The great water deal of 2009: Historic?

Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

By Peter Schrag
Columnist
California Progress Report

On the rare occasions when the biggest players in Sacramento blow kisses to one another for a historic achievement, the object of the celebration deserves a hard second look. It happened again last week when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, legislative leaders and a gaggle of other politicians and lobbyists reached the great water deal of 2009.  He wanted to congratulate all concerned, said the governor “for this historic accomplishment.” 

Like many other big deals in Sacramento in recent years, this one, too, was composed in large part of black boxes, deferrals, fudges and borrowing -- $11.1 billion in general obligation bonds in this case--  for large water projects, some as yet unspecified, plus a fair amount of pork having little to do with water. How many billions have we put on the credit card since 2004, when the governor declared that we’d tear it up?

But if the bonds are approved by the voters next year, the borrowing and the $800 million the bonds will take out of the state’s already deficit-burdened general fund each year will be just one item on a long list of misplaced priorities, calculated ambiguities, and missed opportunities.

From 30,000 feet, the agreement, in the form of five bills, touches nearly all the major issues in California’s complex water picture:  flood control, protecting the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem, securing more water for the big San Joaquin Valley growers, many of them suffering the effects of a severe drought, reducing water consumption, monitoring and replenishing the state’s overdrawn ground water and addressing the increasingly severe effects of global warming.

Given the interests involved, reaching political agreement on them all would have taken a political miracle, and there was no miracle here. As the back-room negotiating proceeded, many of the most promising parts of the bills were watered down (you should pardon the phrase) to the point where the good intentions turned into toothless enforcement machinery and ambiguous policy priorities.   

There’s not much question about who the biggest winners are going to be. “Farm leaders,” said the Fresno Bee, “were all smiles as they celebrated passage of proposals they had pushed for years without success.” In Valley talk, “farmers” means mostly the big growers, particularly the 600 San Joaquin Valley agribusinesses in the powerful Westlands Water District. Collectively they “farm” some 600,000 acres. These are not little family farmers.

We don’t yet know whether the deal will lead to the construction of a peripheral canal to take Sacramento River water around the ecologically overstressed Delta, for delivery to those growers and to Southern California cities. Nor do we know how much of the new storage capacity will be the costly surface dams the growers love and how much will go into the Valley’s depleted underground aquifers.

What we do know is that the deal did little to guarantee effective ground water monitoring by the state or to require more efficient use of water by agriculture, which still consumes roughly 80 percent of the state’s water. It aims to reduce urban water use by 20 percent but requires no similar effort by growers. And it’s still the taxpayers who’ll have to pay off the bonds – with interest a total of as much as $22 billion -- not the farmers, developers and flood plain property owners who will be the major beneficiaries.

The legislation calls for the creation of a seven-member Delta Stewardship Council that’s supposed to develop a comprehensive long-term management plan for the Delta and coordinate the countless federal, state and local agencies involved in California water policy. 

But given the enormously complex issues involved in managing the Delta and the many players involved, there’s no telling how the Council will work or whose interests it will represent. And since Delta issues are now compounded by the effects of global warming, which is likely to raise sea levels and  increase the intrusion of salt water into the Delta, even as the Sierras – historically the state’s largest reservoir --  get less snow and thus will store less water, the questions and problems of  Delta management will only grow more difficult.

Maybe the most divisive of the current questions is about construction of the peripheral canal, a project approved during the administration of former Gov. Jerry Brown. It was blocked in 1982 by a voter referendum backed by an odd combination of environmental groups, Bay Area water interests and growers opposed to an environmental measure to which the canal bill was linked..

So last week, the governor and the five legislative leaders in Sacramento ducked, leaving the choice in the Delta Council’s black box and allowing all concerned the hope that in the end things will come out their way.

Tellingly, the enviros are divided, with the Sierra Club and the Planning and Conservation League opposed and the Environmental Defense Fund, believing that the deal will lead to environmental restoration of the Delta, in strong support.

“It is important to realize,” said an EDF press handout, “that the legislation does not authorize a peripheral canal. It does assure, however, that a canal will only be built if important habitats are restored, water exports from the Delta are biologically sustainable, and the beneficiaries of those exports pay the full cost of construction, including environmental mitigation.”

But as Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s executive director wrote last week, “The governor's proposal continues excessive reliance on outmoded water-storage solutions, lowers the emphasis on protection provided by existing law for the health of California's waterways, does almost nothing to enhance local self-reliance on water supplies, and fails to guarantee commonsense reforms of water policy.” That may be even truer for much of agriculture.

Early in October, California Treasurer Bill Lockyer warned about the increasingly large share that debt service is taking out of the general fund, rising from “the current 6.7 percent to 10 percent or more by the middle of the next decade unless the budget improves,” thus cutting ever more deeply into education, health services and other programs. That “makes the case for user-funding for most water system improvements ...compelling, both as a matter of equity and fiscal prudence.”

But the combination of drought, the resulting federal cuts in water flows to agriculture and legislators’ desperate need to improve their dismally low approval ratings made even a bad deal politically more attractive than no deal. Lockyer might as well have been in Kansas.

Water is a fixed – and probably declining – resource. The only way it can be stretched is by conservation, recycling of waste water and by more efficient use. This deal takes the first baby steps in that direction, but only by promising more goodies to agriculture and by taking most of the money to pay for it not from the beneficiaries but from schools, universities, the old and the sick, and from the taxpayers, present and future. Next November, when they get to vote on the bonds, they’ll have the last word on that. 
 

Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Wednesday for the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics, Immigration will be published early in 2010.