Water Bonds
Water scarcity is again on the agenda in California. This is a recurring theme, and drought is a recurring fact in the Golden State (Golden due to hot, dry summers). How do we get to this crisis again and again?
Californians have built an arcane and extraordinarily complex and decentralized approach to water development, distribution and management that does not easily lend itself to policies that could ensure enough water for all potential needs and uses.
Early in the state’s history, the state legislature determined that it should not attempt to control how water was developed or regulated, and that instead this should be left to localities and property owners. Indeed, the legislature could not even decide whether Spanish water law – prior appropriation – or English water law – riparian rights – would be the most appropriate, and adopted both in a dual and contradictory system. Groundwater resources were never regulated at the state level, and other than providing taxpayer funds for water development and distribution by the state water project, there is little state authority in water affairs.
The State’s Regional Water Quality Control Board, and its Regional Boards, enforces the provisions of the federal Clean Water Act, establishing water quality standards for the state’s waters and receiving bodies under the Porter Cologne Act. It does not determine water distribution, use, or management. The Department of Water Resources conducts research on water supplies in the state and manages the State Water Project, the canal that conveys water from northern California Rivers to the Central Valley and to the southern California region. In the absence of state water management, thousands of water districts distribute water with no rules about conservation, best management practices or collaboration. Some districts are run by boards that are either elected or appointed, and some property weighted boards, such that those with more property have more votes.
There are also large-scale retail water sellers. The Metropolitan Water District for example, created by the state legislature in 1928 to distribute water to urbanizing southern California, delivers water to supply over 17 million residents in the region. MWD member cities are also water retailers, each of which has its own administrative structure, policies, procedures and politics. In some cities of the state for example Fresno and Sacramento, water is so abundant that the utility has not installed any domestic meters; there are only flat fees.
Then there are other entities that are responsible for water too, such as sanitation districts that treat sewage and manage storm water. Both treated sewage and storm water is disposed of, except in a few places where the water resource is treated and recycled into municipal water systems.
This cursory overview has not even touched on agricultural water management, which is equally as complex. But it should be obvious that there are a great number of agencies (including private ones) involved in water in the state, but little organizational infrastructure to manage the resource for the long term.
As water availability shrinks in such a context, tensions among users emerge. There are no mechanisms to coordinate water use, no mechanisms to determine priorities and cost effective solutions. There are glimpses of what might be possible statewide, were there a way to achieve such changes. For example, 20% of the drinking water for 2.3 million people in Orange County is recycled water. The Pacific Institute located in Oakland California, estimates that urban areas in California could conserve 30% of water consumed simply by installing off-the-shelf water conservation technologies. They also estimate that 60% of current urban water consumption is used for outdoor irrigation.
Yet Governor Schwarzenegger and Senator Feinstein are strongly urging the voters of the state to approve a $9.3 billion to build additional reservoir capacity, and a peripheral canal around the Sacramento Delta. Nearly $5 billion would be designated for reservoirs, $2 billion for a peripheral canal, and the remainder would be divided among regions through a competitive process.
There is little doubt Californians are facing a drier future with more unpredictable rain events in the long term due to climate change. But will the bond provide the clean, safe drinking water to California’s homes, businesses and farms that it promises?
Already the state’s reservoirs do not receive enough inflow and are at historic lows. Building more reservoir capacity does nothing to augment the amount of precipitation available to fill them. Additional reservoir capacity risks simply to remain empty, at great taxpayer cost.
The Peripheral Canal proposal – an approach that has been proposed several times since the late 1970s to divert more water into the State Water Project, remains highly controversial due to its potential environmental impacts on the Delta ecosystem. The Delta ecosystem has been entirely reshaped by human levee building, and is now an extremely fragile throughway for Sacramento River water to the San Francisco Bay and for the State Water Project. Pumps and water management through the Delta have resulted in the crash of the Delta smelt populations and the Chinook salmon.
Many experts concur that the best strategy to maintain water deliveries to Southern California, and to southern San Joaquin agriculture, is to build the Peripheral Canal. The Delta itself is in jeopardy from sea level rise and potential earthquakes. The Canal would also be vulnerable to an earthquake. Others, however, point out that perhaps the wisest strategy of all, over the long term, would be to first invest in aggressive conservation measures – urban and agricultural – and groundwater management, leaving more water in the Delta to ensure needed environmental services, including serving to buffer against the intrusion of sea water.
Clearly the future of water in California presents serious challenges. There are many unknowns about the impacts of climate change, and population growth. Higher prices for energy will also affect water use since moving water in California requires a great deal of electricity. It also raises policy decisions about agriculture in the state, its size and crop mix. Can we afford to continue to use nearly 80% of the state’s water on growing food? Can we afford to assume we can import the food we no longer would grow if we decide agricultural water use is no longer a priority? And can we continue to use water in urban areas as though we lived in a climate where grass grows naturally? Building our way out of aridity seems an expensive proposition, especially when we have not genuinely engaged in public dialogue about the options. As Hannah Arendt so wisely suggests in her 1958 The Human Condition, we should think what we are doing. Already the unintended consequences of our actions have created a crisis of water supply; greater intelligence now needs to be applied toward a vision of the future for the state.
Date Posted: 8/18/2008