|
Orange County Register
September 4, 2007
As budget talks screeched to a halt in Sacramento last month,
Gov. Schwarzenegger left town for a desolate stretch of the
Central Valley to begin a week of plugging his comprehensive
water plan. His plan is to issue billions of dollars in bond
debt for two basic purposes: building two big dams and
improving the conveyance of water from Northern to Southern
California.
Now that the budget's signed and the Legislature is back in
session for its final weeks, that ambitious plan is back under
discussion in the Capitol, where it will determine the core
priorities of any legislation purporting to solve California's
water crisis, as some have called it, passed in the final
weeks. Those priorities – specifically, the emphasis on two,
incompletely studied dams – should be reexamined before
Californians are asked to back it with their children's tax
dollars.
To
begin with, to the extent that California can be said to face
a water crisis, it's more accurate to talk of water crises,
plural. There are native species that are in crisis, like the
Delta smelt; whose protection may require drastically reducing
water flows to Orange County, depending on the outcome of
court hearings that began last month. There are invasive
species causing crises, like Ukrainian quagga mussels, whose
presence in San Diego reservoirs threatens to clog aqueducts
and alter ecosystems. There are crises of water quantity –
with supplies threatened by both natural drought and
"regulatory drought" (like the Delta smelt water
reduction) – and crises of water quality – with
approximately 1 million households in California reportedly
receiving contaminated water.
And then there's the biggest crisis of all, the swamp of
ecosystem, flood protection, and water-supply problems that is
the home of the smelt and the hub of California's water
system: the Sacramento Delta. A "comprehensive"
water solution would need to be as multifaceted and diverse as
these problems.
Yet the debate over Schwarzenegger's proposal naturally
focuses on the simplest and biggest expenditure. Most of the
money – $4 billion from just under $6 billion of proposed
bond money – would go toward building two dams, one in the
Antelope Valley and one east of Fresno, whose anticipated
price tags are already projected to exceed this bond
allocation by as much as $1 billion, according to the
Department of Water Resources' estimates.
In the short term, such dams offer obvious financial and
ecological costs, without solving immediate problems of water
quantity, water quality or ecosystem health – which is to
say, most of the problems listed above. In the long term, they
can offer a range of benefits, most notably flood protection
in wet years or storage for dry years. For some regions, the
benefits outweigh the costs, and in those regions dams have
been built, financed by immediate beneficiaries rather than
the state. For example, Diamond Valley reservoir in Riverside
County nearly doubled Southern California's storage capacity
when it came online in 2003, and is being paid for by the
Metropolitan Water District, primarily through water sales. A
Democratic counterproposal to Gov. Schwarzenegger's, while
vague, calls for bonds to be spent on more such regional
projects.
Schwarzenegger's dam plan, in contrast, is to designate funds
before beneficiaries have been identified, costs and benefits
have been tallied, or the plans themselves have even been
finished; the studies for one of the dams won't be complete
until 2009. Moreover, half of that $4 billion in bonds would
be paid out of the taxpayer's pocket, in exchange for the
"broad," "statewide," "ecosystem
restoration" benefits of the dams. Such benefits are
contradicted by environmentalists, but are difficult to argue
with, since, again, complete studies and plans are still
forthcoming. Instead of letting regions weigh these costs and
benefits, the governor's plan would have bureaucrats confirm
his dams' cost effectiveness, while rendering them "cost
effective" in part by shifting costs to state and (the
state hopes) federal taxpayers.
As freshwater expert Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute,
told us, "The only argument I hear [for building more
dams], over and over again, is that we have to do everything
to solve our water problems, and that has to include surface
storage. But we can't afford to do everything. We can
only afford to do the things are most cost-effective."
There are many worthy, cost-effective regional water projects,
from groundwater cleanup and storage to agricultural/urban
transfers. There are even important statewide projects; most
importantly, fixing the Delta, on which both Schwarzenegger's
and the Democrats' proposal agree. But by insisting on a
single "comprehensive" bond measure that includes
"everything" – even vague, expensive,
controversial dams – we worry that a chance to address these
important problems could be squandered. And then California
may face a water crisis worthy of the name.
Whether legislation is passed this session – as looks
increasingly unlikely – or in the next, we urge the
Legislature not to make an attachment to doing
"everything" become an excuse for doing nothing.
|
