Great insight and historical perspective.
Dan Walters: California's water war heating up
By Dan Walters - dwalters@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PST Monday, March 3, 2008
It's been nearly three decades since California has experienced a full-scale battle in its perennial war over water, but another one may be brewing.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, then-Gov. Jerry Brown, in alliance with Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, mounted a drive to build a "peripheral canal" to transport Sacramento River water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the head of the California Aqueduct.
The Brown-Bradley alliance found itself at war with a strange-bedfellows coalition of environmentalists and San Joaquin Valley agribusiness corporations, the former opposed to expanding water exports and the latter opposed to the restrictions that Brown had hoped would placate environmental groups.
The battle raged for months, with acrimonious committee hearings and heated floor debates. On one night, the peripheral canal bill faced a committee whose decisive vote would be cast by a senator who was a notorious lush. A Los Angeles city lobbyist was assigned to baby-sit the senator, and when the lawmaker bolted from the hearing room, the lobbyist tracked him to a nearby bar and persuaded him to return for the final roll call.
It cost Brown a state office building to get one key vote, but he finally moved the bill through the Legislature. The opposition coalition immediately challenged it via referendum and in 1982 persuaded voters to reject the canal.
