Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [237]
It wasn’t a bad idea. The votes the canal would need were in southern California, and those voters would be saddled with most of the cost. About 70 percent of the original works of the State Water Project were being financed by the Metropolitan Water District’s customers. Actually, they paid for the project twice: through daily water rates, and through an assessment of twelve cents on every $1,000 of property value in the service area, which they paid whether they got water or not. (The city of Los Angeles still got 93 percent of its water from the Owens Valley and Mono Basin, but paid the assessment like everyone else because it was subsumed under the MWD.) Using simple arithmetic, one could divide the number of Metropolitan customers into the $11.6 billion that Phase Two was supposed to cost, multiply that by .70 and come up with a figure of $3,000. That was the average cost of S.B. 200 to each household in southern California. If one added the $12 billion in interest that would have to be paid on the bonds, the figure doubled. As if that weren’t bad enough, the California Energy Commission was predicting that energy, in the year 2000, would cost thirty-three cents per kilowatt-hour, which was six times what it cost in 1981. At those rates, it would cost at least $50 just to pump one average family’s share over the Tehachapis. And that share was only a fraction of the family’s annual use, because the MWD’s full entitlement to State Project water amounted to less than a third of all the water used in southern California. People would also be paying for water pumped sixteen hundred vertical feet from the Colorado River; they would be paying for water pumped from the ground. If one added it all together, the cost of water in southern California would be ...
The estimates varied about as wildly as estimates can. State Senator Reuben Ayala, the chief sponsor of the Peripheral Canal bill, said it would cost the average family only $5 extra per year. The Met said $50 per year. Dorothy Green, the leader of the opposition in southern California and the founder of an organization whose acronym had somehow been tortured into spelling WATER, was saying that a year’s worth of water would cost $1,400 in the year 2000 if the canal and everything else were buile. The public remained utterly confused by all of this, which, as far as both sides were concerned, was fine. The campaign could then be run on fear. Magazine spreads began appearing in southern California showing a child’s upturned tricycle at the edge of a dried-up reservoir. Northern California billboards were papered with huge letters (courtesy of Salyer and Boswell, who ended up spending $1 million on the campaign) that simply read, “It’s Just Too Expensive.” Everyone knew what “It” was, just as everyone knew what horrible fate the abandoned tricycle was supposed to represent. One leader of the stop-the-canal campaign, a businessman, talked off the record about how dirty a war over water in California can get:
“The business community in southern California has got the business community in northern California half out of its wits. Crown Zellerbach, the big San Francisco paper company, has been told it better not take an anticanal position if it wants to sell any more paper south of San Jose. They’ve stayed neutral. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is staying neutral, too, even though an informal plebiscite among its members showed 92 percent of them opposed to the Peripheral Canal. The chamber’s board of directors has refused to share those results with the membership. We’re going to have to tell them. The chairman of the board is opposed to the canal—he hates it—but he won’t say so in public. These guys