The 2014 water bond included a novel funding approach designed to take at least some of the politicking out of deciding which projects get public money. This week’s tortured deliberations by the California Water Commission showed just how tough it is to do that. By applying a complex procedure for grading proposals, the bond restricted state taxpayer spending to the pieces of a project that would provide measurable benefits to the public.
To the editor: Your editorial, “California is dammed enough already,” raises some important points about improving our water future. The state faces a chronic problem that will only get worse with climate change: depleted groundwater supplies. Groundwater is the lifeline communities and farmers turn to in drought. The good news is there’s an untapped solution under our feet called groundwater recharge, which is much cheaper than building new surface reservoirs, has few environmental hurdles and can be implemented relatively quickly. There’s also three times more water storage capacity underground than in all of California’s surface reservoirs combined.
The river is so foul that rumors swirl about two-headed turtles and three-eyed fish. If you fall in, locals joke, you might sprout a third arm. So go the stories about the New River, whose putrid green water runs like a primordial stew from Mexico’s sprawling city of Mexicali through California’s Imperial Valley. The river, with skull-and-crossbone signs warning about the danger it poses, reminds Calexico resident Carlos Fernandez of a scene in “The Simpsons Movie” where Homer Simpson disposes of pig feces by dumping them into a lake.
Environmental consequences aside, it would seem to make a certain amount of sense to dam a river in order to store and distribute water where and when it is most needed. But what if there’s no river? Or more to the point, what if every river that can be dammed already has been dammed, and the water in those rivers has already been tapped? The value of new, giant dams is extremely limited and costly without new giant rivers to fill them, and California has no such new rivers.
