This wealthy farmer is taking on Sacramento: ‘God help you if you disagree with him’

Dean “Dino” Cortopassi, the Stockton-area farmer and food processor who could undermine Gov. Jerry Brown’s Delta water project and high-speed rail in California, leaned over a pile of paperwork in his conference room this spring, tossing bread to his black Labrador and pounding on the table. The state Capitol, Cortopassi said, has been overrun by “porkers feeding at the public trough,” and if long-term debt is not constrained, he said his grandchildren’s generation will bear the cost. He called his November ballot initiative – a proposal to require voter approval before the state issues revenue bonds for public works projects costing more than $2 billion – his “moral obligation.” Proposition 53, into which Cortopassi and his wife, Joan, have poured about $4.5 million, is in one way a referendum on Brown’s $15.5 billion plan to build two tunnels to divert water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the south. But to conservative interests in California, the initiative is also regarded as a bellwether. It is a test of the electorate’s appetite for future measures to blunt spending – and of a wealthy but little-known donor’s ability to compete in a heavily Democratic state...more