Lost in the hullabaloo over Tuesday’s vote by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to make a $4.3 million buy-in to what is now referred to as WaterFix was California Governor Jerry Brown’s “lobbying effort” in the days preceding that vote…
WaterFix is the proposed $17-billion project to re-engineer the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and construct two massive tunnels through the Delta to make it easier to facilitate the movement of water from the northern part of our great Golden State to the south, where two thirds of our population lives. The tunnels were originally conceived as a joint project between cities and farms served by California’s federal and state north-south water works. The two primary participants consisted of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a consortium of 26 Southern California communities/cities/water districts and the massive agricultural Westlands Water District in Fresno and Kings counties…
WaterFix is a successor project to the Peripheral Canal concept, a succession of proposals dating from the 1940s to divert Sacramento River water around the edge of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta, thus creating a canal that would transport fresh water from the Sacramento River and bypass the delta instead of going through it, for uses farther south. The peripheral canal was intended to resolve water quality issues brought on by the inrush of saltwater which occurred as the result of the previous importation of water from the southern end of the Delta into the San Joaquin Valley. This saltwater flow came about as a result of the high-power pumps obliterating the somewhat insubstantial boundary between freshwater and saltwater…
In 1982, voters defeated a ballot initiative to build the then-current Peripheral Canal. The Peripheral Canal concept did not die, however, and over the years Senator Dianne Feinstein and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, not to mention Governor Brown, have turned up as supporters of more recent incarnations of the plan…
It goes without saying that the canal concept has its opponents. A major contention against it is that it is an outright bald-faced ploy by the more populous southern portion of the state to politically outmuscle the northern portion of the state’ and steal its water, that it would further diminish the amount of freshwater originating with the Sacramento River flowing through the Delta needed to dilute delta pollutants; that it would greatly reduce the amount of water available to farmers in the Delta for irrigation purposes, and that the tunnels will be harmful to already imperiled native fish. Additionally, many maintain that the tunnels are an unimaginative approach to the water shortage problem in an era when other solutions, such as desalination and water reclamation, are becoming viable because of scientific and technical advances…
If you ask me how I feel about this, I must say I have mixed feelings. First off, I am a resident of Southern California, and as such, my own selfishness and self-interest pushes me toward wanting to see the tunnels completed so I can continue with my self-indulgent and profligate lifestyle, constantly refilling my swimming pool to the brim with clean water, ensuring the landscaping on the grounds of my estate, including my two-and-one-half acre lawn, remains verdant, and taking, as is my wont, three to four long and luxuriant showers per day. After all, I can more than afford financially to do all these things. On the other hand, I recognize how arrogant it is of us down here to want to simply foreclose on water outside of our region. It occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, the way we are running out of water in Southern California – despite having stolen the water from the Owens Valley a century ago and having constructed aqueducts that allow us to siphon off something approaching a billion gallons of water per day from the Colorado River – is God’s way of telling us that it is time for Southern California to end its growth, desist in building any further homes and resolve to accept no further increases in our population until we construct a comprehensive system throughout the entire Southern California region to capture as close as we can to all of the storm water that rains down upon us and using it to recharge our aqueducts rather than allowing, as we do now, more than 90 percent of that resource to simply evaporate or run out to sea…
So, last week our governor came to Southern California and undertook a lobbying effort to get everyone to go along with WaterFix. Because of my ambiguous feelings with regard to WaterFix, I am not going to condemn our governor for what he did. Rather, I am going to condemn him for how he did it…
He arranged a meeting with the members of the Metropolitan Water Board. Yet, to meet with the entire board, or even a quorum of the board, meaning at least one more than half of its members, the board would have needed to agendize the confabulation and allow members of the public to attend it to be in compliance with the State of California’s open public meeting law, known as the Brown Act. But our governor did not want to have the public at large hear his remarks or for them to be on the record in any way. So instead of scheduling that meeting with the entire 38-member board, he arranged to meet with 19 of its members at the agency’s Granada Hills Water Treatment Plant. If only one more member of the board had been present, the meeting would have fallen under the rubric of the Brown Act and members of the public would have been allowed to attend it…
This was a calculated move. Our governor was keenly aware that in the last several weeks the political tide has been flowing against WaterFix. Last month, the Westlands Water District, a jurisdiction that covers more than 1,000 square miles of prime farmland in western Fresno and Kings Counties and as such is the largest agricultural water district in the United States, voted against joining the project, saying it simply did not have sufficient funding to participate. The same day Brown was lobbying those 18 Metropolitan Water District board members, in a development he as governor had to know was coming, state auditor Elaine Howle released a report that was highly critical of the way the California Department of Water Resources administered the planning contract for WaterFix. Howle maintained that the Department of Water Resources replaced the program manager for WaterFix with an executive of the Hallmark Group, who “did not have the necessary qualifications” to act in that capacity…
Our governor, who after all is a Democrat, as in big D, does not appear to be all that comfortable with democratic, as in little d, principles. If he can swing it, as he did last week, he would prefer that his discussions with other politicians – the big people – take place in private, where those he is supposed to represent – the little people – don’t get a chance to hear what he is saying…