CA Latino Water Coalition

CaWaterAlthough it's clearly unfitting to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, I can't help but find substantial comfort in watching Ray take the plunge. While his professional presentation skills are major market quality — among the best I've ever heard — Appleton's mindless, fawning, self-serving, client pleasing embrace of ultra-right wing conservative ideology has been horribly disappointing. Here's a guy who should really know better.
Having been removed from important morning programming and relegated to a three hour block from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Appleton's Obama-hating, liberal-baiting, nerve-grating diatribes have become dreary, weary and worn – but so has the rest of "Conservative Talk" across the nation.
KMJ AM & FM's prime format competitor, Clear Channel's KALZ-FM, inherited the once powerful Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity/Mark Levin/Glenn Beck "Power Talk" package in January of 2013. The new numbers place them only 10th, right behind KMJ-AM with a 3.2% share, more than 30% down from last summer's 4.7%.
Although no time for wild optimism, there seems to be a pronounced, provable swing toward radio sanity long overdue and warmly welcomed. What we see happening in Fresno is being echoed across the country with Rush, Sean, Mark and Glenn exhibiting free fall in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere.The writing is on the wall, driven by stridently constant, thoroughly unsubstantiated, Henny Penny hysteria over the IRS, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, invading alien hordes, anything with the name Obama preceding or following it and the ever more mysteriously mesmerizing Agenda 21 – a Pandora's Box of perplexing paranoia.<div class="entry-date" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px; text-transform: uppercase;">AUGUST 24, 2009</div><div class="entry-date" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px; text-transform: uppercase;">bm greenwash</div><h1 class="article-title" style="margin: 3px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: 36px;">Westlands Hoards Surplus Water While Farmers Suffer</h1><div class="mainauthorstyle" style="margin: 9px 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 1px;">by DAN BACHER</div><div class="main-text" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; line-height: 21px; position: relative;">Over the past several months, the mainstream media and right wing demagogues such as Sean Hannity have reported "heart rending" stories about the Westlands Water District having to fallow fields, putting farmworkers out of work and farms in jeopardy because of a lack of water, supposedly caused by pumping restrictions protecting Delta smelt and Sacramento River Chinook salmon. The movement by a broad coalition of commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, Delta family farmers, California Indian Tribes and environmental justice advocates to restore the Delta and its collapsing fish populations has been falsely cast by Westlands and San Joaquin Valley agribusiness interests as favoring "fish over people." The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance District (CSPA) has countered the lies behind this cynical g campaign by revealing that the district has been "squirreling away" surplus water it can’t use. CSPA has discovered a Westlands’ information bulletin dated  July 23, 2009 revealing that the giant irrigation district, considered the "Darth Vader" of California water politics by fish restoration advocates, has been hiding considerable carryover storage from last year and is adding even more this year. The group is calling for an investigation into Westlands’ surplus water and possible surplus water hidden away by other water districts. “The idea that Westlands Water District has been hoarding surplus water it can’t use while farm workers have been paid to hold vocal protests around the Central Valley accusing Congressman George Miller and federal agencies of starving farmers in order to protect Delta smelt is outrageous," said Bill Jennings, CSPA executive director. “Perhaps Congressmen Devin Nunes and Dennis Cardoza can use their influence to persuade Westlands to share some of their stored water wealth to benefit those less fortunate. Clearly an investigation is needed to see who else might be hoarding surplus water.” At the end of 2008, Westlands had some 233,998 acre-feet (AF) of water stored in other facilities that it didn’t need, according to Jennings. Some 93,700 AF of that stored water were used through June 2009. However, the export pumping restrictions caused by the Delta Smelt Biological Opinion ended June 30 and the State and Federal Projects have ramped up pumping. Westlands has made firm commitments to acquire 141,522 AF of supplemental water and is requesting additional supplies. "Consequently, Westlands staff projects that the District will end the water year with approximately 275,000 AF of water it is unable to use," Jennings disclosed. The disclosure of the hoarding of water by Westlands occurs as the district and its front group, the Latino Water Coalition, have been campaigning to give a "human face" to corporate agribusiness by busing hundreds of farmworkers to "rallies" and "marches" in Fresno, Sacramento and Concord demanding increased pumping of water from the Delta. However, no legitimate farmworker organizations are supporting these efforts, organized by the public relations firm Burston-Marsteller, notorious for campaigns to cast a "democratic" image to dictatorships around the world for decades and for numerous corporate greenwashing campaigns.Paul Rodriguez, a comedian and grower who frequently appears at rallies and marches with Governor Arnold Schwarzengger in support of increasing water exports out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in total disregard for Delta farmers, farmworkers, recreational fishing businesss and commercial fishermen that depend upon a healthy Delta for their livelihoods, is the chair of the Latino Water Coalition. The coalition includes three co-chairs – Orange Cove Mayor Victor P. Lopez, Ruben Guerra of the Latin Business Association and Tony Estremera, a director of the Santa Clara Valley Water District.Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers of America, the 27,000-member union founded by Cesar Chavez, blasted the Latino Water Coalition’s so-called "March for Water" this April for being an event organized by corporate agribusiness, completely stripping away the coalition’s claims that it was lobbying on behalf of farmworkers. "In reality, this is not a farm worker march,” Rodriguez told the New Work Times on April 17. ”This is a farmer march orchestrated and financed by growers.” Ironically, the corporate farmers claiming to stand up for their workers against "radical environmentalists" represent the same San Joaquin agribusiness interests that have ruthlessly exploited farmworkers, crushed their right to organize and denied them their right to clean drinking water in the fields for decade after decade. Last year alone 6 farmworkers died due to heat exposure in unsafe working conditions imposed upon them by growers.The disclosure of the hoarding of water by Westlands occurs as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Diane Feinstein and California Legislators, pressured by corporate agribusiness, are pushing for the construction of a peripheral canal to increase water exports to Westlands and southern California. A coalition of fishing groups, Delta family farmers, Indian Tribes and principled environmentalists is fighting the canal, an enormously costly government boondoggle that would result in pushing Central Valley salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, striped bass, green sturgeon and other California Delta fish populations into the abyss of extinction. On August 18, the California Legislature held a joint hearing of the Assembly Parks and Wildlife and Senate Resources and Water Committees to review a controversial package of five water bills that Jennings describes as a "road map" to the construction of the peripheral canal as Schwarzenegger, Westlands growers and the Latino Water Coalition held a rally pushing for a peripheral canal and more dams at the capitol. Canal opponents, including Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, Mark Franco, headman of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, and Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, and others at the hearing spoke against the mad rush by the Legislature to push through a package that would result in the destruction of the Delta estuary and its fish. "The peripheral canal is a big, stupid idea that doesn’t make any sense from a tribal environmental perspective,” Franco said during a rally at the Capitol on July 7. “Building a canal to save the Delta is like a doctor inserting an arterial bypass from your shoulder to your hand– it will cause your elbow to die just like taking water out of the Delta through a peripheral canal will cause the Delta to die.” During a recent town hall meeting in Fresno featuring Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the UFW’s Arturo Rodriguez was the only member of the meeting panel who didn’t call for the construction of the peripheral canal and more dams or overturning the biological opinions under the Endangered Species Act. In an interview with me, Rodriguez pointed out the contradiction between agribusiness asking for new water infrastructure when farmworkers are denied clean drinking water in the fields. “We have no thoughts on the peripheral canal or dams at this time,” Rodriguez said. “We are looking at the plans and proposals to ensure that what is done takes into account the needs of farmworkers, including making sure that farmworkers have sufficient water to drink in the fields. This is about more than just ensuring water for agriculture – we want to sure that workers have good jobs with good wages and access to representation.” Ironically, when Salazar randomly selected comment cards from the farmworkers to speak at the microphone before the crowd, not one of the workers themselves complained about unemployment. Their concerns were the same as those voiced by Rodriguez – the urgent need for clean drinking water in the fields, improved wages and working conditions and access to union representation. While the growers bemoaned the "loss" of farmworker jobs due to the favoring of "fish versus people," not one of the workers themselves brought this issue up! State water standards violated to deliver Westlands surplus water! The Westlands bulletin also points out that the Banks pumping plant of the State Water Project in the South Delta has been pumping about 1,000 AF of Central Valley Project daily. "Of course use of the ‘Joint Point of Diversion’ (JPOD) is illegal and violates D-1641, the State Water Resource Control Board’s (State Board) order implementing the Bay-Delta Plan. D-1641 explicitly prohibits use of JPOD when south Delta salinity standards are being violated," Jennings pointed out. Presently the running 30-day average for electrical conductivity, the measure of salinity, at Old River near Tracy is 1.02 umhos/cm. The water quality standard for this period is 0.7 umhos/cm to protect Delta agriculture. "South Delta salinity standards have been continually violated the last seven months, imperiling Delta fish populations and Delta farms," Jennings stated. Jennings said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and California Department of Water Resources (DWR) have been ignoring the Cease & Deist Order issued by the State Board in 2006 for violation of south Delta salinity standards. Recently, they requested an extension of the compliance schedule for that Cease & Deist Order beyond the 1 July 2009 deadline. CSPA was a party in the June 2009 State Board evidentiary hearing regarding the DWR/USBR request. Even though the State Board declared in 2006 they would not again extend the compliance schedule, they are expected to shortly issue a decision extending the schedule and excusing past violations. CSPA is prepared to sue over the Board’s continued refusal to enforce the Cease & Desist Order. However, the prohibition against using JPOD while standards are violated was neither raised nor discussed in that hearing. "Earlier this year, the State Board held hearings to consider a relaxation of Delta outflow standards because they were being violated," Jennings stated. "While April rains eliminated the need for relaxed standards, the Board refused to penalize the USBR and DWR for violating existing standards. In June, the USBR acknowledged that Vernalis flows were only about 59 per cent of required flow. Again, the State Board took no action. Water quality standards in the southern Delta have been consistently exceeded since last December." Jennings observed that, “the State Board continues to look the other way as virtually all of the standards protecting the Delta and its collapsing fisheries are ignored and DWR and USBR violate the law in order to supply Westlands with water they can’t use….CSPA remains concerned about the plight of unemployed farm workers, even as we note that data from the California Economic Development Department and annual reports from County Agricultural Commissioners reveal that both farm labor employment and the value of agricultural production has increased in the seven south-of-Delta counties over the course of the drought.”I applaud Jennings and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance for exposing Westlands’ hoarding of water while corporate agribusiness and the Latino Water Coalition engage in a false and misleading campaign portraying themselves as the "voice" of the "poor farmworker" while they clearly care nothing about farmworkers nor the thousands of people in the recreational and commercial fishing industries that are now unemployed, due to the collapse of Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations spurred by increasing water exports from the Delta in recent years. For more information and to read the Westlands report that Jennings based his analysis on, go to <a href="http://www.calsport.org/8-19-09.htm" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(207, 16, 40);">http://www.calsport.org/8-19-09.htm</a>. DAN BACHER can be reached at: <a href="mailto:Danielbacher@fishsniffer.com" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(207, 16, 40);">Danielbacher@fishsniffer.com</a> </div>6/29/2015 06/29/2009 - 17:04. THE PR FIRM FROM HELL As published in the June 30th, 2009 edition of the Fresno Community Alliance newspaper(First of two parts)  By Lloyd G. Carter
      Cesar Chavez knew the power of a good march. He led by example and he never stopped trying until he found a way. And this is exactly what we are going to do. We never will stop until we find a way, find a way together here, because this is the right thing to do, because we need water, we need water, we need water, we need water [chanting with crowd].
            Gov. Schwarzenegger, on April 17, at the San Luis Reservoir, following a four-day grower-funded march in which non-union farmworkers were paid to walk 50 miles from Mendota.  Chavez’ United Farm Workers union did not participate.  UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta called it shameless exploitation of the late labor leader’s legacy.            The masters of “astroturfing” are trying to convince you, the media, California and Washington, D.C. that San Joaquin Valley farmworkers’ new best friend is Big Agribusiness, the same industry that has exploited them for decades.  Say what? Campaigns & Elections magazine defines astroturfing as a "program that involves the manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them."  In other words, rich people with a lot of money but no popular support for their cause (getting richer), will create the illusion of broad public support by half truths, manipulation, disinformation, spin doctoring, creating false impressions, and cash.  It also involves ghost writing op-ed columns and letters to the editor from little people, to generate the perception there is widespread public support for the client’s position.  Grassroots is bottom up.  Astroturf is top down.
