By Doug Curlee
California legislators have provided the state’s voters with the chance to decide whether the decision to pass a 7.5 billion dollar bond to repair California’s decrepit water system was a wise choice or not.
The bond issue will appear as Proposition 1 on the Nov. 4 general election ballot.
Legislators say they think the bond issue will pass, if for no other reason than the fact that the ongoing drought the state is embroiled in will make up their minds for them.
Although the state Senate passed the bill 37-0 and only two Assembly members voted against it, that does not mean there is unanimous support for all of the issues in that bond. There were compromises made all through the yearlong process that upset as many people as they made happy.
Three questions will dominate the debate as it moves toward Election Day:
Who’s in favor?
Most of what’s called the water bureaucracy in California is in favor of the bond issue’s passage. Most of the state’s water districts, including the San Diego County Water Authority, have come out in support of the measure. There is an umbrella organizations of those agencies, the Association of California Water Agencies, which will no doubt bring in public support of the measure. Since agencies like SDCWA are public agencies, they cannot contribute money or take active roles in the Yes on Proposition 1 campaign. This is not to say that individuals associated with the public agencies cannot take individual roles, including personal financial roles. They can, and many will.
Who’s against it?
No one is predicting a landslide victory, because there is still a lot of opposition to the measure in the north central and northern parts of the state. Longtime observers will recall that a north-south split was the major reason the proposed Peripheral Canal was defeated at the polls back in the 1980s.
In truth, much of that opposition is centered in the areas generally surrounding the old and fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is the hinge point for moving water from the north to the south. It’s hard to determine whether the opponents fear this bond issue and what it might bring, or whether their complaints are more aimed at Gov. Jerry Brown’s ambitious $25 billion plan to build two freeway-sized tunnels underneath the Delta, to make it easier to ship water from the Sacramento River south without damaging the Delta further. The bond issue apparently contains absolutely no mention of — and no money for — anything to do with the tunnels.
There is also opposition in the north and central coastal areas, where some water officials say storage facilities — dams and reservoirs — for them were left out completely. One new dam and reservoir, the Sites Dam, is slated for Northern California, near Colusa, and another at Temperance Flat, northeast of Fresno. They will account for $2.7 billion of the $7.5 billion called for in the ballot measure. That leaves almost $5 billion to be spent on a laundry list of other water-related projects to make the state’s water supply more stable and available in the future.
What’s in it for San Diego?
Quite a bit, actually, and very little of it for surface storage of water. San Diego County is in pretty good shape for dams and reservoir capacity. Having doubled the capacity of San Vicente, the dam at Olivenhain, Sweetwater Reservoir and other areas here, we have places to put water. We just need the water to put in those places.
We also have hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water through the deal with Imperial Irrigation District and the Carlsbad Desalination plant coming online next year.
The bond issue would provide money statewide for water recycling, including drinkable and non-drinkable water reclamation and purification. It would provide funding for integrated regional water management projects, including groundwater storage, recharging our depleted underground aquifers and the like.
A large number of water-related projects called for in the ballot measure would directly benefit our region, and San Diego will have a fair shot at a lot of that money. Our region will qualify for about 11 percent
of that $7.5 billion.
Bonus: Will all this happen quickly if the bond is passed come Nov. 4?
No.
Passage of the Proposition on Nov. 4 will not mean that people will start moving dirt and building dams the morning of Nov. 5.
It will be a tough slog setting up the various boards, commissions and entities that will eventually govern all of this spending, and it will be more involved — and political — than you’d like to believe.
That story next month.
—Contact Doug Curlee at [email protected].
