Cadillac Desert (64 page)

Years later, a conversation with an unthreatening interviewer from Berkeley’s Oral History Program finally brought out the truth. “We were questioning, could we even pass a bond act of $1.75 billion,” Brown told his interviewer, Malca Chall. “We didn’t know exactly the cost of the project. We hadn’t priced it out to any exactitude. As a matter of fact, we thought it would cost
more
than the $1.75 billion, probably in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion.... We had to scrape and pull to put this project together. I mean don’t kid yourself. [Laughs.] It was a close fit and $1.75 billion was about all that we felt we could get a bond issue [sic]. We were afraid to make it $2 billion. It was like $1.99 instead of $2. We thought that just sounded better to the people.

“I remember someone telling me how Huey Long operated in Louisiana where the legislature wouldn’t give him money to build a road,” Brown added. “He started at one end, built it to here, and left a great big gap.”

$1.99 instead of $2. Like many of the New Deal politicians of his era, Brown had a habit of dropping the last few zeroes from his figures. These were
billions,
not pennies, that were being talked about, back when a billion was still real money. Brown’s $750 million lie (and, if Hirschleifer was right, it was considerably more than that) was a $3 billion lie in modern money. And it would set the stage for a monumental predicament, one that the governor’s son, ironically, would be the first to have to face. In order to embark on building the project, the DWR would have to have contracts in hand to sell water. That was the whole idea—demand before supply. Those contracts would ultimately demand that the state deliver 4,230,000 acre-feet of water. But if the initial bond issue failed to deliver the full amount, and the voters subsequently rejected bonds to expand the project, the state would expose itself to a torrent of crippling lawsuits from cities and farmers who had planned their growth and invested their money on the promise of water it could never deliver. The damage claims might cost more than the project itself. Back in 1959, however, all of that still seemed far in the future.

One of the reasons Pat Brown felt confident with his misleading cost estimate had to do with the tidelands oil contract between Long Beach and the state which, as attorney general, he had abrogated in 1954. Long Beach was understandably outraged, and immediately filed suit against the attorney general’s office. To its amazement, the California supreme court sided with the state. It was a remarkable legal opinion. The attorney general had nullified a signed contract to let a city have some revenues, and the court had upheld him even though the state had no demonstrable need for the revenues. It didn’t even have a plan to use them. What kind of court was this?

An answer—a speculative one—popped up in another part of the governor’s long 1981 interview with Malca Chall. Actually, they were discussing something else—Brown’s decision to try to use the old Central Valley Project bonds which the voters had authorized in 1933 to scrape together another $170 million in cash. That, in its own right, was a matter of peculiar legality: using a bond issue passed twenty-seven years earlier—a bond issue that was meant to finance the Central Valley Project—in order to construct an
entirely different water project.
But, mystifyingly, the California supreme court had okayed that, too. “That was Phil Gibson, the chief justice, with whom I worked very closely,” Brown told his interviewer. Then, according to the transcript, he laughed. “He was a great chief justice and it was great to validate those bonds.... The chief justice worked very, very closely with me in all of those decisions. You see the supreme court didn’t have to take original jurisdiction in those cases. But I would call the chief justice and say, ‘Chief, this is very important. I want you to take it.’ And invariably he did.”

Phil Gibson died before he could be interviewed for this book, and Pat Brown, in a personal interview, hotly denied ever having tried to influence the court’s decisions. But Gibson’s obituary in the San Francisco
Chronicle
described him as perhaps the most powerful and influential chief justice in the history of the court, and he was, after all, Pat Brown’s bosom friend. All of this leaves at least a
suggestion
that, in California, where an issue as important as water was concerned, strict legality, separation of powers, honesty, and other niceties of governmental conduct could easily be ground into mush.

