Dianne Feinstein championed the environment. On California water, her legacy is complicated

It was 1990, and a self-identified city girl in a denim skirt and boots perched herself atop bales of hay near Los Banos in California’s farming heartland. Dianne Feinstein was running for governor and looking for votes.

“I want to be a good governor for the agriculture industry of California,” she told the crowd, the Los Angeles Times reported. But the former San Francisco mayor lost the race to Pete Wilson, a more familiar face in the world of Central Valley agribusiness.

Feinstein would win election to the Senate two years later and become a powerhouse, the longest serving woman U.S. senator. With her passing this week, she left behind a strong legacy on the environment, brokering deals to restore precious landscapes.

On California water, her record is less straightforward. It was marked by a testy relationship with environmentalists, strong rapport with the state’s agricultural power brokers and a ferocious work ethic that led her to master the subject.

Particularly in the last decade, San Joaquin Valley farmers saw a friend in Feinstein, who increased their water allocations in drought. Environmentalists, in turn, often faced an uphill battle to protect ecosystems and native fish as the climate grew more extreme.

Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, called the senator’s legacy on California water “complicated.” She pointed out that the senator gave Central Valley environmental groups a win in 2013 when she designated the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as California’s first National Heritage Area.

“She thought there were trade offs that you can make to keep everybody whole and that the environment would remain healthy,” Barrigan-Parrilla said. “California has a long history of managing water the way we do without significant environmental impact. But climate change has caught up with all of that and made it all much worse.”

After taking office in 1992 following a decade as the mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein championed conservation legislation. She worked to pass a bill protecting millions of acres of California wilderness, including a 1994 measure that created the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks.

Feinstein grew up attending summer camp on Lake Tahoe’s shores, and it made a lasting impact. She authored multiple restoration efforts starting in 2000 that directed more than $1.3 billion to North America’s largest alpine lake. She hosted summits in the area, where she owned a palatial vacation home.

A tough deal broker, she built a reputation for bringing the competing interests of farmers and environmentalists to compromises after long hours of negotiating. In 2006, that resulted in the San Joaquin River restoration package.

The agreement resolved an 18-year-old lawsuit and called for $500 million-plus worth of investment to revive the river fishery that had been wiped out decades before following the construction of Friant Dam.

According to a participant in the deal, Feinstein closed it by leaving the negotiating table to talk privately with former general manager of Westlands Water District Tom Birmingham.

Historically California’s largest and most influential farm water utility, Westlands grows nearly $2 billion in nuts, fruits and vegetables a year. After the federal government blessed these farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley with subsidized water in the 1960s, the district has seen a dwindling water supply.

The senator’s relationship with Westlands’ Birmingham started out rocky. In a 2000 meeting at her office, an injured Feinstein asked Birmingham for help and he accidentally let her injured foot fall a couple inches to the ground. But they ended up forming a close friendship, in which the two would schedule late-day meetings in D.C. to chat over a glass of wine.

Birmingham credits Feinstein’s fondness for San Joaquin Valley farmers in part to the summers she spent at a Kern County ranch belonging to a friend of her father’s, an experience that left her with a positive impression of agriculture and its need for water.

“I feel truly blessed by having had the opportunity to work with her and and to get to know her and become her friend,” said Birmingham. “Senator Feinstein’s lasting legacy is that people in every region of this state will be served by projects that are operated utilizing the best information available, and in the smartest way possible, to supply water and to minimize or avoid environmental impacts.”

In 2016, Birmingham proposed a piece of legislation to Feinstein’s office that became the WIIN Act, which encouraged increases in water allocations south to farmers and cities from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Environmental advocates say they weren’t consulted on the proposal.

In turn, the senator was heavily criticized by Democratic allies. California Senator Barbara Boxer concluded her legislative career by opposing her own bill because Feinstein had attached the WIIN Act to it.

“This is so wrong, it is shocking,” Boxer told reporters at the time.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who worked with Feinstein on the bill, credited the WIIN Act on Friday as “the most significant California water bill in 25 years.”

But even among environmental advocates who wanted to see more water in California’s system preserved for fish and ecosystems, there was respect for the senator’s intellectual rigor, attention to policy details and deep love for the state.

Barry Nelson, longtime environmental advocate formerly with the Natural Resources Defense Council, called her a “ferociously effective senator even though I disagreed with her.”

“I used to tell staff that the hardest thing they’re going to do is meet with senior elected officials who are really hard to get, and I would always cite Feinstein as the example,” Nelson said. “She would start against us, but you could get to her if you worked incredibly hard.”

As Gov. Gavin Newsom receives pressure to appoint a replacement for Feinstein, longtime observers of water politics say he is unlikely to find someone so willing to to work across the aisle with congressional Republicans and whose affinity for agricultural interests belies her San Francisco roots.

“Senator Feinstein was always willing and eager to listen and find solutions,” said Johnny Amaral, chief operating officer and chief of external affairs for the Friant Water Authority, which serves farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. “For ag water agencies, it has been very difficult to find elected officials on the Democrat side of the aisle.”