            The late Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, a vice-presidential candidate and a lobbyist, is credited with coining the term "astroturf  lobbying" to describe the synthetic grassroots movements conjured up by powerful lobbying and public relations firms.  Astroturfing  is specifically prohibited by the code of ethics of the Public Relations Society of America, the national association for members of the public relations profession.            But that hasn’t stopped the spin doctors at Burson-Marsteller (B-M), the astroturfing PR firm that has been hired by the California Latino Water Coalition (created around 2006-2007), headed by comedian Paul Rodriguez, and Orange Cove Mayor Victor Lopez, co-chairs of the coalition, and technical advisor Mario Santoyo, assistant general manager at the Friant Water Users Authority, which represents federal irrigation districts on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley from Madera County south to Bakersfield.            B-M has been helping the Friant growers for three years, trying to derail the lawsuit settlement to restore a living San Joaquin river to 60 miles of dry riverbed on the San Joaquin Valley floor.  Republican Rep. Devin Nunes has been the most outspoken of the settlement critics and has called for the Governor’s resignation for failing to push new water projects hard enough. (Nunes seems blissfully unconcerned California is facing a $24 billion budget deficit.)             MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow, in a March telecast, called B-M “the PR firm from Hell” and said it had been hired to improve the “image” of AIG, the company which has received $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money. (You can see Maddow ripping B-M on YouTube below.)  How much B-M is being paid by the growers who fund the Latino Water Coalition - if it is being paid - is not publicly available.  No one in the mainstream media has inquired about the financing, except the New York Times, which noted in a story on the mid-April, four-day “March for Water” that farmworkers were paid to participate. Classic astroturfing tactics.            Founded in 1953, B-M is now one of the largest public relations firms in the world, and in 2000 was the first PR outfit to hit $300 million in revenues.  In 1999, Harold Burson was named by PR Week magazine and website as the PR industry’s “most influential person of the 20th Century.” The PR Watch website has considerable material on B-M’s past and present outrages.  Big name employees include George W. Bush’s first press secretary, Karen Hughes, and his last press secretary, the acid-tongued, irritable Dana Perino.  However, the agency is not just staffed with Republican mudslingers. Spinmaster Mark Penn, the staunchly anti-union polling consultant and former chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, is the current Chief Executive Officer of B-M.            B-M’s client list includes a who’s who of corporate scoundrels and tin horn dictators, including:            1. Blackwater USA - After the private security firm killed 17 Iraqi civilians, they turned to B-M for “crisis management.”  Former B-M executive Robert Tappan, who had been a State Department official, worked at the PR firm’s lobbying subsidiary, BKSH & Associates. Tappan helped Blackwater founder and head Erik Prince prepare for his testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (In February, Blackwater, purportedly on the advice of B-M, changed its name to the mysterious Xe, pronounced Zee.) ZOE?            2. Babcock & Wilcox, manufacturers of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, hired B-M to “manage” public perception after the 1979 meltdown. 
            3. Nigeria’s brutal regime employed B-M in the late 1960s to counteract allegations it was committing genocide in the breakaway province of Biafra.  “Crisis management” was also provided the Indonesian regime accused of abuses of its citizens.
            4. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the behest of the Argentinian military dictatorship, headed by General Jorge Videla, B-M organized a campaign against Argentinian human rights organizations which were contending a “Dirty War” against the populaton was taking place, including the murder and disappearance of thousands of people.  In her book “The Shock Doctrine”,  Naomi Klein wrote:
            “Victor Emmanuel, the Burson-Marsteller public relations executive who was in charge of selling the Argentine junta's new business-friendly regime to the outside world, told a researcher that violence was necessary to open up Argentina's "protective, statist" economy. "No one, but no one, invests in a country involved in a civil war," he said, admitting that it wasn't just rebels who died. "A lot of innocent people were probably killed," he told author Marguerite Feitlowitz, but, "given the situation, immense force was required." ”
            5.  Saudi Arabia’s medieval royal government has employed B-M for more than 30 years to promote its interests and image.  B-M prepared U.S. advertisements for Saudi Arabia following the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, due, in part, to the fact 15 of the 19 airplane hijackers were Saudi citizens.
            6. B-M handled public relations for Union Carbide Corporation following the 1984 explosion and disaster at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India which killed 2,000 employees and neighbors and injured or blinded thousands more.
            7.  B-M set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s.
            8.  Bromine Science and Environmental Forum (BSEF), which Burson-Marsteller created on behalf of chemical companies from the U.S., Israel and Japan who wanted to avoid an EU ban on bromine flame retardants suspected to have serious environmental and health impacts. For years the BSEF (lobbyists from the Brussels offices of Burson-Marsteller) lobbied against the EU ban on these substances, without clearly disclosing the nature of the group and the clients.            Major companies in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries currently utilize B-M’s services, according to B-M’s own website.  In 2006, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.            B-M, according to the May 17, 2007 issue of The Nation magazine, is owned by an even larger PR empire called the WPP Group.  The decision to hire Mark Penn as the head of B-M was heavily influenced by Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP.  "Clients of stature come to Mark [Penn]constantly for counsel," claimed Paster, who informally advised Hillary Clinton.  The press release announcing Penn's promotion noted his work "developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector." (Italics added.)            Both these PR and lobbying efforts  - to deregulate energy and financial services - led to the California electricity crisis and manipulation of the state’s energy supply by Enron, the 2003 blackout in the Northeastern U.S. and the current collapse of the financial services sector.            So, what then does B-M expect to do for the California Latino Water Coalition?  B-M’s Patrick George, who works out of B-M’s Sacramento office is listed as the media contact on the Latino Water Coalition press releases. The B-M website boasts that it has won the last nine California statewide initiative campaigns it has been involved in and it was expected to be involved in a $10 billion water bond issue in 2008 before the economy collapsed.  There will undoubtedly be an effort to put another water bond on the 2010 or 2012 California ballot.            Some Western San Joaquin Valley growers acknowledge they are contributing to the Latino Water Coalition. It is clear the poverty-stricken farmworkers aren’t paying the tab, and that it is agribusiness bankrolling the operation.  The coalition website (www.gotwater.org ) and KMJ radio commentator Ray Appleton, a major supporter of the Coalition, both solicit donations from the general public.  Appleton does it on air.  Mario Santoyo said on former Fresno Mayor Alan Autry’s radio show that Comedian Rodriguez is not being compensated for any of his efforts.  In an interview with the Yuma, AZ newspaper Rodriguez called himself the “poster boy” and claimed Cesar Chavez was “like an uncle” to him.  Presumably, the Friant growers were paying B-M big bucks before the PR firm got involved in the Latino Water Coalition.            The transparent objective of B-M’s astroturfing is to put a “human face” on efforts to get more multi-billion dollar water projects built with taxpayer funds to: (1) meet the water needs of industrial farming operations of the western San Joaquin Valley, and (2) halt (or replace) the loss of water by southeastern San Joaquin Valley growers in Tulare and Kern counties due to the restoration of the San Joaquin River.            These are among the public relations objectives:            1. Conflate the interests of growers who want water with the needs of farmworkers who need jobs, so that it appears the largely Latino farmworker population fully supports the efforts of growers to get more taxpayer-financed cheap water, even while the basic needs of the farmworkers, such as decent wages, clean drinking water, and decent housing and working conditions, continue to go unmet.
            2. Make it appear as if the entire San Joaquin Valley is threatened with reversion to desert because of a “two-inch bait fish” instead of revealing that it is only the junior water rights holders who are suffering irrigation cutbacks and that thousands of growers with senior water rights are getting a full allotment this year. Emphasize a “man-made drought” as the problem, not the real drought which is occurring (according to state officials).  Some growers are making fat profits selling water at extortionate prices to their fellow water-short farmers.
             A May 15 letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein from Lester Snow, head of the California Department of Water Resources, indicated that Westlands Water District, through Delta deliveries, carryover, groundwater, transfers and exchanges is actually getting 86 percent of its normal water supply this year.  The groundwater, of course, is of low quality in many cases and cannot be quickly replaced.            3. Demonize environmentalists and brand them as elitists from San Francisco who care more about a “minnow” (i.e., the Delta Smelt) than they do about human beings, especially the tens of thousands of  farmworkers who will lose their seasonal jobs which now pay an average of $8,000 a year.            4. Reduce the crisis in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to a black and white issue of “fish versus farmers” or “fish versus food” and avoid the complexities of Delta restoration and the hierarchy of water rights. Rarely or never mention salmon (much less the commercial salmon industry), or steelhead, or killer whales, or sturgeon in simplifying the issue.  Make it the smelt - a bait fish - versus human beings.            5. Ignore the concerns of the United Farm Workers union and the Teamsters union (which represents farmworkers in the Valley) and ignore or demonize environmental justice advocates.  Don’t get involved in supporting bills in the state legislature to improve the lives and working conditions of farmworkers.  Big Ag routinely opposes those bills and the governor vetoes them.            6. Stage marches and rallies in the tradition of Cesar Chavez, and invoke Chavez’ name where politically expedient, and conceal the fact that the marchers are being paid to participate.  In a slickly-produced YouTube video, Comedian Rodriguez said when he was a boy he had marched with Cesar to help unionize farmworkers and was now asking people to participate in the mid-April “March for Water” to help growers in Cesar Chavez’ memory.  Dolores Huerta shakes her head at this tactic.            7.  Because growers, particularly large corporate operations, billionaire farmers like Stewart Resnick, and wealthy family mega-farms (like the Woolfs of the Westlands), have never been particularly sympathetic figures in the news media, the decision was made to make Latino farmworkers the “human face” of this astroturfing campaign, perhaps to sway urban Latino state legislators.            Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” frequently runs a montage of video clips showing Republican (or Democrat) politicos mouthing the same sound bite of the day, which usually comes from a talking points paper prepared by a PR firm.  That’s what has been occurring the last two years with the “human face” buzz phrase. For example (the italics are mine):
            July 2, 2007 - Fresno County Supervisor Phil Larson, who represents the Westlands Water District area, and allows his public office phone number and staff to be utilized by the Latino Water Coalition, told a House Subcommittee that cutbacks of irrigation water to protect the Delta Smelt was causing hardship among farmworkers, stating, “There is a very human face to the decisions that are made.”
            July 24, 2008 - Fresno Bee Capitol correspondent E.J. Schultz, writing about a grower-financed rally in Sacramento, in which busloads of farmworkers were at the Capitol building to show the “human face” of water politics, wrote:
            “Wednesday's rally was designed to give a  human face to the state's water woes. At least 300 farmworkers, most from the Valley's parched west side, marched and carried homemade signs declaring "agua es vida," or water is life, and "agua = trabajo," or water equals work.”
            April 14, 2009 - Laura King Moon, Assistant General Manager of the State Water Project, which represents the mega-farms of the western Tulare Basin, including the 150,000 acre J.G. Boswell cotton empire, issued this statement: “Today, the California Latino Water Coalition  began the first day of a four-day march across the San Joaquin Valley to highlight the severe water shortage that grips the Valley's farms, cities and jobs, as well as our broader state. Their goal is to raise statewide and national awareness of the water crisis that faces them and to put a  human face on one of the most important issues facing California today.”
            April 14, 2009 - A column by Fresno Bee writer Bill McEwen carried the headline “March to put Human Face on Water Crisis.”  McEwen wrote that with a “recession and a third year of drought intensifying the state’s troubles – and putting a human face on our water problems - solutions might be coming.  This human face will be shown to the nation and the world when the California March for Water begins this morning in Mendota.”
            April 17, 2009 - Tim Quinn, Executive Director of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), appeared at the conclusion of the March for Water and stated to a crowd estimated at 3,000 people (Coalition officials put the estimate at 10,000) that the water crisis highlighted “the human face of the misery evoked by water shortages.”
            KMJ broadcaster Ray Appleton has repeatedly said on his noon hour show the purpose of the Latino Water Coalition is to put a “human face” on the campaign.
            It must be admitted B-M’s astroturfing campaign in the San Joaquin Valley has been remarkably successful.  The “human face” of the new water projects campaign is now that of the downtrodden farmworker, not the rich grower.            But Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, is not fooled and calls the Latino Water Coalition an obvious front group for the growers which is exploiting Cesar Chavez’ legacy.  She said Cesar was an ardent environmentalist and would never have participated in the April March for Water or demonized the environmentalists.  She also notes the Latino Water Coalition has not lobbied for bills to make it easier for farmworkers to unionize nor has the coalition demanded a living wage, decent housing and clean drinking water for farmworkers before any new dams are built.  The governor, she notes, has vetoed bills to help farmworkers unionize.              The Valley’s newspaper and television coverage of the Latino Water Coalition has been extensive and, at times, almost fawning. No hard questions are being asked about where the money is coming from or why the Latino Water Coalition is not lobbying in Sacramento and Washington for improved working conditions, decent housing and clean drinking water for the farmworkers they claim are part of their coalition. However, outside the Valley, the sales job has been tougher, particularly in the Nation’s Capitol.Thus, more “marches” are being planned, including a protest outside the new Fresno federal building on July 1, and the air transport of an unspecified number of farmworkers to Washington, D.C. to show lawmakers the “human face” of failing to build more multi-billion dollar water projects to primarily benefit agribusiness. Presumably, non-union farmworkers will have to be recruited and paid to participate in this latest stunt.  The astroturf needs a mowing.Part Two of this series will focus on the roles of Comedian Paul Rodriguez, Orange Cove Mayor Victor Lopez, growers’ employee Mario Santoyo, KMJ radio commentators Ray Appleton and Inga Barks, Fresno County Supervisor Phil Larson and others in the B-M astroturfing campaign.  Lloyd G. Carter has been writing about San Joaquin Valley water issues for 40 years, including 20 years as an award-winning reporter for United Press International and the Fresno Bee. He has a website, www.lloydgcarter.com=pt 2:
THIRSTY DOWN IN NOBAMA COUNTYSubmitted by lgc_admin on Thu, 07/30/2009 - 16:28. TagsThe following article, "Thirsty in Nobama County", was published in the August 2009 issue of the Fresno Community Alliance Newspaper. It is the second part of a two-part series examining the California Latino Water Coalition, its key players, and the major international public relations firm guiding the Coalition. If you have not read Part One, it is on the LloydGCarter.com website, just click here.
