Water package: Sealing the deal
Steve Weigand
Sacramento Bee
11/29/2009
Just before midnight, he saw it falling apart.
Months of delicate negotiations and hardball confrontations; of meticulously drafted legislation that was torn up as soon as the ink was dry, only to be rewritten; of interminable hours in closed-door meetings and impromptu hallway huddles.
A potentially monumental step toward easing a water crisis that had been decades in the making was close.
And yet an incongruous move by ardent environmentalists to kill a decidedly pro-environment bill was threatening to derail the entire package.
"Incredible," a frustrated Senate President Darrell Steinberg muttered to no one in particular from his desk near the back of the state Senate chambers. "Incredible."
Wrestling with California's water system is like working a Rubik's Cube: As soon as a couple of sides are aligned, the others go out of whack.
To reach agreement among the myriad elected officials, geographic regions and special interests on any one aspect of water in the state is an impressive feat.
Earlier this month, elected officials, special interests and Capitol aides assembled a potentially landmark package of solutions designed to overhaul California's crumbling water system.
It will take years to ascertain whether the package of water system reforms will work. But that they were even agreed to – in an atmosphere suffused with bitter partisanship and decades-old regional rivalries – is nothing short of a political miracle.
Here's how it happened, based on interviews with legislative and Schwarzenegger administration officials and staff, lobbyists and other interest group representatives, and on reporters' notes taken during the months of negotiations and final days of voting.
The Bee agreed not to identify specific sources in order to provide readers a candid view of how in private meetings they pulled together a deal that will frame the state's water decisions for the next generation.
Prologue to a deal
In recent years, the state's water fight has centered on three issues: building more storage, i.e., dams; restoring the vital but fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem; and moving water in the North to the South.
One day in the fall of 2007, state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, broached an idea.
What if proposed water projects – from dams to Delta restoration – were ranked in terms of their benefit to the public, rather than just pursued piecemeal for those who would pay for the project and get the water from it?
Steinberg's approach would emphasize that all of California had a stake in managing what is a finite resource, and would give everyone a place at the bargaining table.
The idea went nowhere, a casualty of partisan and regional bickering. But Steinberg had planted a seed in the Capitol.
The following year, another seed was planted by a pair of unlikely political allies.
The state's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and its senior Democratic U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein, decided to try to broker a water plan based on Steinberg's idea.
The two leaders put together a committee of lobbyists, legislative staff and administration officials to draft a package of measures that addressed all of the key issues – dams, Delta restoration, moving water around – instead of one piece at a time.
Like Steinberg's first idea, it died a partisan and special- interest death. But also like Steinberg's idea, the Feinstein- Schwarzenegger package approach struck a chord under the Capitol dome, and continued to echo into 2009.
Now or never
As the new year dawned, California's water problems were multiplying. Drought conditions dragged on, while federal court decisions and bureaucratic mandates cut supplies to Central Valley farmers and the thirsty South.
In addition, the prospect of a lame-duck governor and elections in 2010 added to the political pressure to get something done in 2009.
Steinberg, who had formally become Senate president pro tem in December 2008, vowed to have a water deal in place by the end of the year.
