http://www.bakersfield.com/News-sections/take-our-river-back/2010/05/06/lois-henry-where-does-the-river-go.html
If you’re like most people in Bakersfield getting to and from work, ferrying kids, doing your shopping, you’ve probably gotten to the point you no longer even notice that big, bone-dry ditch running through town. You likely cross several times a day. And it never occurs to you that weed-pocked gully is a river. In fact, if you were born in Bakersfield in the mid-1980s and lived your whole life here, you can count on one hand how many times you’ve seen the once mighty Kern River run through town — and I mean really run, not just a reluctant a trickle here and there.
We live in a desert and we’ve suffered droughts. But that’s not why the Kern’s water no longer runs its natural course.
Practically since the first white man laid eyes on that river, it’s been under siege. The fights for its water are the stuff of legends, as are the men who struggled to control it.
The Kern’s waters created empires out of sand and swamp. They’ve sustained vast agricultural operations and populations never dreamed of when the first canals were scratched from its banks.
Those few who still control the river’s flow know it has even more fortunes to yield as California is ever determined to outgrow its water resources.
So the tug of war continues.
Yet we residents of Bakersfield, a city built in this very spot because of the existence of that river, have placidly accepted a dry riverbed as the cost of local ag, local jobs and a certain water supply for the city.
We’ve been told the Kern can’t sustain us and still be a river, that one is the price of the other.
These stories examine that premise.
River water is the backbone of local ag. It truly has spawned an agricultural miracle. Thousands of acres of arid land now produce food and fiber shipped around the world.
The two districts that started the fight resulting in loose water farm more than 155,000 acres alone. And that doesn’t count the other districts with river rights or those that buy river water or even others that use it through exchange agreements.
But the river’s flow is also being shunted hundreds of miles away in elaborate deals to sprout houses far beyond the San Joaquin Valley enriching a few individuals and districts.
And even while local taxpayers continue to foot the bill in a decades-old deal that brought state water here for homes and was supposed to also give us a small bit of river most years, that water has vanished as well, either tucked into underground banks or exchanged away.
We’re told over and over that it’s all done in the community’s best interests.
That could be a page out of the playbooks of the two men most responsible for how the Kern is controlled even now, James Ben Ali Haggin and Henry Miller.
When the two immensely wealthy San Francisco land speculators fought for the river more than a century ago, they both played the populist card, accusing the other of wanting the river only to exploit it for personal benefit.
Each claimed he wanted to save the river from the other carpet-bagging robber barron. Not for public use, of course. Not even for use by most local farmers. But still, somehow their cause was portrayed as a noble effort for the greater community benefit.
Dueling newspapers took up sides. Haggin even wrote a column defending his actions.
“My object has not been, nor do I wish to monopolize large bodies of land, but I desire to make valuable and available that which I have, by extending irrigating ditches over my lands … to divide them up and sell them out in small tracts with the water-rights necessary for irrigation,” he wrote in 1880.
Never mind that Haggin already did monopolize large bodies of land having used a variety of nefarious schemes. And that while he often talked about selling out to small farmers, he never did.
One newspaper, the Kern County Gazette, saw the battle for what it was and in 1880 tried to sound the alarm.
“The people of the county are not willing to see any partnership of rich men in the command of the water of the country. They might as well take the air, for it would be impossible for any settler to breathe for a year in this valley with the water of the river out of his reach.”
But people of that time had no means to join the fight.
Miller had thousands of acres along the river. Haggin’s land was further away and needed canals to siphon the water.
When the legal dust settled, Miller and his riparian rights were essentially the victor. But, in a decision that set the course for California water law to this day, the court also acknowledged that Haggin’s appropriative rights had weight as well.
Though Miller won the nearly decade-long battle, the cantankerous old German immigrant turned right around and made a deal with Haggin: If Haggin would build him a reservoir (Buena Vista Lake), Miller would give him two-thirds of the river.
Done.
The so-called “Miller-Haggin agreement” securely locked the water away, dividing it among a small circle of owners. That rights structure has remained in place to this day.
Over the 130 years since Miller and Haggin went to war, several more agreements and decrees have come along. Today’s river users would have us think those are all implacably cemented in place with no room for upstarts.
But times have changed.
In 1994, North Kern Water Storage District and Kern Delta Water District, both offspring of Haggin’s Kern County Land Company, went to battle over 50,000 acre feet of Kern River water whose ownership was in question.
In 2007 that skirmish ended in the hands of the State Water Resources Control board. The board will now decide where that 50,000 acre feet ends up. That has given the public the chance to make a case for the water — and the city has just as much weight as the ag districts.
What once was a murmur from Bakersfield residents — revive the river — has grown to a roar.
The door to the river was cracked open by that lawsuit. Now the residents are pushing to swing it wide, telling the board loudly that we’ve waited on the sidelines long enough.
We want our river back.