Editor’s note: In part one of this two-part series, Lloyd Carter looked at the notorious international public relations firm of Burson-Marsteller, which is providing advice and guidance to the California Latino Water Coalition, headed by comedian Paul Rodriguez and a handful of local Latino leaders in the San Joaquin Valley. Part II examines the roles of the Coalition’s prominent personalities.By Lloyd G. CarterAct One of the California Latino Water Coalition – six months of marches, rallies, lobbying of state and federal officials, an effort to halt traffic on Interstate 5, and a physical encounter by the Coalition leader with a dairy farmer spokesman caught on TV cameras - is over.Act Two of the Coalition’s drive to suspend the Endangered Species Act, drain the Delta, and obtain $20 billion in publicly-funded water infrastructure for San Joaquin Valley agriculture is now underway and will focus, say Coalition leaders, on comedy. That’s right, comedy. Fortunately, the group is headed by comedian and actor Paul Rodriguez, who owns some farmland near Orange Cove and was recruited into the 200-member Coalition more than two years ago by Orange Cove Mayor Victor P. Lopez. Coalition leaders admit Act One was a failure and contend they are now broke. But they are fired up for Act Two.Now I personally find Rodriguez to be a very funny guy – hilarious in stand-up - but he’s been stretching the truth a lot when he speaks out on water issues. Whether he is doing this deliberately or is being fed bad information by the people orchestrating the water campaign is not clear.
To read more...CLICK HERE Whether he is doing this deliberately or is being fed bad information by the people orchestrating the water campaign is not clear.Here is an example.  On Fox Network’s Sean Hannity TV Show which aired nationally on June 19, the following exchange occurred between Hannity and Rodriguez.  The exchange followed a biased Fox news report implying water was being shut off to the entire San Joaquin Valley:RODRIGUEZ:  You know, we’re not going to be farmers any longer.  We’re going to be selling fire wood because our trees won’t last another six months without water.  It’s really a sad situation that those of us who choose to farm, my mother and my family in the central San Joaquin, perhaps the most fertile soil in the world, are now just sitting there ready to go on welfare or some other kind of support because we can’t farm.HANNITY:  Paul, this is so serious, and it's almost mind numbing that this could happen. All right. So we showed the little delta smelt, this little minnow fish that is now on the endangered species list. Now, they literally have shut down — you are getting and farmers are getting zero percent water. Their trees and their farms are dying. Is that right?RODRIGUEZ: Yes . . .   (Italics added.)  (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,528113,00.html.)Now that’s a touching story but it’s erroneous.  Rodriguez’s  40 acres of oranges, lemons, persimmons and olives near Orange Cove and Dinuba on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley is definitely not going dry. Farmers in his neighborhood get their water from the San Joaquin River via the Friant-Kern Canal, or from the Kings River, with groundwater as a backup supply.  He had plenty of water available this year (about 90 percent of normal according to federal officials.)Harvey Bailey, chairman of the Orange Cove Irrigation District and chairman of the Friant Water Users Authority, proudly said at the July 1 Fresno City Hall water rally that Rodriguez gets his irrigation supply from the Orange Cove District.  In any event, Rodriguez’s property  is on the opposite side of the Valley from where the major cutbacks in Delta water deliveries were occurring, i.e. the Westlands Water District, which is many miles away. And only about a quarter  of the Valley’s farmland is suffering the significant water cutbacks, a fact Rodriguez always ignores.  Normal pumping from the Delta to the West Side resumed July 1.  If Rodriguez has acreage in Westlands he hasn’t told anyone about it.  He did say in a 1998 interview with the Los Angeles Times that (at that time) he owned about 800 acres.  Rodriguez also developed a shopping center in Orange Cove and owns non-farm land in the area. Rodriguez’s orchards are not dying, according to a drive-by inspection last month.   Not surprisingly, Rodriguez has not invited news crews to his farm to see his “dying” trees.  Surprisingly, no Valley newspaper reporters or TV news crews, to my knowledge, have even asked to see his orchards.   If he’s trying to create the impression that his own farm has suffered drastic cutbacks in water, he’s not being candid.   Strangely, at the July 5 Fresno meeting with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Rodriguez indicated he had to buy store nectarines for those attending the meeting because his own nectarine trees were not producing, inferably because of  water cutbacks. He never mentioned nectarines on the July 15 KMJ radio Ray Appleton show when Appleton asked him what crops he farms. Rodriguez also joked on the Hannity show that he had never seen a killer whale on the freeway.  Recent government reports have reported plummeting populations of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon and killer whales as a result of the ecological crisis in the Delta, caused in part by massive exports of fresh water from the fragile estuary.  Not everyone thinks the disappearance of killer whales or salmon is funny.  Especially  the thousands of people in the commercial salmon industry who have been out of work for two years. Rodriguez was on Appleton’s noon hour show July 10 to explain why the Latino Coalition is going to try the new comedy tactic.  Rodriguez and Appleton admitted that Act One of the  two-year-old Coalition’s campaign, including the April 14-17 March for Water from Mendota to the San Luis Reservoir, and the July 1 Rally For Water at Fresno City Hall (that cost the cash-strapped city $10,000 in lost parking revenues), has failed to attract the national attention they feel they need to force state and congressional lawmakers to; (1) suspend the Endangered Species Act, (2) resume full water deliveries to the western San Joaquin Valley despite the concerns of Northern California, and (3) spend billions of taxpayer dollars on new water storage reservoirs and a highly controversial Peripheral Canal (also called a “conveyance facility”) around the beleaguered Bay-Delta Estuary.Rodriguez’s new comedy tactic, enthusiastically endorsed by Appleton, is to gather 50,000 or 100,000 signatures demanding that Fresno County be renamed “Nobama County”, which, he believes, will generate so much national publicity it will force President Obama to visit the Valley and order the exports of water from the Delta be returned to maximum historic levels, apparently even if it causes the ecological crash of the Delta estuary.  Rodriguez said the nation needed to be reminded that “Nobama County” is where “farming is illegal.”  I suspect this tactic will be about as effective as the boycott of First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the UC Merced graduation by the Valley’s five congressmen, Democrats and Republicans.   Apparently the collective thinking there was that If you want something from the President it’s a good idea to insult his wife.  The Nobama County name change is equally feckless if they think the President will respond positively to personal insults.  There is another reason the Coalition is changing tactics. “We’re broke,” admitted Appleton on his July 15 radio show. He then asked listeners for more donations.Rodriguez also told Appleton on the air, “I don’t know if people want to be led by a fool.  I’m no leader.”  But he added that God intended the San Joaquin Valley to be farmed.  Appleton agreed, saying “We can’t depend on the politicians anymore.  We’ve got to drop the serious stuff.  We’ve got to go silly for awhile.”  Rodriguez added the news media was only interested in “novelty and shock” and said he thought it would also be a great publicity stunt to get 5,000 people to lie on the ground and spell out the word “help.”  Predicted  Appleton, “The national media will jump on it.”  KMJ callers then began offering their own possible slogans:  “Barack-as-field” instead of Bakersfield,  said one.  Another caller suggested that the camel be named the Fresno County mascot.  Another suggested  “Merdead County” instead of Merced County, even though much of water-rich Merced County farmland received near normal irrigation supplies this year.  One caller suggested Rodriguez do a “Nobama Comedy Tour” to raise awareness of the issue.  One suggested bumper stickers that read “Where ever [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi goes, nothing grows.”  Then, as it frequently does on Appleton’s show, the comments from Appleton’s conservative listeners  turned into trashing of Rep. Jim Costa, Democrats in general, liberals, and “radical” environmentalists.  Democratic members of the Coalition must be uneasy with this.There is a certain naive Children’s Crusade character to the Latino Coalition campaign which is supposed to be bipartisan.  Appleton’s recent target has been  Rep. Jim Costa (who represents Westlands Water District and has been targeted by the Republican National Committee in next year’s elections).  Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of Visalia, who has screamed loud and long in Congress that the Endangered Species Act must be suspended and that “radical” environmentalists have taken over the Democratic Party, must be gleeful about the attacks on Costa, although he claims to be Costa’s friend.  Costa and Democratic Rep. Dennis Cardoza, representing the Northern Valley, struck back in a July 15 Fresno Bee article accusing Rep. Nunes of “grandstanding”  in trying repeatedly in various House committees to introduce amendments to various bills to suspend the Endangered Species Act.“This is baloney, to be doing this sort of thing,” Cardoza told the Bee.  “I have had a number of colleagues tell me they are fed up with it.”  Appleton responded, on air, that Cardoza’s statement was “one of the most foolish statements I’ve ever heard.”  Appleton added, “the sniping has begun”  ignoring his own persistent sniping at Costa. The most vicious attacks, of course, are reserved for “radical” environmentalists (is there any other kind in the eyes of growers?).   Former Fresno Mayor Alan Autry, who clearly misses the spotlight, went even further at the July 1 water rally and branded the Endangered Species Act as terrorism (and, inferably, environmentalists as terrorists).Other than Mario Santoyo, the long-time employee of the Friant Water Users Authority, who is clearly knowledgeable on water issues, the Coalition is essentially composed of front men Rodriguez and Appleton, some Latino business owners in Los Angeles, water and irrigation districts, and a handful of Latino mayors or council members from small towns in the San Joaquin Valley.  It is overwhelmingly male.While the “human face” of the coalition (this is the astroturfing tactic proposed by the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller which was discussed in Part One)  is supposed to be the downtrodden farmworkers, the actual field hands participating in the marches and rallies are often either paid or threatened with job loss if they don’t participate.  The Associated Press reported on the July 1 Fresno City Hall rally that one female farm worker admitted being paid to attend and another was told if she didn’t attend she would lose her job.It seems to matter little to Rodriguez and Appleton that Obama cannot unilaterally void a federal court order, restructure the California water rights priority list, and suspend the Endangered Species Act.  Nor do they ever discuss the plight of Delta farmers who are farming 500,000 acres, Trinity River Indians, commercial and recreational salmon fishermen, or the fact the water they want restored to the Western San Joaquin Valley must come from the people of Northern California.  They stick to the simple-minded slogan ” Fish versus People.”It is useful to take a brief look at the major characters in Act Two of the Latino Coalition.
Paul Rodriguez Rodriguez, son of immigrant farmworkers, who went on to fame and fortune as a stand-up comedian and actor, calls himself the “poster boy” of the California Latino Water Coalition, an ethnic  group funded by agribusiness groups in the San Joaquin Valley.  As chairman of the coalition, he is not entirely comfortable with the role and he freely admits his shortcomings in the Byzantine manuevering  of California water politics.Rodriguez was born in Sinaloa, Culiacan, Mexico in January of 1955, the youngest of 10 children, and came to America with his family in 1957, he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1998 interview.  They were migrant farmworkers, picking cotton in Texas, sugar beets in Minnesota, apples in Washington and grapes in the San Joaquin Valley.  In the mid 1960s, Rodriguez’s father broke his back in a tractor accident and the family moved to San Pedro.   Rodriguez said his mother cleaned fish at Terminal Island but later lost her job because of phlebitis. They then moved in with an aunt in Compton and Paul attended Dominguez High School in Compton, graduating about 1973. (In a posting on the Coalition website, www.gotwater.org , Rodriguez said he grew up in Orange Cove.)He attended community college near his home, enrolled at Cal State University, Long Beach, and then joined the Air Force.  In 1979, he became a doorman at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and got to fill in on stage when a comedian called in sick or failed to show up.  He quickly became popular and by 1984 had his own network sitcom “A.K.A Pablo”, the first TV show in America about a Mexican-American family,  which lasted six episodes.He has done a lot of charity and benefit shows, from USO tours with Bob Hope to performances at San Quentin Prison.  He has done lots of fund-raisers for many Democrats who he feels have turned their backs on him when he needed their help.  He says former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez rebuffed him and  told him to keep his day job when Rodriguez asked for help on the water issue. In the 1998 LA Times interview, Rodriguez admitted he voted for a controversial statewide ballot initiative that year to prohibit bilingual education in California, angering some of his Latino friends.  He said his parents influenced his decision to vote for the measure, which many considered anti-immigrant.“My father actually took the time to go to the school and insist that none of his children have bilingual education, which is not a popular view among Hispanics,” Rodriguez told the Times.  “My father said, ‘You're not going to get a job in this country because you know Spanish.  You're going to get a job because you know English.’ From my point of view, the hearts of Hispanic leaders are in the right place, but in terms of practicality, bilingual education does not work.”This independent streak extends to the Latino Coalition.  In one of his first appearances on Ray Appleton’s radio show he said he was uncomfortable with the word Latino  in the Coalition name and thought it should be just the California Water Coalition.  He also has refused to permit Mexican flags or symbols in any of the Coalition events he has participated in. Rodriguez, although a lifelong Democrat, has been flirting with the idea of becoming a Republican.   In a May 3 speech before the Bakersfield convention of the California Republican Assembly, a very conservative GOP organization, he said he was thinking about switching parties.   The audience was almost entirely white and when Rodriguez saw a Latina waitress in the room he joked that he felt he should be working the tables too.Regarding the delicate question of why there should even be a race-based water lobbying group, Rodriguez told the Republican conservatives gathered in Bakersfield:“When I say Latino Water Coalition a lot of you automatically say, ‘Why Latino?  Doesn't everyone need water, Paul? Why just you Latinos and as a Caucasian person I take offense to that, why does everything have to be segregated?’  I don't know. I don't know but we're using this.  We're using this race card in a positive manner, a cloak. You know everybody's welcome to this.  The reason why  we call it the Latino Water Coalition [is] because it gives them a pause.  ‘Better not attack these Latinos, we don't know.’  If we call it the Caucasian Coalition, you bet they would already be attacking us.  Because Caucasians, sadly to say, who is defending you?  I am.  You know, just to put that to rest, there's no division. “In his speech to the Republicans, Rodriguez said he had been friends with Cesar Chavez, and had hosted the labor leader on his Spanish-language television show, which was, Rodriguez said, later cancelled when grocery chains complained about Chavez’s appearance.  Rodriguez added he had been very disappointed that the United Farm Workers Union had not joined the Coalition to help the growers get more water.“When I was a young man I was indoctrinated with the belief of the evil, incarnate evil white farmer who mistreated his workers and cared more about his John Deere than Juan,” Rodriguez told the Bakersfield crowd.  “Although I never met that person, although if we ever received kindness it was from a farmer, who treated us decently with respect.  That's what I can remember.  I never heard my father complain.  I'm not defending or kissing up or becoming a coconut or whatever label you want to put [on] me.  I'm simply telling you as I, and what happened to me.  I'm not speaking for the other forty people in my house [crowd laughs]. “He closed his remarks to the Republicans (without revealing whether he had joined the GOP; Ray Appleton says he’s still a Democrat) by saying:  “I don't know what I'm going to do next.  I'm going to do something because I'm not going to sit there and see a canal with plenty of water go right by my property and my property has no water.  I'm not gonna sit there and see my family suffer needlessly.  