For many who attempted it, the 4Creeks’ report resulting from its investigation of the irrigation routines on the AB La Grange Ranch was a challenging read. Last December, Modesto Irrigation District (MID) Director Janice Keating said she had found it difficult to understand.
Perhaps as a result of that difficulty, Keating joined Director Larry Byrd in voting against further investigation. Byrd, along with his brother Tim and farm developer Ty Angle, is a partner on the AB La Grange, a property just north of the Tuolumne River, in southeastern Stanislaus County. Byrd voted in a clear conflict of interest. A California State Senator has urged the Fair Political Practices Commission to investigate the vote.
It would almost certainly benefit Janice Keating’s constituents and MID itself if Keating were to take a closer look at the 4Creeks’ report. Janice Keating is a self-employed accountant. When she ran for office, she promised to be a budget hawk. She said she would trim waste and save ratepayers money.
In theory, then, no MID Boardmember should be better qualified to explain what appear to be some very curious accounting methods revealed in the 4Creeks’ report. The 4Creeks’ report includes graphs representing five years’ of irrigation pumping records on 340 acres of almond orchards.
There were two sources for the reports, electrical power records and “TruPoint” records. The power records represent recorded electricity rates from the 250 horsepower pump that delivers water to Byrd’s almond trees from the MID main canal. The TruPoint data is generated from reports made by MID ditch tenders. Ditch tenders read flow meters and report irrigation events more or less as they occur; sometimes they rely on oral reports from ranch managers and owners.
Again theoretically, we shouldn’t expect the TruPoint records and power records to differ by very much. Both the TruPoint data and power records putatively measure the same event or series of events; they are reports of irrigations on a given property at specific times that then add up to a water usage total over a year’s time. That total is also represented in the water bill that every farmer pays as part of his overhead.
The power records and TruPoint records as represented on page 14 of the 4Creeks’ report don’t match. Some years they’re fairly close, as in 2021 and 2023. Other years they’re widely divergent, as in 2020, 2022, and 2024, where the reports sometimes differ by hundreds of acre-feet.
2022 is intriguing for a number of reasons, but especially since it was a year of severely reduced irrigation allotments. Normal MID irrigation allotments are 42 inches.
Because it was an exceptionally dry year, the MID allotment for 2022 was 30 inches. While it would take someone from 4Creeks to decipher exactly how many acre feet are represented by divergent lines on the graphs — the orange lines represent power records; the blue are for TruPoint reports — 4Creeks reported that Byrd’s MID water use for 2022 was 40.37 inches. Whether that figure was compiled from an average of electrical data and the TruPoint data together, we don’t know.
If compiled from an average, it would mean that Director Byrd’s yearly irrigation total on the AB La Grange Ranch comprises three different figures, the power records, the TruPoint records, and the average of the two.
There’s another MID report, gathered as the result of a public records request, that shows Director Byrd pumped 977 acre feet of MID surface water onto the AB La Grange Ranch in 2022. That figure could also be derived from either the power records or TruPoint records. It’s not the same, however, as the 40.37 inches reported by 4Creeks.
40.37 inches is 3.36 feet. 3.36 acre-feet times 340 acres is 1142 acre-feet. 977 divided by 340 is 2.87 acre-feet. So if Byrd had pumped 977 acre feet in 2022, he would have been very close to the 30-inch MID allotment for that year (2.5 acre-feet), but well under the 1142 acre-feet reported by 4Creeks.
In any case, it now seems we have four different records for the same irrigation total for the AB La Grange Ranch in 2022 — the TruPoint records, the power records, the (maybe) average of the two, and the 977 acre-feet sent as a response to a public records request.
Fortunately for Director Byrd and his partners on the AB La Grange Ranch, none of these various records affected their bottom line in 2022. In 2022, at least according to another set of MID records, Director Byrd and his partners pumped only two acre-feet of water onto those 340 acres of in-district almond trees on the AB La Grange Ranch. At least, two acre-feet were all they were billed for.
So we now have a fifth record — 680 acre-feet — for Larry Byrd’s irrigation total for 2022 on the AB La Grange Ranch. None of these totals includes, of course, the 96 acres of out-of-district almond trees on the AB La Grange Ranch. Those trees, to hear Director Byrd tell it, thrived on groundwater. 4Creeks said, however, there was no way they were served by groundwater.
All in all, it seems as though Director Janice Keating should be taking a far greater interest in MID’s accounting methods, especially since that is her field of special expertise. The same might be said of MID General Manager Jimi Netniss.
In 2022, Jimi Netniss was promoted to Assistant General Manager of Finance at Modesto Irrigation District. Prior to that, he was involved in Budget and Rates administration. Shortly thereafter, in 2023, he was appointed General Manager. One of his biggest boosters was Larry Byrd, who said at the time,
“His demonstrated leadership and strategic vision will be an asset as the District navigates any challenges and capitalizes on opportunities ahead.”
After his 2023 promotion, Netniss’s yearly compensation went from $215,996.45 to $502,824.24. Budget and rates are his specialties.
