was I guess why, you know,
it was, kind of an easy from a living standpoint. And it, it worked out
well. I was much more of a student. I mean I, when I got back, here I'm
going back into; here I'd been away from academics for three years and,
and, and entered into junior engineering classes, you know.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Came back a little more mature -- Berkeley.
>> Bob Stoddard: Quite a bit more, yeah. Yeah. I was the top, top guy in
the water resources end of the, you know, in the civil engineering school
here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So you start working for your father then, and it's his
firm in 1972. And is he's still involved in developing irrigation systems
for west side irrigation districts.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yeah, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, we started
that in, that, that's when the San Luis Canal was built, the San Luis Damn
and they built the; there was a whole new major conveyance came in, so we
expanded a lot of the existing districts, that, especially those that lay,
that lay upstream of the, of the, of the Delta-Mendota canal where all
their delivery had to be, were pumped diversions. So obviously they had to
rely on, on more temperamental systems than gravity diversions. When the,
when the new canal came in it was -- trying to think of the elevations of
the two now, but I don't know if I can do that. It was, it was above both
of these districts, so they all wanted to take their water out of the
upper canal rather than the lower canal, because then they could it all by
gravity. So we, you know, we ended up doing a lot of systems where we put
new facilities in to run the water downhill, rather than to replace those
facilities that we had done 30 years prior, you know, running uphill for
20 years, 25 years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So a lot of the work going on out there was actually
expanding, in some sense redoing work that your father had several decades
earlier.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. You know, and then, and then we, you know, we didn't
-- here recently, we're getting involved in, in another layer of
modernization of facilities.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, any particular interesting stories you can remember
back in those times, you know, develop those kinds of, those kinds of
districts, and there's, there's conveyance systems.
>> Bob Stoddard: No. I can't. I don't know. Nothing really specific comes
to mind.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean, do you recall of sort of how many irrigation
districts you were doing this for?
>> Bob Stoddard: I think that's similar to that question you asked me
earlier. Well let me, let me, let me; the other, the other; I mentioned
earlier the Reclamation Reform Act; well that was amended in 1992. I don't
remember the first year. When they amended it in 1992, that was the first
time that the Bureau was mandating water conservations plans to be done by
all these federal districts. So we were involved heavily in development of
these districts and quantification of demands and that sort of thing and,
and obviously, had a great understanding of conveyance system and, and so
we were, that moved us into doing a lot of the water conservation plans in
1992 for these -- no it wasn't no -- yeah. I think is that -- let's see,
maybe it was '82 I think. Because, and then '92 was when the Central
Valley Project Improvement Act came in, and they expanded the requirements
under, under water conservation plans. So we were doing a lot of that sort
of work which moved us into, into, or moved the districts into, starting
to think about the way they were doing business and how they might be able
to improve them. So, those plans at least got them started thinking about
how they might be better stewards of the water supply.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So how did that change your business then? I mean, what
were you doing differently now?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well we, we, that's was the whole, early -- as I
mentioned earlier, the real early way water was delivered just especially
in the gravity systems through like the Miller and Lux developed. You
know, they, they, and I talked about the net deliveries. They, they'd take
water into systems and they'd deliver the water, the excess water would go
out the end of the system or it would go, the tail water would run out, it
all go down stream. In that case, the -- in a lot of cases on the West
side into the, into the wetlands areas and was used for supply there.
That, that, that, that sort of way of doing business was not considered to
be I guess, proper, and they wanted to better measurement systems and
better, better ways to account for the water, and all that was covered in
the water conservation plan at work.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So the, the -- so the emphasis now was on, you know,
trying to minimize water use, conserving water to use as little as
possible.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, yeah, well, not yeah, it'd be efficient users of
the supply I guess would be a better way to put. The amount you use is
depending on what your cropping patterns are and that sort of thing.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do you actually design an irrigation system for, to be
used for certain kinds of crops rather than other kinds of crops, like row
crops versus permanent crops, and...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you have, you have a general idea of what the, what
the cropping patterns are and compute what the, you know, what the demands
were in the peak months, and make sure you can make those deliveries.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Were you also involved with the development of
irrigation systems on the east side of the Valley?
