Water Agency's Land Purchase Rattles California Farmers

Bart Fisher, farmer and president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District, looks at the Colorado River. The third-generation farmer who was born in Blythe, left 29 percent of his farmland fallow this year. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the nation’s largest distributor of treated drinking water, became the largest landowner in the region including Blythe for good reason: The alfalfa-growing area sits at the top of the legal pecking order to Colorado River water, a lifeline for seven Western states and northern Mexico.(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

By Elliot Spagat and Jae Hong
Associated Press

BLYTHE, Calif. (AP) -- The nation's largest distributor of treated drinking water became the largest landowner in a remote California farming region for good reason: The alfalfa-growing area is first in line to get Colorado River water.

Metropolitan Water District of Southern California's play in Palo Verde Valley, along the Arizona line, tapped a deep distrust between farm and city that pervades the West over a river that's a lifeline for seven states and northern Mexico.

Farmers recall how Los Angeles' modern founders built an aqueduct a century ago to bring water hundreds of miles from rural Owens Valley, a story that was fictionally portrayed in Roman Polanski's 1974 film, "Chinatown."

"Are we going to dry up our rural, agricultural communities just to keep Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego growing? I think it would be a sad state of affairs," said Bart Fisher, a melon and broccoli farmer who is board president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District.

Metropolitan tried to calm nerves by sending its chairman in September to a public forum in Blythe, 225 miles east of its Los Angeles headquarters. It pledged to honor a 2004 agreement that caps the amount of land it pays farmers to idle at 28 percent of the valley.

That agreement, which expires in 2040, is hailed as a model for farms and cities to cooperate. Metropolitan pays farmers about as much as they would profit to harvest - $771 an acre this year - to bring foregone Colorado River water on its 242-mile aqueduct to 19 million people in the coastal megalopolis it serves.

Palo Verde enjoys California's highest rights to the river, making their immune to drought.

The dynamic changed when Metropolitan paid $256 million in July to nearly double its Palo Verde holdings to 29,000 acres, or about 30 percent of the valley. The agency denied its purchase from Verbena LLC, a company that bought the land several years earlier from the Mormon church, was part of an orchestrated plan.

"It's made the farmers out there nervous that we are the largest owner but there was a strategic opportunity that came up," Metropolitan's general manager Jeffrey Kightlinger said.

Metropolitan stirred similar angst this month in Northern California when its board expressed interest in buying farms on several islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Its staff said the land could provide water storage and wildlife habitat.

Blythe, a riverside town of about 13,000 people in the Mojave Desert with two state prisons, is an oasis of gas stations, motels and fast-food restaurants on Interstate 10 between Los Angeles and Phoenix. Thomas Blythe staked claim to the river in 1877, beating Southern California cities under a Gold Rush-era doctrine called 'first in time, first in right.'

Los Angeles and its suburbs founded Metropolitan in 1928 to build the remarkably durable Colorado River Aqueduct. Parker Dam and the reservoir it created in Lake Havasu empties into a gray Art Deco-style building with nine pumps that quietly pipe water 300 feet up a steep slope. Teal metal cases that cover the pumps vibrate so little that a nickel placed on top stands on its side.

The water goes uphill through four more pump stations and through tunnels, canals and pipelines before reaching Southern California's coastal plain two days later.

The Colorado's huge man-made reservoirs have made the river an unheralded savior in California's four-year drought. Last year, the river supplied two-thirds of the 1.7 billion gallons of drinking water that Metropolitan delivers daily, up from a third three years earlier.

The river sustains 40 million people and farms 5½ million acres, but white "bathtub rings" lining walls of the nation's largest reservoir in Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are evidence of shrinking supplies. California took more than it was entitled to until Sunbelt cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas clamored for their share and forced the nation's most populous state to go on a diet in 2003.

"It's really the only supply of water to this otherwise bone-dry region," said Bill Hasencamp, Metropolitan's manager of Colorado River resources.