Given Janice Keating’s and Jimi Netniss’s trained expertise and long experience in accounting, it’s difficult to comprehend how both of them have managed to remain so oblivious to glaring irregularities in MID’s record keeping for Larry Byrd’s use of MID’s most precious public asset. Perhaps they’ve both forgotten their fiduciary duty to the MID farmers and ratepayers whose power and water payments shouldn’t enable a public utility to become a private watering trough for a Director with a smorgasbord of widely variable payment options, none of which seems to represent what actually happens to the Tuolumne River surface water that finds its way to the AB La Grange Ranch via MID infrastructure and water rights.
It’s time for an audit.
It is over due for an audit. Keating is as complicit in this as Byrd is.
It’s a cliche, but we used to hide cash in our socks when we went to party in Mexico in case we had to pay off police. People who didn’t could end up spending a few days in jail. The way it was explained to me was that the US and Mexico have about the same amount of corruption, but in the US it was always hidden, where in Mexico it isn’t.
We may have reached the end of that era. The corruption in America seems pretty obvious these days, although there is nuance in its forms. At least with Mr. Byrd, he put in the effort to hiding his wrongdoing in a complicated number salad. The current administration seems unwilling to work so hard. The upcoming UFC fight will turn the White House into a pretty good imitation of Idiocracy, and some of the cash and crypto dealings (Bible and shoe sales) give us that weird flea market in dystopia look. Going after “rigged” elections by actually rigging elections is another hit, but the top of the charts is the Watergate-level Epstein thing. When you see people like Mike Johnson scrambling to protect a dead pedophile and his accomplices, you know we’ve reached a threshold.
I may cheat on my taxes this year. Why not? Patriotism seems to be a lost concept these days. Nice work Eric. If you were a republican you could likely expect to get appointed to run the intelligence community. Or Venezuela, or Iran.
Janice Keating is NOT an accountant. According to her LinkedIn page, she was a chemistry major in college. At most she had a bookkeeper service out of her house. She really does not understand the 4Creelks study. Her campaign promise to be a budget hawk and fraud watchdog were a hollow sales pitch.
Dollars to donuts Byrd and his cronies are the same kind of grifting scumbags who espouse patriotism and traditional values, who hold themselves out to be defenders of the American way. But with their actions, they s**t all over the principles of honesty, honor, and personal responsibility. Grifters and scumbags, all of them. The same thing is happening on a federal level, and as much as Trump has perfected the grift he didn’t pioneer it. This country is run by con men. It has been for generations. But the grift is now costing average Americans a lot of money. It’s made life miserable for us. The con men in charge and their donors rake in the big bucks, while working-class Americans struggle to get by, if they can even manage that. This is how you drive a nation to revolution. There is no political solution to this corruption. As we’ve seen here in Modesto with the MID scandal and in DC over and over, the mechanism by which we the people can reform the system and hold the crooks accountable is itself controlled by the crooks. It’s been an interesting 250 years, but America’s days are numbered. Just remember: your neighbor is very likely not your enemy, even if they look or vote differently than you do. It’s the a**holes in charge who’ve done this to us.
Let’s look at some numbers…
Send Byrd a bill for $1,769,590.00 and if MID has to go to court treble damages are 3 times the amount which would equal $5,308,770.00
Let’s do the accounting-
MID irrigation rates are 5 and 11/ acre foot when an irrigator surpasses the 2nd acre foot mark. So for simple accounting lets average 5 and 11 equals 8. Byrd’s account says he has 806 acres in the District and the 4 creeks said it takes 3.5 acre feet to properly irrigate the crop and he only paid for 2 acre feet.
1.5 acre feet x 806 acres equals 1209 acre feet @ $8 = $9,672.00 plus a 10% late penalty ( the water code demands 10 % late penalty) $967.00 for a Total $10,639.00 × 10 years= $106,390
His out of district trees are 144 acres @ 3.5 acre feet = 504 x $200.00 (MID out of district program is $200.00)= $100,800.00 ×10% penalty =$110,880.00 × 8 years ( we had a year drought in this 10 year period and the price of water was around $700.00 locally/ acre foot) = $887,040.00
504×$700.00 ( 2 drought years) =$352,800.00×10% penalty $35,280.00 total $388,080.00 × 2 years = $776,160.00
Now let’s add all three totals together to see what Director Byrd owes MID
$106,390.00 + $887,040.00 + $776,160.00 for a Grand Total of about $1,769,590.00 due upon receipt
Thanks for such detailed investigatory work and reporting. The endemic and systemic corruption in California’s rural county and city governments and utility boards is off the charts. Appreciation needs to go to all the indie media outlets and citizen journalists reporting on matters willfully suppressed by legacy media.
Hear hear, Christopher! Without Eric’s reporting, Larry Byrd would’ve got away with this and would probably still be stealing water and bilking rate payers. Eric’s reporting first exposed this story, and his persistence has kept it alive. I think it’s safe to say that without Eric’s work, the Modesto Focus would have never been aware of this story, and the Fair Political Practices Commission wouldn’t have been made aware of it either. Eric’s reporting has broadened public awareness of and interest in this scandal. Hopefully, in this instance, some kind of justice will be done. No electoral or governmental mechanism exposed this corruption. Eric Caine, a citizen, did.
+1