Will California's Proposition 1 give rise to more dams?
While some environmental groups support the water bond on Tuesday's ballot, some call it "mystery meat."
Proposition 1, the $7.5 billion water bond on the California ballot next Tuesday, could provide millions of dollars for projects everyone likes. It sets aside funds to strip pollutants from valuable urban aquifers; it will bring in money to repair aging pipes that leach pollutants into drinking water. And the Salton Sea and the Los Angeles River could get part of the $500 million the measure authorizes for restoring damaged ecosystems. A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California shows 58 percent of the state's voters will go for it.
So what about it makes many environmental groups so mad? The Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and San Francisco Baykeeper have all taken an explicit stand against Proposition 1, as has virtually every fisherman’s advocacy group in the state. The Sierra Club, though it officially opposed the legislative bill that produced the ballot measure, remains neutral in theory, but the group's position statement announcing neutrality also uses the word hate.
Proposition 1 never explicitly states that any of the $2.7 billion will fund dam projects, however, and not every environmental group worries quite so much. “The era of big dams is over,” pronounced Doug Obegi, staff attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, on the organization’s blog. “The water bond does not earmark funding for Temperance Flat or any other surface storage project.” Dams cost too much money to make sense anymore; even with taxpayer subsidies they “can’t compete economically with these regional and local water supply projects.”
Emphasizing that NRDC “strongly opposes” both Temperance Flat and a Shasta Dam raising, Obegi says the organization endorses Prop. 1.
Tu thinks that’s not only “optimistic,” but at odds with Gov. Jerry Brown’s oft-stated agenda. “Every time the Governor talks about the water crisis, he talks about building out water infrastructure projects that go back to the 1950s,” she says. “Those are projects that both state and federal legislatures have been pushing for many, many years.” They’re also projects that the state’s agricultural interests, which consume more than three-quarters of the state’s water, have lobbied hard for, along with a multibillion-dollar tunnel project that would suck water from the Sacramento River before it ever gets to the ailing California Delta. (Prop. 1 was written to be “tunnel neutral.”)
Adam Scow, California campaign director for Food and Water Watch, calls Prop. 1"a bunch of mystery meat," ominously geared toward finding more ways to deliver water to industrial agriculture. Even more alarming, he says, is that according to the provisions of the bill, the nine members of the California Water Commission have been tasked with allocating the meat. Those nine members have been appointed by "Big Agriculture's closest ally," Scow says. "A man named Jerry Brown."
Scow thinks Proposition 1’s other benefits recede in light of that fact. Aquifer cleanup, water for fish, habitat restoration and drinking water for disadvantaged communities are all good, he says, and even necessary. They just don’t have to be yoked to what he calls “a bloated bond deal,” written with industrial agriculture in mind.
“We do need to address the inequities in water rights we have in this state,” Scow says. “We just don’t need a bond deal to do it.”
Judith Lewis Mernit is a High Country News contributing editor. She tweets @judlew.
