Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [228]
“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.
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,