Cadillac Desert (66 page)

Besides, what if the legislature, dominated by southern California and the agricultural lobby, decided to overrule the Delta outflow guarantees? And what if it decided to dam the North Coast rivers? With the canal in place—it was, after all, to be four hundred feet wide, and would be capable of containing most of the Sacramento River—the water could finally be moved. The Glenn Reservoir site, curiously, was at the receiving end of the proposed Grindstone Tunnel, which was to have carried water from Dos Rios Reservoir through the Coast Range. The Peripheral Canal, according to Graff, was a “loaded gun pointed at the North Coast.”

Brown’s answer to that, in 1981, was yet another set of environmental guarantees. When his first canal legislation failed to pass the legislature, he supported a new package known as Senate Bill 200, which included an amendment to the state constitution keeping the North Coast rivers wild and scenic forever—which meant no dams. All of the larger ones had had such designation since 1972, but it was state, not federal, protection, and the legislature could annul it at will. Brown’s constitutional amendment would have made it impossible to develop the Eel and the other rivers unless the state’s voters, by a two-thirds majority, decided at some point to repeal it.

Jerry Brown was quite sure his proposal would mollify the environmentalists, but it had a totally different result. Until then, feeling about the Peripheral Canal—a term that became shorthand for everything else in the plan—had sloughed along traditional lines: northern Californians were mostly against it, the valley and the South Coast were mostly for it. But his decision to include constitutional protection for the North Coast rivers in S.B. 200 created a stranger alliance than Brown and the growers. It was, in the minds of some, the oddest alliance since the Hitler-Stalin Pact. All of a sudden, two of the mightiest, wealthiest growers in California were on the side of Friends of the Earth.

The two retrograde growers were the J. G. Boswell Corporation and the Salyer Land Company, which had long dominated affairs at the valley’s southern end. Salyer and Boswell were two of the main beneficiaries of the Corp of Engineers’ Kings River and Kern River dams, which gave them year-round irrigation water that was nearly free and tens of thousands of new acres in the old bed of Tulare Lake. They had figured prominently in the Feather River Project Association, which helped get the State Water Project authorized in the first place. In 1980, Boswell owned 206,021 acres in California, plus hundreds of thousands of acres elsewhere; it was the biggest grower in the state. Salyer’s holdings were smaller, about 77,000 acres, more than the five boroughs of New York. In one year, Boswell’s private political action committee, or PAC, ranked among the top ten in the nation in the amount of money it showered around. For all their power and money, however, Boswell and Salyer had a problem. They were located in the part of the valley with the severest groundwater overdraft. Someday, if pumping wasn’t to become prohibitively expensive, more surface water would have to be brought in—a lot more water, since the valley’s groundwater overdraft was projected to surpass the yield of the State Water Project by 1999. Boswell and Salyer felt there was only one place it could come from—the Middle Fork of the Eel. The idea of making the North Coast rivers wild and scenic seemed like a prescription for their economic demise; they were also incensed, as a Salyer spokesman put it, that “the Delta fish come before we do”—an allusion to the minimum Delta outflow guarantees in S.B. 200.

By the end of 1981, to everyone’s amazement, Boswell and Salyer had poured $406,000 into the campaign against the Peripheral Canal, outspending the thirty-three largest contributors on the pro-canal side—who included Shell Oil, Getty Oil, Southern California Edison, Lockheed, the Fluor Corporation, and Walt Disney Enterprises—by $73,689.. It helped, but not enough. Later that year, the legislature passed S.B. 200, subject to ratification by the voters in a special election to be held in June of 1982. The planning meetings among the canal’s opponents, as they prepared for the referendum, must have been something to behold. Environmentalists and northern Californians were there because they thought S.B. 200 was too weak. Boswell and Salyer were there because they thought it was too strong. Delta interests didn’t much care one way or the other; they just wanted to keep getting their irrigation water free. (As water on the way to the federal and state aqueducts flows between their levees, they simply slurp it out; they would have to pay to get it out of the canal.) After a series of ferocious catfights, the strategy that the canal opponents and Russo-Watts, the public relations firm handpicked by Salyer and Boswell, agreed on was to hammer away at the cost.