And if it's illegal for me to take a backhoe and open up and make a canal, then I've already been accused of being illegal once before. “Again, Rodriguez doesn’t need to worry about a canal carrying water by his farm while his trees die.  The current problem involves the West Side of the Valley, not the East Side where his farm is.  It was a good story but not true.   Ray AppletonAppleton, in addition to being on the air from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., is the host of a two-hour weekday show from noon to 2 p.m. on KMJ, Fresno’s most popular AM radio station.  KMJ General Manager Patty Hixson farms several hundred acres in Fresno County and is clearly sympathetic to growers.  In addition, KMJ is flooded with pesticide commercials during Appleton’s morning and noon shows so there is also an economic reason to champion the cause of the West Side growers.The KMJ website section on Appleton shows pictures of him taken earlier this year purportedly sneaking into the Delta export pumps and turning them on.   While no doubt  intended as a humorous stunt, if Appleton actually did this it would be a criminal act, probably a felony.  Some of his grower callers are threatening civil disobedience.His erratic behavior on the show, raging one day, confident and predicting victory the next, is typified by a July 10 posting on his blog at the website:  “Many of you ask me how I can handle all the pressure from the Water War.  I get this all the time.  I’m surprised that many of you feel that I am pressured.  Yes, I know I’ve have had my moments on the air where I have been a bit out of control. Yeah, that’s always a lovely ‘bit’ for live radio when it’s real and I assure you this, for me, has never been more real. “Here is a sampling of Appleton’s inflammatory comments on the air in recent weeks:On  July 7, the House Appropriations Committee rejected an amendment by Rep. Nunes to suspend the Endangered Species Act and restore water exports from the Delta at “historic maximum levels.”   Appleton, on his show the next day, excoriated the Democrats on the committee and said Rep. Sam Farr, D-Monterey, was “a weasel.” He has called Rep. Costa a “traitor” on the air. He told listeners that Congress was “terrified” of Rodriguez and that, as Act Two gets underway, “we are now deferring everything to him [Rodriguez].  From now on he’s going to be calling all the shots [for the Coalition].” Appleton has called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “the Antichrist” and slandered Rep. George Miller of Contra Costa County in similar terms.   Appleton claimed that “law enforcement” had estimated the July 1 city hall water rally crowd at 11,000 people, without naming which law enforcement agency or officer had made this alleged estimate.  In contrast, the Fresno Bee and the local TV stations said Fresno police had estimated the crowd at 4,000.Appleton has called the United Farm Workers Union the “enemy” of farmworkers and claimed if Cesar Chavez were alive he would be in the radio booth with Appleton advocating for more water for growers.Appleton continues to claim that Delta smelt (Hypomesus transpacificus) is not indigenous to the Delta, that it is only on the Endangered Species Act Threatened List, and that smelt are plentiful throughout much of  America.  He is right that the Delta Smelt is only on the Threatened List but wrong about it occurring elsewhere in the United States.  Delta Smelt are members of the Osmeridae family (smelts) and, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Delta Smelt is found only from Suisan Bay upstream through the Delta in several counties.  Once abundant, their numbers have plunged in recent years, in large part due to reductions in freshwater outflow (i.e., water exports), and being ground up (“entrained”) at the massive Delta export pumps near Tracy.  Other causes in the population decline include pollutants, competition and predation from non-native fish.  There are other species of smelt in the Osmeridae family in other parts of America (some grow to eight inches in length) but they are not Delta smelt.  Using Appleton’s logic here, the analogy would be that it is okay if Polar bears go extinct because there are eight species of bear (black and brown bears for starters) in the Bear Family (Ursidae) and because if you’ve seen one bear you’ve seen them all, right?Appleton takes considerable pride in being the “new best friend” of Paul Rodriguez and loves to entice his listeners with tidbits about Rodriguez but says he cannot say everything he knows.  He told listeners recently Rodriguez had recently been fired from the movie “Family Wedding” starring America Ferrara, even after Rodriguez had completed shooting for his part, but said he couldn’t talk about it on advice of both Rodriguez’s lawyers and KMJ lawyers.  The inference was that Rodriguez was fired because of his political activism for the Coalition.  When Rodriguez came on Appleton’s show a few days later Appleton never asked him if he was fired from the movie.  If Rodriguez was, in fact, fired for exercising his free speech rights, that was wrong.He told listeners on July 7 that Rodriguez had become so disheartened over the Fourth of July weekend he was thinking of quitting the coalition but later changed his mind.   Appleton also told listeners Rodriguez was feuding with his agents.  “Well, Paul is having a little bit of a crisis with his agent right now, so he’s got that on his back as well because the agents are having a cow because he’s not fulfilling some of his commitments,” Appleton said.  “Paul is getting it from all sides, and I’m trying to be protective of him.” Appleton appears unconcerned that blabbing to listeners that Rodriguez is  not keeping his business commitments might be a bad idea.  Appleton later told listeners Rodriguez had fired his agents and retained new representation.  When Rodriguez was next on the show, Appleton never mentioned any of this.
Mario SantoyoMario Santoyo is the Assistant General Manager of the Friant Water Users Authority and one of the highest ranking Latinos in California’s water world.  He is probably more responsible for the creation of the California Latino Water Coalition than anyone else.  According to a February 27, 2009 article in the Fresno Bee, the Coalition was formed in 2006 after Santoyo and other Valley Latino leaders met with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and asked what they could do to help increase agriculture’s water supply.   Santoyo said the Governor “encouraged us to put together a coalition and spread the word” focusing on pleading their case to the Legislature’s Latino members.  The incorporation papers for the non-profit Latino Water Coalition were filed on December 29, 2008 (two years after the organization was formed) by Sacramento lobbyist and attorney George H. Soares, who owns a dairy farm in Hanford.  Ruben Guerra of Rosemead, head of the Los Angeles-based Latin Business Association is listed as the Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition and spoke at the July 1 city hall rally.  Curiously, Paul Rodriguez and Mario Santoyo are not listed as officers or named anywhere in the incorporation documents. Santoyo admitted in the February 27 Bee article that there are few Latinos in positions of California’s water world, either in government or agribusiness, lamenting “the water world has not been a world where there’s been a great diversity of people.  There’s only a few Latinos in that world.  I always felt kind of lonely.”However, the United Farm Workers and the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, among others, have complained the Coalition has focused on getting irrigation water for agriculture while ignoring the campaign for clean drinking water and decent housing for farmworkers, who are the poorest working people in America.  The Coalition has yet to speak out on farmworker health, safety and drinking water issues.
Orange Cove Mayor Victor P. LopezLopez is credited with luring Paul Rodriguez to head the Latino Water Coalition two years ago.  He had brought Rodriguez to Orange Cove in 1990 to help raise funds because of a freeze which damaged much of the citrus crop and threw the town’s predominantly farmworker population out of work.Lopez has been a controversial figure in the small farm town of Orange Cove, 40 miles southeast of Fresno, for more than three decades.  When he was elected to a fifth four-year term as mayor in 2006, his opponents claimed he had disgraced the city by hiring relatives and travelling the world on city funds, ostensibly on “official business.” A November 8, 2006 Fresno Bee article said Lopez’s critics and opponents accused him of squandering $174,000 in city funds on travel to China, South Korea, Mexico and elsewhere in the  five years previous to the 2006 election.  Lopez brushed off his critics by claiming they were merely jealous of him and noted he had brought tens of millions of dollars of state and federal grant money to Orange Cove.Fifteen years ago, Lopez called a community meeting to discuss graffiti, vandalism and gang problems.  “It's a major issue,” Lopez told the Fresno Bee in a January 27, 1994 article. “We have complaints about gang activity, graffiti, vandalism, and we have to deal with it.”  Lopez said then that there were four gangs in Orange Cove, and officials wanted to find the root of the problem.   'We will do whatever has to be done to remedy the situation,” Lopez predicted.The 66-year-old Lopez is still mired in controversy.  On May 24 of this year, the Fresno Bee ran a front page story saying a BMX bike park in Orange Cove, which was supposed to be financed by a $490,000 state grant from the California State Parks Department, had run into serious financial problems.   The grant application listed gang problems as one of the reasons a bike park was needed.State auditors say the city spent lavishly for the park but funds were unaccounted for.  The Bee investigation discovered the city had put Lopez’s son in charge of overseeing the project in a no bid contract even though the son had no engineering experience.  A Lopez grandson was given a security guard job at the bike park.  Odilon Ortiz, the city’s former finance manager who challenged Lopez for the mayor’s job in the 2006 election, said Lopez wanted the project completed before the election and classified the project as an emergency and instructed staff to ignore normal contract bidding rules. Lopez is also the only mayor in Fresno County paid by the county Economic Opportunities Commission.  Since 1971, he has drawn a $43,000 a year salary from the EOC as a “rural development specialist.”State Parks officials say Orange Cove, with a meager budget of $1.7 million, may be forced to cover the bike park construction costs if the $490,000 state grant is withheld.   Local officials also admit the bike park is rarely used.  Lopez told the Bee, “I have been here for 30 years and can hold my head high.  We’ve done nothing wrong.”In what may be a coincidence, the Fresno County Council of Governments (COG), comprised of Fresno City and 15 smaller cities in the county, approved a May 21 letter to the governor on an emergency basis (the item had not been on the agenda) recommending that Mario Santoyo be appointed to the State Parks and Recreation Commission, which sets policy for the state Parks Department.   The letter identified Santoyo as the founder and president  of the Latino Coalition.  Santoyo and Lopez have worked closely together in the Latino Water Coalition.  Lopez sits on the COG board.
Fresno County Supervisor Phil LarsonLarson is the 75-year-old Fresno County supervisor who represents the Westlands area.  He is a former pesticide/fertilizer salesman, farmer and former head of the Fresno County Farm Bureau.   After he spoke at the July 1 Fresno City Hall water rally and was leaving the podium, Paul Rodriguez, acting as MC, wisecracked, “there goes a walking sex scandal.” After Victor Lopez gave a near-shouted speech in Spanish, Rodriguez joked he should run for president of Honduras. Like I said, Paul Rodriguez is a funny guy.Larson has offered his county office and secretarial services to the Latino Coalition, a private non-profit group, raising questions about the appropriateness of the use of his office as a fund-raising mechanism for the private organization.Larson frequently states in TV interviews that the avowed purpose of environmentalists is to end farming in the San Joaquin Valley. Of course, he never names a single environmentalist who actually holds this view.  It is clear, however, that he’s looking out for the interests of the big growers as well as the small family farms.On March 1 of this year, there was a special session of the Fresno City Council called by member Cynthia Sterling.  Visiting Fresno was California Rep. Adam Schiff, who is considered to have clout in Congress about where federal economic revitalization funds might be spent.  Stirling was hoping some of that federal stimulus money will flow to Fresno.  According to Stephen Smith, a member of the Fresno County Democratic Party Central Committee, who attended the special session and took notes, Supervisor Larson showed up and wanted to know if the Obama Administration’s announced intention to limit farm subsidies to farms or farm companies producing under $500,000 worth of crops a year  was set in stone.  Larson said he had a friend and a nephew who both easily exceeded the $500,000 figure in gross annual farm receipts, which Larson considered a low figure.  In essence, Smith said, Larson was asking Schiff to go back to Washington and lobby for more subsidy money for big farms.  Rep. Schiff made no commitment to do so.  Smith said he was astounded by Larson’s comments.
KMJ commentator Inga BarksBarks, who hosts a daytime radio talk show in Bakersfield and a similar evening show on KMJ radio in Fresno, is a conservative who loves to bash Democrats, liberals and environmentalists, who she labels as “humaphobes” a term she coined for me, according to her blog on the KMJ website.  She knows little about water issues but that doesn’t stop her from blathering the agribusiness party line of the moment, oblivious to the fact Big Ag is awash in subsidy programs that, as a conservative, she should despise.She doesn’t have anything to do with the Latino Water Coalition as far as I can tell.  However she has viciously attacked me on the air several times (as a typical environmentalist) and thus I include her here.  Shortly after my controversial televised remarks about the pathology of farmworker culture in early February she posted the following comment, in part, on the Internet:  “I am convinced that Mr. Carter is not a racist, but an elitist. He doesn’t care about the laborer because he doesn’t care about the farmer.  He doesn’t care about the farmer because he believes the bread basket of the world (Central California Valley) should be a desert where the blunt[-]nosed leopard lizard runs free.  Regardless [of] race, he hates you, your car, your farm and your water faucet.”Come now Inga, I hate water faucets?  And stop calling the Valley a breadbasket because grains, which is what bread is made from, are mostly grown in the Midwest.  You can call the San Joaquin Valley the Fruit Basket of the Nation, or the Lettuce Bowl of the Nation, but not the bread basket.But, hey, it’s right wing talk radio, right?As Mrs. Barks herself put it in an April column in the Bakersfield Californian:  “Talk radio also gives a voice to people who actually believe in God without harassing them like they are some kind of uneducated, back-water, snake-handling, NASCAR-watching, country music-listening, intermarrying, group of bumpkins/possible terrorists. We have a groundswell of populism every day on my show.”  How about a groundswell of accurate facts?Others in the Latino Water Coalition or supporting the causeAlthough  Paul Rodriguez is listed as the chair of the Latino Water Coalition, the organization, according to its website,  includes three co-chairs including Orange Cove Mayor Victor P. Lopez, Ruben Guerra of the Latin Business Association and Tony Estremera, a director of the Santa Clara Valley Water District.  Lopez and Guerra have spoken at Latino Coalition events along with Piedad Ayala, a farm labor contractor, who has provided farmworkers to West Side agribusiness for nearly 20 years and was reportedly in charge of busing in paid and unpaid farmworkers to Coalition events.  Last of all is the congressional point man of the Coalition is clearly Rep.  Nunes.  Nunes has taken to posting videos on YouTube of his regular diatribes on the floor of Congress, a  popular astroturfing tactic employed by the big public relations firms.  He is likely the person who connected the Friant Water Users and/or the Latino Coalition with Burson-Marsteller.  After Part One of my article was printed, a B-M official told a Fresno television station it was advising  the Coalition but insisted the firm was donating its services.  Please note, however, that Burson-Marsteller has not said no one is paying the high-priced firm.  They have been advising the Friant Unit  growers for three years and they are surely being paid consulting fees for that.In the final analysis the biggest problem the Latino Coalition may face in the next year is not finances, or a coherent message that resonates nationally, or being pulled apart by partisan political bickering.  An El Nino weather pattern is forming in the Pacific Ocean and forecasters are predicting we may be heading into a wet winter. It’s hard to cry drought, even regulatory drought, when California’s rivers are running full.   Rodriguez better come up with some good jokes for that scenario. Lloyd Carter has been writing about Valley water issues for 40 years. His website is www.lloydgcarter.com
