Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [238]
Nineteen seventy-six and 1977 were the third-driest and the driest years, respectively, in California history. Shasta Lake, the reservoir on which billions of dollars in farm income depend, was nearly dry, down to an eighth of its capacity; water rationing was imposed all over the state. But 1978, which looked as if it might herald the beginning of California’s end, was, to everyone’s surprise, a wet year; 1979 was even wetter. In 1980, Los Angeles was clobbered by a succession of subtropical Pacific storms that threatened to float it out to sea. By then, memories of the drought—which had panicked almost everyone in California, even environmentalists in Marin—were growing dimmer. 1981 was drier than normal, but not by much. 1982 marked the beginning of what climatologists called the “El Niño episode,” when parts of the state got three times their normal rainfall and relentless storms caused $1 billion worth of property damage. It would be excessive to say that a string of five rain-laden years determined the outcome of the vote on the Peripheral Canal, but it would probably be true. Had the referendum been held in October of 1977, when most of the state had barely seen rain in a year and a half, Californians might have voted for anything, even dragging icebergs down from the North Pole. Memories of the drought had grown faint, but memories of inflation hitting 15 percent in 1980 were strong. Houses that had cost $35,000 in 1974 were being snapped up for $200,000. The referendum on the Peripheral Canal carried southern California by two to one. But in counties around San Francisco it lost nine to one. When the final tally was in, the Peripheral Canal had gotten less than 40 percent of the vote. It was trounced.
As it turned out, however, the big San Joaquin growers would have plenty of water—miraculously cheap water—for a long, long time.
Twenty-two years earlier, after Californians had voted in favor of building the State Water Project, the Department of Water Resources began to circulate water sales contracts in the San Joaquin Valley. Few of the farmers were willing to sign. The irrigation water would be relatively unsubsidized—the main subsidy being the $25 million annual contribution from the Tidelands Oil Fund, which was called a “loan” even though virtually none of it has been repaid—and it would be expensive. The development cost would be around $20 per acre-foot, plus the price of delivery, so most irrigation water would cost anywhere from $25 to $45 per acre-foot. And that was actually a discount price, held low by cheap power rates and a drawn-out repayment schedule, so that the farmers could afford to build laterals, headgates, and all the other appurtenances they would need to shift from groundwater to surface irrigation, or from no irrigation to irrigation. Eventually, the cost would shoot up dramatically to recover the initial discount. Farther north and east in the valley, farmers were buying water from the Bureau of Reclamation for $2.50 to $3.50 an acre-foot. The most anyone paid for Bureau water was $7.50. In a lot of places you could still pump groundwater for $15 an acre-foot. How could the State Project’s customers compete? The difference between water at $3.50 an acre-foot and water at $30 an acre-foot—if you irrigated 320 acres and used four feet on your crops—was $33,920. That was more than the net income of a typical small farmer in a year.
There was, however, a way to make the water affordable. The phenomenal growth rate that California has sustained since the turn of the century was finally slowing down. (In 1969, for the first time ever, the state registered a net loss of a few thousand people.)