COMMENT POSTED AT 60 MINUTES WEBSITE

As someone who has written about California water issues for 40 years I
found Leslie Stahl's report on California water remarkably naive. She
doesn't have a clue what is going on out here. First of all, she started by
misquoting Mark Twain. The quote is not "Whiskey is for drinking, water is
for fighting" as she said. It is "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for
fighting over."

A small point but telling.

Not once did she mention the selenium-tainted soils of the Westlands Water
District. Drainage water from the Westlands fields contains selenium, which
got into the food chain at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge 25 years
ago and killed thousands of birds and triggered deformities in bird embryos.
Thanks, in part, to an excellent report by 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley on March
9, 1985, the poisoned evaporation ponds at Kesterson were closed. Sadly,
this latest 60 Minutes report on Westlands is far off the mark.

Twenty-five years later the estimated cost for providing drainage to the 600 growers
who operate on a thousand square miles in Westlands is set at $2.7 billion.
Leslie Stahl should have asked the governor what he is doing about the
drainage problem. Answer? He's doing nothing.

For those who want a different view of what's really going in California
water politics, I suggest you visit the following link to the Golden Gate
University Law School Environmental Law Forum:
http://www.ggu.edu/lawlibrary/environmental_law_journal/eljvol3/attachment/Carter.pdf

You will discover that the American taxpayers have showered a billion
dollars of subsidies and cheap water on the problem-plagued Westlands. The
fundamental problem of San Joaquin Valley agriculture is not lack of water,
it is low prices caused by surplus. In the last four years, almonds have
dropped from $4 a pound to $1-2 a pound.

The San Joaquin Valley now has 650,000 acres of almonds. Do we really need
to spend billions of dollars on new dams to grow more almonds?
Which the Westlands should never have planted! Stuart Woolf should
never have planted his almond orchards. At a congressional subcommittee
hearing at Fresno City Hall a couple of years ago, Woolf threatened to take
his 25,000-acre "family farm" operation offshore if he was not provided water.

Finally, Stahl failed to mention that big growers like Stuart Resnick, a
confidante and major contributor to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, is making tens of
millions of dollars re-selling farm water supplies to Southern California
development interests so we can grow an ever larger population in the Mojave
Desert. This is a prescription for disaster.

I knew Ed Bradley. He interviewed me for the 60 Minutes Kesterson show 25
years ago. Leslie Stahl is no Ed Bradley.

Lloyd Carter
http://www.lloydgcarter.com

For a working link to the California water report on the 60 Minutes website, go to http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/2009/12/schwarzenegger-138.html