Responding to the vote, our executive director, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, said, "Stewart Resnick's Kern County Water Agency is looking to MWD ratepayers to pay the bill for water that will cost too much to farm. Southern California ratepayers will be on the hook for Beverly Hills billionaire farmers and Delta people will pay the environmental cost." To read more about expenses for Kern County, click here for our prior press release.
Via the Sacramento Bee, “Group of San Joaquin farmers says they’re willing to pay for the Delta tunnels,”:
But the level of support from members of the Kern County Water Agency, which serves much of the $7 billion-a-year farm economy at the southern end of the valley, was less than wholehearted. An estimated 48.5 percent of the agency's water users said they're interested in helping pay for the tunnels, which works out to about $1 billion in financial support.
That leaves the tunnels project, known officially as California WaterFix, still billions of dollars short of the funding it would need to bring to completion Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to re-engineer the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and improve water deliveries to south state water agencies.
…
Even some of the largest agricultural barons of Kern County are still calculating whether WaterFix makes financial sense for them. Bill Phillimore of Paramount Farming, which grows pistachios and other crops for financier Stewart Resnick's Wonderful agribusiness empire, attended the board meeting but wouldn't say if Paramount would help pay for WaterFix.
"We're still looking at it," he said.
Read full article.