TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Westlands Water District is suing the federal government for $1 billion, claiming the Interior Department failed to deliver a court-ordered cleanup of salty irrigation drainage.

About a dozen years after an appellate court upheld the cleanup order, bad water trapped below the ground surface still slowly poisons west valley farmland. The swath of compromised land is two-thirds the size of Los Angeles.

"We're tired of waiting," said Westlands general manager Thomas Birmingham. "We've been paying for drainage service for decades. The land is sustaining irreparable harm."

The suit was filed last month in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. Interior officials declined comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit is in the claims court because the water district is seeking damages instead of trying to force the government to honor a decades-old law to provide the drainage.

Westlands, the largest irrigation district in the nation, years ago won the case in federal district court to force the cleanup.

Farmers have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for drainage service that the government never provided, Birmingham said. Along with drainage cleanup costs, farmers deserve at least $1 billion, he said.

Northern California conservationists and river advocates reacted to the new lawsuit by saying Westlands continues to exploit the federal water system, buying cheap water and irrigating bad land.

"Westlands has been fleecing the taxpayers for years, and this latest action just continues their pattern of gaming the system to continue polluting and grabbing water," said Patricia Schifferle, director for Pacific Advocates, a consulting group in Northern California.

The fight over Westlands' drainage goes back decades -- in courtrooms, public forums and lawmakers' offices. At the core is a 1960s law that promises the government would drain the bad water away from the 600,000-acre Westlands district and other west-side contractors.

The drainage service is necessary because irrigation water picks up natural salts and minerals as it seeps through the soil on the west side. The briny water gets trapped on clay lenses below the land's surface and builds up until it poisons the cropland above.

Authorities were aware of the problem when the federal Central Valley Project began selling water to farmers.

The bad water must be drained away or the billion-dollar agricultural economy will eventually die off, farmers say.

The government's plan decades ago was to construct a canal and send the drainage into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Northern California water and environmental groups successfully blocked the efforts.

Facing mounting pressure in the late 1970s, federal officials started funneling the drainage to Kesterson Reservoir in western Merced County. The water created a wildlife disaster, killing and disfiguring shorebirds and other creatures.

The government shut down the flow of bad water in the mid-1980s. Westlands drainage lawsuits started soon after.

The government tried to find a remedy in the last decade. In 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced a $2.7 billion plan to retire the tainted land -- almost 200,000 acres. No money has yet been set aside for the project, farm officials said.

West-siders have since offered to take over the cleanup if the government would forgive almost $500 million of debt that the farmers owe for construction of reservoirs, canals and other irrigation facilities that make up the San Luis Unit of the Central Valley Project.

The deal also would have required the government to hand over a reservoir and more than 100 miles of federal canals to farm water districts.

Interior officials say farmers could take over the cleanup, but they attached strings to the offer -- including the return of 400,000 acre-feet of the district's federal water allotment.

"The proposal is unacceptable," said Birmingham. "From Westlands' perspective, the government has no intention of providing drainage service."