Land Letter | By Damon Franz | April 10, 2003
In the first of what will likely be a series of court decisions on the legality of the massive California Bay-Delta Program (CALFED), a California Superior Court upheld the general environmental report spelling out the goals and objectives of the plan.
In its ruling against the California Farm Bureau, the state Superior Court for Sacramento County found that the broad programmatic environmental review does not need to nail down specific impacts of portions of the program that have not yet been approved. And although the review is not legally required to consider economic or social impacts, the authors of the report did an adequate job of addressing those concerns.
The CALFED program, which involves 18 state and federal agencies, is aimed at improving water delivery to cities, providing more irrigation water to farmers and restoring damaged ecosystems. The largest set of environmental restoration projects ever undertaken, the $8.5 billion CALFED seeks to balance water needs over a vast portion of the state between human and environmental needs. A fairly large sector of CALFED's human segment, however, fears the program seeks not to accommodate their needs but rather eliminate them entirely. In January 2001, the California Farm Bureau filed suit against the state agencies involved in CALFED, saying the program focuses too much on buying out farmers for the purpose of rehabilitating wildlife habitat.
According to Dave Kranz of the California Farm Bureau, the CALFED plan will result in anywhere from 250,000 acres to 1 million acres of farmland converted to wildlife habitat.
"The bottom line is that farmers and the farm bureau believe CALFED must plan for and manage habitat restoration on land the government already owns," Kranz said. "We're concerned about the amount of land the government plans to remove from agricultural production. We believe habitat restoration is a worthy goal, but the government should go about it in partnership with farmers rather than seeing them as obstacles to be removed."
Although farmland would only be bought from willing sellers, Kranz said that the government could turn farmers into "willing sellers" by imposing mandates and restrictions that would make it difficult for the grower to operate. The Farm Bureau would prefer a system where government programs give farmers incentives to manage wildlife habitat on their land. "That way, you keep the farmer on the land, keep the local economic activity he creates, maintain local tax revenue and restore habitat," he said.
In challenging the project, the Farm Bureau, along with the Regional Council of Rural Counties and others, target the 3,500-page environmental impact report (EIR) that that provides a basic framework for the 30-year proposal. The groups argue that the EIR is inadequate because it is too vague, but the court rejected this argument, saying the EIR is a general planning device that must be kept vague to allow for flexibility.
"A program EIR of this breadth is not designed to document all the specific environmental consequences of all the anticipated individual actions," Sacramento Superior Court Judge Patricia C. Esgro wrote in her opinion. "Rather, the program provides a broadbrush description of the overall program and its alternatives, environmental consequences, and mitigation strategies."
The groups also argued that the EIR did not give adequate consideration to the impact CALFED would have on agricultural communities.
But under the California Environmental Quality Act, an EIR is not required to address economic an social changes resulting from a project, Esgro said. Furthermore, she added, the agencies do indeed address these issues in the CALFED EIR. "While not required to do so, the EIR goes to great lengths to identify general mitigation strategies for reducing the outright acquisition of farmland and for assisting local farming communities in retaining control of their water," she wrote.
California Secretary of Resources Mary Nichols said the ruling verifies that CALFED has taken an equitable approach to addressing human and wildlife needs. "The court recognized that CALFED is a work in progress, as well as the massive documentation and analysis we performed at the program level," she said. "As we move forward with specific projects, we are committed to detailed environmental review and full public participation."
"CALFED will remain strongly committed to addressing the issues raised by rural and agricultural communities," added CALFED Director Patrick Wright.
CALFED spokesman Margaret Gidding said its hard to tell at this point how much farmland the project will seek to acquire, but the program is actively seeking ways to restore wildlife habitat on farmland while keeping the land in production. For instance, she said, CALFED recently issued a $1.5 million grant to the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited for a pilot project to test and improve wildlife-friendly agriculture.
And the agency issued a $1.9 million grant to the University of California to study the economic and ecological costs and benefits of alternative agriculture practices. "If these projects end up being viable, the amount of farmland the program needs to buy might end up being at the lower end of the range," she said.
Kranz said the Farm Bureau has not yet decided if it will appeal the decision, and the group has a similar case against CALFED pending in federal court that could still go either way. "I don't think it is possible to predict what will happen in federal court based on what happened in the first round of state court," he said.Land Letter:
