Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [290]
“We were being sold a bill of goods,” recalls Ronnie Dugger, the publisher of the Texas Observer, virtually the only newspaper in the state that opposed Amendment Two. “It was actually $7 billion, not $3.5 billion, when you factored in the interest. Seven billion for what? No one was saying. No one knew. It was the biggest blank check in the history of the United States.”
All such objections notwithstanding, the proponents of the measure had managed to amass as formidable a group of sponsors as Texans were ever likely to see. The backers included nearly everyone who was anyone in the state. Three former governors—John Connally, Allan Shivers, and Price Daniel—served as cochairmen. The editors or publishers of the San Antonio Light, the Austin American-Stateman, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Times Herald, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Wichita Falls Times-Record-News, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Beaumont Enterprise-Journal, the Port Arthur News, the El Paso Times, and the San Angelo Standard-Times were on it, not to mention dozens of smaller papers like the Bonhom Favorite and the Waxahachie Times. The mayors of Midland, Dallas, Bay City, Corpus Christi, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, Dallas, Lubbock, Fort Worth, and Arlington were on it. Presidents, chancellors, and regents of Texas universities were represented: Baylor, Texas Tech, the University of Texas, Texas A and M, Southern Methodist University. A hundred and forty-three of the 150 members of the Texas House of Representatives were on it. Twenty-eight of the thirty-one members of the Texas Senate were on it. The head of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission; lobbyists for railroads and manufacturers and municipalities; grocery-store magnates; retired Congressmen; Texas kingmakers such as Robert Strauss (later the head of the Democratic National Committee) and Leon Jaworski (later the Watergate special prosecutor)—the list read more like the sponsors of the United Way than a plan that appeared likely to end up dumping the Mississippi River on the expiring plains.
As an accident of geography made the rescue of West Texas so difficult and expensive, however, an accident of migration made passage of the referendum at least as difficult. In California, the conservative and reactionary factions of the state’s electorate are concentrated mainly in the sprawl south of Los Angeles, in San Diego, and in the hard-bitten little cities of the San Joaquin Valley. Every one of those places is a desert or semidesert, haunted by extinction, and every one of them saw the State Water Project as salvation. An unknown number of people whose antipathy to government runs to things such as fluoridated water and Social Security voted enthusiastically for the most expensive public-works project in California’s history. In Texas, the ultraconservative faction of the electorate tends to be spread more around the state. If it has a center, it is probably Houston, which stood to gain virtually nothing from the Texas Water Plan. The mayor of Houston, in fact, was conspicuously absent among those big-city mayors who had enlisted as members of the Committee of 500. Dallas, another conservative bastion, was to get water, but felt no sense of desperate need. Aside from that, Texas’s population as a whole is skewed to the east, where the main problems with water tend to come in the form of thunderstorms, hurricanes, and floods. In California, two-thirds of the population resides in the drought-ridden south. “The opponents of Amendment Two were strange bedfellows,” says Ronnie Dugger. “You had the Sierra Club voting with the little old ladies in tennis shoes.” When the final count was in, the Texas Water Plan had lost, by sixty-six hundred votes.
About a year before the referendum on Amendment Two was held, Congressman George Mahon, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, had asked Jim Casey over for a chat between fellow