Too Much Water, and Too Little : November Ballot Measure 148: Helping to Manage State Resources

In a perfect world, voters wouldn’t be faced with an omnibus water bond measure but would be able to weigh separately each of its provisions. What voters have instead is Proposition 148, which is loaded up with $380 million worth of projects. Still, taken as a whole, the measure is important to California’s future and should be approved Nov. 6.

Among the big-ticket items is $90 million for flood-control projects, about $60 million of which would go toward the Santa Ana River flood control project. It is on this river’s 100-mile plain that experts say a disaster is waiting to happen with the next 200-year flood--that is, one expected to happen just once every two centuries. While difficult to imagine during these times of prolonged drought, such a catastrophic flood could cause an estimated $14.5 billion in property and business losses, and result in up to 3,000 deaths.

The federal government will pay about two-thirds of the $1.5-billion flood-control project, which includes increasing the storage capacity of reservoirs in San Bernardino and Riverside counties and deepening the river channel through Orange County. The state will pay most of the rest.

Among the other important projects contained in the measure are $30 million for California’s share of an international waste-water treatment plant to treat sewage flowing north from Mexico to San Diego County; $20 million for drought assistance, which would help local agencies acquire water rights, drill or improve wells and build water treatment facilities, and $95 million for loans to localities to fund water reclamation projects. There also would be money for ground-water treatment.

Questions have been raised about a provision of Proposition 148 that would cut interest rates in half for water agencies that qualified for state loans under a 1976 water bond act. The argument can be made that this is a good idea; many smaller water agencies need the boost of low-interest loans to meet new, tougher environmental standards.

But taxpayers will have to pick up the bill for the estimated $110 million in additional costs because of interest rate cuts for these loans over the next several decades. Given the state budgetary woes, that means other programs may need to be cut. That wasn’t made sufficiently clear during the legislative process.

Still, Proposition 148 contains too many important projects to reject simply because of the slipshod way some of it got through the Legislature. It deserves an affirmative vote by the electorate.