Keeping an Eye on Flood-Control Prize : * O.C. Delegation Broke Ranks on Key River Project

It’s the start of what undoubtedly will be another dry summer, so it’s difficult to imagine what it would be like if the Santa Ana River breached its banks and flooded the plain that covers much of northern Orange County. Harder still to conjure is a flood like the one that inundated the county in 1862. But such disasters, dubbed 100-year floods, do occur periodically--and unpredictably. Were one to happen in the next rainy season, the once-agrarian Orange County, now fully urbanized, could sustain mind-boggling losses: 3,000 lives and $14 billion in property damage.

Compared to the havoc such a flood could cause, the massive $1.5-billion Santa Ana River Mainstem Project now underway sounds prudent. Still, the project, which is designed to prevent such a flood, requires a massive commitment of funds from local, state and federal agencies through the end of the century. This year, for example, Congress was asked to approve the largest annual funding so far--more than $90 million. That level of funding must be maintained for each of the next several years until the main project--the new Seven Oaks Dam upstream in Riverside County--is finished. Even in its final years, the project will require tens of millions of dollars each year from the federal government to upgrade the Prado Dam and complete channel improvements along the 100-mile course of the river, which runs from the San Bernardino Mountains to the ocean at Huntington Beach.

Getting approval for a federal commitment of that dimension requires an intense, year-after-year lobbying effort on the part of Orange County’s congressional representatives. That’s why two recent “no” votes against this year’s allocation were so disappointing.

The negative vote cast by Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), who is leaving Congress at the end of this term, was disturbing but hardly surprising; Dannemeyer opposes most money bills. But Rep. Christopher Cox’s vote was a head-shaker. Cox (R-Newport Beach), who has performed well in his nearly four years in Congress, had heavily lobbied the House Appropriations Committee to include the funding. He justified his vote against the omnibus Energy and Water Appropriations bill when it reached the House floor as an objection against the last-minute exclusion of $434 million for the Superconducting Super Collider. Cox said the $8.2-billion atom-smasher, which is to be built in Texas, would greatly benefit California firms and universities, including UC Irvine.

But Cox’s first priority should be the Santa Ana River project. Granted, funding for the river project appears not to be in immediate danger. And, granted, Cox will have another chance to vote for it once the bill comes out of a House-Senate conference committee.

But had the county’s remaining representatives--Republicans Ron Packard of Oceanside, Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove and Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach--voted against the bill for whatever reason, the Mainstem project well may have been in trouble. Cox’s vote, even if merely a political stratagem to get the super collider back in the bill, sent the wrong signal.

Support in Congress is especially important because Sacramento, facing the state’s gravest budgetary crisis since the Depression, is considering tampering with one of the special funds from which the county draws most of its payments for the project.

Cox and all of Orange County’s legislators need to keep their eyes on the ball as the Santa Ana River Mainstem project is shepherded through the political process.