In a nutshell, Westlands relapses

The DNP preferred Westlands’ lateral thinking from a couple months back.

Back then, WWD’s perhaps hundreds of people were exploring alternative development options for its toxic but productive real estate.

But we should have known that like any intelligent strategic thinker, Westlands understands the value of a multi-pronged strategy for making money or winning battles over geography and scarce resources.

As the Fresno Bee’s E.J. Schultz reports, Westlands has hired Craig Manson, University of the Pacific law professor and former assistant secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks under George W. Bush.

Quoting Schultz:

Manson worked in the Bush Interior Department from 2002-05 and pushed some policies that were harshly criticized by environmentalists. In 2003, for instance, the administration shrank plans to protect Central Valley vernal pools, citing economic reasons.

One of Manson’s underlings, Julie MacDonald, faced accusations from environmentalists that she bullied career scientists.

She was reprimanded by the Interior Department’s inspector general for leaking information to private groups, such as the California Farm Bureau Federation, and resigned in 2007.

The DNP agrees with Michael Campana about the implications of Manson’s hire. 

Campana sits on the National Academy of Sciences’ Bay-Delta panel charged with producing independent, sound scientific analysis on the dynamic interplay of the Bay-Delta ecosystem and human impacts, including pollution and water export, on that ecosystem.

Clearly, Westlands is gearing up for their next round of litigation. Why wouldn’t they be? It is in their interest to do so, these perhaps hundreds of people who have no water rights but do have a great deal of political power.

Ironies abound here. The reason why Campana sits on the Delta NAS panel in the first place is because Sen. Feinstein agreed to help out friends and contributors the Resnicks, who didn’t like what the Endangered Species Act was likely to do to their pistachio and pomegranate profit margins.

And if the Resnicks have a moderate Democratic U.S. Senator in their corner, Westlands knows it doesn’t hurt to have the not-so-moderate right wing megaphone at your disposal:

Along with friends in high places and Fox News, litigating is a big part of the tool kit. How do they fund it, these perhaps hundreds of people who control an empire with huge unemployment rates in the small towns that dot their domain?

It helps of course to minimize the expense of putting local people to work. Despite all of the claims of hardship by folks like the Resnicks and the perhaps hundreds of Westlands litigants, keep in mind that they still have the money to pay lawyers millions of dollars a year to advocate their interests.

Manson’s annual salary will be $185,000. That number suggests he might be taking less than market rate for the pleasure of the task.

Despite Fox News’s coverage of an embattled farmer destroying his almond orchard because, he claimed, he had no water to irrigate the trees because of a little fish, California almond production was up 8.5% last year, to 1.53 billion pounds.

From the Agriculture Statistics Service:

The DNP has no idea whether Fox’s (almond) farmer, the Resnicks or Westlands came along for the state’s almond farming 8.5% growth joyride. We suspect they did. From the splash page of the Resnick’s Paramount Farms website:

For the powerful, enough is never enough. As water becomes ever scarcer in California, we hope civility will not.