Big Dams and Other Monuments

It’s a memory from his early boyhood, and much has faded away. Charlie Casey remembers going with his grandfather to cut a ribbon at one of California’s great new dams. He can’t recall where, or exactly when. He does remember a VIP tour of the structure’s innards. He remembers skimming across the reservoir in an amphibious car, and thinking: “Pretty cool.”

And why not? Dams meant growth and growth was good. Rivers were resources to be rounded up and put to work, irrigating farmlands, lighting cities. That’s how most folks saw it back then, in the early 1960s. It was a view promoted with almost religious conviction by Casey’s own grandfather, who was the governor: Pat Brown.

Much concrete--for freeways, universities and, yes dams--got poured in Pat Brown’s era, often in the name of future Californians. It’s not difficult to imagine little Charlie Casey up there with the dignitaries at the ribbon cutting, a perfect prop for all the grand talk about “building for tomorrow” and all that.

Three decades later, the grandson of the governor is 40 years old, the father of two young children. He also is an officer with an environmental organization called Friends of the River. And he has devoted his last seven years to fighting the Auburn Dam, a billion-dollar federal colossus proposed for the American River--the sort of project his grandfather once championed.

“This is a different era,” Casey says, peering down at a river bend where the dam would go. “Times change.”

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In selling Californians on large-scale waterworks, Pat Brown often spoke in public of “one state,” united north and south, sharing its most precious resource. Privately, he would wink at Northern Californians and suggest that moving water south was the only way to keep Los Angeles hordes from migrating north. He was wrong. The hordes have come anyway.

A great migration is underway. People from the cities, particularly those in Southern California, are flooding into the northern and central Sierra foothills. To the east of Sacramento, in the rolling hills where the rivers wind down from the mountains, housing tracts are going up willy-nilly. They are bought by evacuees from Los Angeles and other cities, who come seeking peace amid the rustics.

With new houses, of course, come new demands on water supplies. It’s a familiar pattern: Available water does not drive the developments; rather, developments create the demand and political will to grab new supplies of water. This is one reason why Auburn Dam opponents grow suspicious when they hear it pitched to Congress as flood control for Sacramento.

They say there are less expensive options to protect the lowlands, like improving the levee systems. They note that the dam, in previous proposals, was sold (unsuccessfully) as a source of irrigation water, and then hydroelectric power. In the end, the opponents figure, the dam will serve only to lubricate foothill growth. Which raises a question: If the dam’s main beneficiaries are to be land developers, why should federal taxpayers from Florida to Oregon finance it?

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Federal legislation to build the dam is expected to face its first committee test soon, perhaps this week. It is sponsored by John Doolittle, a Republican who represents Sacramento foothill country. As irony, this competes with Pat Brown’s grandson helping lead a fight to block a dam. Doolittle flies with budget hawks, a foe of government expenditures.

In fact, when the Mississippi River overran its banks in 1993, Doolittle was one of only 27 House members who voted against a flood relief bill. Curiously enough, his pitch to Congress regarding Auburn has been “pay now, or pay later.” In other words: Build the dam for $1 billion (minimum) or pay out billions more if and when a 500-year flood comes--which assumes, bravely, that after a torrent of the magnitude needed to trigger such a flood, there’d be anything left of California worth saving.

Not all Doolittle’s colleagues are buying. In fact, Casey counts among his most productive allies congressional Republicans--spendthrifts like Rep. Thomas E. Petri of Wisconsin who, sounding a lot like Doolittle when it was someone else’s river which had flooded, has called Auburn “a pork-barrel monster that should be killed again, this time for good.”

Casey no doubt would love to defeat the dam on environmental grounds. Something like 50 miles of wild river could be drowned under “Auburn Lake.” It’s rare, beautiful country, and something he believes should be preserved for his grandchildren--a monument, in its way, as meaningful as his grandfather’s dams. He understands, however, that it’s best to fight this one on more prosaic grounds, to let the Republican fiscal conservatives lead the charge. That’s just good politics, and he is Pat Brown’s grandson.