Flood Control, Road Measures Hit Snags : Santa Ana River Plan Loses Funds for Study

The $1.3-billion flood control project for the Santa Ana River suffered another setback Wednesday when the House Appropriations Committee refused to approve $4 million for engineering studies.

Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) charged that the vote was the result of “hardball politics” practiced by Democrats, but aides to Democratic representatives said their bosses had legitimate questions about the project.

The deletion of the $4 million does not spell death for the project, but could delay it for a year, congressmen said.

The project “is on a siding, it hasn’t been derailed,” said Pat Fulton, an aide to Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), who played a crucial role in getting the allocation dropped.

The overall plan calls for widening and deepening the flood channel of the Santa Ana River in Orange County, raising the Prado Dam near Corona by 30 feet to increase its capacity for containing runoff waters, and building one or more new dams upstream from Prado Dam.

Bottled Up in Congress

Plans for controlling the river have been bottled up in Congress for years, despite warnings that a major flood on the river could cause $14 billion in damage in Orange County alone, and could kill numerous people.

Both the House and the Senate still must authorize the project, then appropriate money for it. The $4 million, for studies preliminary to any authorization, could be restored by Senate action later this summer or in the fall, but the full House would have to agree.

Problems with support for the project cropped up last month, when Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Riverside) objected to including it in a bill authorizing a welter of navigation and flood control projects across the country with an estimated cost of $11 billion to $20 billion.

Brown said he didn’t want Congress to approve the project until all engineering and design studies were done. Dannemeyer suggested that Brown was exacting revenge for Dannemeyer’s visits to Brown’s district during the last congressional election to campaign for Brown’s opponent.

Brown recently acknowledged that he was not “enthusiastic” about supporting the flood-control measure “just to help a bunch of guys who are out to sink me.”

Fazio, meanwhile, engineered the deletion of the $4 million by the Energy and Water Development subcommittee in the House, of which he is a member. The subcommittee’s action, taken approximately two weeks ago, did not become known to congressmen from the Santa Ana River flood area until Wednesday, only hours before it was upheld by the House Appropriations Committee.

Democrats’ Reservations

Fulton, Fazio’s aide, said subcommittee members, most of whom are Democrats, were concerned that the exact shape of the project has not been determined by the Army Corps of Engineers.

But it was Brown, Fulton said, who was “instrumental in bringing the disarray the project was in to the attention of the committee” that knocked out the $4 million.

Dannemeyer said the flood control project was caught “in the middle of a political struggle,” and added: “George Brown and Vic Fazio are playing hardball politics as a means of evidencing their dislike for we Republicans having retired Mr. (Jerry) Patterson and also having made an effort to retire Mr. Brown.”

Republican Robert E. Dornan of Garden Grove defeated Patterson, a Democrat from Santa Ana, in last year’s election.

Dannemeyer said in a telephone interview from Washington that the maneuvering was an act of revenge by Democrats who wanted to “embarrass us in our backyards by cutting out funding for a project that is supported, up until now, by all of the members of the Santa Ana River system (area).”

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-San Bernardino) said Fazio had also in the past “indicated some pique with members (of Congress) from Orange County who oppose water projects and now want a big one.”

Dannemeyer and Dornan have campaigned against “liberal big spenders” in Congress, in which group they include Brown and Fazio.

Project in Jeopardy

Lewis said he hoped the $4 million would be restored later, but said he was more concerned that Brown might formally ask that the Santa Ana River flood control project be dropped from the overall water bill when it comes before the full House, probably in several weeks.

Lewis and others have warned that if the project is not authorized this year, it could take several years for it to be included in another major water bill. The congressmen have also emphasized the need for unified support of the project by representatives from Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties in order to win its approval from their colleagues in the House.