A Noble Way to Use a River
FOR NEARLY HALF a century, Osborne and his fellow irrigators had no important enemies. Every year the Bureau compiled reports about the Project that trumpeted impressive numbers about tons of wheat and bushels of apples and millions upon millions of dollars of gross farm revenues. Regional newspapers gave prominent display to the figures, confirming that irrigation subsidies were a sound and patriotic investment. It was painless to believe in irrigation because nearly all the benefits of the Project stayed within the state while 98 percent of its costs were paid by taxpayers who lived somewhere else.
The screw started to turn, however, when irrigators attempted in the 1980s to double the size of the Project. They wanted to expand it to the one million acres that was envisioned during the early years of the New Deal. They hit a snag back in Washington. For the first time in the Project’s history, both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government were balking at giving Columbia Basin farmers all the money they wanted. Jackson and Magnuson were gone, replaced by senators with less clout and more doubts about subsidizing un-poor farmers. The Bureau was coming under intense environmental criticism for ruining too many western rivers with too many dams; its construction budget was shrinking. No longer willing or able to foot the entire bill for expanding the Project—a bill estimated at more than two billion dollars—the Bureau instructed Columbia Basin farmers to look closer to home for expansion money. They turned to the Washington State legislature.
The man who ended up turning the screw on Osborne and his neighbors was, by background and manner, an unlikely enemy. Norm Whittlesey grew up on an irrigated cattle farm near Aspen, Colorado. He talked the slow talk and walked the bowlegged walk of a cowboy. A small, wiry man in his early sixties, he favored string ties, cowboy boots, and turquoise belt buckles. He taught agriculture economics at Washington State University, a land-grant school in eastern Washington with a long tradition of indulging the interests of local irrigators.
When Whittlesey first moved out to Washington State in the mid-1960s, he worked for the Project as a researcher. Like most westerners who grow up on farms, his natural inclination was to believe that irrigation was a noble way to use a river.
That natural inkling, Whittlesey told me, did not change until he hired on in the mid-seventies as a consultant to a state legislator from eastern Washington whose constituents were farmers in the southern part of the Project. The legislator wanted the professor to prepare a report showing how it made good sense to expand the Project and get somebody else to pay for it.
“The conventional wisdom was that we should go ahead and irrigate more ground. No one anticipated that I would not be favorable to that idea.”
To his surprise and dismay, the more Whittlesey studied the numbers, the more he became convinced that any expansion of the Project would be a net loss to the economy and environment of the Pacific Northwest. He found that water had a much greater regional value if it was kept out of irrigation ditches and left in the Columbia River, where it could generate electricity and transport fish. Expansion of the project, Whittlesey calculated, would benefit only a few thousand farmers, fertilizer dealers, and equipment suppliers while taking cash out of the pockets of millions of Pacific Northwest electricity consumers. Many of the likely winners already were well-off, Whittlesey concluded, while many of the likely losers were poor.
Testifying before the state legislature in 1984, Whittlesey ambushed Osborne and other Columbia Basin farmers. What they had expected to be another easy seduction of friendly lawmakers turned into a surprise massacre. Whittlesey calculated that each one-thousand-acre farm added to the Project would cost the Northwest about $200,000 a year in higher utility bills. That was the cost of replacing the electricity lost when farmers took water from the river. The $200,000-a-year per-farm price tag, Whittlesey said, would continue and perhaps increase for as long as the Project existed. And that was only for replacement energy costs.
As for construction costs, Whittlesey calculated that any expansion of the Project would cost $5,000 an acre, with farmers paying just $115. Somebody else would foot the rest of the bill. Washington State residents would pay about $1,000, Northwest electricity consumers about $192, and federal taxpayers the remaining $3,693.
The professor further concluded that expanding the Project would increase the country’s surplus of grain, take water away from migrating salmon, and penalize the vast majority of Northwest farmers, who lived outside of the Project and yet would have to pay higher taxes and electricity bills to support a scheme that only benefited their competitors. Most curiously, Whittlesey’s figures showed that after the public ponied up nearly $5,000 an acre for new land in the Project, its resale value would be about $1,500 an acre. “If you took that $5,000 and gave it to the farmer, hopefully he would invest it in something more useful,” Whittlesey said.
Osborne and his fellow farmers hired economic consultants to discredit Whittlesey. His numbers, however, were solid. No one of his academic stature was inclined to challenge them. Beaten on the facts, farmers tried to appeal to the state legislature’s sense of honor. They said that a solemn promise had been made in the 1930s to complete the entire one-million-acre scheme. When that did not work, the farmers argued regional rivalry. They said that if Washington State did not quickly give its own irrigators more water from the Columbia, then the state of California would come up with some sneaky plan to come north and steal the river for its own water-starved irrigators. When that did not work, farmers predicted mass bankruptcy. Some irrigators on the uncompleted part of the Project (who used well-water in their sprinklers) had exhausted nearly all the groundwater beneath their land. They did so in anticipation of being bailed out by water pumped in from the Columbia. They complained that they faced ruin. But the lawmakers were unmoved. They refused to spend any state money on expanding the Project.
