Southern California Losing Water Wars One Drop at a Time

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By Wayne Lusvardi and Charles B. Warren

What are the political prospects that the current “Perfect Political Drought” in California might end?

Like the term “Perfect Storm,” “Perfect Drought” means the confluence of the present periodic natural drought, the court injunction stopping water shipments to Southern California due to the disappearance of the Delta Smelt fish in the Sacramento Delta, and the protracted impasse of the state Legislature over funding for the Peripheral Canal to route water around the delta.

The phrase “demography is destiny” means that as a rise or fall in birth or immigration rates works itself out, over the decades it affects everything in a society. But in California it is more like the hydrological cycle is destiny.

In 1982, voters defeated a ballot initiative to build the much ballyhooed Peripheral Canal to route water around the periphery of the Sacramento Delta to Southern California. Ever since then, the words “Peripheral Canal” have been called the “third rail” in water politics. Any public official who dares to touch the subject would suffer politically, just as touching the third rail on a train track means electrocution.

When you talk about the Peripheral Canal, farmers talk about a regulatory taking of their water rights and the value of their farmland. In the state Senate each county is represented. So Butte can defend its farmers equally as well as Los Angeles can defend its swimming pools.

Under a court order to protect the tiny Delta Smelt fish, which have purportedly vanished due to the huge pumps on the California Aqueduct, environmentalists have been successful in shutting down water flows to Southern California and putting a kibosh on the Peripheral Canal project. The Delta Smelt, like the Three Spine Stickleback fish, could have gone into hiding to protect themselves. The improvement of water quality in the delta helps smelt eaters, too. This possibility seems to have escaped environmentalists.

The population of California was nearly 25 million in 1982 when the Peripheral Canal was shot down by the voters. Today, California’s population tops 38 million and is growing. But the water resource and infrastructure system in place today is essentially the same as it was in the 1960s, when the population was hovering around 15 million people. Hence, demography is not necessarily destiny when it comes to California’s water system.


Slow-moving current

A north-south water conveyance system was first proposed in California as early as 1919. By 1931, a “State Water Plan” took nine years and $1 million to prepare. Sound familiar?

The State Water Plan was finally adopted in 1933 with the passage of the Central Valley Act and a subsequent $170 million bond approved by the voters. But revenue bonds in the Great Depression were unmarketable so the federal government took over the project in 1935.

After WWII, California experienced a second “Gold Rush” of population growth as people flocked to California for new jobs and its attractive climate. The call came for the construction of the State Water Project (SWP), the largest water project in the world. However, both Northern and Southern California initially opposed it.

What ended the impasse was the Big Flood of 1955, which broke through levees in Northern and Central California, resulting in 67 deaths and $200 million in property damage. Afterwards a $25 million emergency appropriation was passed in 1957 to begin construction of Oroville Dam. Southern California apparently said to Northern California, “If you want your levees fixed, then send us some water.”

Subsequently, the Burns-Porter Act (aka “Proposition One”), officially known as the California Water Resources Development Bond Act, was placed on the November 1960 ballot and was narrowly approved by a 3 percent margin of the state ballots counted.

The lesson we can derive from history of the California water wars today is that it is highly unlikely that there will be any political movement to resolve “The Perfect Drought” unless there is a catastrophic event, like the levees in the Sacramento Delta breaking due to a deluge of rainfall; or perhaps a near-8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, like the recent one in China, resulting in a breach of the levees around the delta.

Northern California has apparently sent the southern half of the state a message reminiscent of Marie Antoinette: “Let them drink effluent water or Perrier” before any more Northern California water is sent southward. Predictably, Southern California water agencies have recently proposed, for the first time, to use recycled sewer water for drinking water.

The Italian political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli once famously wrote that political fortune was like the vagaries of a violent flooded river that ruins buildings and trees. And Southern California’s water fortunes may be dependent on an unpredictable catastrophic event. Though we cannot control political fortunes, good rulers must be patient and prepare for it for water wars are long wars of attrition and to the patient and the relentless go the spoils of victory.


Wayne Lusvardi was formerly with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. He lives in Pasadena. Charles B. Warren is a real estate appraiser in San Francisco specializing in water-related properties.

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