Governor seeks to revive the Peripheral Canal

[sTony]

Governor seeks to revive the Peripheral Canal

By Jerome Waldie
East County Times columnist
Article Launched: 05/07/2008 06:58:53 PM PDT

Gold used to be the most valuable resource in California. No longer. Water, by far, has overtaken gold as the most precious commodity in the Golden State.

The fierce demand for water to continue the ever increasing over-development of the arid southland and to meet the expanding needs of the corporate agriculture interests of the Central Valley, motivated in the 1960s, a political proposal by southern water distributors, to divert much of the Sacramento River to the Central Valley for agricultural use and then, farther south, to the Los Angeles area. The key political entities promoting this major project were the Westlands Water District representing agricultural interests in the Central Valley and, most importantly, the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles seeking to provide water to meet the insatiable demands of development in the arid Los Angeles Basin.

I was a freshman member of the state Assembly when, in l960, Gov. Pat Brown, responding to the southern water interests, sought legislative support to fund the construction of the massive California Water Project designed to transport northern waters to southern California. The measure passed, though I voted against the scheme, believing we in the north could not afford to allow a significant amount of our most precious resource, water, to be captured and then transported south for the sole benefit of Central Valley agricultural and Los Angeles urban development.

The Water Project was built and for a number of years captured and diverted a large portion of the high quality Sacramento River water to the south. It soon became clear that a problem concerning the transport of water to the Los Angeles Basin had arisen involving the unique and environmentally fragile, northern California Delta. It is through this sensitive estuary that the Sacramento River waters, those most desired by the Los Angeles interests, must flow before entering the pumps of the Water Project to be conveyed directly to the thirsty south. The high-quality waters of the Sacramento River were diminished as they flowed through the estuary waters of the Delta to the pumps sending those waters south.

To correct the problem plaguing the southern water interests, they proposed to deliver the Sacramento River water directly to the pumps headed south thereby avoiding the historical mixing of those high-quality waters with the less pure Delta waters. The facility proposed to attain that outcome was the Peripheral Canal, which would convey the Sacramento River flows around, not though, the poor quality waters of the Delta.

They had no concern about the environmental devastation to the Delta that practically eliminating the flow of Sacramento River water through the Delta would cause. A valuable fishery in the Delta, already endangered by excessive diversions, was to be further jeopardized.

And the fresh water supply of a half million Delta inhabitants would be imperiled.

The politically powerful Metropolitan Water District, in 1980, persuaded Gov. Jerry Brown and the southern dominated legislature to adopt the Peripheral Canal to solve their problem of receiving poor quality northern water. Outraged Delta residents, environmentalists and concerned northern water users, flatly stopped the Peripheral Canal in its tracks by seeking a referendum of that legislation and obtaining a substantial majority vote canceling the measure. We northerners thought the detested Peripheral Canal was finally dead and discredited forever.

We were wrong. Gov. Schwarzenegger, responding recently to the never-satisfied Metropolitan Water District and its development constituency, seeks to revive the Peripheral Canal as a solution to the Delta contaminated water still being transported south. He has established a Study Group controlled by southern water interests lead by the Metropolitan Water District to advise him how to revive the Peripheral Canal, though they will never use that discredited name in their recommendation.

Environmentalists were purposefully denied any role in the Study Group.

Who do they think they are kidding? They don't give a darn about the Delta! Their interest is clear. They want control — absolute control — of northern waters and the key to that scheme would be the "faucet" controlling the entire system, the Peripheral Canal — no matter what the Governor will end up calling it.

Jerome Waldie is a former Democratic Congressman representing East County.Reach him at jeromew@innercite.com. The opinions in this column are those solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the newspaper.

[Dan McKenzie]

good bad or otherwise we are gonna have a canal shoved in our collective cabooses, regardless of the law, the courts or anything else that we throw in the way.