Dan Walters’ column from this morning’s Bee is excellent, capturing the context of the often silly arguments that have precluded meaningful action on water storage, supply, and flooding issues for generations.
Rather than comment on it, I will just give you an excerpt and ask you to read it in its entirety.
Dan Walters: Decades-long debate really involves a tiny amount of water
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist Published 2:15 am PDT Tuesday, April 4, 2006
One reason - but by no means the only reason - why the Capitol responds so poorly to California's growth and socioeconomic change is that its occupants spend too much time inside the building, listening to lobbyists for self-interested groups, and too little time in the real world.
A case in point is the circular and unproductive debate over how California should respond to its water needs, which has been part of the equally fruitless machinations over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's call for massive investment in infrastructure.
One of the many hang-ups that blocked infrastructure bonds from reaching the June primary election ballot was an ideological confrontation over whether California should build more reservoirs to capture winter rains and spring snowmelt, as Republicans demand, or meet demands through conservation and/or pumping water into underground aquifers, as Democrats prefer.
It's not a new debate; in fact it's been under way for several decades in one form or another, what Schwarzenegger described as "almost ... a religious issue," adding, "It's amazing. It was like the holy war in some ways."
The last big political confrontation over water came in the late 1970s and early 1980s when then-Gov. Jerry Brown pushed legislation for a canal to carry Sacramento River water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the head of the California Aqueduct. Brown won legislative approval, only to see the Peripheral Canal defeated in a 1982 referendum jointly backed by San Joaquin Valley farmers concerned that it had too many environmental strings and environmental groups worried that it had too few.
Ever since, the debate over water demands from an ever-increasing population (up 12 million since 1982) has preoccupied politicians, water development advocates and environmentalists in the closely knit "water community," but without resolution.
The infrastructure bond confrontation merely reflected the stalemate that's been evident in the water community for decades. But while those in both arenas have concentrated on finding some magic political formula that would overcome the ability of all stakeholders to veto anything they didn't like, the debate bears little relationship to hydrologic reality. And that's why legislators should get out of the building and reconvene about 10 blocks away in Old Sacramento, adjacent to the Sacramento River, California's largest single source of residential, industrial and agricultural water.