>> Bob Stoddard: I did, just did some, did some work on planning of
modernization of some facilities for the Turlock Irrigation District and
the Modesto Irrigation District. Did some work for the little district,
Ballico Cortez which is east of the Turlock Irrigation District as far as
there is some idea of, or proposal to maybe they could get some, get some
surface supply from Turlock Irrigation District, so we did some planning
on, on the, and feasibility study of the, of expanding systems to, to
deliver water to those, those acreages. And there might be some other, we,
we did, just when I first, when I first started, we did a major project
for the Stockton East Water District, but that was to deliver some of
their surface water out of the Calaveras River to the, to a new water
treatment plant for the city of Stockton and so that was a major -- I
think it was about 13, 15 miles of large diameter pipeline. And that was
all, that was, that was to get more surface water. You probably heard
about all the, the chronic overdraft that happens in that, in the Stockton
area. This is one of the first projects to, to, to get more surface water
into the area.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So they wouldn't have to rely on the ground water so
much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Right, right. To decrease the, the demand on the ground
water.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wow. Okay. So in what ways has, has your business then
really changed over, over the decades. I mean, certainly [inaudible] bear
emphasis on some water conservation as a result of CVPIA.
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, initially, as [inaudible] I think it was the '82
Reclamation Reform Act which had started and then the, in the, the 1992
CVPIA was a, a much more rigorous requirements for the, for the water
conservation planning by the districts. There was a lot of criticism by
third parties, I guess, for lack of a better term to, about they did all
these, these water conservation plans responding to the '82 amendment to,
that got done, and then submitted to the Bureau and were thrown on the
shelves. You know, so they, when they into '92, they, they, they set it up
so you had to do annual updates and be able to report on how, on how, on
progress you've made on your, on your various activities you had
identified in your initial plan, as far as improvements to your systems,
both physical improvements, and, and, you know, management or operational
improvements.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So did you have to deal a lot with, directly with the
Bureau, or was it mostly through the irrigation districts that were
contracting you?
>> Bob Stoddard: No we dealt, we dealt especially with the, with the, on
the water conservation side of things, we dealt directly with the Bureau
quite a bit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Especially, I guess, during some of the earlier years.
I'd say back in the 1970s, was there a kind of a big sense that you were - well, let's think about that a different way. And I guess a lot of
agricultural expansion had already taken place along, on, on the west
side. But was there sort of, sort of a sense that, you know, this was a
you know, a, a, your, you know, big, you know, big projects, you know,
contributing to, you know, you know, really large scale, from the large
scale agriculture in United States and that this was, well that, that,
that any sense that, that, that the problems that came along later -- was
any of that anticipated in the 1970s, or even the 1980s, you know, the,
the, the, all the restriction and water and [inaudible]...
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the drainage, the drainage problem was certainly
identified in those times.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let's, let's talk a little bit about that. What
actually is the drainage problem?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, there's a, it's, it's the tight soils on the west
side perch the, the, the, the water that's, percolates past the, the root
zone, and there has to, they needed a way to remove it, so they, they put
in, under, tile drainage systems, these buried pipelines to collect that
water, and then they discharge it into the same conveyances. This is, this
is going back [inaudible] I talked about the drainage water and the
grassland supply. It was both surface drainage, or tail water and
operational spill, together with subsurface drainage, which is water
collected in these drainage systems. But that they, that they, it was
required that they do that in order to keep the, keep the water from
raising up into the root zones and, and damaging crop production.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wouldn't the water normally just percolate down through
the soil.