Metropolitan has diverted up to 118,000 acre feet of water a year from Palo Verde since 2005, enough for about 250,000 households. It paid $3,170 an acre to farmers who committed for 35 years, plus an annual fee for fallowed land. It idles 7 percent to 28 percent of the valley each year, depending on its needs.

Jack Seiler, a grower who volunteered 900 acres, calls the agreement a "poster child" for farms and cities to cooperate but Metropolitan's July purchase of nearly 13,000 acres unsettled him. It gave Metropolitan the largest voting bloc on Palo Verde's water board.

Metropolitan says it won't have to pay someone else to idle the land it now owns and will lease it to farmers, cutting its net cost to about $50 million. It voted for incumbents in a September election to Palo Verde's seven-member board, which includes Seiler.

"I obviously don't know why they bought all this land," Seiler said. "It puts us a little bit at odds."

Desert fossil discovery reveals surprises

Desert tortoise eggs are among the finds at a solar project in eastern Riverside County

A fragment of ivory from an Ice Age mammoth was found in the Mojave Desert, on the future site of the Rio Mesa solar project near Blythe.

BY JANET ZIMMERMAN
Press Enterprise

A solar energy company planning a development in eastern Riverside County has discovered a rare Mojave Desert treasure-trove of Ice Age fossils, including a clutch of desert tortoise eggs believed to be the first found in California.

Paleontologists are buzzing about pieces of ivory from a mammoth tusk, the teeth of ancient horses and other indications of large vertebrate animals seldom found in California, they said. The first fossils of a sidewinder, desert horned lizard and desert kangaroo rat to be discovered in Riverside County also were located on the project site 13 miles southwest of Blythe, near the Arizona border.

“It’s quite a find,” said Casey Weaver, an engineering geologist with the California Energy Commission, which oversees licensing of the project. “It was very surprising, especially the number. We’ve never had a site that is so fossiliferous.”

The fossils were discovered as the developer, BrightSource Energy, prepared an environmental review for its application last year for the Rio Mesa solar complex. This week, the company submitted revised plans for how it will proceed with its project and extract what experts say is sure to be a valuable and informative cache of fossils underground.

Rio Mesa would have two solar plants on 4,000 acres. Each plant would have a 750-foot concrete tower surrounded by mirrors that focus the sun on a boiler to create steam and turn turbines. Together the facilities would generate about 500 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve 200,000 homes per year.

Most of the 800-plus fossils uncovered so far were fragments spread over eight miles on the Palo Verde Mesa, according to company documents submitted to the state.

“On a scientific level only, the finds are exciting in that it had been thought that the last Ice Age sediments laid down in the Blythe region were terraces of the Colorado River, but we can now say that animals and plants later remodeled the upper layers of these terrace sediments into a soil, and that hundreds of animals left their remains in that fossil soil,” said Joe Stewart, the project paleontologist from URS Corp.

The fossils were located in soil dating back about 14,000 years. Finding such treasures on the surface, where they had been subjected to the elements, means chances are good the fossils deeper down will be more intact and identifiable, said Eric Scott, curator of paleontology at the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, where the collection eventually will be curated.

Only a few paleontological records exist from the surrounding region, which makes this find noteworthy, he said. Scott was especially excited about the discovery of tortoise shell fragments and the pieces of eggs preserved inside a burrow.

“The tortoise shells are over the top. We have desert tortoise fossils from the Ice Age, but no shell fragments. That’s really significant. If you’re finding stuff that is that delicate and that rare and preserved in that good a condition, that supports arguments that other stuff down there will be really well preserved,” Scott said.

CLIMATE CHANGE CLUES

Pieces of large vertebrates were dragged by rodents into their burrows, including fragments of deer antlers, a pronghorn and what is believed to be a bighorn sheep, according to BrightSource documents filed with the state. Also found were fossils of rabbits, rodents, a badger and a coyote.

The discovery has given paleontologists an updated understanding of the prehistoric environment in that area. When combined with information about fossils found at Diamond Valley Lake, Joshua Tree, the La Brea Tar Pits, Arizona and Las Vegas, it may help provide some clues about climate change, Scott said.

