A GREEN GRAB OF BLUE GOLD

Posted date: 1/11/2010

Power Grab at Center of Environmentalist Water Package

OP-ED – Los Angeles Business Journal http://www.labusinessjournal.com/industry_article.asp?aID=46689725.8866183.1869634.102028.82574202.919&aID2=143809&cID=8

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

California has historically always been in a rush over gold and a war over water – blue gold – in the Sacramento Delta.

The package of water bills that is being put on the November ballot is nothing but a capture of California’s water resources by one political faction, environmentalists, over the interests of farmers and cities.

Environmentalists have seized on an opportunity created by bad laws and a normal three-year dry spell to shut down by lawsuit the huge pumps at the headwaters of the California Aqueduct that deliver water to farmers and urban Southern California. The result: California’s “wettest drought.”

The Environmental Defense Fund claims that the Delta smelt fish is in decline due to the damaging action of the pumps. But the decline could be for a number of other reasons including natural drought, prior water quality improvements that may have increased natural predators of the smelt and forced the smelt into hiding, or even a decrease in “dirty” water krill upon which the smelt forage.

In any case, environmentalists have strangled the state water project at its most vulnerable choke point on the Delta, and are extorting Californians to force a cleanup of the Delta and a huge green jobs program during the Great Recession.

Legislators have responded with a flotilla of water bills (SB1, SB2, SB6, SB7, SB8 all in 2009) that have been rolled into a Water Bill Package that will be on the November ballot. Included is an $11.1 billon water bond, of which $2 billion is pure political pork.

But this Water Bill Package is not just a fix of the Delta and a bunch of money for scattered water projects and pork. It is a radical restructuring of the entire state water system. It will reverse California’s historic water social contract whereby farmers and cities got water, and the bay-Delta area got levees and thousands more acres of productive and developable land at a cost to the freshwater ecology of the Delta. “Restoring the Delta” is jargon to undo this social contract, and grab the water, land, levees and future development – and blame it on a “drought.”

The Water Bill Package will create an unelected seven-person Delta Stewardship Council that will effectively have power to veto nearly any water project in the state. This council will also regulate water use, land use, development and transportation in the entire bay-Delta region to bring about cleanup of the Delta. In short, the stewardship council will be a California Coastal Commission for the bay-Delta area, only with the enforcement powers of a new Delta watermaster and far-reaching veto powers.

Paying ransom

Water agencies across the state have decided to pay the environmentalists their ransom of the cost to fix the Delta in return for a hoped for Peripheral Canal or Auburn Dam somewhere in the distant future, say 2050, if ever. But the last time Southern California popped for a bunch of bonds to fix flood-prone levees in the Delta, it enshrined it in the state Constitution so it could not be unwound at the next session of the state Legislature. There is no guarantee that this is not a “bait-and-switch” scheme, nor is there a sunset clause in the Water Bill Package.

The stated goals of the Delta Stewardship Council would be to advance the “co-equal goals of Delta restoration and water supply reliability.” But there’s no “co-equal” political parity of other interests in the Water Bill Package. Urban water ratepayers and farmers throughout the state will be without political representation. Delta Stewardship Council members will only represent the myopic interests of the Delta.

The so-called decline of the Delta is mostly an illusion. If salt water intrudes into the Delta as a result of drought or deliveries of water to farmers and cities, this may mean that freshwater fish and plants will decline. But a saltwater ecology will thrive in its place. Which ecology is best cannot be determined by science, but only by deciding what cultural and commercial values we want to enshrine into law and policy.

But appeasers say: “We’re desperate. Give them what they want. We need water.” But what if we have a sudden return of the monsoon rains that fill California’s reservoirs? Californians will have permanently ceded their water entitlements, and their votes will be disenfranchised in return for deep reductions in water deliveries and a package of unproven water and Delta cleanup projects.

The scattered water projects to be funded by the Water Bill Package around the state have no proven economic or physical feasibility. Nor is there any quantification that the water yield from such projects outside the Delta would offset what could be a 75 percent cutback in Southern California’s maximum water entitlement from the State Water Project through the Delta. It may be better for Californians to wait for rain than to create a Delta superagency that effectively runs all of the state’s water system and that funds a pork-laden water bond, an illusory Delta cleanup and unproven scattered water projects when the state is broke.

As the old Zen saying goes:

“Before enlightenment,
chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment,
chop wood, carry water.”

 

 

Comments

[John Bass]

Your perspective, Mr. Lusvardi, is no doubt representative of a fair number of people in California.

If I understand correctly, your position is that nothing should be done and no money should be spent on co-equal goal policies. No "appeasement" is to be given. I have no clue what that means in practice, but it does put you in a coalition with Delta advocates. Extremes come together, I guess, despite their differences.

A case in point is that the EDF will get it coming and going. They support the recently passed Cal water legislation, much to the consternation of their more "principled" environmental brethren. Complicated business, walking a practical tightrope.

Policy-wise, waiting for rain is like waiting for Godot. And thst might just be the default policy, given the dysfunction of the legislative process in California, Prop 13, 1/3 majority rules, etc.

[Wayne Lusvardi]

Thanks John for reading my article and for your feedback. I am NOT in favor of doing nothing. Rather I'm in favor of the status quo over the proposed package of water bills. I'm in favor of full disclosure that the water bill package is a reaction to extortion. Where I believe I disagree with you is that any new Delta "fix" will be the basis of the next Delta eco-disaster.

For the edification of readers John Bass is a professor of architecture at the U. of British Columbia. Check out his website DeltaNationalPark.org

Note: there is no actual Delta National Park