Essay: Water grab
Proposition 18's off the ballot, but the governor's stealth water plan moves forward
Burt Wilson
Sacramento News & Review
08/19/2010
In a surprise announcement at the end of June, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed that he had asked the state Legislature to yank his coveted water bond, Proposition 18, off the November ballot and reposition it for the 2012 elections. Last week, the Legislature gave him exactly what he wanted.
If this leaves you wondering why the governor would abandon the bill he thought would be his greatest gubernatorial victory—a wholesale revision of the California Water Plan—you’re not alone. Such a massive revision was supposed to be Arnold’s supreme political legacy.
Was it really too costly in this era of debt and deficits? Was the presence of too much pork a reason to kill it? Did the governor fear it would be rejected at the polls and cost him some prestige?
No, no and no again. I believe the water bond was pulled because the governor figured out a better way to get a through-Delta-water conveyance system that would do the job the water bill was designed to do, but without all the water bill headaches! In short, here is the outline of Arnold’s secret plan to raid Northern California water and send it south.
Most Californians never did understand the water bond completely, because it was so disingenuously promoted to the public. The deception began with the formation of the governor’s Blue Ribbon Task Force Delta Vision Committee in 2006, which defined and framed the issue as establishing what the group conceived as “co-equal goals” to “restore the Delta ecosystem” and “maintain a reliable water supply.” It was hard for anyone to argue with that.
To the casual observer, these co-equal goals seemed to be a harbinger of good water policy in the works, but far from being co-equal, the dual goals were actually mutually exclusive. In fact, the goals cancel each other out because taking more water from the Delta—to “maintain a reliable water supply” was meant for the entire state! And any more water sent to Southern California would destroy the ecosystem, not save it.
Was the committee really just about creating a smoke screen for a water grab? The answer lies in the machinations of that great hidden force in California politics, the California Business Roundtable. The roundtable foresees a population growth of 20 million new people for California in the next 20 years. Where will they go? Most of them will end up in Southern California.
The CBR and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a major force in the political maneuvering for more water, envision this gigantic influx of people to be a boon to future economic development in the southland.
But only if they can get more water.
The MWD lost its Colorado River water allotment in 2003 and, ever since, has been looking to the north to supply it with more of California’s liquid gold. Long known for its water grab in the Owens Valley, the MWD can’t get any more water from the north without a wholesale revision in the California Water Plan, principally one that mandates the equal distribution of California’s water resources over the whole state which, of course, would mean diverting more Northern California water south.