It wasn’t a bad idea. The votes the canal would need were in southern California, and those voters would be saddled with most of the cost. About 70 percent of the original works of the State Water Project were being financed by the Metropolitan Water District’s customers. Actually, they paid for the project twice: through daily water rates, and through an assessment of twelve cents on every $1,000 of property value in the service area, which they paid whether they got water or not. (The city of Los Angeles still got 93 percent of its water from the Owens Valley and Mono Basin, but paid the assessment like everyone else because it was subsumed under the MWD.) Using simple arithmetic, one could divide the number of Metropolitan customers into the $11.6 billion that Phase Two was supposed to cost, multiply that by .70 and come up with a figure of $3,000. That was the average cost of S.B. 200 to each household in southern California. If one added the $12 billion in interest that would have to be paid on the bonds, the figure doubled. As if that weren’t bad enough, the California Energy Commission was predicting that energy, in the year 2000, would cost thirty-three cents per kilowatt-hour, which was six times what it cost in 1981. At those rates, it would cost at least $50 just to pump one average family’s share over the Tehachapis. And that share was only a fraction of the family’s
annual use,
because the MWD’s full entitlement to State Project water amounted to less than a third of all the water used in southern California. People would also be paying for water pumped sixteen hundred vertical feet from the Colorado River; they would be paying for water pumped from the ground. If one added it all together, the cost of water in southern California would be ...

The estimates varied about as wildly as estimates can. State Senator Reuben Ayala, the chief sponsor of the Peripheral Canal bill, said it would cost the average family only $5 extra per year. The Met said $50 per year. Dorothy Green, the leader of the opposition in southern California and the founder of an organization whose acronym had somehow been tortured into spelling WATER, was saying that a year’s worth of water would cost $1,400 in the year 2000 if the canal and everything else were buile. The public remained utterly confused by all of this, which, as far as both sides were concerned, was fine. The campaign could then be run on fear. Magazine spreads began appearing in southern California showing a child’s upturned tricycle at the edge of a dried-up reservoir. Northern California billboards were papered with huge letters (courtesy of Salyer and Boswell, who ended up spending $1 million on the campaign) that simply read, “It’s Just Too Expensive.” Everyone knew what “It” was, just as everyone knew what horrible fate the abandoned tricycle was supposed to represent. One leader of the stop-the-canal campaign, a businessman, talked off the record about how dirty a war over water in California can get:

“The business community in southern California has got the business community in northern California half out of its wits. Crown Zellerbach, the big San Francisco paper company, has been told it better not take an anticanal position if it wants to sell any more paper south of San Jose. They’ve stayed neutral. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is staying neutral, too, even though an informal plebiscite among its members showed 92 percent of them opposed to the Peripheral Canal. The chamber’s board of directors has refused to share those results with the membership.
We’re
going to have to tell them. The chairman of the board is opposed to the canal—he
hates
it—but he won’t say so in public. These guys are representing the interests of their own corporations, not of northern California, or even the Chamber of Commerce. They’re scared to death. It’s hard for us to raise any money, because contributions are identifiable and everyone is scared they’re going to be found out and blacklisted down south. It’s like a banana-republic election where the houses of the opposition candidates all catch fire.”

