A MORE INCLUSIVE DEFINITION OF PUBLIC BENEFIT IN WATER INFRASTRUCTURE By Dave Puglia, President and CEO
••• Staring at the reality of shrinking water supplies, today many of the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are looking toward a future that looks far different than the one preceding generations envisioned and achieved. Many are talking about downsizing operations or selling to investors. We are assured that the state’s water policy direction is toward resiliency, but resilience that accommodates some interests at the expense of others doesn’t create anything resembling resiliency for the losers. We are stumbling from one year to the next, all the while diminishing reliability and affordability for water users, especially for our state’s farmers and the millions of people connected to the ag economy. And that is why we must redefine public benefit. When a storage project dies, the impacts go far beyond the state’s narrow definition of “beneficiaries.” As the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and constricted water supply via the Delta are demonstrating already, when farming scales back due to water cuts, the economic well-being of entire regions and millions of people is threatened. Sure, a canal delivers water to a farm, but that farm and thousands like it together form the foundation of a regional economy. The people who own and work in businesses that are “ag-adjacent” are as much the beneficiaries of water delivered to farms as the farmers themselves. And California writ large is the beneficiary of a large and vibrant agriculture sector, thanks to the tax revenue it generates. This state will not build big water projects again unless we toss this outdated and narrow-minded policy out the window. A change in policy like that is no small thing. The words themselves—public benefit, and its partner “beneficiary pays”—have been given holy status in Sacramento. But it needs to change.
During his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the American people about the dangers of what he termed the Military-Industrial Complex: the increasingly tight relationship between a segment of the government and a sector of the economy, each able to serve the other’s interests at the expense of the greater public interest. Today in California, we suffer from a form of this. Some environmental organizations—not all, to be sure—have made it their mission to work inside the regulatory process, frequently complemented by litigation, to create endless process delays and to place so many barriers in front of a water infrastructure project that it finally collapses. Regulatory agencies have largely accepted a narrowing of the aperture through which water projects must pass; no longer representing the public interests of the voters and taxpayers but instead a segment of “stakeholders” whose sole purpose is, seemingly, to thwart the expressed will of the voters. Let’s not pretend that environmental organizations of this sort are solely motivated by environmental objectives. These are non-profit organizations, but they do have financial motivation. A successful non-profit employs people and can pay them well, assuming it has a motivated and reliable base of financial backers. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. But ask yourself: What would happen if an environmental non-profit declared victory? What if it told its backers, “We identified this environmental crisis, you all stepped up to help us work on public policy solutions to address it, and it worked! We fixed it!” Of course no one would do that, because their financial backers would move on to something else and a bunch of people employed by those organizations would be looking for jobs. But here’s the thing: They have enormous credibility in California, both with voters and with policy makers. They wear white hats. I, on the other hand, wear a black hat. Not in my own mind, of course, but that’s the perception of my industry propagated by environmental and labor organizations and many of their allies in Sacramento. We in the agriculture industry are labeled “Big Ag,” or “Corporate Ag.” The truth is far different. Only 2.5 percent of California farms are non-family owned corporations. And only 4 percent of California’s farms are more than 2,000 acres.
This column is excerpted and modified from a speech given by Dave Puglia at the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) 2025 Conference in San Diego on Dec. 3, 2025.
4 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com January – March 2026
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