[env-trinity] Red Bluff Daily News - Op-Ed and Letter in Response

[Byron]

 Red Bluff Daily News - May 2, 2005

Too much water under the bridge for Northern Californians

By DOUG LaMALFA-Special to the DN

What a thirsty California needs now is storage, more storage

It's spring. Our hillsides are green. After a year of record rains in
Southern California, the desert has bloomed. And, once again, in the North
State, precious water is rushing under our bridges and out to the sea, lost
forever. Why?

We all try to put away some money for a "rainy day." Then why don't we store
more of this year's precipitation for the dry days that are sure to come?
The answer is as simple as it is outrageous: Self-appointed "protectors of
the environment," aided and abetted by liberal allies in the bureaucracy and
Legislature, have managed to put their own peculiar obsessions ahead of the
needs of the people of California.

The simple facts of water life in California are these. We have dry years
and wet years, but over the long haul, a plentiful supply of rain and snow
falls on our state. The problem isn't a natural shortage of precipitation
it's a manmade shortage of water storage.

Earlier generations of Californians understood those facts well. For over a
century, they built dams and reservoirs not only to store water but to
control floods and create clean, renewable hydroelectric energy. Their
foresight turned California into the nation's number one agricultural state
and helped it become the most populous state in our nation. Without our
remarkable manmade water system, California would never have grown and
prospered so.

In the last four decades, however, as environmental radicals have waged a
relentless propaganda campaign, many in California have lost sight of those
realities. Since the Oroville Dam was completed in 1967,
California's population has doubled. In the same period, these extremists
fought every effort to increase water storage in the North State, even
though we are the source of most of the state's water supply.

If that isn't bad enough, the people who for decades have stopped us from
building new dams are now lobbying to blow them up. First they went after a
few small ones, here and there. Now they are targeting O'Shaughnessy Dam at
Hetch Hetchy, a 360,000-acre foot reservoir that has provided water to
San Francisco for nearly a century. Without its water supply, the Bay Area
would never have grown and prospered.

Now environmental extremists are telling us San Francisco doesn't really
need Hetch Hetchy. Ironically, the groups who so vigorously oppose all other
water plans are proposing an elaborate engineering project to
replace Hetch Hetchy. It's an interesting but hard-to-believe role reversal.

The plan seems more like a shell game. Here's how it works. One group of
environmentalists, calling themselves "Restore Hetch Hetchy," wants to
restore the valley that was flooded to create the reservoir. In exchange, it
proposes, among other things, a new pipe from the Sierra to supply water to
the Bay Area. At the same time, however, another environmental organization,
American Rivers, opposes the pipe, saying it would harm the Tuolumne River.

Which group do you believe? Neither one, as far as I'm concerned.

In Yolo County, Friends of the River is also pushing a bill in the
legislature that would slap a "wild and scenic" label on 31 miles of Cache
Creek. In the name of protecting natural resources, this bill could very
well threaten human lives and property by making it difficult to provide
flood protection for the growing Woodland area. Of course, that makes no
difference to extremists more concerned with the fate of delta smelt,
kangaroo rats and their next fund-raising letter, than people.

It's a gloomy picture but a ray of sunshine is breaking through. It comes
from, of all places, San Francisco. The leaders of that ultra-liberal city
are beginning to feel pinch. They don't like it. Environmentalists be
damned, they say, as they launch an all-out battle to keep Hetch Hetchy.

We in the North State have known this truth for a long time. For once, San
Francisco has gotten it right. Now, all Californians must recognize the need
for more water storage that will serve our state for generations to come.

Assemblyman Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, represents Tehama County.

 


Dear Editor,

I could not disagree more with the op-ed piece about the value of dams that
you printed recently from Assemblyman Doug LaMalfa.  Underlying the
gratuitous partisan attacks on environmentalists in the Assemblyman's piece
was a very important substantive misconception-that California needs more
surface water storage.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

The old, out-dated, destructive paradigm that all water shortages are solved
with ever more expensive dams has been debunked thoroughly by science and
practical money management.  Contrary to what Assemblyman LaMalfa would have
you believe, dinosaur dams have been eliminated by cost more often recently
than by environmental opposition.  

 

No one, particularly farmers, can afford to pay the huge costs of building
dams in the marginal places where new dams are proposed to be located.  No
one, other than Uncle Sucker, or badly led state taxpayers, would be willing
to pay $300 per acre foot (Sites Reservoir) or $1000 an acre foot (expanded
Los Vaqueros) for water that would only be available on occasion.



 

As for the proposed Shasta raise, how will pouring additional concrete make
it rain more?  Shasta's problem is that it is not full often enough,
something like one year in 8 over the last 30 years.  Assemblyman LaMalfa
should know that there is plenty of water available for Sacramento Valley
farming today and far into the future if more cheap North State water is not
"re-sold" to continue the present outrageous waste of water in Southern
California and in industrial agriculture on the westside of the San Joaquin
valley.  

 

What is the motivation for a Northern California politician to be blaming
environmentalists for opposing additional financial and environmental waste
on new dams when there are financially sound water solutions readily
available for Southern California-recycling, reuse of the approximately 2
million ac/ft pumped into the sea in Southern California each year, capture
of more of the 1.2 million ac/ft of stormwater run-off
that rushes uninterrupted into the sea in Southern California in an average
year, de-salination of polluted groundwater, and retirement of contaminated
farmland on the westside of the San Joaquin valley?  These cost effective
measures should be fully utilized before the politicians fleece the
taxpayers to pay for marginal dams that no water user in Northern California
would or could afford on their own for local use.



 

If Southern California water users need water they should look to their own
resources first, not Northern California rivers and groundwater basins.
They presently use 60% of their water on outside water uses while living in
a desert.  They only drink one per cent of their water.  They live within a
few miles of the largest water source on the planet, the Pacific Ocean.
They don't need more North state water, except that it's very cheap and some
of our politicians aren't very good at protecting it.

Michael Jackson,

Quincy, California





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