Public leadership is beginning to realize the mistake made when stopping the canal from being built years ago, and that is good news.
Dan Walters: Disputed canal back on agenda
By Dan Walters - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, June 19, 2007
A few months after he assumed the governorship in 1999, Gray Davis put forth an oh-so-cautious "preferred alternative" for dealing with the complex problems of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. His incremental steps were aimed, in effect, at delaying major decisions on the troubled estuary until Davis was out of office.
It was characteristic of the risk-averse Davis -- a quality that led to his governorship being terminated three years prematurely by the state's voters and the election of action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger as his successor.
Ideologically, you couldn't slip a piece of tissue paper between Democrat Davis and Republican Schwarzenegger, but in stylistic terms, the two couldn't be more different. While Davis assiduously avoided conflict whenever he could, Schwarzenegger dives into thorny issues that, as he has said, "have been pushed under the rug for decades."
"I love tackling big problems," Schwarzenegger told a gathering in Chico recently, adding, "I feel strongly that the people of California have sent me to Sacramento to tackle those big problems. They have seen me on the screen to be the big action hero, so they know that I can be the big action hero also in Sacramento."
Not the least of those long-ignored issues is the plight of the Delta that predecessor Davis so assiduously shunned eight years ago. Last week, without prompting, Schwarzenegger, during another "town hall" event in Bakersfield, endorsed the single most controversial approach to the Delta, a peripheral canal. Declaring that "we have studied this subject to death," he demanded action on the state's knottiest water issues, saying he wants to "build more conveyance and ... more water storage."
