Schrag: California Water Policy, Dams, and the Delta More Important than the State Budget

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

But Schwarzenegger Traveling Around State On Has Only Made Bare Beginning on Water Policy

By Peter Schrag

Last week, while Senate Republicans thumbed their noses at their governor and vetoed his budget, he was showing-and-telling new projects for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the 738,000-acre region of sloughs, wetlands and farms that many Californians don't know exists.

But of the two, the latter, with its thorny tangle of related water issues is easily the more crucial to the state's future.

Delta restoration work that the governor came to Twitchell Island to announce will be a bare start on a set of problems -- shaky levees, endangered wildlife habitat, subsiding land, rising sea levels -- that affect not only the Delta, but much of California's water supply as well. The Delta is the hub of California's water system.

Given the fragile state of the region, the governor's attention is both welcome and long overdue. It's also encouraging that the administration, in the words of Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, D-Davis, is now "engaged" in her effort to link flood risks to land-use planning in floodplains and to devolve some responsibility for flood damage to the local entities that authorize development there.

Yet even recognizing, as Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow does, that the listed projects -- restoring habitat, working on emergency plans in case of earthquake or floods, checking land subsidence -- are just a beginning, the governor's program does nothing to change the basic assumptions on which the state's water policies and planning have long been based.

The key assumption is that there's a direct relationship between growth of the population, a growing economy and increasing demand for water. But as Peter Gleick of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute points out, between 1975 and 2001, as California's population increased by 60 percent and the state's gross product rose 250 percent, total water consumption went down.