California's water war heating up
By Dan Walters - dwalters@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
8:02 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 trans****t 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 cor****ations, the former opposed to expanding water
ex****ts 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.
The peripheral canal battle made subsequent governors and legislatures
leery of approaching California's water conflict. Brown's successor,
Republican George Deukmejian, took a half-hearted swipe at it, and
Republican Pete Wilson tried to resolve it with a collaborative
process of Delta improvements that eventually collapsed. Democrat Gray
Davis ignored it altogether. Now Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger is
attacking it with his usual gusto.
Schwarzenegger wants to revive the peripheral canal, which is probably
still the best solution to the interrelated problems of maintaining
deliveries while protecting the Delta's fragile environment. The
courts have been ordering reductions in pumping out of the Delta to
protect endangered fish species, creating much angst among water
agencies south of the Delta.
Schwarzenegger created a task force to study the Delta, but has also
moved to put the peripheral canal back on the agenda, alarming its
many foes. Last week, after it was re****ted that Schwarzenegger might
issue a unilateral order to begin preliminary work on a canal project,
state Senate leaders urged him to back away, saying any such action
would make it "difficult to negotiate seriously" on an overall water
policy. For years, state water officials have contended that they have
the authority under current law to build a peripheral canal without
further legislative authorization.
Two days later, Schwarzenegger replied, insisting that he's not acting
alone although warning that the Delta "is in jeopardy of collapsing
without both immediate action and long-term solutions."
A coalition of business and agriculture groups, meanwhile, is working
on a ballot measure that would bypass long-stalled negotiations in the
Capitol on the peripheral canal and additional reservoirs, and
environmentalists who oppose both are gearing up for a ballot war.
The war over water isn't so much about water as it is about competing
visions of how California should develop. And the Capitol's chronic
inability to resolve the water issue is emblematic of its dysfunction
on all big issues, including the deficit-ridden state budget, health
care, education and trans****tation.
Chances are that Schwarzenegger's governor****p will end without water
being settled. At the moment, his most likely successor may be Jerry
Brown, who has returned to politics as attorney general.
What goes around comes around.
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