No legislative oversight on record-setting water bond
Proposition 3 would authorize the largest water bond in California history, $8.9 billion — with $8.4 billion in interest, it’s $17.3 billion. That’s $430 million annually for 40 years.
Prop. 3 is the product of a classic pay-to-play operation, wherein an initiative creator shops his draft proposal to interest groups, trolling for financial backing. Interests that donate to the cost of collecting voter signatures and the election campaign usually buy themselves a share of the initiative’s benefits. Pay to play in legislatures are old-fashioned pork barrel politics. A legislator demands a special carveout for his district in exchange for his vote.
In 2009, the California Legislature passed a $11.1 billion water bond so bloated with pork lawmakers were too embarrassed to even place it on the ballot.
Finally in 2014, the Legislature — motivated by a devastating drought — passed a relatively pork-free $7.5 billion water bond that voters overwhelmingly approved.
Last year, the Legislature passed another water bond — held down to $4.1 billion — and voters approved it in June.
Then Jerry Meral, a water expert, environmentalist and pay-to-play practitioner, devised Prop. 3. The campaign had raised $4.7 million as of Oct. 1. There’s been no opposition money.
Agriculture is a major bankroller along with bird hunters and watchers and the California Wildlife Foundation (the proposal includes wetland restoration). Environmentalists are split. The Nature Conservancy supports the measure.
The Sierra Club is opposed.
“A lot of the money is going to a few big farming interests in the Central Valley,” asserts Kathryn Phillips, the Sierra Club director in California.
A $750 million expenditure to repair the federally owned Friant-Kern and Madera canals between Fresno and Bakersfield is a sticking point.
First, critics say, the canals need repair because they’ve sunk due to farmers overpumping groundwater, causing major subsidence. Growers caused the problem. Now they want the whole state to solve it.
Historically, water projects are funded on the basis of beneficiary pay. Water users pay through their monthly bills. Prop. 3 would undo that policy for these two broken canals.
Second problem: The federal government owns the canals and should fix them — not the state.
“In the age of Trump, California taxpayers are going to fix a federal project? It’s just mind-boggling,” says Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, who wrote the cleaned-up $7.5 billion water bond in 2014 and strongly opposes Prop. 3.
Meral answers: “The federal government has been a little bit missing in action in California. It will be an unmitigated catastrophe if those canals aren’t fixed. We just can’t let them go. An agricultural water supply means we have a food supply.”
However, California growers export much of their produce overseas. Maybe the whole world should fund repairs if all Californians are expected to.
Prop. 3 includes many good things — money for purifying drinking water, flood protection, dam repairs, recycling, desalination and habitat restoration. But are these projects priorities? There seemed to be no prioritizing.
“It’s garbage — nothing but pet projects,” Rendon says.
State Senate leader Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, supports it, however.
“It will increase reliable water supply in my district and across the state,” Atkins said in an email to me.
One crucial flaw in the initiative is that the Legislature would have no say over the bond program’s operation. No legislative oversight. The money would be spent unchecked by state agencies.
Voters should resist Prop. 3. And the next Legislature should devise a more modest plan with oversight.