>> Bob Stoddard: It couldn't. It was, it, it, it was, it was, there was
different clay layers in there that inhibited the, the, the percolation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. And, originally, the Bureau of Reclamation was
supposed to build a drainage system for a lot of the, the west side
districts, wasn't it.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes. They had an obligation to do that.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What happened?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, they got the, the, the drain built to Kesterson
Reservoir which was going to be ultimately a regulating reservoir, but was
an evaporation reservoir because they hadn't built a drain from Kesterson
to the, I think, Chips Island or I think, some place in the Delta where,
where it was going to discharge and, and, it was that evaporation and that
Kesterson Reservoir that concentrated the selenium that caused the, the
deformities in the wildlife out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I think you had said earlier that there, there'd been
an assumption that, you know, that a lot of the water coming through the
drainage system was actually not going to be dangerous to wildlife?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I mentioned earlier that, that back in the, and, I,
I think it was in the '50s that I ran across, I mean I ran across, not in
the '50s, but I ran across a report in the, probably in the '80s of, of,
done by a fish and wildlife service that concluded or supported the use of
that drainage for, for the wildlife benefit.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So apparently, someone made a mistake somewhere.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. Well, [inaudible crosstalk]. Well, they're looking
I think at the, at the, at the salinity of the, of the water, not the
constituents, so to speak.
>> Thomas Holyoke: In fact this is a problem essentially still unsolved
today.
>> Bob Stoddard: It certainly is. But the shortage of
that water more, the, the, the drainage more valuable
there's, you know, there's, there's treatment methods
have been too expensive. They're now being considered
and make the water available.
supply is making
and there's,
which heretofore
to remove the salts
>> Thomas Holyoke: Recycling all, all the water we can. So what's, what
has your business practice been like in the '90s, and into the 21st
century? Still working on and developing and refining, you know,
irrigation systems?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, I'm retired, now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Oh. When did you retire?
>> Bob Stoddard: I retired at the end of the year. End of last year. Just
turned 70. I thought that was probably enough. I'm not like this guy over
here to go forever.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Are you still not retired?
[ Laughter ]
Now what kind of work were you, were you, have you been doing in the last
[inaudible crosstalk] fifteen years?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well I, Los Banos is a fairly small community and it's a
little, it's a little bit difficult to attract good engineers, you know,
to, to, for our business, and in 2005, we ended up merging with Boyle
Engineering Corporation. They were actually a subcontractor to me on a
major municipal development of water plants, sewer plants, and collections
systems, and drainage systems to take out in the Santa Nella are to build
a community out there that started as a trailer park into a community of
about 18,000 people, I think was the, was the plan. And they, they got
the, they'd gone through the county of Merced and got the approvals for
the, for the specific urban development plan to have, have that happen.
But, and we were; while we started doing; our; the business started in,
in, in the agricultural water arena, we, we decided we'd branch into the
municipal -- you know, broaden our, our capabilities and, so we began
doing municipal engineering and we, we ultimately were contract city
engineers for Los Banos and Gustine and Patterson and Newman and
Firebaugh, and you know... So we were; these, these cities were too small
to have big engineering staffs, so we were kind of contract city
engineering staffs for them. And I mentioned the Santa Nella project, that
was a, that was major municipal project. So we were doing a lot of; back
in the early 2000s we were doing more municipal work than we were
agricultural work because agricultural work was pretty well done, I guess
I should say, except for maybe a lot of this, a lot of this water
conservation planning and, and, and that sort of thing. But we were, we
were, I think we had about 22 people at that time and we were, you know,
we were killing ourselves. Couldn't, couldn't get any, couldn't, couldn't
get any help and, you know, and you had these clients that you'd had for - and Jim knows this. You have these clients for, that you've had for 30
years or so, and they come in the door, you don't tell them to go
someplace else, you figure out how you're, you know, you figure, you, you
go ahead and do what you can to get, get their, respond to them, you know.
So I, I was looking, I was searching countrywide to find, find engineers.
