Maybe Not Such a Deal After All?

If you’ve spent evenings this summer listening to your back yard pansies screeching piteously for more water, if you’ve watched your front lawn turn brown in patches, here’s some news. A New Order is coming to the world of water in California and it will change the fate of your pansies, and almost everything else, forever.

The new order is trundling along the legislative tracks in both Washington and Sacramento. There are many nuances but the basic notion is this: The farmers of California will be stripped of their hold over 80% of the state’s water supply, and some portion of that water will be made available to the thirsty cities.

This idea gained currency during last winter’s drought, but now it appears to be happening faster than anyone expected. The champions of the change are U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Assemblyman Richard Katz of Sylmar.

Their legislation would allow, for the first time, a free market to exist in the buying and selling of water delivered by the huge irrigation projects of the state.

Good news, eh? Heretofore, you understand, the irrigation projects of California were operated according to principles that might be described as socialist. They were built with monies from the public purse and the water was delivered, at a heavily subsidized price, to the farmers who grew our food and fiber.

If anyone else asked for some of this water, they were shown the door by the apparatchiks of the system, the directors of the local water district. No one but farmers need apply.

Under the New Order, the logjamming water districts would be cut out of the loop. If a city had the ready cash and the desire, it could approach a farmer--let’s call him Farmer Brown--and ask directly if he wanted to sell some of his supply. And Farmer Brown would say yes or no. The local district could not nix the deal.

Very simple. But do not underestimate the significance of this change. California would never be the same. The New Order could make vast amounts of water available to the cities, at a price. It could alter the landscape of the San Joaquin Valley and other farming regions. It could slowly transform the balance of power between different regions of the state.

That’s because, in California, water equates with power. Already, the prospect of the emerging New Order has changed the state’s political equation. In pushing for the change, the Southern California cities have embraced their old adversaries, the environmentalists and the cities of the north.

Of all these, the role of the environmentalists is most curious. They see, in the New Order, a way to reduce the political pressure for yet more dams in the Sierra. In fact, the very concept of the New Order belongs, more than anyone else, to Thomas J. Graff of the Environmental Defense Fund in Berkeley.

I describe their role as curious because, ultimately, the environmental consequences of the New Order remain to be seen. Your pansies and mine, of course, would have an easier time of it under the New Order. But that would only be the beginning of the story.

Do we really want a Southern California, or a Bay Area, with access to as much new water as required for building more and more layers of civilization? Do we want California’s water to be spent on new Moreno Valleys and new Palmdales rather than carrots and cotton?

And would the towns of the San Joaquin wither as the big money from the cities tempted ever more farmers to sell their legacy?

These questions are difficult to answer because the ultimate impact of the New Order remains largely hidden from us. That’s the way it goes with new orders.

For example: Under the rules of the Katz legislation, only 20% of the land in a farm district could go fallow from water sales during any one year. Is that number reassuring? Or is it simply a number to be changed at a later date, when the imperatives of a free market begin to be felt?

We don’t know. There is, in fact, this wonderful irony posed by the coming of the new order. Here is California, one of the citadels of capitalism, shackled by a water system that could have been designed in the Soviet Union. It is corrupt and inefficient.

And yet its replacement just might bring worse terrors yet. The more you look at the new order, the more you want to embrace the old.

It’s enough to make you understand Brother Gorbachev’s problem.