Replacing Farms with Houses

I encourage everyone to read Alison Williams’ August 11, 2007 Los Angeles Times article about water in the Borrego Valley, “A Resort Town Thirsts for Solutions.” Granted, Williams’ article has its shortcomings, but it makes one very important point.

Williams unfortunately perpetuates recycled and misleading information about the health of Borrego’s aquifer, for example the myth that the aquifer only has a useful life of 30 years. Furthermore, Williams’ article places an alarmist emphasis on a recent speculative remark made by the Department of Water Resources’ Tim Ross about the MW-5 monitoring well on the southern edge of the Borrego groundwater basin. The Borrego Sun made this same mistake a couple of months ago in an article Steven Smiley has rightly called “sensationalized” and “misleading.”

Finally, while falling into the familiar trap of blaming valley farms for a water crisis that in fact cannot be convincingly shown to exist, Williams only quotes one of Borrego’s farmers. Most of the other people quoted are committed antagonists of valley farms. The article is not adequately balanced.

Williams is dead right on one point however, and this is primarily why her article has merit. For the first time, to my knowledge, a journalist has finally recognized and acknowledged what is really going on behind the effort to run Borrego’s farmers out of the valley. The goal is not primarily to save water at all, but rather to transfer ownership and control of water from valley farms to residential developers and to the Borrego Water District. It’s about money and power, not conservation, “merely replacing farmland with houses,” as Williams’ article puts it. That’s just not a good idea.