But back in, in those days, everybody was. You know, there was a, there
was a, a severe shortage of, of engineers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is that the case today?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'm not sure. It's -- Jim's nodding yes, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: [Laughter] Still a shortage of engineers.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I don't, I don't know that it's quite as bad as it
was back then because, you know, I don't think there's such a demand. You
know, the amount of work going on now not's quite as much as it was back
then, at least, you know, where I, where, where I was. So that's what, as
I say, you know, I started to say, Boyle was a, was a subcontractor to me
on this major project and we started talking and the... And the, actually
of the head of the Los Banos -- or excuse me, the Fresno office of Boyle
Engineering started his career in Los Banos. He was, he, right after, he
was another Fresno Stater and he, he -- the first five years or so of his
career was, was with us so I knew him real well and so that's, you know.
Anyway, we started talking and ultimately the way to, to meet your
client's demands was to merge with somebody so you had a lot more
horsepower. So we went from somebody; we went from people; went from about
20 some odd people to a firm of about 700, which was, which were, you
know, big in California and Florida, actually, and a little bit in, in
Colorado. And then, oh 2000 and, so we merged with Boyle in 2005, and in
2008 -- about 2008 -- they, they got gobbled up by, by AECOM, which was 40
some thousand people. So here I'd been, had this little organization of 20
some, and then we went to 700, that was okay, but then we went to 40 some
thousand and that, that bureaucracy I just couldn't, couldn't handle. So
that's started, that's started me thinking well it's probably, you know, I
mean I can't do this any longer. I knew these guys -- I've known this guy
for a, for a while now, all my career, and, and, and his, you know, the
other guys in his organization. And they, they kept trying to urge me to,
you know, so anyway. Well, when I, when I quit AECOM, which was in 2012,
I, I went to work for, for Provost and Pritchard with the understanding if
they, if they hired me, they'd have to hire all the, all the, all the
employees in the Los Banos office. In other words, just take over the
office. And...
>> Thomas Holyoke: How many people was that at that point?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, it was always only half a dozen I think, if that. I
mean the recession hit pretty hard. You know the, we were doing, I
mentioned we were doing all this work for these municipalities and then,
so then the, the, when the, when the recession hit, you know, all that
just dried up and the Ag side of things was, was, was pretty slow, too, so
that, that slowed everything down.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do serious droughts, well, like we're in now, the one
back in '77, does that take a pretty big toll in your industry?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, actually, you know, droughts and floods are good
for engineers. It's the normal years that aren't any good. But, but in
this case, this prolonged drought, all these districts -- the way they
make their money is to, is to sell the water to their, you know, they,
they buy the water from the Bureau, they sell it to their, to their
constituents, and they get, you know, that's how they get money to, to, to
run their business or run their districts. And after the, when they have
no, no water to sell, they have no revenue, except for standby charges.
And then that, then you take that one step farther, that they get their
revenue from the farmers who get, who, who grow crops with the water. If
they're not getting any water, they don't grow many crops, and so there's
no revenue coming, and there's no; so anyway, the revenue stream is, is,
is, is pretty thin these days in a lot of these districts, and that, that
has an effect on the, on the engineering community.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So does that mean that you've picked a, a good time to
get out of the business?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yes.
[ Laughter ]
>> Thomas Holyoke: What else should we ask?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, you know, the other thing, you bring, we talked
about this water conservation and the water supply in effect now that, you
know, the, the last two or three years or four years the, the water,
there's been zero allocations for the federal contractors. And it's been,
it, it's pretty amazing how they've taken these limited supplies and done
transfers and, and other ways, and, well obviously, they've developed
ground water, which, which is, may end up causing problems if this
continues on by, because of overdraft and, and subsidence. But, but, I
think there's been a drastic change in the water supply situation. And I
think there was a, there was drought from '86 to '92. Prior to that, the
federal contractors haul, they had a limit of water available in their,
you know, in their contract, they had a limit. But the Bureau would sell
them any water, as much as water as they wanted. You know, the San Felipe
project, which is the, you know, the pipeline over Pacheco Pass over to
Santa Clara and San Benito hadn't been built yet, so there, there was a
lot of supply there. There weren't the restrictions in the Delta for, for
pumping, and so they could, they could, you know, they could order
whatever they wanted. And then, after '89 I think it was, all of a sudden
the, the, because of that drought, things started getting bad, and they've
been getting worse every year, as far as water supply availability.