Helen Sommers, a legislator from Seattle, later wrote that Whittlesey’s work “helped state decision-makers avoid a significant misallocation of resources.” Predictably, legislators from around my hometown were spitting mad.
“It’s hard for me to understand how the work that went into this Project by people like Franklin Roosevelt, Scoop Jackson, Warren Magnuson, and [former Washington governor] Dan Evans over the past fifty years can all go down the drain based on three hours of testimony by one man,” said Curt Smith, a state legislator from the Columbia Basin.
Whittlesey insisted that he had nothing against farmers.
“I was not anti-irrigation, and I was not saying the Project should never be expanded,” Whittlesey told me. “I was merely trying to inform the public of what we were buying.”
Ted Osborne and his fellow farmers did not see it that way. They believed that anyone against expansion of the Project was against the American tradition of family farms. Furthermore, they believed it was unethical for a professor from a land-grant university that they supported with their tax dollars to betray the interests of local farmers. Never before had Project farmers been so convincingly rebuffed in their search for subsidies. Never before had they felt so humiliated. They took it personal.
“We tried to get rid of Norm Whittlesey,” Osborne told me as we ate his wife’s spice cake. “I don’t think Whittlesey knew the value of food. He thought electricity was more important than food. We called up our state senator [Frank “Tub” Hansen], and we badgered Tub to get something done, to get rid of that guy. Tub was with us all the way. Tub felt Whittlesey was giving out misinformation that was harmful to the Project. ‘Ol Tub said he’d be damned if he was gonna appropriate money for the kind of stuff that was coming out of Washington State University. He went over to WSU and tried to get Whittlesey fired. We nudged Tub right along.”*
Tub Hansen, a New Deal Democrat with a lifelong commitment to the Project, met with the president of Washington State University and with the dean of its College of Agriculture. He complained to them that Whittlesey was biting the hand that fed him, that the professor had no business receiving a paycheck from the agriculture department while “putting out data that did not reflect solid support of agriculture.” Jim Ozbun, then dean of the College of Agriculture, does not recall that Hansen explicitly demanded Whittlesey’s firing. But Ozbun added, “Whittlesey’s firing would have pleased Hansen. . . . Norm could have lost his job had he not had tenure. That was the only situation I can recall where a professor was that irksome to the agriculture community.”
The state senator attempted to single out Whittlesey’s salary as a line item in the state budget. Whittlesey’s personnel records were subpoenaed by the state Senate Agriculture Committee, of which Hansen was the ranking Democrat. The subpoena was part of an investigation that Hansen launched of state university professors who did outside consulting.
“It was a fishing attempt,” Whittlesey told me. “What he [Hansen] was looking for was anything he could find to discredit me. The university, being fearful of budget cuts, stepped aside and said there is Whittlesey, do what you want to him.”
After several months, Tub Hansen’s fishing trip failed. The tenured professor kept his job and went on to win national recognition for having risked his career for the public interest. He received the annual prize of the American Agriculture Economics Association in 1987, a peer award that in his academic specialty is the equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize.
“Whittlesey almost single-handedly transformed the public sector’s understanding of irrigation-hydropower trade-offs, and in the process forestalled the tragic misallocation of billions of dollars in public funds,” Ralph Cavanagh, director of the Northwest Energy and Water Project for the National Resources Defense Council, wrote in a letter supporting Whittlesey’s nomination for the award. “Absent Professor Whittlesey’s findings, I am convinced that the Pacific Northwest would now be committed to new irrigation diversions in the Columbia Basin exceeding two million acre-feet per year, three times the city of Los Angeles’ annual consumption.”
After surviving the ire of the farmers, Whittlesey began paying more and more attention to what had happened to the Columbia River and its salmon. He became increasingly annoyed at the way that irrigators—along with other users of the Columbia, such as barging companies and utilities—calculated the river’s value.
“They feel the current status quo is sacred. It does not matter to them how that status quo came about. They assume the value of what they destroyed—the river and its salmon—was zero. It is only their present use of the river that has monetary value. It has somehow become a God-given right from which all costs are to be measured,” Whittlesey said.
The professor, who became persona non grata in the Columbia Basin and was skittish about attending meetings there, said that neither farmers nor other river users were willing to concede that their middle-class prosperity had come at the expense of the river, its fish, and the Native Americans who depended on both. Defenders of the sacred status quo, he suggested, were deadbeat debtors, unable to pay the bills they have run up, unwilling to acknowledge that debts even exist.
