Westside farmer sells water for $77 million

Forget gold. In Kings County, water gets most of the attention. More specifically, it’s the prospect of losing local water rights to outside entities that gets everybody’s dander up.

That's why the Kings County Water Commission spent a good chunk of a Monday night meeting talking about a Westside landowner who plans to sell 14,000 acre-feet of water a year to the Mojave Water Agency in San Bernardino County for $5,500 per acre-foot.

That’s $77 million of the wet stuff headed out of the county for likely urban development (an acre-foot is enough water to supply a typical home for a year, according to Wikipedia).

The tradeoff is that the unnamed landowner — a member of a Bay Area company called Sandridge Partners, based in Sunnyvale — plans to cut down 2,500 acres of his almond trees along Interstate 5 near Kettleman City.

Normally, that probably wouldn’t rank high on the concerns of the water commission — The land is far away from Hanford, it doesn’t affect Kings River water users and it’s California Aqueduct water coming from the Sacramento River, anyway.

But the concern is that the pattern could become more common as scarce water becomes more valuable as a commodity than as a way of growing crops.

“Higher bidders are bidding for the water and are willing to pay more,” said Don Mills, commission member.

Mills said he’d like to stop Sandridge from selling the water, but that Kings County “has no legal authority (to stop it).”

Dudley Ridge Water District, where Sandridge’s land is located, has adopted a policy divvying its water among member property owners. That gives each the right to sell their share.

No representatives from Sandridge Partners or Dudley Ridge Water District spoke at Monday’s meeting.

According to Mills, however, Sandridge plans to use part of the $77 million to buy groundwater rights on adjacent land in Kings and Tulare counties in order to keep at least some of its almond trees alive.

The groundwater might be lower quality, but it is a more reliable water supply than Aqueduct water, which has been reduced severely due to drought and environmental issues in the Sacramento River delta.

“It’s a matter of economics,” said Mark Gilkey, general manager of the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District, in an interview.

Property owners in his water district have done the same thing in the past, Gilkey said.

As with most water discussions in Kings County, Monday’s comments quickly turned to the topic of new dams — a sore point in Sacramento as Democratic legislators balk at new storage projects and Republican lawmakers, along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, say they won’t support anything that doesn’t include new dams.

“The answer’s got to be more [water] contracts,” said commission member John Howe, adding that the reshuffling of the existing water supply is “delaying the inevitable.”

The reporter can be reached at 583-2432.

(Aug. 25, 2009)