Hiltzik: Water initiative is a budget grab by Big Ag
Whoever coined the phrase “Whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting” didn’t have things quite right.
In California, water is for scamming. The newest example is a majestically cynical ploy being foisted on taxpayers by some of the state’s premier water hogs, in the guise of a proposed ballot measure titled the “Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022" — or, as its promoters call it, the More Water Now initiative.
The measure’s backers need to gather nearly 1 million signatures to place the measure on the November 2022 ballot. That process has just begun, and its outcome is uncertain.
But the initiative is so costly and dishonest that it’s wise to nip it in the bud now.
The measure could wreak permanent damage to the state budget and force taxpayers to pay for ecologically destructive and grossly uneconomical dams, reservoirs and desalination plants.
It would also undermine the authority of state judges and environmental regulators and gift growers and dairy ranchers with millions of acre-feet of effectively free water.
The initiative’s proponents say it’s needed to provide “clean, safe drinking water for homes and businesses, water for agricultural use, and treatment, purification, and reclamation of storm water and wastewater, while maintaining protection for the environment.”
“It’s really a bait-and-switch,” says Doug Obegi, the California water expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It significantly undermines environmental protections for fish and wildlife,” Obegi told me, “and raids the state’s general fund to subsidize new water projects that would predominantly benefit industrial agriculture in the Central Valley.”
Here’s the background.
There’s no disputing that the state faces a multifaceted water crisis. The problem is partially bequeathed us by reality: Our natural sources of water — rivers, groundwater and rainfall — are all oversubscribed as a result of population growth and increased demand from industrial and agricultural users.
The problem also stems from policy, or to be precise, a failure of policy. California has never found a way to balance the competing demands of urban residents, growers and ranchers and the environment to ensure that all have equitable access to clean and reliable water.
The agriculture industry is the epicenter of the problem: It consumes 80% of the water used every year in California by homes and businesses.
Since 1990, the volume of water used by farmers and ranchers has remained flat while the value of agricultural production has soared. But the sector has the potential to reduce usage by as much as 22% through more efficient usage without affecting productivity, according to the Pacific Institute.
Urban use, meanwhile, has plummeted, although residential users have pared back their conservation efforts in recent years. From 1990 through 2015, urban usage fell by almost 40% despite population growth.
The relentless funneling of water to California agricultural users may help feed the country — and the world — but it has left the environment parched.
Releases of water for irrigation from Shasta Dam in the far north of the state raised the temperature of water in the Sacramento River and effectively cooked salmon eggs and fry to the point that the salmon fishery is facing a loss of 90% of the fish population this year, according to Barry Nelson, a consultant to the fishing industry.
Other Northern California water courses have been exploited to the limit. That has helped make California “a global hot spot for fish extinction,” Nelson says.
The question is not whether there is a crisis, but what to do about it. The preferred solution of agricultural water users in the Central Valley, the state’s breadbasket, has been to build more dams and larger reservoirs.
That brings us to the More Water Now initiative.
The measure aims to fund a wide range of water projects — underground storage; storm water and wastewater recycling; expansion of existing reservoirs and construction of new ones, including through construction or raising of dams; desalination plants; and pipelines.
But it’s really aimed at capital-intensive public works. That said, it requires nothing in the way of cost-benefit analyses of the sort that have helped to quash several extremely wasteful and overly costly projects such as the Temperance Flat dam in the Central Valley. Conservation, which is really the key to sustaining California in the modern drought era, would get short shrift.
“This proposed initiative is a desperate throwback to the idea that there is still more water that can be extracted from California’s already massively overtapped rivers and aquifers, and that the way to do it is with old, damaging 20th century infrastructure of dams, diversions and expensive centralized systems,” says Peter Gleick, one of the state’s leading experts on water.