Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [234]
Wilson insists he got the story from Livermore himself, though Livermore, still a Reagan loyalist in 1984, said he “couldn’t remember” it. Whatever the case, in 1969, Reagan finally announced that he would not support Dos Rios Dam. In the press release explaining his reasoning, he talked about costs, poor economics, the frailty of the flood-control rationale. Privately, though, Reagan was upset about flooding the Round Valley reservation. “We’ve broken enough treaties with the Indians already,” the old cowboy actor is reported to have said.
By the time Reagan left Sacramento, in 1974, the Department of Water Resources was predicting that the dreaded shortfall—demand for water greater than supply of water—might be as little as fifteen years away. To plan the final phase of the State Water Project, get it approved and funded, and build it would easily require fifteen years. Through an irony some found delicious, then, the person who took it upon himself to complete the project that Pat Brown had left unfinished was none other than the apostle of the “era of limits,” the first politician to proclaim that “small is beautiful” and “less is more”: Jerry Brown—Pat Brown’s son.
“He did it for the old man” was how Jerry Brown’s last loyalists explained the spectacle of the younger Brown promoting what seemed certain to become the most expensive water project in the history of the world. Depending on which of the Brown administration’s estimates one believed—and a new one seemed to appear every six months or so—the cost of completing the project was either astonishing or flabbergasting. What Pat Brown hadn’t foreseen, when he underfunded the bond issue to ensure that the voters would pass it, was inflation. Because of inflation, it would cost two to five times more to deliver the project’s last 1,730,000 acre-feet than it had cost to deliver the first 2.5 million. The most detailed estimate, released by the DWR in 1980, pegged the cost at $11.6 billion. Interest on the bonds—based on a rate of 9 percent, which was then three points too low—would add another $12 billion. It was unheard-of. The only comparable schemes anywhere in the world were Canada’s James Bay Project and Itaipu Dam, which would end up costing $19 billion and help Brazil dig itself a bottomless financial hole. But Itaipu would at least generate 12,500 megawatts of electricity to help pay for itself. Brown’s Phase Two water plan would consume an awesome amount of power, because the water, cubic miles of it, would be pumped not just uphill but over a mountain range.
Jerry Brown’s dilemma—which was insoluble, but which he thought he could solve anyway—was trying to please the water lobby and his large environmental constituency at the same time. He wanted a project, but he wanted it to be “environmentally sound.” To be environmentally sound, there could be no on-stream storage—no dams or reservoirs on any significant wild streams. The North Coast rivers, with 29 percent of the state’s runoff, were therefore off limits. Instead, Brown wanted to skim high “surplus” flows from the Sacramento River during the winter and spring and store them. But all the natural storage basins were at elevations well above the river. His Department of Water Resources engineers, acting on orders some of them considered insane, finally settled on a basin in the foothills of the Yolla Bolly Mountains, near Red Bluff, which had a stream running through it and a couple of small preexisting flood-control dams. They would run a twenty-mile aqueduct up there, up a thousand-foot slope, and dump the Sacramento surplus flows in. The reservoir, to be called the Glenn “Complex,