In 1959, after intensive lobbying by Pat Brown, the California state legislature agreed to allot the tidelands oil money for the water project—an annual interest-free loan of $25 million, repayable ... whenever. It was an open-ended deal; the Tidelands Oil Fund could keep feeding the project until the oil ran out, which might take a hundred years. Even Brown would admit in yet another startling little confession to Malca Chall that “it was another subsidy to the big farmers.” But it was not just any old subsidy. It was a subsidy that had an architectural elegance, a wonderful symmetry to it. Several of the “big farmers” who would get much of the water from the Feather River Project were oil companies—the same oil companies that were paying into the Tidelands Oil Fund. In exchange for a modest extraction tax—quickly offset by the billions they would make on the easily accessible oil—they would have their barren, worthless acreages in the San Joaquin Valley turned opalescent green.
And
they would get the growth, and the cars, and the freeways, that would increase the demand for—and the cost of—the oil!

In the last days of the legislative session in 1959, the legislature gave final approval to the Burns-Porter Act, which authorized the Feather River Project—now rechristened the California Water Project—subject to a statewide referendum on the bond issue scheduled for November of the following year. Once again Pat Brown had shown what great Irish politician’s instincts he possessed. One of the two sponsors, Hugh Burns, was a northern Californian who had made a reputation
opposing
water diversions from the north. Brown, among whose attributes modesty was notably absent, would later boast, “The fact that I selected Hugh Burns to carry the bill in the Senate ... that was political genius if I do say so myself.” Cyril Magnin, “Mr. San Francisco,” was persuaded to serve as campaign chairman there. The supporters put on prominent display in southern California were fiscal conservatives and Republicans. Everyone would get a little water, too: Napa County, Alameda County, the Santa Clara Valley. But the Kern County Water Agency alone would get thirty times as much as all of California north of San Francisco.

Only in December,
after
the legislature had already authorized the project, did the Department of Water Resources make a stab at an economic justification, in a report called
An Investigation of Alternative Aqueduct Systems to Serve Southern California.
Instead of trying to justify the project by weighing costs against benefits—which is what the Bureau of Reclamation did, or went through the motions of doing—it compared the cost of the project to the most expensive alternative: desalinating seawater. On that basis, it concluded that the project made sense. But as Jack Hirschleifer disdainfully commented in his RAND Corporation report, you can justify
anything
if you compare it to a more expensive alternative.

The critics were too few and too late. On Friday, November 4, 1960, just four days before the referendum was scheduled, the Metropolitan Water District capitulated and signed the contracts that indicated its support. The Los Angeles
Times
was now in favor. The only widely read newspaper that adamantly opposed the plan was the San Francisco
Chronicle.
When the votes finally came in, forty-eight of the fifty-eight counties in the state had voted against the bonds. But the populous counties in the artificial paradise of southern California all went heavily for the project. It was, after all, early November, and they hadn’t seen real rain since April. November—the last days before the rainy season began. That was another little bit of subtlety from Pat Brown. The bond issue passed by 174,000 votes.

T
he California Aqueduct begins at Oroville Dam, an inverted pyramid of such improbable dimensions—the height of the Pan Am Building, the length of the Golden Gate Bridge—that it appears much smaller than it actually is. In February of 1980, in the midst of a long spell of wet Pacific fronts, Oroville Reservoir, despite its capacity of something like a trillion gallons, was full, and the dam was spilling—seventy thousand cubic feet per second, the Hudson River in full flood, roaring down the spillway at forty miles per hour, sending a plume of mist a thousand feet in the air.

Below the dam and the Thermalito Afterbay the Feather River joins the Sacramento, which flows through the Delta out to San Francisco Bay. In the winter of 1980, the Delta, a huge reclaimed marsh protected by weakening dikes made of peat, was in danger of being reclaimed by nature; the levees were being repeatedly breached by the flood, and farmed tracts of three thousand acres were disappearing under twenty feet of water. From a chartered Piper Cub, the odd vulnerability of this Brobdingnagian contrivance was manifest: the levees keep intruding seawater from mingling with southern California’s water as it traverses the Delta on its way to the California Aqueduct, which begins south of there. The Delta is the system’s weakest link, and one could see why from an airplane: below was the water on which a million-plus acres and ten million people depend; a few miles west, lapping hungrily at the first phalanx of levees, was the tongue of a salty ocean that humbles all.

