Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [236]
Brown’s answer to that, in 1981, was yet another set of environmental guarantees. When his first canal legislation failed to pass the legislature, he supported a new package known as Senate Bill 200, which included an amendment to the state constitution keeping the North Coast rivers wild and scenic forever—which meant no dams. All of the larger ones had had such designation since 1972, but it was state, not federal, protection, and the legislature could annul it at will. Brown’s constitutional amendment would have made it impossible to develop the Eel and the other rivers unless the state’s voters, by a two-thirds majority, decided at some point to repeal it.
Jerry Brown was quite sure his proposal would mollify the environmentalists, but it had a totally different result. Until then, feeling about the Peripheral Canal—a term that became shorthand for everything else in the plan—had sloughed along traditional lines: northern Californians were mostly against it, the valley and the South Coast were mostly for it. But his decision to include constitutional protection for the North Coast rivers in S.B. 200 created a stranger alliance than Brown and the growers. It was, in the minds of some, the oddest alliance since the Hitler-Stalin Pact. All of a sudden, two of the mightiest, wealthiest growers in California were on the side of Friends of the Earth.
The two retrograde growers were the J. G. Boswell Corporation and the Salyer Land Company, which had long dominated affairs at the valley’s southern end. Salyer and Boswell were two of the main beneficiaries of the Corp of Engineers’ Kings River and Kern River dams, which gave them year-round irrigation water that was nearly free and tens of thousands of new acres in the old bed of Tulare Lake. They had figured prominently in the Feather River Project Association, which helped get the State Water Project authorized in the first place. In 1980, Boswell owned 206,021 acres in California, plus hundreds of thousands of acres elsewhere; it was the biggest grower in the state. Salyer’s holdings were smaller, about 77,000 acres, more than the five boroughs of New York. In one year, Boswell’s private political action committee, or PAC, ranked among the top ten in the nation in the amount of money it showered around. For all their power and money, however, Boswell and Salyer had a problem. They were located in the part of the valley with the severest groundwater overdraft. Someday, if pumping wasn’t to become prohibitively expensive, more surface water would have to be brought in—a lot more water, since the valley’s groundwater overdraft was projected to surpass the yield of the State Water Project by 1999. Boswell and Salyer felt there was only one place it could come from—the Middle Fork of the Eel. The idea of making the North Coast rivers wild and scenic seemed like a prescription for their economic demise; they were also incensed, as a Salyer spokesman put it, that “the Delta fish come before we do”—an allusion to the minimum Delta outflow guarantees in S.B. 200.
By the end of 1981, to everyone’s amazement, Boswell and Salyer had poured $406,000 into the campaign against the Peripheral Canal, outspending the thirty-three largest contributors on the pro-canal side—who included Shell Oil, Getty Oil, Southern California Edison, Lockheed, the Fluor Corporation, and Walt Disney Enterprises—by $73,689.. It helped, but not enough. Later that year, the legislature passed S.B. 200, subject to ratification by the voters in a special election to be held in June of 1982. The planning meetings among the canal’s opponents, as they prepared for the referendum, must have been something to behold. Environmentalists and northern Californians were there because they thought S.B. 200 was too weak. Boswell and Salyer were there because they thought it was too strong. Delta interests didn’t much care one way or the other; they just wanted to keep getting their irrigation