Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson    Red Bluff Daily News   3/31/2015

          Fighting over water supplies

With great fanfare, as reported in the Daily News, March 28, our Guv’ner “Brown signs $1B water plan” dedicated to “infrastructure spending amid the worst drought in a generation, although much of the plan was drawn with future dry years in mind.” (AP) Just to briefly summarize the areas of funding: In this initial installment of the multi-billion dollar bond passed by voters last November, we are told that the first and, apparently, highest priorities for the monies are “aid to residents hurt by the drought” while “the vast majority is expedited spending on water infrastructure.”

Let’s just back up and describe the situation a bit more accurately. Nature has delivered California several “dry,” “very dry” or even “exceptionally dry” years. California and the Western region are prone to extreme variations in precipitation. The native flora, fauna and indigenous people adapted, migrated and engaged in limited existences based on what could be sustained over the years and centuries of natural variation. Before European migration, activities and settlements arrived, water and fire were the forces that maintained balanced ecosystems that plant life, as well as animals, simply lived (or died) with.

The species that survived up to and through the recent past did so without environmental regulations, the EPA, CEQA (environmental quality rules), and in spite of years, even decades, of dry conditions. Did some plants and animals go extinct? Well, not the ones that survived—that may sound trite but it illustrates that nature is far more resilient than we give it credit for. Native tribes moved during winter months in nomadic fashion from mountains and foothills to lower, more hospitable climes. They set fires to create meadows and an abundance of edible foliage to entice, even guarantee, deer populations a menu to thrive on until finding their way onto the aboriginal menu.

These same tribes were well aware of the tendency for floods great and small in the flat valleys in winter, even informing the Sutters and others that they were foolishly building what is now Old Sacramento below flood level. The basements of those buildings are testament to the ingenuity, determination and, yes, foolhardiness of the gold miners and business builders of that time. European-Americans used those same qualities to raise the street grade level and build what would have been the second floors for those occasionally flooded structures; that testifies to the intelligence and abilities of the soon-to-be-predominant migrants from the east.

Environmental and cultural foolishness, let alone abominable mistreatment aside, the spirit of the newer inhabitants forged ahead into the 20^th century. It is an objectively praiseworthy thing of technological, engineering and creative wonder that the most precious, often scarce but essential element for humans to thrive in abundance—water—has been marshaled, directed and saved from uselessly (for the most part) flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

So, in mid-century California’s leaders saw no serious or intelligent impediment to building dams to capture runoff in winter, for the inherently laudable purpose of serving the water needs of a growing residential and agricultural state. However, beginning in about the 1970s, an absolutist environmental movement worked its way into public policy planning with the result that water infrastructure became incomprehensibly discouraged, postponed and often stopped cold. In the greens’ quasi-religious fervor, reasonable human needs took a back seat to poorly thought-out and marginally reasoned substitutes: water conservation for critters and, for the most agriculturally productive land on the planet, rationing and cutoffs.

Hence, a hardly unprecedented series of dry years—snow surveys from Donner Pass going back to the late 1800s show similar minimal snow pack conditions in the 1880s, 1930s and 1970s—have now demonstrated the paucity of foresight and commitment to human water needs. To the extent that these dry winters constitute a “drought” (no rivers or streams are yet drying up), it is a human-manufactured “drought.” Sites Reservoir has been known about, planned and capable of construction for decades for a fraction of the money it will now require; same goes for at least one other reservoir location. Delta smelt are a completely manufactured crisis that should never have become a cause or pretext for depriving farmers of water for crops and orchards.

Drought relief payments to those suffering in economic deprivation are, therefore, simply guilt money that acknowledges reality: people have created ludicrous policies that are killing large parts of the agricultural sector. Paying for “flood control” as part of “drought relief” is simply an asinine shifting of money voted for the purpose of water storage toward pet projects.

Senator Jim Nielsen nailed it: “the plan provides no oversight or accountability to ensure that the moneys would be spent as they were intended…The drought is being exploited to give sweeping and punitive powers to the Department of Fish and Wildlife to impose fines of up to $8,000 per day, per violation…(and) creates a new government entity—the Office of Sustainable Water Solution—without identifying the size, scope or funding source.” Jim favored the water bond because he had worked admirably to put ironclad commitments to increasing storage; I expressed doubt that Democrats and their enviro constituencies could be held to those commitments. We are now seeing the anything-but-more-dams crowd predictably shift money and priorities to what they do best: hand out money to those hardest hit by anti-human agriculture policy; and fund favored, but largely irrelevant “flood control” and conservation projects.

           Solution: For a fraction of High Speed Rail cost, sewer water could be recycled for yards, crops and pools; desalination plants could be placed around coastal cities for drinking water.