At the south end of the Delta, the Clifton Court Forebay appeared below us—a receiving reservoir big as a Minnesota lake that rises and falls like the Bay of Fundy in rhythm with southern California’s thirst. A wide canal leads out of the forebay toward a rectangular building resembling the nonnuclear end of a very large nuclear power plant. The building houses the delta pumps—a battery of ten-thousand-horsepower machines that suck Feather River water thirty miles across the Delta before it can escape to sea, then lift it the first three hundred feet toward its ultimate thirty-four-hundred-foot rise over the Tehachapi Mountains. The water disappears inside and reappears thirty stories up the hill, at the beginning of the California Aqueduct. From overhead one could see the water spurting out of the siphons, each one wide enough to consume a freight car, as if shot from a water cannon. The aqueduct wound southward through the pale foothills, as level as a railroad grade, and disappeared in valley heat. It is 444 miles long, the longest river, if you can call it that, in California, and it is entirely man-made.

Interstate 5 parallels the aqueduct for two hundred fifty miles through the San Joaquin Valley. Not many years ago this was utterly barren land: it sprouted some patches of green during the winter, then lay dead during summer’s drought. Now it is a wide swath of cotton and orchards growing billions of new dollars in agricultural wealth. A hundred miles south of the Clifton Court Forebay the water arrives at San Luis Dam, now the ninth-largest dam in the world, a structure almost as immense as Oroville. What is bizarre about San Luis is that its basin, in the rain shadow of the Coast Range, is devoid of constant streams. Nearly all the water in the huge reservoir, eight miles across, is Feather River and Sacramento River water, pumped uphill. San Luis adds stability and security in a state inclined toward unpredictable weather and tectonic upheaval; in such a theater of disaster, a state utterly dependent on reservoirs needs to store its water in as many places as possible. The penalty for this added security is the giant jolt of electricity required to lift the water another three hundred feet. It is a Sisyphean lift, for the water comes right back down again when the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles call for more. You recapture some of the expended energy in turbines when you release it from San Luis, but the overall loss is around 33 percent. More than anyplace else, California seems determined to prove that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a lie.

This whole hydrologic ballet, this acrobatic rise and fall of mega-tonnages of water performed on a stage twice the length of Pennsylvania, is orchestrated by a silent choreographer in the Water Resources building in Sacramento: a Univac Series 904 computer punched and fed floppy disks by a team of programmers. At the south end of the valley, the aqueduct arrives at its moment of truth. The Sierra escarpment curves westward and the Coast Range bends eastward and they mate, producing a bastard offspring called the Transverse, or Tehachapi, Range. The Tehachapis stand between the water and Los Angeles, which sits in the ultramontane basin beyond.

The water is carried across the Tehachapis in five separate stages. The final, cyclopean one, which occurs at the A. D. Edmonston Pumping Plant, raises the water 1,926 feet—the Eiffel Tower atop the Empire State—in a single lift. To some engineers, the Edmonston pumps are the ultimate triumph, the most splendid snub nature has ever received: a sizable river of water running uphill. At their peak capacity, if it is ever reached, the Edmonston pumps will require six billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, the output of an eleven-hundred-megawatt power plant. Moving water in California requires more electrical energy than is used by several states.

Having surmounted the Tehachapis, the water charges downhill again through closed siphons and a battery of turbines that steal some of its energy back. Soon it is in an open aqueduct again, which ultimately forks like an interstate highway: the West Branch goes straight to Los Angeles, and the East Branch continues southward across the high Mojave Desert to the vicinity of Riverside, where it terminates in Lake Perris—a reservoir. Lake Perris is six hundred miles from Oroville Dam.