Water: Slow Haste

If you think that yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater is an inflammatory act, try venturing into Northern California and talking about exporting more of the region’s water to Southern California--even in a whisper. Assemblyman Jim Costa (D-Fresno) did that during a press conference in Sacramento the other day. The reaction from Northern California conservationists was predictable, running something like “Over our dead bodies!”

Thus the export issue grabbed the headlines and denied Costa the credit that he is due for his considerable effort over the past year to forge a consensus among competing water interests around some solutions to a few of the state’s major water problems. Costa’s is not the only such group at work, but Costa is a key figure in the puzzle, since he represents part of the Central Valley agri-empire and is chairman of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee.

Not many years ago a legislator from Fresno would have been run out of town for daring to utter some of the proposals that Costa has made in a “white paper” compiled by his Committee for Delta Resources Improvement, a group of water agencies and sportsmen’s associations. But Costa is willing to talk about the sort of environmental safeguards in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay that would have been lynchable offenses in Fresno not long ago.

Costa plans to incorporate portions of his paper into legislation that would seek solutions to the havoc created in the delta by the pumping of vast quantities of water by state and federal water projects to the south. Sen. Ruben S. Ayala (D-Chino), chairman of the Senate’s water committee, also has drafted such legislation. Costa, although his bill has not been written, said that it would incorporate authority to build a new channel in the northern delta that would allow the State Water Project to pump even more water from the estuary and send it to farm customers in Kern County and to urban Southern California. Aha! the critics said, it’s Duke’s Ditch all over again.

Duke’s Ditch was a northern delta channel supported by Gov. George Deukmejian in 1984 as a scaled-down alternative to the long-proposed Peripheral Canal designed to carry Sacramento River water entirely around the delta. The canal was thumped to defeat by Northern California in a 1982 referendum, and Duke’s Ditch, a through-delta facility, met a similar fate in the Legislature in 1984.

At some point pumping must be increased to meet contract commitments by the state for water deliveries to the Kern farmers and to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. But the political realities of today also dictate that the environment of the delta and San Francisco Bay must be protected before exports can be increased. That is, after all, the law.

Costa and Ayala may be premature in declaring that consensus is at hand. Impressed with all the movement toward conciliation of the warring factions, they may be too eager to jump in with a grand solution to Southern California water problems that radiate from the delta, the source of 40% of California’s natural surface water supply.

Impressive progress has been made in resolving delta issues in the past two years, and several programs are under way now to deal with other problems--including the installation of additional pumps to allow the state project to take more water during high-flow periods without additional damage to delta channels or water quality. Much more can be done--needs to be done--before the old battle of new exports need be joined. It is time to make haste slowly.