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By Root 1768 0

sector sharing the cost, the bonds would be paid off unless the city, for some reason, saw its growth curve go drastically into reverse. In the mid-1950s, the most that irrigation farmers could pay for water was, by a generous average, about $15 an acre-foot—less than a fifth as much as New Yorkers paid. And New York City’s water arrived by gravity; California’s farmers would have to pay for several hundred vertical feet of pumping, and Los Angeles would have to buy water pumped more than three thousand feet if the aqueduct went over instead of through the Tehachapi Mountains. (The United Western Investigation had already concluded that tunneling was too risky because of earthquake hazards.) How could anyone afford it?

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