The Pleistocene, from 40,000 to 11,000 years ago, was a time of dramatically shifting climates and temperatures, and produced abundant fossils that are often well-preserved and easy to date, experts said.

During that era, the Colorado River Valley was free of ice, and the lowlands were well-watered and vegetated from freshwater lakes and rivers, Scott said.

An area with lots of horses, mammoths, bison and camels would tell scientists of an abundance of food. Correlating that information with climate change over time can show how animals adapted and how they might change in the future, he said.

“We’ve moved past the idea of, ‘Wow, this is a mammoth, isn’t this cool.’ In order to understand how these animals were living and adapting to changing climate and conditions, you need not just a fossil, but samples of many different animals to tell you how the ecosystem worked,” Scott said.

It’s not known how deeply buried other Rio Mesa fossils might be, Scott said. Part of the site, which is owned by the Metropolitan Water District, was disturbed during World War II training exercises

FURTHER STUDY

In February, the Energy Commission asked BrightSource for additional excavation to determine where and how fossils are positioned beneath the surface, Weaver said.

BrightSource initially objected to the request because the work would cost the company time and money, according to documents. But this week, the company submitted a supplemental report laying out its plan for further study. The company will excavate 10 trenches about 10 feet deep and bore five deeper holes under supervision of a paleontologist.

Concern stems from the pedestals for the project’s mirrors. Driving the pylons into the ground will cause vibration that could damage any nearby fossils, the Energy Commission said. One of the conditions of certification will be training workers on what to do when they encounter fossils during excavation, the commission’s Weaver said.

BrightSource spokeswoman Kristen Hunter said the discovery won’t delay the project, which is expected to begin construction next year.

Paleontologist Stewart, of URS, said it is possible that the only fossils recovered will be “microvertebrates,” pieces such as lizard, snake and tortoise eggshell parts found by screening sediment.

“It is important to note these fossils found on the Rio Mesa site are not big flashy fossils that one would expect to see on display. Rather they are small fragments of skeletal elements,” he said. “We might not even see any of these fossils until we sort the concentrate with a microscope.”

The fossils are being stored temporarily at the URS lab in Pasadena. Once they are at the museum, the identities will be confirmed, samples will be numbered and labeled and they will be added to a digital database for use by other researchers, Scott said.

A public workshop on the state’s preliminary staff assessment of the project will be held Oct. 29 in Sacramento. A second workshop in Blythe is planned for November, though an exact date has not been set. Information on the assessment and other documents are available online.

Blythe Calif Station Burns

Author: Winks
Blythe area paper

The historic Santa Fe Depot, a Blythe landmark that has graced the city since 1926, was destroyed by fire the afternoon of May 2. No one was injured in the fire. Witnesses told police they saw sparks from overhead electrical wires and that is believed to have been the cause of the inferno. Despite being closed for years, the depot still had electric and gas turned on.

Jim Green, manager of the Blythe Food Pantry, which sits adjacent to the former depot, said he and a friend were working on his car out back of the Pantry facing the depot when they smelled smoke.

"I said 'darn, it smells like rubber burning,'" Green said. "I ran around to the other side of the car and was fixing to look at the vehicle when I noticed the smell coming in from the southwest. I looked at the dock of the building and flames were coming up from under the loading dock."

Green's friend dialed 911 and Blythe Volunteer Fire responded.

Fire Chief Billy Kem said it was the first big fire he's been on since being appointed to the position last month.

"It was a shame," he said about the fire that took down the 80-year-old building. "It was just an old wooden structure-type building that had been there a long, long time. We don't know the cause and there was no putting it out - it got up into the top real quick."

Kem said the blaze started at the south end of the building and burned through to the front.

Located at Rice and Commercial streets, the building was first constructed in 1926, 10 years after rail service first came to Blythe. The depot was listed in Riverside County's Historic Resources Inventory by the Riverside County Historical Commission in 1983.