Water Biz, the Governor and Bushwa

Let’s start with our pie chart. Every column on California water begins with the pie chart because it makes clear what some would like to obfuscate.

In the chart, the pie represents all the water available in California. Now picture the pie divided into five slices.

Remove one slice. That’s the share that goes to California’s cities. All the houses and factories and schools and office buildings in all the cities of the state get roughly 20%.

Now go back to the remaining four slices. That’s the share that goes to our rural brothers, the farmers.

The pie chart represents an economic absurdity and tells you why the cities have suffered more grievously from the drought than have farmers. It also explains why the leaders of the have-not cities believe that the realities of water sharing in California must change, and soon.

Gov. Pete Wilson and his trainee senator in Washington, John Seymour, want you to forget about that pie chart. They want you to believe that a struggle over California water, now under way in Congress, involves nothing more than a fight over some freshwater guarantees for fish and wildlife.

Thus far, Wilson and Seymour are winning this spin war. Salmon and ducks have played big on the news pages. Last Thursday, Wilson railed again over the wildlife provisions of a bill submitted by Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee.

“California will not be steered toward . . . unworkable formulae pitting environmental protection efforts against our need for food and fiber and jobs,” Wilson said in a letter.

On and on it went, deja vu language from a thousand weary fights over the environment, designed to lull and benumb. At the end, Wilson expressed interest in taking over control of the Central Valley Project, the fed’s huge irrigation system in the San Joaquin Valley, presumably to avoid any more confrontations over fish and ducks.

Bushwa. Fish and ducks constitute only a side game in this struggle. The real issue is the pie chart. California’s cities, in league with the environmentalists, have built a new coalition to change the way the pie gets sliced. That forms the core of the struggle, a core that Wilson and Seymour would like to camouflage.

If the cities win, they will gain the right to buy water from individual farmers supplied by the Central Valley Project, a transaction now forbidden by federal law. The Johnston legislation, as well as a companion bill by Sen. Bill Bradley, would allow these purchases for the first time.

And when the door opens on the federal project, the State Water Project likely will follow. Together the two systems deliver between 8 and 9 million acre-feet of water per year--or 15 times the amount of water that the city of Los Angeles consumes in a year.

This switch to a free market in water would alter the economic landscape of the state. Since the cities have the money, soon they would have the water they need. The farmers, once the pashas of the water world, would be forced to scramble along with everyone else.

Why do Wilson and Seymour want this struggle camouflaged as a fight over fish and ducks? Because they fear the outcome if it gets portrayed in its real terms. Playing fish and ducks--or, even better, the environmentalists--against the farmers promises far better results than playing them against the 25 million souls living in California’s cities.

And most likely they calculate that the voters in the cities sleep peacefully without undue worry over the arcane niceties of water law. After all, it did rain in February, didn’t it? There’s still water in the shower, isn’t there?

So let them sleep.

But we will see. Within a month the outcome of the Bradley and Johnston bills should be known. No one is taking big bets on this one. The governor of California exercises considerable leverage over any legislation that would change his state so dramatically. Wilson and Seymour, working together, may have the power to stop both bills.

If that happens, an intriguing scenario can be imagined. Picture a campaign debate in the upcoming senatorial election. Seymour, of course, will be a candidate. Say this debate arrives at the subject of the drought and water and an opposing candidate looks at Seymour.

Why, he asks, did you help destroy an opportunity for the cities to get the water they need? Why did you choose to represent the interests of several thousand farmers over the interests of tens of millions in the cities?

I don’t know the answer, but it’s an interesting question.