Water in the West has never
made sense, thanks to states drawn with straight lines and
watersheds that won’t stay put. Then there’s
California, where hydrology and demography rebound off each other
In opposite directions. Two-thirds of the people live in the south,
while two-thirds of the surface water is in the north. This
mismatch between nature and culture has made the south dependent on
water imports, and to some, this is evidence of Southern
California’s parasitic self-indulgence.
Yet
northern cities have no reason to be smug, since many of them are
water thieves themselves. Two years after Los Angeles had colonized
the Owens Valley and begun its desertification, San Francisco
performed an even more brazen act of hydrological abduction: It
built a dam inside a national park and transformed one of the most
scenic valleys in California into a giant bathtub.
Yet
these same northern cities reacted with self-righteous indignation
when the Bush administration recently proposed that residents of
San Francisco and other Bay Area communities pay more — a lot
more — for the right to exploit a national treasure.
The water impounded in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir makes its
way through a 156-mile-long aqueduct to the San Francisco
peninsula, which is no more capable than the Los Angeles plain of
providing sufficient water for the metropolis that sprouted upon
it. Yet San Francisco has avoided infamy for its act of piracy,
unlike Los Angeles, which at least paid for the water it took from
farms and ranches lying at the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada,
San Francisco didn’t pay much for drowning Hetch
Hetchy Valley and sucking the water of the Tuolumne River halfway
across the state — and that’s the point of a startling
proposal in President Bush’s budget.
Under the 1913 act
of Congress that authorized San Francisco’s violation of Yosemite
National Park, the city was to pay the federal government $5,000 a
year for the right to create a reservoir on public land. In the
1920s, that increased to $30,000, which is still all that the city
pays. The Bush budget would ramp up that rent to $8 million
annually and dedicate the proceeds to Yosemite programs.
The city can afford it, for here’s the real revelation: Hetch
Hetchy and its dam are more than a water and power supply for San
Francisco; they are a giant cash register. The city sells surplus
water and electricity from the system to other Northern California
communities, reaping a handsome profit.
Between 1979 and
2001, according to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle,
the city funneled $670 million from Hetch Hetchy water and sales
into its general fund.
Generations of San Francisco
politicians have, in fact, become so addicted to the cash flow from
Hetch Hetchy water and power that they have failed to follow even a
modestly prudent program of reinvesting those profits in the aging
system itself. The city had to beg voters to approve a $1.6 billion
bond measure in 2002 to repair and upgrade the decrepit water
system; suburban customers got stuck with a $2 billion bill for
their share of the work.
Still, civic leaders have
reacted to the president’s budget proposal with astonished outrage.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco,
deplored it as “a raid on city coffers.” The
Chronicle, which two years ago exposed the
city’s long financial neglect of the water system, displayed a loss
of objectivity by headlining its story on the rent increase, “Bush
budget soaks S.F. for Hetch Hetchy.” The city’s Public
Utilities Commission spluttered indignantly that it already gives
Yosemite $1.7 million a year.
Yes, but that money is
spent entirely on ranger patrols and other security efforts
intended to keep the public — which owns Yosemite National
Park — away from the reservoir and to protect the purity of
the water so San Francisco does not have to filter it. You cannot
touch the water in Hetch Hetchy, and you cannot enter that part of
your national park at night.
What’s a fair price to put
on San Francisco’s commercial exploitation of a priceless national
treasure? That’s difficult to say. But it’s even more
difficult to believe that $30,000 a year even comes close.
John Krist is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He is a columnist for the Ventura County
Star in California.
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