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Faced with possible cutbacks in revenues because of the state's huge budget deficits, two mosquito-control districts in the region have asked duck clubs to help pay for spraying flooded rice fields that attract ducks.
After four days, flooded rice fields are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, officials say. The Sutter-Yuba Mosquito and Vector Control District and the Colusa Mosquito Abatement District have sent letters to 53 duck clubs in their districts with proposed cooperative agreements. They have asked for $18 per acre per season to offset the costs of mosquito abatement.
The Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District is holding off on making a similar request unless the district decides it needs extra money to do its job, said manager David Brown.
By requesting money from duck clubs, the mosquito districts hope to avoid abatement orders, officials said. In those cases, mosquito districts would do abatement work, bill the club an amount almost certainly more than $18 per acre and have recourse to a property lien to collect the money.
Duck club owners said they strongly oppose being singled out as being responsible for the mosquitoes and a source of revenue for abatement programs, said Chris Voight, executive director of the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California.
Larry Silvernail, co-owner of the Silvernail-Peterson Duck Club near Durham, said it would be particularly wrong to go after duck clubs not open year round.
"That's ridiculous," Silvernail said. "If it's a full-time club, maybe, yeah. But in 'rice' duck clubs, the window (when acreage is hunted) is too small for mosquito breeding."
Many duck clubs that lease rice acreage are open only during fall and early winter, Silvernail said. During a year, a farmer may have flooded land twice, for extended periods -- once for growing and a second to rot out crop stubble -- and have allowed generations of mosquitoes to breed before any duck hunting takes place on the land, Silvernail said. Duck hunting happens during months it's too cold for mosquitoes to breed, he said.
Some club owners said they couldn't afford $18 per acre per season.
"We'd go broke," said Silvernail, whose duck club has 7,000 acres.
"We're 600 acres," said Tom Orgain, manager of RSCT Inc., a duck club near the city of Colusa. "We couldn't pay."
The mosquito breeding ground in California's Central Valley has grown more than 50 percent in the last 10 years, and one trend contributing to the growth -- an increase in acreage flooded and planted in rice -- appears likely to continue.
Mosquito-control officials are concerned about the migration of the West Nile virus, which arrived in New York in 1999 and has now reached Louisiana.
They are alarmed by the numbers of mosquitoes in the region.
"I've been here 12 years, and it's steadily getting worse," said Sutter County resident Reece Cordi, whose home near Live Oak is a mile and a half from a duck club and two miles from the Gray Lodge State Wildlife Area, a wetland. "It used to be the worst time was in the fall. Recently, we're getting them now, in the spring, and we're inundated.
"The population grows through the summer. They're thick. They're swarming. It's unbearable."
A 1990 survey by the Ducks Unlimited conservation group showed 295,000 acres of standing-water duck habitat -- and mosquito breeding ground -- in the Central Valley, said group spokesman Mike Pottage.
During the 1990s, the amount of flooded acreage swelled.
Federal subsidies to rice growers caused some of the increase in flooded acreage in the Sacramento Valley, said Ron McBride, manager of the Sutter-Yuba district. And a state air-quality directive 10 years ago forced farmers to avoid burning crop stubble either by plowing it under -- a time-consuming and costly operation -- or by flooding fields to rot the stubble out.
"There's an added 150,000 acres in seasonally flooded acreage, just in rice, specifically in response" to the clean-air directive, Pottage said.
"One thing we noticed even before the phase-down of stubble-burning was that every year, the rice crop got bigger," said Jerry Martin, spokesman for the state Air Resources Board.
The phased ban currently permits burning of diseased stubble only, and only on one-quarter of a farm's acreage. A goal of the Air Resources Board is 100 percent elimination of stubble burning.
Fred Gaines, owner of the Gaines Ranch Hunting Club near Gridley, said it is tempting for farmers saddled with costs of importing water used for rotting out stubble to pass on the costs by leasing acreage to duck clubs.
"We're looking at putting together a technical paper," Pottage said. "There are ways (to create duck habitat that is not mosquito breeding ground). You have to get the water on and get the water off before it can breed mosquitoes."
Cordi said his research showed water removed within four days cannot breed mosquitoes. He said changing land management practices at duck clubs will take time.
"In the meantime, I think duck clubs will have to help with the spraying," Cordi said. "We're looking at a health factor. It's encroaching on the populated areas."
The Bee's Roger Phelps can be reached at (916) 321-1047 or rphelps@sacbee.com.
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