[Sosfbay-discuss] Water Wars Continue

[Wes Rolley]

Op Ed submitted to the Morgan Hill Times yesterday for publication 
(Hopefully on Friday).

__

Some of us have been writing about water for years. Get used to reading 
it because you are going to be inundated with ever more stories, opinion 
pieces, etc. between now and early next year.

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) published a report on 
the California Delta that supplies water for more that 60% of 
California's residents and a great deal of the Central Valley 
agriculture. This report has, during the past week, been covered to some 
extent on every major news outlet in the State The PPIC places all of 
our hopes for a reliable water supply on the construction of a 
peripheral canal routing water around the delta, changing the nature of 
that resource forever and doing it in a manner from which it can not 
recover.

In the same week, we had Gov. Schwarzenegger and Sen.Feinstein calling 
for the state legislature to deal with a $9.3 billion bond proposal to 
build new reservoirs and other water conservation projects. This, even 
though the PPIC has a negative opinion on the usefulness of new dams. 
The PPIC's report seems incomplete. The data backing up their 
conclusions was in appendices which will not be made public until later 
in the summer. I am told, that the Schwarzenegger pushed to have the 
report out before it was ready. The story is being scripted.

Every political publication has a back story that makes you want to 
doubt the motives of the authors. Besides Schwarzenegger's meddling, the 
PPIC Report was funded, in part, by Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., co-owner of 
Bechtel Corp., one of the largest players in the businesses of water 
system construction and water privatization.

The fact that one of the funders has a vested interest in the outcome of 
this study is enough to make me begin to question how it was 
constructed. It is always possible to control the answer to problem by 
the way you structure it's definition. It would be refreshing to hear 
Bechtel say that they will refrain from bidding on any water project, 
but I am not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Bechtel's history in water projects is one where they use political 
power and then seek to overturn common sense in their pursuit of 
profits. For example, with one World Bank project in Bolivia, Bechtel 
claimed that they had the right to charge farmers for the water that 
fell as rain on their property since that was water that Bechtel could 
have sold to the cities.

This is going to be much more complicated than just being an attempt to 
grab new water supplies for Southern California, even though the 
Metropolitan Water District has said that they are willing to pay. The 
same could be said for the farmers of the Central Valley, except that 
they are never willing to pay and get by now on heavily subsidized water.

The fact is that the world is running out of fresh water and the fight 
to control it has begun. Major corporations, like Bechtel, are in the 
middle of it all. There is a history of major water vendors to take over 
the operation of a system, for example as Bechtel did in Guayaquil, 
Ecuador. They then protect their profits by not investing in needed 
upgrades or even maintenance. In the case of the Bechtel contract in 
Guayaquil the system broke down, the water was contaminated and the 
citizens finally threw them out.

We have similar water privatization problems in California.. OMI-Thames 
is a major European water corporation who took over the operation on the 
Stockton Municipal Water system in 2003. The contract with the City of 
Stockton was later judged to have been illegal. Even so, the same 
patterns of non-performance were in evidence in Stockton, just not on 
the scale of Bechtel's Ecuadorian fiasco.

As for ourselves, a $6.8 billion bond issue effort was sponsored by 
State Senator Don Perata. It failed to make the ballot in Nov. There are 
now five separate, but similar, bond issue proposals listed on the 
Secretary of State's web site, all of which would spend 30% of the money 
for new dams but asking for $11.6 billion.

The PPIC was right in that we don't know what we are doing but, in the 
rush to fix the problem and get re-elected, our politicians are going to 
fall back on simplistic solutions for complicated problems. A common 
view is that water needs to be stored behind dams for use later. . Well, 
California has hundreds of dams and they are not full this year, or most 
years. So, I am not sure what we gain by building new ones.

We are told that we have to rebuild the delta's levees. The PPIC report 
indicated that there are some islands in the delta that are not 
sustainable and should be abandoned. This may mean that State will have 
to buy up as much as 100,000 acres of farm land, allowing the levees to 
fail and the land to return to its original state. Of course, these 
costs were not included in any of the bond measures nor, as far as I can 
tell, in the cost projections furnished by the PPIC..

We will end up with multiple solutions. It will involve conservation, 
recycling, desalinization and levee maintenance not only for now, but 
for sea levels pushed higher as the result of global warming. One way or 
another, as taxpayers or as rate payers, we will end up footing a very 
large bill. I only hope that common sense will prevail because the 
prospect of continued political stalemate on this issue means financial 
disaster for California. I don't trust those whose current governance of 
California's water to come up with the right answers.



-- 
"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" Roberto Clemente

Wes Rolley
17211 Quail Court, Morgan Hill, CA 95037
http://www.refpub.com/ -- Tel: 408.778.3024

-- 
"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" Roberto Clemente

Wes Rolley
17211 Quail Court, Morgan Hill, CA 95037
http://www.refpub.com/ -- Tel: 408.778.3024