Cadillac Desert (63 page)

What passed for an answer provides an insight into the thinking of Edmonston and the water lobby and a good many politicians at the time. It was also as remarkable a statement as any certifiably sane person ever made. “It is believed that the cost of water
will not be a limiting factor
in ultimate development of the water resources of California,” Edmonston’s report read. “It is indicated that urban communities will always be able and willing to pay the cost of water to meet their municipal needs. Furthermore, it is considered probable that under pressure of future demands for agricultural produce,
the water necessary for greatly expanded irrigation development will be provided, at whatever cost may be required....
Many works financially infeasible today will undoubtedly be financed and constructed in the future” (emphasis added).

If anyone found such a statement preposterous—it was really like saying that, because of population pressure, we were bound to settle Mars—he kept his opinions to himself. The nearest thing to a publicly expressed doubt was the somewhat timorous suggestion of the Stanford Research Institute, which was asked to comment on the report, that a “definite price policy” would be required for “more realistic estimates of probable water sales,” and that these, in turn, might well decide “the financial outcome of the project”—that is, whether or not it would end in the greatest bankruptcy of all time. The prevalent mood was more accurately reflected in a remark by the director of California’s new Department of Water Resources, Harvey Banks—a remark he used in a great many of the speeches he gave to drum up support for the plan. “We must build now,” Banks would say, “and ask questions later.”

Meanwhile, the financial foundation of this most recklessly ambitious of plans was quietly being laid.

In the 1940s, some petroleum deposits were discovered off the southern Californian coast, near Long Beach. A few years later, when several major oil companies announced that they planned to begin exploiting the reserve, California decided to impose a severance, or extraction, tax, and agreed to give the revenues to Long Beach. After all, the money wouldn’t amount to all that much, and Long Beach would need it to enlarge its harbor and cope with the mini-boom that would inevitably result. But after the tidelands oil revenues had been promised to Long Beach, in a contract duly signed by the city and state, the amount of oil offshore was discovered to be far greater than the initial estimates had indicated. The severance tax, if these estimates were correct, would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. As a result, the attorney general of California decided that there was only one sensible course of action: he nullified the contract.

The attorney general, whose name was Edmund G. Brown, was at the time a politician of less than starlit promise. Of middle height, a little squat, Pat Brown was a cheery Irish ward-heeler kind of politician—hale, earthy, utterly lacking in the complexity and awkwardness of his future rival, Richard Nixon. At about the same time he voided Long Beach’s tidelands oil contract, Pat Brown developed an obsession, one that would remain with him for the rest of his life: water. As his water czar, Bill Warne, was to describe it later on, Bob Edmonston, the state engineer, had corralled him one day in the capitol and implored him to do something about “the water crisis.” Brown, who grew up in San Francisco, said he wasn’t aware there was any. Hadn’t Los Angeles built its Colorado River aqueduct? Hadn’t the Bureau just built the Central Valley Project? Yes, answered Edmonston, and that was precisely the problem. When you added a couple of lanes to a freeway or built a new bridge, cars came out of nowhere to fill them. It was the same with water: the more you developed, the more growth occurred, and the faster demand grew. California was now hitched to a runaway locomotive. At the rate the state was growing in both population and irrigated agriculture, it ought to be developing 750,000 new acre-feet each year. It was developing nothing. It had no major plans. Even if it started today, it would take twenty years to get a big project authorized, financed, and built. By then, California could have another seven or eight million people. “When we finally come to our senses,” Edmonston told Brown, “the biggest bandwagon in history is going to come rolling through with water written all over it. If you want to be elected governor, you jump on it early—now.”

It was a moment of epiphany, Brown told his friends. The thought of all those people arriving to no water, perhaps even to a Biblical drought, suddenly left him staggered. He would never be the same. Edmonston was right—water was worth developing at whatever cost. Nearly twenty-five years later, in 1979, he still believed it. In an interview he granted to the University of California’s Oral History Program, Brown said, “No, I don’t think it [cost] has any validity because you need water. Whatever it costs you have to pay it. It’s like oil today. If you have to have oil, you’ve got to pay for it. What’s the value of oil? What’s the value of water? If you’re crossing the desert and you haven’t got a bottle of water, and there’s no water anyplace in sight and someone comes along and says, ‘I’ll sell you two spoonfuls of water for ten dollars,’ you’ll pay for it. The same is true in California.”

In 1958, after campaigning for and winning the governorship of the state, Pat Brown turned to the task of building his new dream, Edmonston’s water plan, with an energy few of his friends had ever seen. He wheedled, cajoled, and mule-traded like a home-grown Lyndon Johnson, trying to accomplish something which, in its own way, was as daunting as Johnson’s Great Society agenda: uniting a state divided into wet and dry parts, into sophisticated cities and hundreds of mean little farm towns, on a breathtaking agenda of water development. An Irish Catholic, Brown came across like a missionary preaching to the damned when he spoke to Californians of their water crisis. But he was also ruled, at times, by a Catholic’s impulse to confess, and later he would tell an interviewer about his other, more prosaic motivation. “I loved building things,” he blurted in an unguarded moment of candor. “I wanted to build that goddamned water project. I was
absolutely determined
I was going to pass this California Water Project. I wanted this to be a monument to
me.”

It must have been frustrating for Brown that the most implacable opposition did not at first come from northern California, as expected. It came from the corner of the state whose cooperation was essential if the project was ever to be built: metropolitan Los Angeles.

