Measure Attempts to Put Regional Water Wars to Rest

The group behind a $1.97-billion water bond on the March 7 ballot is flying under the banner, “Californians for Clean, Safe, Reliable Water.”

If it wanted a more homey slogan for the measure, Proposition 13, it might try “Can We All Get Along?”

The measure, which would pay for dozens of water infrastructure projects, represents an attempt by state authorities to get diverse regional, economic and political interests to put aside their animosities and their lawyers.

Leading environmental groups and major water agencies are endorsing the bond issue, but many farmers are not buying into it.

The problems that the measure would help correct read like a laundry list of the state’s water woes: flooding on the Russian, Yuba and Feather rivers in Northern California, seawater intrusion along the coast, depletion of ground water, urban runoff polluting the beaches of Southern California, destruction of riparian habitat along the San Joaquin and Kern rivers in Central California, and much more.

Although the projects are disparate in nature and location, they share a common philosophy: That California needs to redouble its efforts to make greater use of its existing water supply and that the days of an ever-expanding water supply are over.

By one estimate, the projects to be funded by Proposition 13 could, through conservation and reclamation, increase the state’s usable water supply by 3%.

To anyone who isn’t a water wonk, that may seem like a paltry amount, but it pays to remember that this is a state that is perennially just one dry winter away from drought and is also facing a sizable increase in population in coming decades.

Admittedly, the price tag is a whopper, kept strategically just below $2 billion, just as the price of consumer goods often hovers at 99 cents. Add interest payments and the cost to taxpayers is more like $3.5 billion.

Still, boosters say the cost reflects the state’s chronic neglect of its water system.

“We let it go too long and now we’ve got to make up for it,” said Assemblywoman Denise Ducheny (D-San Diego), one of the Legislature’s water experts.

Four years ago, voters endorsed a $995-million bond issue that was billed as a means of ensuring the state’s water future.

Two-thirds of that amount was dedicated to the down payment on the state’s share of the state and federal effort to rescue the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Plagued by pollution, silting and flooding, the delta provides drinking water for 22 million people and irrigation for 4.5 million acres of farmland.

But now the Calfed program, to some observers, is caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of California water politics: the environmental movement and farming interests. Trying to please both, the program has pleased neither.

Deadlines have been pushed back, the proposal dearest to the interests of Southern California (a canal looping around the delta) is no longer even under discussion, and the Calfed executive director has left for a federal job.

With the Calfed stalemate firmly in mind, the crafters of Proposition 13, principally Gov. Gray Davis and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature, opted to tilt firmly toward the environmentalists. The result is that the environmental movement is exultant and the California Farm Bureau is in a huff.

“One of the best things about Proposition 13 is something it doesn’t do: It doesn’t rely on building big dams and reservoirs,” said Lisa Boyle, director of law and policy for Heal the Bay, a group dedicated to cleaning up Santa Monica Bay.

Dams and reservoirs are anathema to the environmental movement. Agriculture interests insist they are essential to control flooding and also to store water for use in drought years.

“Our members have made it clear to us that Proposition 13 does not contain enough benefit for agriculture statewide to justify our support,” said Bill Pauli, president of the California Farm Bureau, which decided to remain neutral.

To mollify the farmers, the governor included $20 million in his proposed budget to study above-ground storage in the Central Valley.

The Farm Bureau is unmoved. Its concern about Proposition 13 is part of an overall feeling that farmers are being cheated by state and federal water policies that favor fish and birds over farmers.

Whatever the environmental and economic arguments, the political reality is that the Farm Bureau has limited political clout.

“I have a lot of respect for the Farm Bureau, but, let’s face it, the votes are in the cities,” said Steve Hall, executive director of the Assn. of California Water Agencies. “Suburban California will decide this measure and there’s a lot in it for the suburbs.”

Proposition 13, like all water plans, is at its heart a political document.

For example, there is not a whisper in the measure’s verbiage that any of the $1.97 billion will ever be used to study the idea of a canal to bring the purer water of the Sacramento River around the polluted delta and into the California Aqueduct, which brings water to Southern California.

The voters of Northern California have repeatedly shown their overwhelming opposition to a peripheral canal (although the past five governors have endorsed the idea as essential).

At the other end of the state the farmers of the Imperial Valley are just as adamantly opposed to the construction of an aqueduct to bring Colorado River water to San Diego. But there are barely 140,000 people in the Imperial Valley, compared to 2.5 million in San Diego County.

Proposition 13 contains $3 million to study the idea of an aqueduct to serve both San Diego and Tijuana from the Colorado River. The Imperial County Farm Bureau is sputtering.

“If there is another straw into the river, another way to bypass the Imperial Valley, it’s just another way of taking away our water resources,” said Lauren Grizzle, the bureau’s executive director.

The discontent of some farmers aside, support for Proposition 13 is wide and deep among the state’s water agencies, local governments, environmental groups and health organizations.

There is also an aggressive fund-raising effort to provide money for TV advertising, an effort that includes support from “Seinfeld” actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a board member of Heal the Bay.

Getting the public’s attention for such a dry topic as water is always difficult. Without the threat of drought, Proposition 13 backers worry about their message getting lost amid a lengthy list of ballot measures and the hoopla of the presidential primary.

“It’s too bad the snow level’s up in the Sierra right now,” said Mark Watton, a member of the San Diego County Water Authority and a Republican candidate for the state Senate.

Unlike the 1996 water bond, Proposition 13 does not contain one overriding big-ticket project. Rather, there are conservation, reclamation, pollution control, environment restoration and flood control projects scattered throughout the state.

The Libertarian Party, which opposes the measure, argues that individual projects, such as the upgrade of water treatment plants in Los Angeles and increased pollution control in Orange County, should be paid for by communities directly impacted and not by statewide taxpayers.

Boosters counter that it’s high time Californians rid themselves of the notion that water is strictly a local issue.

Although the term is not likely to become a household word, the boosters preach the doctrine of “interconnectivity”--that is, that a water problem in one location, for example, pollution in Lake Elsinore or loss of wildlife habitat in the San Dieguito River Valley outside Del Mar, will cause problems elsewhere.

“I think California is finally maturing in how it views water,” said Jerry Meral, executive director of the Sacramento-based Planning and Conservation League, which backs Proposition 13.