Undoing the Mistakes of Past : State needs a water policy of future, not 1940s

The Interior Department is blithely planning to put 20% of California’s water out of reach to thirsty urban areas until 29 years into the next century, according to a recent report by the General Accounting Office.

The GAO recommends a moratorium on new contracts in the federal Central Valley Project, which supplies most of California’s irrigation water, until Washington thinks more carefully about this policy. Does renewing old water contracts makes sense in a time when California cities are rapidly growing and face a possible sixth year of drought? In our view it doesn’t.

Federal rules already forbid sales of water to farms or cities that are outside the boundaries of the Central Valley, which means that surplus water can’t be sold south of the Tehachapis.

Simply extending old water contracts--some of which were signed in 1949--as though nothing has changed in 40 years will also extend damage to vast areas of cropland. It would leave unchanged an intolerable situation in which wildlife habitat in the valley chronically lacks water.

Congress should respond at once, not only for the sake of wildlife in the San Joaquin Valley but to help ensure the future of the entire state.

Interior officials argue that a 1956 law gives them no choice in whether to renew contracts. They also read the law as saying the Interior Department cannot make significant changes in contract terms. So it’s up to Congress to intervene.

Congress should pass two important bills. One, sponsored by Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), would change the rules for the federal water system in California--the largest such project in the nation--so that its water could be bought and sold as a commodity under state law.

The other is by Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) to require farmers to take either federal water subsidies or federal crop subsidies, but not both. The GAO report said that in the mid-1980s nearly half of the federal water delivered at subsidized prices was used to grow crops sold, in turn, at subsidized prices.

Federal rules make buying and selling of Central Valley water far more difficult than do California rules. Although the state’s policies need fine-tuning to create a true market for water, they were good enough to allow Gov. Pete Wilson to create a state water bank earlier this year as a drought emergency measure.

At the federal level, Interior already has signed about a dozen contracts that commit it to sell cheap water to irrigation districts for another 40 years, the GAO report says. Over the next five years, it could sign another 50 or more unless the law is changed.

California agriculture must stop living in the past and let the people of California allocate nearly 8 million acre-feet of water with a process that fits the state’s present-day needs. The bills that would do that both sit in the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Bradley should put them to a vote without delay. And California’s Republican Sen. John Seymour should drop his misguided opposition to the bills and help them along.