Let the Water Wars Cool Off

In California, Mark Twain said about a hundred years ago, whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’. For most of this state’s recent history, that indeed has been the case, with farmers fighting city folks and Northern California fighting Southern California over what in this largely arid state is a precious resource.

In the last couple of years, however, political infighting has died down thanks to a series of reasonable and farsighted compromises, chief among them a much-needed reform of how the state’s biggest man-made water source operates. That source is the Central Valley Project, a series of dams and canals built by the federal government in the 1930s to bring river water from the north to farms in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

For almost two generations the CVP sold heavily subsidized water to large and sometimes inefficient farms, even in times when California’s cities were struggling through drought. That finally began to change in 1992 when President George Bush signed a law intended to bring a measure of free-market economics to CVP operations. Among other things it allowed farmers to sell their surplus water to cities and it set more realistic rules for long-term water contracts, shortening them from 40 to 25 years and requiring that they be reviewed after they lapse rather than being renewed automatically.

Since that law went into effect, it seems to have worked reasonably well, although some technical fine-tuning has been suggested. That, unfortunately, is not good enough for some agribusiness interests and San Joaquin Valley water districts that were never happy with the CVP reform law in the first place. They want the new Republican majority in Congress to simply scrap the whole reform law, and they have prodded a number of Congress members from the Central Valley, chiefly Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Rockland), to push legislation that does just that. Doolittle’s bill, HR 1906, is now before the House subcommittee on water and power resources--where it should die.

The CVP reform law is too new to require any rewriting. It should be monitored, to be sure, and where necessary modified administratively by the federal government in consultation with the affected parties. But reopening the years-long negotiations that resulted in the CVP law is politically unwise. That would lead to the reopening of other political water fights, not least among them the even more complex compromise on water quality in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River Delta, the state’s biggest natural source of water. If Doolittle and other shortsighted folks in the Central Valley get their way, the cynical wisdom of Mark Twain’s wit will be proved for another hundred years. A populous and increasingly urbanized California can’t afford that.