Sisk, Bernie
<font face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" /><div><font face="Times New Roman">Bernice Frederic Sisk (December 14, 1910 – October 25, 1995), usually known as B. F. Sisk or Bernie Sisk, was an American politician who served as a <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Congressman from California from 1955 to 1979. He was a Democrat.</span></font></div><div>
</div><div>Sisk was born in Montague, Texas in 1910. He was elected to the House in 1954, representing a district that included Fresno, Merced and Modesto. He defeated Republican incumbent Allan Hunter in one of the major upsets of the 1954 midterm Congressional elections. The district had been in Republican hands for all but ten years since its creation in 1913, but Sisk went on to hold the seat for 12 terms.</div><div>
</div><div>He was a long-time member of the House Rules Committee and the Agriculture Committee, and served as Chairman of the Cotton Subcommittee, where he helped heal the long-standing rift between southern and western cotton producers. A proponent of production inducements rather than direct farm subsidies, he backed legislation to aid the dairy, wine, sugar, fig and raisin industries. Sisk was also a major political force in the United States Congress for the creation of the <b>Central Valley Project</b> that eventually developed into a $37 billion water system that continues to serve California's 400-mile-long Central Valley.</div><div>
</div><div>Sisk retired from Congress in 1978. He was<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> succeeded by his former chief of staff, Tony Coelho.</span></div><div>
</div><div>External links[edit]</div><div>Bernice F. Sisk at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman"> 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 <b>folksy tire salesman from Texas named B.F. “Bernie” Sisk</b>. 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, t<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">here 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. </span></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 </span>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. </font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman">==</font></div>