='Grassroots' Latino Water Coalition registered to ag industry lobbyistSubmitted by lgc_admin on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 10:46.Malcolm McLachlan, a reporter for the Sacramento-based Capitol Weekly, has been digging around seeking information about the California Latino Water Coalition. Here is what he found: CLICK HERE
---------CAPITOL WEEKLY'Grassroots' Latino Water Coalition registered to ag industry lobbyistBy Malcolm Maclachlan | 10/01/09 12:00 AM PSTAnyone who works in or around the Capitol has likely seen them in the last few months: clumps of Latino farm workers holding blue and white signs with slogans such as "Farm water=Jobs" or "If you like foreign oil, you'll love foreign food."The California Latino Water Coalition is one of several groups that have sprung up in recent years as the Golden State has tried to address its water woes. But according to critics, those blue signs are hiding another color: the green of Astroturf. In politics, "Astroturfing" means creating and financing a group to make it appear to be a real grass-roots organization when, in fact, it isn't. It is a common practice in the high-stakes world of Sacramento lobbying and communications strategy"The Latino Water Coalition is about as real as Schwarzenegger's hair color," said Democratic political consultant Steve Maviglio.Documents on file with the secretary of state show that the Coalition was formed as a nonprofit and registered by influential Sacramento lobbyist George Soares, whose A-list of about three dozen agricultural clients include the California Rice Commission, the California Cotton Growers and Ginners Associations, the Friant Water Authority, the Nisei Farmers League and The Grape and Tree Fruit League, among others.The group has been billed as the protector of the jobs of Latino farm workers, although labor leader Dolores Huerta and others have denounced it as a front group.Mario Santoyo, a top adviser and spokesman for the group, said the coalition receives funding from numerous sources."Like any other non-profit, our funding is pretty much dependent on funding we get from individuals, organizations, corporate interests. It's whoever is interested in donating to the purpose and cause of the coalition," said Santoyo, who also is a top executive with the Friant Water Authority.The Coalition was registered on Dec. 29 of last year by Soares. His firm, Kahn, Soares, & Conway LLP, billed lobbying clients more than $580,000 during the first six months of this year, over 80 percent of it to agricultural clients. The mailing address listed on the Coalition's Web sites is identical to that of Soares' firm, located on L Street across from the Capitol.yosemite wallpaper:  http://www.ksclawyers.com/Called on Tuesday, an employee of the firm said Soares was out of town until next week, and that he was the only person there who could discuss the Coalition with Capitol Weekly.Santoyo said growers and other agribusiness interests support the group financially, although he said he did not know exactly who contributed or how much. He also said the group was pushing for $2 billion for "restoring the Delta ecosystem."Details about the Coalition are not easily obtained. The group's Web site domain, GotWater.org, is registered to DomainsByProxy.com, a company that registers domains for clients who wish to remain anonymous. The Coalition doesn't officially lobby on bills or give money to candidates, so it doesn't show up on the Secretary of State's Cal-Access online database. The Secretary of State's records show that it was registered as a non-profit. On all of those records but one, "Coalition" is misspelled as "Coaltion," which might reflect a single multiplied error if the forms were completed using software with an auto-fill function, according to a representative of the Secretary's office.The organization does not show up on the online database of non-profits maintained by the State Attorney General, or the Internal Revenue Service's GuideStar system. However, according to Denise Azimi, a spokeswoman for the Franchise Tax Board, it's possible that they have applied for tax exempt status with the state, and also for tax-deductable status with the IRS, but these applications have not yet gone through.While the Coalition is hardly alone in trying to influence the direction of water policy in the state, no other group has had a more noticeable presence in the public debate. Their rallies are common and often large; an estimated 7,000 people showed up at an event they held in downtown Fresno on July 1.The Coalition has a celebrity spokesman familiar to many people, Latino actor and comedian Paul Rodriguez. Rodriguez has given numerous rousing speeches on behalf of the group.While he grew up in East Los Angeles, his family has roots in farming in the Central Valley, something he has often referred to in appearances. In June, he showed up on KFSN-TV News in Fresno, engaging in a shoving match with a white dairy activist-a confrontation that ended with Rodriguez being held back while yelling, "What have you done?!"Rodriguez has rarely been quoted in press reports about the Coalition, a role that has generally gone to Santoyo.  He did appear in an interview with TV commentator Sean Hannity on "The Valley that Hope Forgot," a special Fox News live broadcast from the Central Valley. Rodriguez said President Barack Obama "cut the water off."According to the Fresno Bee, Rodriguez and Santoyo were to be in Washington, D.C. this week meeting with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno.The Coalition has also had a photo montage promoting its work posted on the wall outside Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office since mid-September. When asked about the display, Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said it was there as part of the celebrations of Hispanic Heritage Month, though the governor agreed with the group's goals.Maviglio, a critic of the Coalition, said that Schwarzenegger was "renting" the space. In a Sept. 15 post on the Majority Report blog, where he is the most prominent contributor, Maviglio wrote that "the Latino Water Coalition is a PR front for Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations agencies that has a contract to push dams, canals, and other environmentally-unfriendly 'solutions' in California water policy."Others have made similar charges. Activist blogger Lloyd Carter has been waging war against the Coalition almost from the moment they came on the scene about two years ago."They've got a lot to hide," Carter said. "They're just a front group."Santoyo did not respond to phone messages requesting further comment this week. The name and telephone number of a Burson-Marsteller employee, Patrick George, has appeared on several Coalition press releases since mid-2007, but he is not identified as a Burson employee. George said the company did not have any current connection to the Coalition."We're not doing any work with the Water Coalition anymore," George said. "I've volunteered some of my personal time to help the Coalition because I had a personal interest in the water issue." Asked about his company's past connection to the Coalition, George declined to answer.According to Carter, the Coalition is funded mainly by large growers and other agribusiness interests in the southern Central Valley. For years, these interests have been fighting for a greater share of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the source of about two-thirds of California's water-a solution that essentially equals dams and a peripheral canal, projects lower Central Valley farmers have been pushing for years. Environmentalists and Delta residents have been fighting against them, seeking to keep a greater share of water for the Delta ecosystem, as well as farmers and residents in northern California.These growers know that as multimillionaires with holdings ranging into the tens of thousands of acres they don't make the most sympathetic of poster children, Carter said.This is where the Latino farm workers came in, he said-to add the "human face" and "grassroots" activism that speakers at Coalition rallies often refer to.A March 27 fundraising letter signed by Rodriguez asked for money "to manage logistics and support marchers including many unemployed farm workers." The fundraising boxes listed were "$1,000," "$2,500," "$5,000 OR MORE," and "Other." Among the group's goals cited in the letter were "to temporarily and immediately relieve severe Endangered Species Act standards that are preventing much needed pumping from the Delta to other regions of California." The letter makes no mention of donations being tax deductable. Santoyo's employer, Friant, is a "joint powers authority comprised of 22 member districts located in Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties," according to their Web site. He said that Friant has not given any money to the Coalition.The Coalition's board also includes several other members with water authorities. Treasurer Sylvia Ballin represents the city of San Fernando on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California board. Southern California chairman S. R. "Al" Lopez is president of the Western Municipal Water District of Southern California. Coastal chairman Tony Estremera "has been a Santa Clara Valley Water District director since 1996," according to the website.The Coalition is hardly the only group that has sprung up around the water issue. The California Water Alliance formed in June as a 501c4. The group said it is largely funded by growers, but has not yet produced a list of its funders.Another group, the Coalition Coordinator Alliance for a 21st Century Water Supply, launched in August to promote a "balanced solution" that not only includes a peripheral canal and new storage, but also promotes "restoring the Delta," according to their website. While it does not currently list donors on its website, the group did list several in press materials when it launched. KP Public Affairs, which represents the Alliance said they will send out a list of donors upon request, and that this group includes the California Building Industry Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, the Western Growers Association and several other business groups."In order to attract the kind of leading statewide groups necessary to help solve the problem, the Alliance has been completely transparent about who we are, what we are asking for and why," said Nicole Ratcliff, a spokeswoman for the Alliance from KP.Meanwhile, the chair of the Senate Food and Agriculture Committee - a Latino himself - said that he had always disagreed with "inserting the issue of race into the discussion of water," especially if it turns out that Latinos have merely "lent their names" to an effort run by farmers."I believe that the folks involved in the coalition are sincere in their desire to have an equitable water plan for California, I just think that these types of discoveries unfortunately distract from their message," said Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter.He added, "When it comes to water, nothing surprises me anymore.""March for water" was not a farmworkers' march.Submitted by Lloyd Carter on Sun, 05/03/2009 - 01:11. People have asked me my opinion about the "March for Water" that was sponsored by the California Latino Water Coalition from April 14 through April 17. I was out of state during the four-day march but later reviewed newspaper and TV news accounts of the event, which got extensive coverage from San Joaquin Valley media but little play in the rest of California or the nation.The march was supposed to be about farmers and farmworkers working together to protect their mutual interests but noticeably missing from the event was the United Farm Workers Union or representatives of organized labor.As UFW spokesman Armando Elenes said on Fresno's Channel 30 news, on the day the march started: "This is a grower-sponsored march, a grower-organized march, for water for growers. This is not a farmworkers' march."Curiously, Channel 30 was the only Fresno area news outlet to report that the UFW was definitely not participating in the march. The Fresno Bee, with coverage that bordered on the excessive, never mentioned the UFW. Nor did the rest of the local television stations.The New York Times, however, did mention the UFW, in its only story (April17) on the march."[S]ome labor organizers and advocates for rural areas contend that the marchers' goals reflect only the desires of agribusiness and not the real needs of farm workers," the Time story said, adding "many of the protesters were paid by their employers to march in lieu of harvesting crops." Missing from accounts in the Fresno Bee and other Valley newspapers were that the marchers were being paid to march, or the obvious longstanding conflicts between farmers and farmworkers."In reality, this is not a farm worker march, '' Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers of America, the 27,000-member union founded by Cesar Chavez, told the Times. ''This is a farmer march orchestrated and financed by growers.''The New York Times' lead paragraph of the story read as follows: "Hundreds of farmers, farmworkers and local elected officials walked along dusty roads in the Central Valley on Thursday, part of a four-day march to protest federal cutbacks in water supplies."Estimates of the size of the crowd varied widely. On the windy morning the march started, Fresno's Channel 30 estimated the crowd size at 400. As the march continued estimates ranged from the New York Times estimate of "hundreds" to localmedia's assertion of several thousand marchers. None of the news accounts I reviewed said WHO was making the estimates of crowd size or how the numbers were arrived at. Sacramento Bee reporter Matt Weiser, normally a solid reporter on water issues, wrote in an April 26 column that an "estimated 10,000 farmers and farmworkers marched 50 miles across the gasping San Joaquin Valley." Who made the 10,000 figure "estimate" was never revealed but it is a certainly that 10,000 people did not walk all 50 miles. As to what he meant by a "gasping" San Joaquin Valley, perhaps he was referring to the fact that the Valley has some of the poorest air quality in the nation with one of six children suffering from asthma or respiratory problems. He certainly cannot have been referring to the entire San Joaquin Valley losing out on water supplies since the cutbacks are basically limited to parts of the west side of the Valley. Many irrigation districts in the Valley will be receiving their full allotment this water year (or most of their average water supply), a fact conveniently omitted from most of the press coverage.Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger met the marchers at the end of the march at the San Luis Reservoir and said he would continue to champion the cause of getting more water for western Valley agribusiness. He was promptly attacked by conservative Republican congressman Devin Nunes who called for Schwarzenegger's resignation for allegedly failing to deliver on proposed new taxpayer-funded water storage projects. The Metropolitan Water District, the Nisei Farmers League and the Western Growers' Association quickly came to the governor's defense, rejecting Nunes' attack, which critics said was merely grandstanding by the volatile congressman.Following the march, KMJ Fresno radio news commentator Ray Appleton, who participated in the march and has become the new best friend of comedian Paul Rodriguez, the head of the California Latino Water Coalition, blasted the UFW. Appleton said during his noon hour show ijn late April that the United Farmworkers Union was the "enemy" of farmworkers. Appleton, who works for a radio station that probably runs more pesticide advertisements than any radio station in America, is treading on thin ice by attacking the UFW, which has the long-standing support of many Southern California Latino legislators. Their votes will be critical to any new water projects in California and Appleton?s anti-union diatribes will not endear him to those legislators.The UFW, in a statement issued on the March for Water, said it did not necessarily oppose farmers getting more access to water for irrigation but that it should be tied to getting farmworkers access to clean drinking water. The UFW press release noted the state of California continues to deny basic rights for farmworkers and the governor continues to oppose efforts to make it easier to unionize farmworkers.In my view, the coverage of the march by San Joaquin Valley media outlets was little more than cheerleading for the region?s biggest industry. Not one reporter asked whether or not Comedian Paul Rodriguez is being paid for any of his efforts, nor how much the march cost, or who actually is bankrolling the California Latino Water Coalition although it seems obvious it is the growers and not the poverty-stricken farmworkers. Six farmworkers died in California fields last year from heat stroke and the UFW continues to contend that growers and farm labor contractors are not doing enough to make field work safer and more tolerable.Despite the lack of tangible results from the March for Water, the Latino Water Coalition is now planning to take its show to Washington, D.C. to lobby members of Congress and the Obama Administration to suspend the Endangered Species Act and order more pumping from the beleaguered Delta Estuary. Meanwhile, the Delta ecosystem continues to collapse and the commercial and recreational salmon fishing season has been cancelled for the second year in a row. No word on whether thousands of salmon industry families thrown out of work also plan to march on Washington, D.C. to demand that more water be kept in the Delta. Maybe the West Side growers can explain why their water needs are more important that the salmon fishing families.Stay tuned.=RAW VIDEO - Paul Rodriguez fights with Merced area dairy group spokesman in Fresnohttp://abc30.com/archive/6872766/Fresno, Calif. -- Paul Rodriguez is the chairman of the Latino Water Coalition that is pushing to increase water supplies to Westside Valley farmers. But Thursday's fight over water got physical When Rodriguez was heckled by a man who says the comedian is not keeping his promise.Rodriguez had just left a meeting with Governor Schwarzenegger and was in the middle of a television news interview when the scuffle started.The man heckling Rodriguez is Jos? Corvelo who claims to be a spokesperson for a small, newly formed dairy coalition out of Merced County.  smelt, god squad
