A Heart in San Francisco

To its credit, the City of San Francisco has decided to leave well enough alone. In this case it means that San Francisco has abandoned its shameless opposition to federal legislation that would prohibit the city from raising O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir on the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Richard H. Lehman (D-Sanger), won approval from the House Interior Committee on Wednesday and now goes to the House floor. It also would bar the construction of any new dam in any national park. The measure merits quick House and Senate passage and the President’s signature.

Hetch Hetchy, of course, is San Francisco’s major water supply. The system was built under the infamous Raker Act of 1913, a legislative defeat of monumental proportions for John Muir and the San Francisco-based Sierra Club. The idea of it! Putting a dam right in the middle of one of the nation’s most magnificent national parks and inundating a rockbound valley that nearly is the match for Yosemite Valley itself!

Even more ludicrous was the notion, seven decades later, of raising the dam by 50 feet and flooding even more of Hetch Hetchy Valley. Yet Mayor Dianne Feinstein was resentful of the Lehman legislation last year and enlisted her friend, Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), to block it in the Senate on flimsy procedural grounds.

It is not that San Francisco needed the water for itself. The city wanted more water to sell to its suburban neighbors and to generate more electric power to raise more revenue for the city. San Francisco picks up a cool $70 million to $100 million from Hetch Hetchy power annually.

San Francisco’s new water chief says that the city might want to go ahead with O’Shaughnessy enlargement some years from now when it would be joined by its suburban friends to get the Lehman legislation repealed. That really would not be necessary, however. If San Francisco did not take the Tuolumne water directly by pipeline from the Sierra--the city’s own version of the Peripheral Canal--the water would naturally flow into the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta and then out to San Francisco Bay.

If San Francisco needed more Tuolumne water in the future, all that it would have to do would be to apply to the state for the authority to take it out of the delta instead, just as Southern California and several other Bay Area water agencies do.