Whittlesey started what became an avalanche of criticism of the Project. For a few years, it was confined to unread academic reports. A doctoral dissertation at Washington State University concluded in 1985 that the only people who benefited more than they lost from the Project were farmers living in it. It said the Project’s annual cost to Washington State exceeded its direct benefits by sixty-three million dollars. Earlier, another Washington State University researcher found that the Project, which was supposed to have been a national showcase of government assistance to small family farmers, had been far friendlier to rich farmers than poor ones. “Program benefits are shared in a very unequal fashion,” Craig Lynn Infanger concluded, citing figures showing that the richest 5 percent of Project farmers enjoyed 20 percent of its subsidized benefits. The poorest 10 percent received only 0.7 percent of the benefits.
As the salmon crisis deepened, with the invocation of the Endangered Species Act and with fish advocates demanding that more and more water be made available to migrating fish, Osborne and his fellow farmers lost support from their one reliable benefactor, the Bureau.
After nearly a half century of winking at flagrant violations of reclamation law, the Bureau moved for the first time in 1992 to prosecute a Basin farmer for conspiring to exceed limits on the size of an irrigated farm inside the Project. A millionaire farmer from Royal City, Washington, pleaded guilty to falsely understating the number of acres he sprinkled. He lied so he could have access to river water at the subsidized price of $2.63 an acre, rather than the full price of $85 an acre.*
Back in Washington, D.C., the Bureau announced it would never again be a builder of dams or big water projects. It would be a water manager with an environmental mission. The transformation did not take long to be felt in the Columbia Basin Project. Under mounting pressure to help save salmon, the Bureau ordered a moratorium on all new sales of river water to farms on the fringes of the Project. The order halted expansion of the water-selling scheme that Project farmers had used for more than two decades to cut their costs.
The Department of the Interior, a year later, singled out eastern Washington irrigators as the most egregious water outlaws in the West. The farmers were accused of “water spreading,” the illegal irrigation of unauthorized land. Interior charged that “water from the Columbia Basin Project was delivered to an estimated forty-two thousand to fifty-three thousand acres of ineligible lands that could have been used to provide increased stream flows for migrating salmon.” The government threatened that it would demand up to twenty-nine million dollars in compensation.
Hardly had the farmers swallowed that accusation when the Bureau formally announced that, in light of the salmon crisis and the Bureau’s new role as a water manager, it was giving up on the expansion of the Project to the full one million acres envisioned in 1933.
Congress, too, turned on the farmers. Searching for ways to save salmon and staunch the flow of red ink at the Bonneville Power Administration, which supplies half the power consumed in the Northwest, the House Committee on Natural Resources zeroed in on the ultra-cheap electricity that is reserved for Project farmers. If farmers paid normal wholesale rates for their electricity, a committee report said, Northwest consumers would suddenly save thirty-two million dollars a year. More important, the report said that “the extremely low price” farmers pay for electricity encourages them to waste water that could be used for salmon or power generation.
Another damning report from the same House committee, entitled “Taking from the Taxpayer,” singled out Project farmers for enriching themselves by selling electricity generated by subsidized water. “Every drop of water added to the canals provides more profit” to the farmers, the report said.
Finally, farmers in the Project were bombarded by attacks from a regional think tank that delighted in making them look greedy and environmentally blind. Bill Bean, director of the Portland-based Columbia Basin Institute, which attracted money from the Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute, was obsessed by the short-sighted acquisitiveness of farmers and other users of the Columbia River. The best way to understand the Columbia Basin scam, Bean told me, is to compare it to welfare cheating in New York City.
“I used to work for the New York City welfare department on the Lower East Side, investigating welfare fraud. Mrs. Rodriguez would say she had six kids, when she only had four kids. Why does that happen? She gets more money if she says she has six kids. I don’t think there is much difference between Mrs. Rodriguez and farmers in the Columbia Basin Project. In this country everyone takes what he can get.”
Bean’s institute charged that some farmers worked hand-in-glove with giant fast-food corporations, such as McDonald’s. About 80 percent of America’s French fries were grown and processed in the Columbia Basin. The processors set up shop inside the Project to take advantage of its subsidized water and electricity. Even as they profited from subsidies, Bean’s report said, potato-processing companies refused to pay their fair share of cleanup costs for polluting local groundwater. The multinational potato processors also failed, according to the report, to shoulder the social costs of a large and impoverished Latino workforce in the Basin.
“A regional system of federal subsidy, expanded during the New Deal to provide a better life for a distressed class of small farmers and rural residents, has evolved into a mechanism for creating a new rural underclass, impoverished communities, and degradation of the very water and public power developments upon which the entire system depends,” Bean’s study said.