http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=6872766 ...
Blog entry - lgc_admin - 06/21/2009 - 10:51 - 3 comments - 0 attachments
"March for water" was not a farmworkers' march.... the march and has become the new best friend of comedian Paul Rodriguez, the head of the California Latino Water Coalition, blasted the ... industry. Not one reporter asked whether or not Comedian Paul Rodriguez is being paid for any of his efforts, nor how much the march ...
Blog entry - Lloyd Carter - 05/04/2009 - 01:18 - 10 comments - 0 attachments
Transcript of the Hannity Show with my Comments... Joaquin Valley, interviewing Rep. Devin Nunes and Comedian Paul Rodriguez, who is head of the California Latino Water Coalition. ... is Congressman Devin Munes and comedian and activist Paul Rodriguez. • Video: Watch Sean's interview ...
Blog entry - Lloyd Carter - 08/13/2009 - 11:48 - 8 comments - 0 attachments
THE PR FIRM FROM HELL... Coalition (created around 2006-2007), headed by comedian Paul Rodriguez, and Orange Cove Mayor Victor Lopez, co-chairs of the ... Two of this series will focus on the roles of Comedian Paul Rodriguez, Orange Cove Mayor Victor Lopez, growers’ employee Mario ...
Blog entry - lgc_admin - 06/29/2009 - 17:19 - 9 comments - 0 attachments
THIRSTY DOWN IN NOBAMA COUNTY... California Latino Water Coalition,  headed by comedian Paul Rodriguez and a handful of local Latino leaders in the San Joaquin ... Fortunately, the group is headed by comedian  and actor Paul Rodriguez, who owns some farmland near Orange Cove and was recruited into ...
Blog entry - lgc_admin - 07/30/2009 - 16:34 - 2 comments - 0 attachments
Some Things Never Change: Westlands water rustlers' latest job... who influenced and directed district politics. The late Paul S. Taylor, a University of California economics professor who was a well ...
Blog entry - Lloyd Carter - 04/17/2014 - 16:37 - 0 comments - 0 attachments
Record-breaking “Dead Zone” Predicted in the Gulf of Mexico This Summer... Texas all the way to Alabama.   Dr. Paul Montagna, Chair and Professor for the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of ...
Blog entry - Lloyd Carter - 11/04/2013 - 19:56 - 0 comments - 0 attachments
Blog entry - Lloyd Carter - 07/02/2013 - 08:20 - 0 comments - 0 attachments
'Grassroots' Latino Water Coalition registered to ag industry lobbyist... familiar to many people, Latino actor and comedian Paul Rodriguez. Rodriguez has given numerous rousing speeches on behalf of the ...
Story - lgc_admin - 10/01/2009 - 10:46 - 1 comment - 0 attachments----
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000058573&year=2014The Politics of Drought: California Water Interests Prime the Pump in Washington by Kitty Felde and Viveca Novak on April 10, 2014   http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/04/the-politics-of-drought-california-water-interests-prime-the-pump-in-washington/This story is the result of a collaboration between Southern California Public Radio and the Center for Responsive Politics.=Some Things Never Change: Westlands water rustlers' latest jobSubmitted by Lloyd Carter on Sat, 08/25/2007 - 01:28.  Tags nb my paraWestlands water rustlers’ latest job FURTHER DOWN THE DRAIN BY LLOYD G. CARTER “Since pre-Columbian times, the Westlands area was known to be part of the uninhabitable Great California Desert.” From the history section of the Westlands Water District Website, WWW.WestlandsWater.org For more than half a century, growers in the fabled Westlands Water District have been the “bad boys” of federal irrigation projects in the American West, ignoring residency and acreage requirements for taxpayer-subsidized water, getting Congress to change laws they didn’t like, seducing both Republicans and Democrat politicians with a river of campaign contributions, and reaping more crop, water and power subsidies, tax breaks, and debt forgiveness than any other group of farmers in America. Now they are poised to pull off the biggest coup in their controversial history. If they get what they are asking for, 260 billion gallons of publicly-owned water a year for 60 years, they will capture water worth anywhere from $20 to $40 billion - that’s billion with a B - with which they are free to farm tainted soils with, OR resell to urban interests at fantastic profit margins. At the current retail market price of $500-600 an acre-foot in Southern California, the Westlands water, purchased at a fraction of its true valley could be worth $2,000 an acre-foot by 2050, when there could be 60 million Californians. The potential value of 15.6 trillion gallons of water in a drought-stricken climate staggers the imagination. The catch? Westlands says it will solve a problem being caused by irrigation of its drainage-impaired, highly saline soils, contaminated with the toxic trace element selenium. Westlands makes this promise despite 52 years of federal research and hundreds of millions of dollars in studies that have failed to come up with a wildlife-safe, effective and affordable solution. It gets better. Westlands also wants forgiveness on an already interest free $489 million capital debt for taxpayer construction of its water delivery system it should have already paid off. But first a little history. After pumping a huge aquifer dry on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in less than 40 years, the patriarchal families of the West Side, the Giffens, the Harrises, the O’Neills, the Dieners, the Wolfsens and a few others, turned to a folksy tire salesman from Texas named B.F. “Bernie” Sisk. They bankrolled Sisk’s try for Congress and in 1955 he landed in the nation’s capitol. Sisk spent the next five years tirelessly promoting a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation project to bring Northern California (Trinity River) water to western Fresno County. In a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1959, Sisk promised that if the San Luis Unit (which would have been the last major leg of the Central Valley Project begun in the 1930s) was built, there would 6,000 family farmers on 100-acre ranches on the West Side and peace and prosperity would prevail. It was the first of many misrepresentations Westlands, or its supporters, would make over the next 48 years. Twenty-five years after Sisk’s promise, in 1984, there were still only 240 growers in Westlands and 40 of them, mostly from the original founding families, controlled over half the land and all the politics in the one-acre, one-vote district. Southern Pacific Railroad, Chevron, and cotton king J.G. Boswell were among the major Westlands landholders who influenced and directed district politics. The late Paul S. Taylor, a University of California economics professor who was a well known critic of Reclamation policies in the mid-20th century wrote a 1964 article in which he quoted Alabama Congressman Oscar Underwood’s1902 speech on the floor of Congress, the year the Reclamation program was created to protect and foster family farming: “Federal reclamation began as a program to help ‘farm boys’ who ‘want farms of their own’ to obtain them ‘without being driven into the already overcrowded cities to seek employment.’” Many of the “farm boys” from Westlands would eventually live in multi-million dollar mansions in North Fresno, on the San Joaquin River bluffs or toney Van Ness Extension Avenue, 50 miles from their industrialized farming operations, in a zip code that receives more farm subsidies than any other zip code in America, 93711. The first thing West Side growers did after the water delivery project was approved by Congress in 1960 was to annex another 200,008 acres known as the West Plains Water Storage into the 400,000-acre Westlands, a move a 1978 Congressional Task Force later concluded was unauthorized by Congress. Ironically, some land in the West Plains district had been designated too salty and unsuitable for irrigation by Bureau engineers in the 1950s when designing the original San Luis project, which included Westlands and three other adjacent small irrigation districts. Irrigation of the upslope West Plains lands, near the Coast Range along Interstate 5, would later worsen salty and selenium-plagued groundwater problems on the low-lying farmland near the trough of the Valley, where the San Joaquin River runs. Congressional funding intended for completing the drainage system was instead diverted to build a water delivery system for West Plains, according to the 1978 Task Force report. In exchange for bringing cheap subsidized water to the western valley, Westlands growers had agreed to break up the huge estates, including the 106,000 acres owned by Southern Pacific, and the 100,000 acres owned by the Giffen family, after 10 years. The excess land provisions in Reclamation law provided that a husband and wife could own 320 acres but no more than that. Of course, the Bureau of Reclamation had never enforced the residency requirement or the acreage limitation, which is what drew the wrath of Professor Taylor. When the mid-1970s rolled around, National Land for People, headed by George Ballis, sued to break up the huge ranches and actually give “farm boys” and farmworkers a chance to have ranches of their own. Fat chance. A celebrated 1977 San Francisco Examiner series titled “The Paper Farmers” chronicled how the big growers were evading the acreage limitations by, in some cases, adding the names of relatives, employees and even unborn children, to land deeds to increase the amount of cheap water they were eligible to receive. Westlands dragged its feet for several years in the National Land for People case, while the Bureau maintained the status quo on water deliveries, meaning big growers continued to get the cheap water for ranches which often exceeded 5,000 or 10,000 acres. Westlands also went to Congress and Rep. Tony Coelho, who had replaced his mentor Sisk in 1975. Coelho, who would become a powerhouse in the House before resigning following a real estate scandal, helped engineer the so-called “Reclamation Reform Act” in 1982, which didn’t really “reform” anything but did legalize a lot of the outright illegality occurring over the acreage limitation. Coelho was aided by western states congressmen subservient to their own local large growers getting federal water. [some kind of $ transformation?]The Reform Act eliminated the residency requirement and boosted the eligible acreage for the cheap water to 960 acres. It also created an even bigger loophole by allowing growers to get cheap water for lands they leased, rather than owned. As a result, leasing schemes mushroomed overnight and the mega-farms continued to get the cheap water. Then in 1983-1984, the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge debacle hit, when word leaked out that drainage water from Westlands, being evaporated in 1,280 acres of diked ponds at Kesterson, was poisoning fish, ducks, and shorebirds at the dual purpose ”refuge.” Because of a subterranean clay layer underneath Westlands farmland, salty groundwater accumulated near the root zone. To protect crops the shallow groundwater had to be pumped out and sent somewhere else. The original plan was to funnel the salty drainage through the Delta to the Pacific Ocean. When Bay Area interests objected in the 1970s, Reclamation officials latched on to the risky idea of utilizing evaporation ponds at Kesterson as a stop gap measure while they undertook studies to convince the State Water Resources Control Board the drainwater would not harm the Delta. These studies revealed that much of Westlands’ acreage was riddled with selenium, a trace element which is a micronutrient in very small doses but toxic in slightly higher amounts. Selenium had been washing out of the Coast Range mountains for eons, accumulating in the western valley. Selenium’s toxicity to livestock was well known and Department of Agriculture studies in 1939 had actually detected elevated levels in Fresno County’s western foothills but that information had been overlooked or ignored by Bureau officials eager to build the San Luis Unit. Many federal scientists saw Kesterson coming although they did not know that it would be selenium, not pesticides, that would cause Kesterson’s Silent Spring. Despite the documented misgivings of field level biologists as early as 1962, the Department of Interior, parent agency of both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, had actually claimed in the late 1970s that the Westlands salty drainage would be good for the Kesterson wetlands. Amazingly, much of the tab for constructing the Kesterson facilities was deducted from the Westlands’ repayment tab because it was designated a benefit to wildlife and the general public. The wetlands at the 5,900-acre Kesterson refuge adjacent to the San Joaquin River in Merced County were in the middle of the wintering grounds for hundreds of thousands of migratory ducks supposedly protected by an international treaty, the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. When full strength drainwater began flowing to Kesterson in 1981, high levels of selenium dissolved in the drainage water quickly moved into the food chain, killing fish and birds and triggering grotesque deformities in wildlife. Kesterson neighbors Jim and Karen Claus, who watched their cattle die after drinking water seeping from the evaporation ponds, filed a complaint with the regional water board and sounded the alarm. On March 15, 1985, following a year of intensive media scrutiny, including a segment on CBS’ “60 Minutes” and front page stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Secretary of Interior Donald Hodel ordered the Kesterson ponds closed and irrigation water deliveries to Westlands shut off. Hodel said the evaporation ponds were a violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. A delegation of Westlands officials and growers, including former California Secretary of State Bill Jones (Jones’ family owned several thousand acres in Westlands), traveled to Washington to lobby Hodel to resume irrigation deliveries. In exchange for the Bureau to continue the flow of Northern California water to Westlands, the water district officials signed an agreement on April 3, 1985 in which they pledged to halt drainage flows to Kesterson even though this would worsen their drainage crisis. In that 1985 agreement, Westlands also assumed any liability for lawsuits from individual Westlands growers. In 1991, some growers in a 42,000-acre area of Westlands who had originally drained their wastes to Kesterson filed suit against Westlands and the Bureau of Reclamation for damages caused when the drainage system was closed and plugged. The suit was placed on the back burner during the Clinton years, as Reclamation officials plodded along spending tens of millions of dollars on drainage studies, including a $50 million, five-year investigation by a state-federal team. Their report, issued in 1990, concluded the cheapest solution was to take the high selenium lands out of production and drastically reduce the amount of drainage produced. When George W. Bush came to office, the growers who had filed the lawsuit a decade earlier began pushing it again. A career Justice Department attorney, Yoshinori H.T. Himel, representing the Department of Interior and the Bureau in the grower suit, filed a motion in August of 2002 to get it dismissed. Himel pointed out that Westlands, in the 1985 agreement, had agreed “to design, install, and operate alternative means for disposal of drain water in an efficient and environmentally sound manner.” Himel then noted that the 1985 Agreement “placed the obligation on Westlands “to design, install and operate alternative means for disposal of drain water from Westlands.” Himel said alternative means included evaporation ponds, salt tolerant crops and recycling. While Himel acknowledged it could be argued the 1985 agreement may not have required Westlands to assume long-term responsibility for drainage for the entire San Luis Unit he said Westlands assumed, at the minimum, responsibility for solving the drainage problems of the 49,000 acres that had been draining to Kesterson. Himel added “One thing the Agreement did alter, however, was Westlands’ obligation to indemnify the