Primarily, I guess because of the restrictions and diversions out of the
Delta.
>> Jim Provost: Where do you see the San Joaquin Valley going
economically, farming wise?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, if you know, I think the senior water right holders
are probably going to do fine. You know, the, the river diverters, and the
exchange contractors. The, the, those who rely primarily on the, the
Central Valley Project and the State Water Project are probably going to
be in trouble, and you know, they're going to continue pumping ground
water. But now we have this recent legislation, or recent laws that are
going to require that you, you manage your ground water for, for
sustainability, that you know, that's, I think ultimately 20 years down
the road till that, that actually happens. But that's going to be; that
may or may help, but it may be too late, also, because of the amount of
ground water pumping going on. I, I don't, I'd be surprised if we don't
really start seeing some, some repercussions from water quality
deterioration, ground water quality deterioration, and subsidence as a,
with all the pumping that's going on. I just hear about the number of
wells they're putting in, that, that they put in at the west lands, for
instance. You know, I guess there's hundreds of them out there now.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is it the sheer number of wells their expanding out
there because they're relying entirely on ground water?
>> Bob Stoddard: Entirely, entirely on ground water. Maybe a little bit of
surface supply and transfers. That's the other thing we've been doing, or
that we've been doing over the last, oh, probably the last ten years or
so, is working on both, both ground water transfers and fallowing
transfers.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Fallowing transfers?
>> Bob Stoddard: Where people are; in the; this is primarily in the
exchange contract or service area where they've allowed growers to fallow
some of their land and then as a result of the fallowing be able to
transfer that, a portion of that supply to, to the federal, the CVP
contractors to, to assist them in their supply side. There is; so we're
doing both those fallowing transfers and ground water transfers. So our
work in the fallowing transfers was to calculate the, the, the amount of
water that was... Essentially, the, the amount that was actually
consumptive used from the, used out of the delivery could be transferred,
and the rest would have to remain. And the -- on the ground water
transfers, it was looking at what the, how the pumping might impact
overdraft or, or how it may impact through, through draw down impacts to
neighboring wells.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And there, there's enough information out there to
calculate that sort of thing.
>> Bob Stoddard: Pardon me.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I mean there's, that, that can be calculated.
>> Bob Stoddard: Oh yes. Well, I mean, it's there, there, it's, it's to
the best you can, yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, [inaudible], I don't know if you actually
know this, but you, you were talking about all the wells going in over on
the west side, any sense as to how deep those wells are going now to hit
the water table?
>> Bob Stoddard: I'd say there, I guess their over a thousand feet now. I
don't know. I have really have not been involved in the, in the well
drilling out in that area at all. So that's, you know, that's; what I
understand is happened out there.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Anything else?
>> Jim Provost: We covered the base.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Well, any other comments you'd like to make?
Thoughts about the future? Predictions? Regrets?
>> Bob Stoddard: Well, the only regret I have, I worked too hard.
[ Laughter ]
I don't think I took a week off in thirty years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Really?
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. I think it was about 30 years until I actually took
a, a -- you know, I'd grab a day here and there sort of thing, but, you
know, actually take a, take a week's vacation.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I heard you were duck hunter. You must have taken a
little time off for that.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah. On a weekend.
[ Laughter ]
So; and that's only, you know, fifteen miles away from where I live, so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. Well, retirement gives you the opportunity to go
do those sort of things.
>> Bob Stoddard: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: All right. Okay. Thank you very much.
>> Bob Stoddard: Okay. I hope I did okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Of course you did. Of course you did.