Group wants dairies, agriculture to be held accountable for discharge.

By Louis Galvan / The Fresno Bee

Veronica Mendoza held up a plastic bottle filled with a dark, murky liquid substance she said came from a water faucet in the small farming community of Ducor in southern Tulare County.

"We have the right to drink clean water, not this," she said.

Mendoza, who lives in Cutler, another Tulare County farming community, was one of about three dozen members and supporters of a new coalition created to fight for contamination-free and affordable water in the central San Joa- quin Valley.

The supporters gathered Saturday in Fresno to make their battle known. The group, La Asociacion de la Gente Unida por el Agua -- or AGUA, the Association of People United for Safe Water, held a news conference to announce that the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board should stop dragging its feet and start doing its job.

Laurel Firestone, a lawyer with the Delano-based Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, said a legal petition was submitted Friday to the regional water board demanding that it start issuing waste-discharge requirements to the more than 1,600 dairies the board oversees.

The Bee was unable Saturday to reach anyone at the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board to comment for this story.

Firestone said the dairy industry has long been identified as a leading ground-water polluter, but added that the board has been allowing dairies to discharge wastewater for years.

Firestone said the board has failed to comply with state law by not setting permit requirements for any of the dairies it oversees.

She also pointed out that as recently as June, the board renewed a wastewater discharge waiver for agriculture despite protests from AGUA and other members of the public.

The program waives monitoring and protection requirements for fertilizers or pesticides for all water flowing off fields and into ground water.

Also, she said, the board has been meeting for three years behind closed doors with the dairy industry on a new general permit plan, but has yet to release a draft of the plan to the public.

The petition calls for the board to start issuing waste-discharge requirement permits within 30 days to every new and existing dairy.

In addition, it calls for the board to to make any draft general permit plans open to the public within 30 days.

"Without any permit in place, the board cannot protect the ground water that communities rely on for drinking water from further degradation," she said.

Assembly Member Juan Arambula, D-Fresno, who joined AGUA at the news conference, said he, too, was concerned about the effects of wastewater discharge on the public.

"We need a comprehensive regional ground-water monitoring and regulation program that is practical and effective," he said in a prepared statement. "The Central Valley has gone too long without properly protecting water resources for its rural communities. It is the regional board's legal responsibility to protect the quality of the Central Valley's ground water."

In an interview, Arambula said he just recently started studying the issue surrounding the waivers more closely, and that on Wednesday he wrote to the board, asking for more information about the board's duties and its needs.

"If it's about lack of resources for them to do their job, I want to know," he said. "If it's about something else, we can deal with that, too.

Jesus Quevedo, 71, a retired farmworker who has lived in the Cutler-Orosi area for 36 years, said no one was out to get rid of dairy farmers or any other farmers.

"They provide jobs and a lot of people depend on those jobs," he said.

"We just want the board to do its job and make sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing to protect our water supply. Everyone is affected by contaminated water, not just the poor."

The reporter can be reached at lgalvan@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6139.