Finicky fruits and cubby-holed bureaucrats

The editorials sums up the issue as "some cloistered bureaucrats in Sacramento think the good people of the Santa Clarita Valley should subsidize the growers' production, just because we live here and drink water." The problem is that water quality standards are set to protect "beneficial uses" designated for each water body found within its region. But beneficial uses aren't washing clothes or dishes or drinking the water; the water quality's fine for that. But...

There's the rub. Whose "beneficial use" trumps whose? The quarter-million residents of this valley who would like to continue to drink water and wash their dishes and go to the bathroom - or the avocado farmers who can't handle the water we're sending them?
There are only so many options.

Sixty percent of us could move and tear down our houses so nobody else can move into them, because 60 percent of our water is from the state project. We can't live here and shut off the tap, so 60 percent of us will have to leave.

Maybe we can have a lottery.

Or the avocado and berry farmers can switch to growing oranges, which can handle chloride levels of 240 ppm, or lemons and limes at 350 ppm to 600 ppm, depending on the variety.

Or those avocado and berry farmers can put up the $250 million to remove the chloride if they don't like it.

Or the state can pay to nip the problem in the bud and get the chloride out of the state water at its source.

It turns out the area draws water imported by another state agency. That water has 200 ppm chloride, not enough to impair its use for humans' drinking water or for household uses, but problematic for salt-sensitive avocados and strawberries.

The finicky fruit don't like our "used" water when it reaches them downstream.
The lemons and oranges don't mind. Grapes are particularly impervious - the Ventura County farmers grew lots of them 100 years ago - and the palm trees couldn't care less.
It's those darned avocados and berries that get all crazy when the chloride level exceeds 120 milligrams per liter. That's 120 parts salt for every 1 million parts water.
How little is that? It's so little that even the drinking water we receive from the State Water Project has more chloride in it.

In Sacramento, heedless legislators are preparing legislation (AB 1366) to further enable the avocado growers. For all their efforts, however, the farmers may not be able to enjoy the fruits of their efforts (sorry about that!) since they're facing new and stiff competition from avocados imported from South of the Border.