The stubborn resistance of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to a plan that would give it more water, at one stroke, than it had ever received was perfectly understandable from its point of view, even if it was baffling on its face. The water it had been counting on to meet its future growth was water that Arizona felt it rightfully owned, and was at issue in a seemingly endless lawsuit then before the Supreme Court. The Met’s case, which was based largely on Arizona’s initial refusal to sign the Colorado River Compact, was somewhat flimsy; it wasn’t so much a legal argument as a game of chicken with the Supreme Court. In effect, the Met was daring the Court to take away water for three million people just as they were coming to depend on it. Because of the weakness of its legal position, southern California had at least as great a stake in thwarting bills that would have authorized the Central Arizona Project—something which its Congressional delegation had accomplished for twenty years. But the key to victory, in Congress if not in the Supreme Court, too, was demonstrating that the contested water was crucial to its growth, if hot its very survival.

From the Met’s point of view, then, the Feather River Project, which it ought to have viewed as salvation, was in a more immediate sense a threat. If it was built, it could wash away the strategic foundation of its legal and moral argument. It was an absurd position to be in, but the Met was committed—it had to pretend that no water was available from anywhere else.

As a result, the chairman of the Met’s board of directors, Joe Jensen, decided to oppose the Feather River Project at all costs. The Met also disliked the idea of subsidizing the growers in the southern San Joaquin, who would receive half of the water but pay less than a third of the cost, and that was the argument it trundled out for public consumption. “If an urban area is to help carry this agricultural load,” Warren Butler, the Met’s vice-chairman, told the Los Angeles
Times
on August 10, 1960, “the urban area of Kern County should.” (As Butler well knew, that urban area—Bakersfield—couldn’t possibly afford to.) If any project bringing water to the South Coast was going to be built, the Metropolitan Water District was going to build it on its own. While Pat Brown thumped his Feather River Project up and down the state, Joe Jensen was talking about water from the Eel River, from the Trinity, from the Columbia—in due time (which was to say,
after
it had won its lawsuit with Arizona). While Brown talked of water famine in apocalyptic tones, the Met board issued a statement that “these forecasts of disaster are without foundation in fact.” To the utter consternation of the growers, who were frantically lobbying for the project under the auspices of the Feather River Project Association, the Met went after the idea hammer and tongs, arguing against it on every conceivable ground: cost, need, feasibility, practicality, even morality. In 1957, the board of directors staged an opulent victory dinner in honor of several legislators who had successfully crushed the project’s hopes in the last legislative session. “They refused to listen to reason,” Bill Warne, Brown’s water chief, would recall. “I must have gone down to talk to them a dozen times, but all they could think about was that they might weaken their case before the Supreme Court. I didn’t think they would. As a matter of fact, I didn’t think they had much of a case to begin with. But
they
thought they did.”

Pat Brown was wise enough to see that eventually the Met would be brought into the fold. “I remember Norman Chandler saying he was going to oppose the project in the Los Angeles
Times
unless we went along with the Metropolitan’s viewpoint,” Brown recalled later in an interview. “I told Norman, ‘Then you just oppose the project, Mr. Chandler. The people will look at you with scorn as the years go on.’ So he walked out and I didn’t know whether he was going to support it or not.... But they had to do it. I knew we had them. I knew that if they didn’t get this bond issue over, they’d never get water in southern California.”

Actually, though, the Met’s opposition wasn’t Pat Brown’s thorniest problem, even if it may have been his most frustrating one. The thorniest problem was the cost.

Brown knew that a lot of voters will vote reflexively against any bond issue, even one to hire police and build jails in the midst of a crime wave. They would rather not pay taxes and buy guns, rather not pay taxes and dig wells. This was especially true in southern California, the home turf of the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby. Northern Californians were sure to be violently opposed, even if they were promised some of the water. Northern Californians had always resisted sending
their
water to L.A. Between metropolitan San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland, Stockton, and Contra Costa County, there were four million people and at least a million voters (out of three million who might vote statewide) who were certain to go against him. Those votes had to be counterbalanced by
“yes”
votes in southern California. But when those good Republican migrants from the Middle West down there saw how much the project would cost, they would blanch. How could he possibly win? There was only one way, Brown decided. It was to lie.

“Lie” is a strong word, but in this case it is advised, because one day Pat Brown would all but admit it himself.

It was, to begin with, hard to say how much the project would cost, except that it would cost a bundle. Oroville would be not only the world’s tallest dam, but its fourth most massive. San Luis, in the Coast Range foothills farther south, would be the
fifth
most massive dam in the world, nearly two miles long. Two of the world’s biggest dams; the world’s longest aqueduct; the world’s highest pump lift, surmounted by the world’s most powerful pumps—five full batteries of pumps; a chain of smaller dams and reservoirs strung out to receive the water—all of this would be incredibly expensive. The Department of Water Resource’s feasibility report, known as Bulletin 78, offered an estimate of $1,807,000,000, but an economist for the RAND Corporation, Jack Hirschleifer, immediately tore it to shreds. Reading between the lines, Hirschleifer noticed that though the report mentioned Oroville Dam at length, it
failed to include the expense of building
it. It was an extraordinary omission, to say the least. The DWR explained that the dam wouldn’t be needed right away and might be built later. (It would be built right away.) The estimate also failed to include the cost of branch aqueducts to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, although the DWR had promised those cities water and Pat Brown was counting on their votes. And there was no “cross-Delta facility,” later known as the Peripheral Canal, on the price list, though without it the project could never deliver its full annual yield of 4,230,000 acre-feet. In fact, it was unclear how the above-mentioned facilities, immense as they were, and assuming all were built, could deliver that much water every year. Even ignoring that, Hirschleifer wrote in his report, “the correct figure, for capital costs only and accepting official estimates, is certainly in excess of $3 billion.” Three billion dollars in 1959 was the equivalent of $13 billion in 1987. What state would vote for a $13 billion bond issue today? Not one. Pat Brown knew that very well. That was why he decided to say that the project would cost $1.75 billion—just over half of what he knew, or should have known, the estimate should have been.