Less than a year after the French-fry attack, Bean and his associates lobbed another grenade at Project farmers. The Columbia Basin Institute accused them of scheming to “convert federally subsidized water into an economic commodity.” It said farmers, by selling subsidized water and generating power with subsidized water, were thumbing their noses at national water-conservation goals and emergency efforts to save salmon. Bean took his report to Washington, D.C., and presented it at a House hearing to which Columbia Basin irrigators had been called to defend their irrigation practices.
As Bean had hoped, he and his institute succeeded in making farmers look bad.
“An uncharitable person would say that since you are making money off hydropower, you don’t have any incentive to conserve water, even if you could,” Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon, told the irrigators. “They [Bill Bean and his institute] have aimed a dagger at your heart. You have to do a more effective job of defending yourselves.”
As seen from Ted and Barbara Osborne’s kitchen, the Project’s fall from honor was nothing less than treachery. Interrupting her husband and getting genuinely mad, Barbara Osborne said, “We feel we are being betrayed by our own country.
“You can’t expect a narrow segment of society [irrigators] to pay all their costs to grow the country’s food. How much are those environmentalists willing to pay for their food? People won’t understand the need for us until there are no Wheaties on the table.”
“What’s this latest damn fish?” Ted Osborne said, warming to the argument. He was referring to environmentalist petitions to list summer chinook in the mid-Columbia as an endangered species. “They are not on the endangered list yet, but I’m sure they will be. The fish people have the power now. Rush Limbaugh calls them wackos.”*
Ted and Barbara both repeated the word “wackos,” laughing bitterly.
“We have water rights for the rest of the Project,” Ted said, referring to a 1939 agreement that, in theory, gives farmers the right to extract more than twice as much water from the Columbia as they are taking now. “But it don’t mean a thing anymore. The fish are going to take that. I think people are going to have to get a little bit hungry before they realize that fish ain’t that important.”
The irrigators’ remaining self-justification was hunger. They claimed they were a bulwark against hunger. The claim did not make much sense until food shortages became an urgent global concern in 2008, as crop failures dovetailed with sharply increased food consumption in developing nations.
Still, more than 60 percent of the Columbia River water consumed in the Project, and nearly half of the land under cultivation, did not produce food for human consumption. It produced forage and pasture crops, primarily alfalfa. Much of the hay was cut, compacted into cubes, and barged down to Portland for export to Asia, where it was fed to cattle. And more water pumped from the river for irrigation would mean less water for hydropower, which was relatively cheap and did not warm the planet.
A number of cost-benefit analyses of reclamation projects showed that, as far as national economic development was concerned, most federal irrigation schemes devoured rather than created wealth. The schemes were found to represent an inefficient use of land, water, capital, labor, and materials.
Ted Osborne, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-nine, was not so quick to anger as younger farmers and irrigation managers in the Project. Though he did not want to lose water for fish, for him it was more a matter of principle than need.
“Nobody wants to give up anything. If the farmers really wanted to conserve water, and they knew that was all they were gonna get, they could do it. The new technology allows it. Farmers around here could get by with a third less water. A lot of water is being wasted.
“Yeah, we could get by on less, but don’t spread that around too much.”
Younger irrigators did not share Osborne’s resigned view that “the fish” were going to take their water.
“We are going to use the courts and the political arena to fight back,” Dick Erickson, manager of the East Columbia Basin Irrigation District, told me after he had been humiliated in a hearing room on Capitol Hill. “We are not going to apologize for what we do. This Project grows a lot of food, creates a lot of jobs. We keep getting characterized for doing something that is evil because of politics.
“This whole thing is being driven by urban centers. This idea of saving all the wild runs of salmon has gotten to be such a priority that people are not looking at how they are damaging rural areas. There is a lot of environment other than salmon. But the votes are in the city. The money is in the cities. Elected officials are catering to cities.
“In the cities they don’t understand where food comes from. The guy from Microsoft in Seattle, as soon as he drives east over the mountains, he does not want to see dams or farms or people making a living. He wants to see pristine wilderness, and he wants a nice four-lane to get there and get back home.”
Erickson and his fellow farmers were far from helpless. As evil as they said political games had become in the New West, they still played them. Farmers and their lawyers were resourceful in court. Their lawyers stopped the Bureau from collecting a penny of the millions earned by hydroelectric generators on government-owned canals. Erickson warned that any attempt by environmentalists to reduce the amount of water the Project extracted from the river would be met by a lawsuit.
By 2008, global food shortages, climate change, and relentless lobbying from irrigators combined to give a glimmer of new life to the Project. Washington State approved a limited plan to use more water from Columbia River reservoirs for irrigation. It would replace groundwater from an aquifer that had been depleted by the wells of potato growers. In 2010, the federal government proposed a number of alternatives that would further expand the Project and use more water from the Columbia to grow food. It was not clear how much water the irrigators would get, but it seemed likely they would get more.