United States for, among other things, ‘losses, damages, claims and liabilities’ arising from Westlands’ performance or non-performance of the Agreement. The language ‘losses, damages, claims and liabilities’ indicates money claims, such as Plaintiffs’ money claims in this lawsuit . . . Westlands thus undertook at a minimum to indemnify the United States for lawsuits by those who might be dissatisfied with the results of Westlands’ ‘alternative means’ for drainage.” A federal court rejected this argument but critical issues of apportionment of liability for the drainage mess remained. Of course, we will never know what would have happened had the apportionment of fault issues been decided by a jury or a judge. Bennett Raley, a Colorado attorney who represented irrigation districts and was appointed Assistant Secretary for Water and Science by his Interior Secretary Gale Norton in 2001, made sure that a trial on the merits did not happen. Raley, undoubtedly with the support of Norton and the White House, undercut Himel and other Justice Department career attorneys defending the suit, agreeing to a $139 million settlement in December of 2002, with most of the money coming from U.S. taxpayers, not Westlands. Raley, of course, gained fame in 2002 for allotting water from Oregon’s Klamath River to irrigators rather than to endangered fish, leading to a massive salmon die-off. News reports later indicated Vice President Dick Cheney masterminded the Klamath decision. It is unknown if Cheney or former White House advisor mastermind Karl Rove were consulted or involved in the decision to concede victory to the Westlands growers without a court fight. In an October, 24, 2002 pre-trial order for partial summary judgment in the growers’ suit, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger noted that there was no dispute the growers continued to irrigate their lands knowing “that their lands would be damaged without drainage.” Wanger added, “There are multiple issues to address at trial, however, regarding the operative ‘cause’ of damage to plaintiffs’ land, whether that damage constitutes a public or private nuisance, whether federal defendants and Westlands are concurrent tortfeasors, apportionment of any comparative fault of plaintiffs, and whether plaintiffs[] consented to or assumed the risk of a nuisance or trespass by demanding water deliveries to their farmlands, despite the knowledge that no drainage facility existed.” (Emphasis added.) In other words, a jury or a judge may have found the growers knowingly ruined their own lands and might not have awarded them a cent in damages. But Raley, as already noted, pre-empted any jury determination of those issues and, contrary to the Justice Department attorneys’ written arguments, settled. 
Under the settlement, the federal government was to pay $107 million to have the farmers’ lawsuit dismissed. Westlands had to spend $32 million to settle its part of the case, buying 34,000 acres of the plaintiff’s ruined land and retiring it. “We weren’t batting a thousand with this court,” Raley claimed in a 2002 interview with the Sacramento Bee. “They were claiming that we had damaged them, damages in excess of $400 million.” Raley did not mention Westlands officials had signed the April 1985 agreement assuming liability for all such lawsuits or that his own government attorneys thought they had a good case and could win in court. Rep. George Miller and environmental activists howled at the settlement, which they warned would be used as a precedent for the still unsolved drainage problem facing the Western San Joaquin Valley. Having given away $107 million in taxpayer money, Raley returned to private practice representing water districts in December of 2004. Following the 2002 settlement (in which the federal government admitted no wrongdoing), Westlands worked on getting a new long-term water delivery contract and pressuring Reclamation to come up with a drainage solution because a district court, and then the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, had ruled Reclamation had a legal obligation to try and complete a drainage system for Westlands. Westlands growers had a powerful ally in Jason Peltier, a native Californian and deputy secretary at Interior who was the Administration’s point man on western water issues and was a former lobbyist for Westlands and other California federal irrigation districts. Peltier claimed in news interviews he had nothing to do with matters involving Westlands. However, Westlands recently hired Peltier at an undisclosed salary. A former regional Reclamation official, Susan Ramos, has also been hired by Westlands. Which brings us to the present. Westlands general manager and general counsel Tom Birmingham is now pushing a “global” settlement to the outstanding drainage lawsuits (filed by water districts downslope from Westlands) and Westlands’ desire for a long-term secure water supply. In recent closed door meetings with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Valley congressmen Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa (who represents the Westlands area), Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Hamilton Candee and a few others, the various stakeholders have tried to work out a deal. The news media is not permitted to cover these talks while decisions are made involving billions of taxpayer dollars. Ed Imhoff, a retired federal scientist who headed a post-Kesterson $50 million, five-year study of the drainage problem from 1985-1990, was also kept out of the talks. Feinstein reportedly insisted “too many” people were in on the talks. Imhoff has been critical of the proposed drainage solutions of both Reclamation and Westlands. His 1990 study, dubbed the “Rainbow Report” noted land retirement was the cheapest option. In the Central Valley Project, water supplies have always been distributed on a first in time, first in right priority system in which the oldest CVP irrigation districts get the water they need before irrigation districts down the totem pole get their water. Westlands, as the last CVP area to come on line, is at the bottom of the totem pole. This has often meant drastically reduced supplies for Westlands. For example, during the 1987-1992 drought, Westlands, in 1990 and 1991, only got 25 percent of its annual contract amount of 1.15 million acre-feet (an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons). Westlands has tried repeatedly in court to get on the same footing as more senior water contractors but to no avail. The drainage crisis, widely misunderstood and mishandled by both Reclamation and Westlands, has provided the growers an opening. A few months ago, Westlands announced it could solve the drainage dilemma for less than half of the $2.6 billion Reclamation officials say it will cost to provide reverse osmosis, bio-remediation, recycling, and land retirement. Birmingham said that in exchange for letting the Bureau off the hook on drainage, Westlands wanted the Bureau’s extraordinarily valuable state water permit and operational control of the huge San Luis Reservoir near Los Banos. As anticipated, the audacious claim provoked a hostile response from Rep. Miller, Northern California interests and environmental groups statewide. Birmingham then abandoned that strategy amid a torrent of negative publicity and, in the first week of August, just prior to another closed door meeting with Feinstein he came up with a revised, but still sketchy, proposal. Birmingham suggested that if the federal government would forgive a $489 million debt the Westlands owes for capital construction costs, and would exempt Westlands and other San Luis Unit water districts from acreage limitations and pricing provisions of federal law, Westlands would take over responsibility for the drainage mess. In addition, Westlands wants a 60-year water delivery contract with rights of renewal (federal law now prohibits federal water contracts in excess of 25 years) and wants the Bureau to authorize transfer of title to various pumping plants, internal distribution systems, and the Coalinga Canal. Apparently unmentioned in the Feinstein talks is that Westlands signed a “waiver/indemnity agreement” with Interior back on April 3, 1985, after the Kesterson closure or that the federal government admitted no liability in the 2002 settlement. The claim that the United States is somehow responsible for any damage to the former desert lands and thus should make major concessions on water delivery or drainage issues is simply unproven in a court of law. Feinstein also seems unclear on the concept that even though the Bureau estimates it may take up to $2.6 billion to produce a drainage program, Westlands is ultimately required under the 1960 legislation to pay for it, albeit over 40 or 50 years and interest free. Neither the district court nor the Ninth Circuit has ever held that Congress must appropriate money to build a drainage system or that Westlands would not have to ultimately pay for it. Moreover, few people in Washington seem to be questioning why Westlands should get off the hook for the $489 million still owed on the delivery system. If a man builds you a house and a plumbing system and fouls up the pipes underneath the bathroom, you don’t get the house for free. You just get your plumbing fixed. Following a meeting in her office on Aug.1, Senator Feinstein said of a potential agreement “the devil is in the details.” Environmentalists fear she isn’t really paying attention to the details or looking out for the interests of American taxpayers and especially Californians, who are cutting back usage in urban areas while Westlands’ 500-600 growers could get enough water annually to meet the needs of a city of eight million people, or two cities the size of Los Angeles.
 Consider this: If Westlands gets 800,000 acre-feet of water a year, which is what it would like, that translates to 260.68 billion gallons of water a year and 15 trillion, 640 billion gallons over the life of the proposed 60-year contract. If you calculate the urban retail value of 800,000 acre-feet of water at a conservative $500 an acre-foot (Rep. Grace Napolitano of Los Angeles, new chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Water and Power Resources, says its $600 an acre-foot in Southern California) you come up with $400 million a year. Assuming the Westlands pays a generous $100 an acre-foot (they will argue for, and probably get, a cheaper price) that means they will pay $80 million for $400 million worth of water in a given year. Over 60 years, $400 million times 60 turns out to be $24 billion worth of water for a few hundred growers(Westlands claims 600 growers but has never produced a list and critics say it could be as few as 400). And many of those “growers are connected by blood or marriage, or simply entities operating under different corporate names but controlled by the same people. Of course, in my example, they would pay for 20 percent of that water ($100 an acre-foot) which means the retail value of that water delivered over the life of the contract, less what they paid for it, would be $19.2 billion. Actually, the potential profits of water sale could be much higher. 
First of all, you can bet that the current urban price of water will be far higher in 60 years, when the western San Joaquin Valley may look like the San Fernando Valley. Water then may be worth $2,000 an acre-foot or even more if climate change produces extended drought. Although Westlands’ Birmingham contends any guaranteed supply of water is strictly for farming in the district, there is no question it is legally permissible, thanks to a 1992 change in Reclamation law, for Westlands to sell its water on the retail market to the highest bidder, i.e. Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has an insatiable thirst. Indeed, several San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts are already selling water to developers or urban interests and some individual Westlands growers have already offered to sell water to Metropolitan. They understand very well that water is the new cash crop. Westlands’ so-called solution to the drainage problem is (1) conservation, (2) recycling and the most controversial and unproven, (3) use of sprinklers to disperse the tainted drainage water into the air, with the water evaporating and the salts and selenium falling back onto a gravel bed. The technology has never been tried large scale other than on one California Department of Water Resources test plot that was less than the size of a city lot. Westlands officials have not explained where the millions of tons of salts that would accumulate over the decades would be hauled for disposal. Or what would happen if their scheme did not work.
 Environmentalists worry the drift of the salty spray from the sprinklers, especially in windy conditions, could damage surrounding fields or further taint groundwater. And sprinklers, or puddling of water would surely draw wildlife to the tainted water. The spray drift zone downwind would be more than two football fields long. If trees were planted for a drift barrier that would created a selenium-charged terrestrial environment. Huge amounts of land for a safety zone around the sprinklers would be required for the amount of drainage Westlands generates. The district hasn’t said how much land. So if Westlands’ drainage scheme doesn’t work the growers will simply idle the bad lands and keep the very valuable water which they can resell to the highest bidder under the 1992 law. 
How fortunate. At Feinstein’s Aug. 1 meeting with Birmingham and others, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientist Joseph Skorupa was not in attendance although Senator Feinstein reportedly asked for him to be there. Skorupa is probably the premier expert in the United States on the impacts of farm drainage water on wildlife, especially birds, and has been studying San Joaquin Valley drainage since the 1980s. Fish and Wildlife managers, under pressure from Bureau officials, told Sen. Feinstein that Skorupa was unable to attend the Aug. 1 Washington meeting. According to sources at Interior, however, this was an outright lie and Skorupa was both willing, and able, to attend the Feinstein meeting. Ironically, the same day Skorupa was told he could not attend the Feinstein meeting, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Director Dale Hall was testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee Hearing regarding Interior’s questionable scientific and policy decisions under the Endangered Species Act and claimed that “Science is the cornerstone of the Service’s work; it is what guides the agency’s decisions.” Unless, of course, Westlands is involved. Westlands growers have making campaign contributions to Feinstein for years, including nearly $5,000 personally from Birmingham. No one has calculated how much. But they have a lot to gain if Feinstein buys off on their proposal and sponsors legislation. According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG) website, in a recent year the largest 10 percent of the farms in the Central Valley Project - which stretches from Redding to Bakersfield - got 67 percent of the water, and of course, Westlands has the biggest CVP farms of all and uses the most water of any district. Twenty-seven large CVP farms, most in the Westlands, received water subsidies averaging in excess of $1 million annually (i.e. the cost of replacement water). One Westlands farm, Woolf Enterprises, received more water by itself than 70 water districts in the Central Valley Project, for a subsidy worth up to $4.2 million annually at urban prices for water. EWG has also documented that CVP farmers get power subsidies to pump that Delta water uphill into the San Joaquin Valley at rates that are about 1/15th what the average citizen pays for the monthly electricity bill. CVP growers’ water rates are about two percent of Los Angeles residents’ rates. 
Fortunately, any deal the Westlands/Bush Administration cabal makes with Feinstein must run the gauntlet of a Democratic Congress, which may not be as solicitous of the Westlands as Feinstein is. Rep. Miller and Rep. Napolitano promise to closely monitor any sweetheart water giveaway. California environmental groups, fishing groups and Northern California Native Americans are also mobilizing to fight the latest Westlands scheme. One question for Congress to ask is how many billions do American taxpayers owe the few hundred Westlands growers? Kesterson whistleblower Felix Smith, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who first leaked to the news media the selenium-caused bird deformities, has been writing about the Kesterson debacle for 25 years. He estimates the overall subsidy to the Westlands (cheap water, cheap power, interest free construction costs), per acre, is now well over $6,600 per acre, or $3 billion for the whole district. The per acre subsidy is far more than the land is worth. More worrisome is that if Westlands is guaranteed an enormous amount of water, it will increase the stress on a Delta that is already on the verge of ecological collapse due to overpumping by the State Water Project as well as the federal pumps. However, Westlands’ “farm boys” are hoping that public apathy and congressional confusion or ignorance will result in one more very big payday. Over 15.6 trillion gallons of water in the middle of a desert. Think of the riches. Their desert may be uninhabitable but it does rain money.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition</a>

