Calif. water politics complicate Brown’s decisions

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As California struggles to cope with its historic drought, Gov. Jerry Brown is facing increasing pressure to tackle longstanding problems in the state’s water storage and delivery systems at a time when the politics of the issue have never been more tangled.

For Brown, the drought presents both opportunity and risk for a governor facing re- election who also was in office during California’s last major drought in the mid- 1970s.

It comes as he is pitching a costly and contentious proposal to drill two 35- mile- long, freewaysize water tunnels beneath the Northern California delta, a project that will cost at least $ 25 billion and is opposed by environmentalists who say it will all but destroy the imperiled estuary and has divided the agricultural community.

Few things are more politically divisive in California than water. Who gets it, who pays for it, where and how it is captured and transported have proven to be political minefields for California governors for nearly a century.

The state’s current crisis has gained national attention through pictures of reservoirs turned to mudflats, rivers slowed to a trickle and farmers ripping out orchards and fallowing their fields. The two Republicans in the race to contest Brown’s expected re- election campaign are intensifying their criticism and say his administration has not done enough to improve California’s water supply or help the hardest hit communities.

Yet policymakers, water agencies, farmers and worried local government officials hope the crisis will produce enough urgency to yield a rare political compromise. Brown told reporters in Tulare last week that “if anybody can get it done, I can get it done.”

Now may be the time, said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

If the motivation has arrived, so have the politics. Last month, the Brown administration announced that for the first time it will deny any water allocations to thousands of Central Valley farmers and communities.

In explaining the severity of the situation, Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, urged people “to take a deep breath, put down the arguments we’ve all had in the past and come together as Californians.”

Republicans in Congress last month pushed through legislation to override federal limits on pumping water from the delta and stop efforts to restore the San Joaquin River, which Rep. David Valadao, R- Hanford, said was a “commitment to putting California families over fish.”

Brown called the legislation an “unwelcome and divisive intrusion” that would “re- open old water wounds.” It is not expected to clear the Democraticcontrolled U. S. Senate, but it did prompt Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, Democrats from California, to respond with a proposed $ 300 million drought- relief package.

Already divisive is the governor’s plan to build twin tunnels, a 10- to 15- year project that is intended to make it easier to pump water from the Sacramento River to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities.

Environmentalists say the project would suck more water from the already fragile delta, the hub of the state’s water- delivery system. Critics say it would further harm the delta’s fisheries, increase costs for water users and devastate the agricultural economy by lowering river levels and allowing salt water from the San Francisco Bay to invade.

Central Valley farmers who would benefit from the tunnels share blame for the current water crisis by planting lucrative but water- sucking crops such as almonds, pistachios and citrus that require year- round irrigation, said Barbara Barrigan- Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, which is fighting the tunnel plan.

Voters statewide rejected a similar water conveyance plan, the so- called peripheral canal, during Brown’s first stint as governor in 1982.

Brown’s water challenges also come against the backdrop of history, specifically his father’s tenure as governor in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then- Gov. Pat Brown reached a water deal in 1959, persuading lawmakers and voters to back the State Water Project, an extensive system of reservoirs and canals that was considered an engineering marvel in its day.

It now supplies 25 million people and farms that produce half the nation’s fruit and vegetables.

But that system was created for a state with a population half of the current 38 million, and the state has not built a major reservoir in Northern California since 1968.