Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [227]
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