Word: willey
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...vast aqueduct system, there is room for both sides to benefit from resale of unneeded irrigation allotments. The idea had two minor drawbacks: many California farmers would sooner spread salt on their fields than surrender an acre-foot of the water they regard as their birthright, and second, Willey's employer, the Environmental Defense Fund, has a reputation for fighting the new water projects coveted by a lot of farmers. But Willey and E.D.F. offered to find farmers willing to sell, and the Mono Lake litigants agreed to pay for the search...
Thus at 5:30 on a recent morning, Willey and a partner, E.D.F. lawyer Tom Graff, headed from their Oakland office down Highway 5 to dicker with irrigation districts on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. An odd pair: Willey, somewhere over 6 ft. 5 in. in his cowboy boots, lean, green-eyed and with an easy grin; Graff, short and with a squared-off boxer's nose, but unpugnacious. As environmentalists go, they speak softly and strangely: California water distribution suffers under misguided socialist precepts, they argue. What it needs is fewer bureaucrats and more capitalists. Turn...
...years of development, and the environment's been kicked around pretty bad," Willey says. "We're trying to figure out a philosophy to rehabilitate things over the next 100 years. You're not going to do it by wholesale taking away of resources from industry and farmers, or they're going to wind up litigating you for the next 100 years. You're going to do it through a system of incentives." His approach is to "go out and make some deals" with the people who control water rights -- the farmers...
...Willey, himself a product of the central valley, has spent years scouting irrigation districts. "It's taken a decade of learning local customs to get where we can have this little discussion," he says of the morning's talks. "There are still some groups in the valley that wouldn't sit in the same room with us." E.D.F. hopes to entice two of the more progressive irrigation districts, Firebaugh and Broadview, to risk heresy and agree to a 10,000-acre- foot pilot project. "The party line is that nobody takes water from agriculture. That's what they're going...
...farmers who've come out to meet Willey are neither heretics nor hayseeds but businessmen in a carpeted irrigation-district boardroom. They hem and haw in their own argot. They are worried, for instance, about load-flow relationships: if the government sets stringent new standards on selenium in their runoff, they may need to dilute it with the very water Willey is proposing to buy. Life is terribly uncertain. The regulatory agencies, they observe, "just agreed that water runs downhill about two months ago." The farmers also have this uneasy feeling that the environmentalists want them to save water...