Nineteen seventy-six and 1977 were the third-driest and the driest years, respectively, in California history. Shasta Lake, the reservoir on which billions of dollars in farm income depend, was nearly dry, down to an eighth of its capacity; water rationing was imposed all over the state. But 1978, which looked as if it might herald the beginning of California’s end, was, to everyone’s surprise, a wet year; 1979 was even wetter. In 1980, Los Angeles was clobbered by a succession of subtropical Pacific storms that threatened to float it out to sea. By then, memories of the drought—which had panicked almost everyone in California, even environmentalists in Marin—were growing dimmer. 1981 was drier than normal, but not by much. 1982 marked the beginning of what climatologists called the “El Niño episode,” when parts of the state got three times their normal rainfall and relentless storms caused $1 billion worth of property damage. It would be excessive to say that a string of five rain-laden years determined the outcome of the vote on the Peripheral Canal, but it would probably be true. Had the referendum been held in October of 1977, when most of the state had barely seen rain in a year and a half, Californians might have voted for anything, even dragging icebergs down from the North Pole. Memories of the drought had grown faint, but memories of inflation hitting 15 percent in 1980 were strong. Houses that had cost $35,000 in 1974 were being snapped up for $200,000. The referendum on the Peripheral Canal carried southern California by two to one. But in counties around San Francisco it lost nine to one. When the final tally was in, the Peripheral Canal had gotten less than 40 percent of the vote. It was trounced.

As it turned out, however, the big San Joaquin growers would have plenty of water—miraculously cheap water—for a long, long time.

Twenty-two years earlier, after Californians had voted in favor of building the State Water Project, the Department of Water Resources began to circulate water sales contracts in the San Joaquin Valley. Few of the farmers were willing to sign. The irrigation water would be relatively unsubsidized—the main subsidy being the $25 million annual contribution from the Tidelands Oil Fund, which was called a “loan” even though virtually none of it has been repaid—and it would be expensive. The development cost would be around $20 per acre-foot, plus the price of delivery, so most irrigation water would cost anywhere from $25 to $45 per acre-foot. And that was actually a discount price, held low by cheap power rates and a drawn-out repayment schedule, so that the farmers could afford to build laterals, headgates, and all the other appurtenances they would need to shift from groundwater to surface irrigation, or from no irrigation to irrigation. Eventually, the cost would shoot up dramatically to recover the initial discount. Farther north and east in the valley, farmers were buying water from the Bureau of Reclamation for $2.50 to $3.50 an acre-foot. The most anyone paid for Bureau water was $7.50. In a lot of places you could still pump groundwater for $15 an acre-foot. How could the State Project’s customers compete? The difference between water at $3.50 an acre-foot and water at $30 an acre-foot—if you irrigated 320 acres and used four feet on your crops—was $33,920. That was more than the net income of a typical small farmer in a year.

There was, however, a way to make the water affordable. The phenomenal growth rate that California has sustained since the turn of the century was finally slowing down. (In 1969, for the first time ever, the state registered a net loss of a few thousand people.) The Metropolitan Water District wouldn’t need its full entitlement for a good while—that was common knowledge—and now it looked as if it could do without it for even longer than expected. But water projects do not make more water available in small increments. Once Oroville Dam was completed, an immense amount of water would suddenly be available. The system was likely to have a big surplus sloshing around in it for years. What was wrong with letting the growers have that water for the energy cost of delivery?

The growers made their case to Bill Warne and found him sympathetic. Naturally, he said, there ought to be some restrictions. The surplus water should go only to lands that overlie the aquifer (the extreme southern part of the San Joaquin has no usable groundwater at all). Otherwise it would bring a lot of land into production that would be stranded when the surplus deliveries ended, creating even more pressure for new water development. The water would have to be sold on an interruptible basis, from one year to the next, and it ought to irrigate only pasture or alfalfa, not permanent crops such as orchards. Otherwise, when the surplus ran out, the farmers, having invested a lot of money in trees, would begin pumping groundwater like crazy to protect their investment, and demand still more dams, and the vicious cycle the State Water Project was intended to stop would begin all over again.

If Warne was amenable to the idea, Joe Jensen, the thin-lipped, mercurial Mormon chairman of the Metropolitan Water District, was not. The growers, he told Warne, were self-interested, avaricious cut-throats who wanted a free ride on the Met’s customers. They—the urban users—would be paying capital and interest costs on each acre-foot developed, whether it was delivered to them or not. In fact, they would be paying higher development costs on the surplus water, without seeing a drop of it, than the growers would pay to have it delivered to them. Why, shouted Jensen, should
not
receiving water cost more than receiving water? The whole idea was an outrage. The Met, Jensen said, would never stand for it.