The California Latino Water Coalition (CLWC) describes itself as "a statewide coalition of influential Latino leaders that supports development of San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta environmental, conveyance and sustainability solutions along with additional water resources in California. With actor-comedian Paul Rodriguez as chairperson, the organization's goal is to demonstrate the need for a comprehensive statewide water infrastructure plan, a program that includes groundwater and surface water storage capabilities, conservation and water resources stewardship, water recycling and desalinization." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_note-about-0" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[1]</a>

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[<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#" class="internal" id="togglelink" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">hide</a>] </div>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#Personnel" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">1 Personnel</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#Contact_information_and_Burson-Marsteller_connections" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">2 Contact information and Burson-Marsteller connections</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#Articles_and_resources" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">3 Articles and resources</a>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#Related_SourceWatch_articles" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">3.1 Related SourceWatch articles</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-5" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#References" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">3.2 References</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#External_resources" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">3.3 External resources</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#External_articles" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">3.4 External articles</a></li>

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From the CLWC website: <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_note-about-0" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[1]</a>

<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Paul_Rodriguez&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Paul Rodriguez (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none;">Paul Rodriguez</a>, Chair</li>

<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Mayor <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Victor_Lopez&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Victor Lopez (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none;">Victor Lopez</a>, Co-Chair, Central Valley, City of Orange Cove</li>

<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ruben_Guerra&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Ruben Guerra (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Ruben Guerra</a>, Co-Chair, Southern California, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Latin_Business_Association&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Latin Business Association (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Latin Business Association</a></li>

<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tony_Estremera&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Tony Estremera (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Tony Estremera</a>, Co-Chair, Director, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Santa_Clara_Valley_Water_District&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Santa Clara Valley Water District (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Santa Clara Valley Water District</a></li>

</li></ul>

<h2 style="color: black; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); width: auto; font-size: 19px; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Contact information and Burson-Marsteller connections</h2>

Website: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.gotwater.org/" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">gotwater.org</a>

<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_George&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Patrick George (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Patrick George</a>, cell phone number 310-487-3001, is listed as the CLWC contact on the group's press releases. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_note-1" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[2]</a> George is a director of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Burson-Marsteller" title="Burson-Marsteller" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Burson-Marsteller</a>'s media practice, working out of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Public_relations_firm" title="Public relations firm" class="mw-redirect" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">public relations firm</a>'s Sacramento, California office. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_note-2" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[3]</a> The same phone number, along with Patrick George's name and sometimes his Burson-Marsteller email address (patrick.george AT bm.com), is listed on press releases for <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Accenture" title="Accenture" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Accenture</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_note-3" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[4]</a>, the newsletter of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Cotton_Ginners_and_Growers_Associations&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="California Cotton Ginners and Growers Associations (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">California Cotton Ginners and Growers Associations</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_note-4" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[5]</a>, and announcements for the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Friant_Water_Users_Authority&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Friant Water Users Authority (page does not exist)" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Friant Water Users Authority</a>. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_note-5" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; white-space: nowrap; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">[6]</a>

<h2 style="color: black; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); width: auto; font-size: 19px; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Articles and resources</h2>

<h3 style="color: black; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; font-size: 17px; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Related SourceWatch articles</h3>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Burson-Marsteller" title="Burson-Marsteller" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Burson-Marsteller</a></li>

</ul>

<h3 style="color: black; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; font-size: 17px; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">References</h3>

<li id="cite_note-about-0" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">↑ <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_ref-about_0-0" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">1.0</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_ref-about_0-1" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">1.1</a> "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.gotwater.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10&Itemid=56" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">About CLWC</a>," California Latino Water Coalition website, accessed July 2009.</li>

<li id="cite_note-1" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_ref-1" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">↑</a> "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.gotwater.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=1&Itemid=53" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">News</a>," California Latino Water Coalition website, accessed July 2009.</li>

<li id="cite_note-2" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_ref-2" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">↑</a> "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.burson-marsteller.com/Global_Network/Lists/KeyContact/DispForm.aspx?id=70" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">Our office key contact: Patrick George</a>," Burson-Marsteller website, accessed July 2009.</li>

<li id="cite_note-3" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_ref-3" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">↑</a> Press release, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4628" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">Accenture Study Reveals Need for Chemical Companies to Capture and Share Supply Chain Best Practices</a>," Accenture, January 3, 2008.</li>

<li id="cite_note-4" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_ref-4" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">↑</a> "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.ccgga.org/newsletter/09/apr09web.pdf" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAQAAAAnOwc2AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAE5JREFUeF5lykEKgDAMBdF/+17Es/QkiosiCBURXIzJooZohmweX6gwmkCeI+Oqc2C1FnvnF2ejlQYU0tLK2NjY6f/l8V12Ti7uhFFgDj19b58EwXuqkAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">The Cotton Chronicle</a>," Volume XX, Issue 4, April 2009.</li>

<li id="cite_note-5" style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition#cite_ref-5" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">↑</a> "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.usbr.gov/newsroom/newsrelease/detail.cfm?RecordID=13661" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">Press Conference: San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Finalized</a>," U.S. Bureau of Reclamation website, September 12, 2006.</li>

</ol>

<h3 style="color: black; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; font-size: 17px; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">External resources</h3>

<h3 style="color: black; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; width: auto; font-size: 17px; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">External articles</h3>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Lloyd G. Carter, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.lloydgcarter.com/content/090629251_the-pr-firm-from-hell" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">The PR Firm from Hell</a>," as published in the Fresno Community Alliance newspaper, June 30, 2009.</li>

<li style=" margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Dan Bacher, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/08/19/18616644.php" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">Westlands Hoards Surplus Water While Farmworkers Suffer: CSPA demands investigation into water hoarding by Westlands and others</a>," IndyBay.org, August 19, 2009.</li>

</li></ul>

<table style="font-size: 13px; margin: 0.5em 0.57em 0.5em 0.7em; border-collapse: collapse; border: 1px solid rgb(218, 210, 109); border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 250, 205);"><tbody><tr><td style=" width: 988.625px; padding: 0.25em;">This article is a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">stub</a>. You can <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">help</a> by <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=California_Latino_Water_Coalition&action=edit" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAGXRFWHRTb2Z0d2FyZQBBZG9iZSBJbWFnZVJlYWR5ccllPAAAAFZJREFUeF59z4EJADEIQ1F36k7u5E7ZKXeUQPACJ3wK7UNokVxVk9kHnQH7bY9hbDyDhNXgjpRLqFlo4M2GgfyJHhjq8V4agfrgPQX3JtJQGbofmCHgA/nAKks+JAjFAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); padding-right: 13px; background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;">expanding it</a>.</td><td>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

</div>

<div id="mw-normal-catlinks" class="mw-normal-catlinks"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:Categories" title="Special:Categories" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Categories</a>:

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-style: none; padding: 0px 0.5em 0px 0.25em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Water" title="Category:Water" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Water</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Energy" title="Category:Energy" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Energy</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:United_States" title="Category:United States" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">United States</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0.125em 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.25em; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0px 0.5em; zoom: 1;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Stubs" title="Category:Stubs" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Stubs</a></li>

</ul>

</div>

=Tony Estremera began his tenure on the Board of Directors in 1996, when he was appointed to fill out Director Pat Ferraro's term after the District 2 representative resigned. He has a long list of government experience in both appointive and elected positions, serves as directing attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Santa Clara County and is an active member of the State Bar of California and the Santa Clara County Bar Association.bsComing from humble origins as a son of Mexican immigrants, Ruben Guerra has risen to become a leading advocate for Latino entrepreneurs.Currently Chairman and CEO of the Latin Business Association, the nation’s largest Latino business trade organization, Mr. Guerra travels throughout the US and internationally coordinating trade pacts, such as the historic agreement with the City of Suzhou, China, and those with numerous cities and states in Mexico and the Honduras.Ruben Guerra is well-known in the California and national political scene, advocating with legislators for increased access to business opportunities for all Latino entrepreneurs, serving as Vice Chairman of the California Water Coalition and promoting the California Water Bond, slated for the November 2012 ballot, which supports the state’s water infrastructure, as well as serving on the boards of directors of several major California Utility and Small Business Advisory Boards.An entrepreneur himself, Ruben Guerra founded Municipal Energy Solutions, which specializes in LED lighting and renewable energy projects, and RG Design and Construction.We are pleased to honor Mr. Ruben Guerra for his many years of outstanding leadership, and collaboration both as a friend and partner with SCE.=

CA Latino Water Coalition

Attachments