‘Water: Slow Haste’

Your editorial (Jan. 15), “Water: Slow Haste,” credits Assemblyman Jim Costa (D-Fresno) for “his considerable effort to forge a consensus among competing water interests” in the state. The editorial also takes a sideswipe at “predictable” shrill conservationists.

As one of those allegedly predictable conservationists, who has worked diligently for several years on various consensus efforts around this state, let me beg to differ.

While Costa’s white paper, issued at a press conference on Jan. 12, does contain the customary water developers’ lip service to San Francisco Bay and Delta protection (we heard that one before in the 1982 Peripheral Canal campaign), only a committed partisan of increasing freshwater diversions from the Bay/Delta estuary could be fooled by the “consensus” Costa purports to represent.

No general purpose environmental organization, nor any group generally representing the Bay Area, was invited to the meetings that debated the white paper’s contents, nor are any expected to support Costa’s legislation. Moreover, a careful inventory of the groups Costa has gathered around him will show that neither are the great majority of sportsmen’s organizations who have concerns about the health of Bay/Delta fisheries and waterfowl habitat part of his alleged consensus.

A true consensus, such as the one Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), working with Reps. Tony Coelho (D-Merced), Richard Lehman (D-Sanger) and Charles Pashayan (R-Fresno), fashioned in Congress last year to pass legislation authorizing federal and state water project coordinated operations, includes not only those who are sure supporters of the prime sponsor’s point of view, but also his adversaries. Costa, in choosing the opposite course, is forging conflict, not consensus.

But the principal reason we will oppose Costa’s legislation is not that he and the traditional water community have chosen to go it alone in promoting conventional water facility authorization legislation in the Delta. The reason is that his bill, like The Times’ editorial, which gives him so much credit, will be based on the false and outmoded premise that “at some point pumping must be increased to meet contract commitments by the state for water deliveries to Kern (County) farmers and . . . Southern California.”

The San Francisco Bay/Delta ecosystem is already so stressed by freshwater diversions that additional pumping would risk its near total collapse. Considering the recent sharp decrease in water use in California, particularly in Kern County, moreover, the irony is that it would take only a few relatively minor policy adjustments, involving water marketing, water pricing and water pollution control, at once to protect the Bay/Delta and to meet Southern California’s and the San Joaquin Valley’s legitimate water needs now and far into the future.

Let’s make haste quickly on water marketing, Bureau of Reclamation reform and creative solutions to problems like toxic agricultural drainage and threatened groundwater pollution. As for expediting additional water exports from Northern California, even slow haste is much too fast.

THOMAS J. GRAFF

Berkeley

Graff is senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund.