Doug Curlee | Editor at Large

Now that California voters have comfortably approved a $7.2 billion bond issue to upgrade the antiquated California state water system, when will the money start to flow?

Not this year.

Not next year.

And, very likely, not the year after that.

What the bond measure did was promise that money would be available for water projects large and small.

What it did not do was set up any kind of mechanism for seeing to it that the money is distributed to those projects. That means the California Water Commission, an appointed nine-member board, has to begin working with California’s Department of Water Resources and the water quality control board to create a system to evaluate the avalanche of applications for that money.

The various entities will have plenty of time to do that, since the ballot measure specifically says that almost all of that money approved by the voters cannot be spent before December of 2016. That gives the agencies time to set up what may grow into a major new water bureaucracy governing water money.

There are laundry lists of environmental and political concerns that must be addressed before a dollar can be spent — many more than were in place for any previous water measures we’ve had in effect.

There will have to be numerous public hearings involved in virtually every process. Every “T” will have to be crossed, and every “I” dotted, before anything can happen.

Glenn Farrel, who oversees legislative matters in Sacramento for the San Diego County Water Authority, points out that there is a long way to go before we see much of anything.

“Things are in pretty much a holding pattern right now,” Ferrel said. “There is a lot of internal planning and work that has to be done. A lot of terms and conditions have to be created and approved before anything really public can happen, and right now, that internal process hasn’t really begun yet.”

Lester Snow of the California Water Foundation used to be the general manager of the county Water Authority, and followed that up with the leadership of the California Department of Water Resources. If there is a recognized expert on California’s water problems, it’s probably Lester Snow.

Snow says that the current bond, while critically important, should not be seen as the overall fix for our ongoing water troubles.

“I refer to [the bond issue] as a down payment on what needs to be done in California,” Snow told the Los Angeles Times. “It gets us started, but it would be a mistake to think that now that we’ve passed this bond, our worries are gone.”

Where all this goes in the next two years is problematical at best. Until the Water Commission can put together the various systems to handle the dispensing of bond issue proceeds, no one can really say exactly what will be done, and when.

All the talk so far has been about where to build at least two new dams, or even whether to build them. But that only accounts for $2.7 billion of the $7.2 billion bond amount. The majority of the money will be for such important things as groundwater purification, cleaning up polluted underground aquifers, recycling and conservation efforts and other less glamorous but essential steps. That will include some $52 million for San Diego, to begin with.

All of this is important to San Diego County, and it will become more so as time goes on.

But the bottom line here is simple, and we’ve alluded to it before.

We don’t need new dams here. We have places to put significant amounts of water. What we must have is water to put in those places.

No bond issue, and no amount of legislative action or voter approval, will provide that for us.