Home / Archive / Publisher's letter: April 2009
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Publisher : April 2009
Political waters
For more than 60 years, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has been the center of California’s water supply, serving as a critical transfer point. Snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada flows into the delta, mostly via the Sacramento River. Huge pumps pull the water from the delta to users in the Bay Area, the southern Central Valley and Southern California. Today that water reaches two-thirds of California’s homes and irrigates nearly 3 million acres of farmland.
After decades of this massive interference with natural water flows, the delta is in crisis. Native fish populations are declining so rapidly that courts have forced substantial cuts in water delivery to both cities and farmers. More than 1,000 miles of delta levees are aging and weak; an earthquake or flood of any magnitude is likely to allow seawater to pour in, contaminating the freshwater supply. Two years of dry winters have left us with drought conditions and urgent calls for more conservation and better water management.
And yet we continue to dither and debate. In both 1965 and 1973, water experts sounded the alarm calling for a peripheral canal designed to carry Sacramento River water around the delta in order to stop its environmental degradation.
In the early 1980s, the Legislature finally approved the canal, but an alliance of farmers and environmentalists convinced voters to stop it. They claimed the canal was a blatant grab for water by Southern California with few benefits for those of us in the north. Their critics say the referendum campaign was based on misinformation and exploitation of public fears.
Whatever was true then, the picture is far different today. Necessity has forced Southern California to conserve water better than any other region in the state. The typical Los Angeles resident uses 138 gallons a day; the typical Sacramento resident uses 278.
Last year the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California issued a report prepared by a multidisciplinary team consisting of its staff and University of California experts. The report looks at four alternative means to achieving both a stable water supply and environmental improvements to the delta, including a detailed cost-benefit analysis of each. Once again, researchers concluded that the peripheral canal is the best solution.
Early this year the Delta Vision Committee, five state Cabinet secretaries appointed by the governor, made a similar recommendation. The committee’s report finalizes earlier recommendations by the Delta Vision Task Force, a governor-appointed task force.
Both the PPIC researchers and the Delta Vision Committee stress that a peripheral canal is only the engineering piece of the solution and perhaps the easiest (albeit expensive) to implement. Every bit as important is developing a new framework for governance and regulation of the delta, one that will allow decisions to be debated, decided and implemented more quickly than is currently feasible given the large number of local and regional stakeholders.
This is a clear instance where we have done our homework — over and again, in fact. We get the same answer: a peripheral canal and unified management of the delta. However, we can’t summon the political will to get it done.
Leaders at all levels need to stop the posturing and politics, and get on with the task of forging good policy for the delta and for our state.
