Cotton Rotten?

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/?q=node/8059

The original California Aqueduct and its 1960 Prop 1 was approved - narrowly - by the razor thin margin of 173,944 votes from about 5.8 million ballots counted. Only one northern county supported the proposition--Butte County, site of Oroville Dam. California's North-South political scale would never again be so evenly balanced.

Today, of California's 38 million residents, nearly two-thirds of the state's population inhabits the same southern region where an indigenous population of only 100,000 could be sustained before water conveyance. The 12,000 percent increase in population in less than a century is entirely the result of the State Water Project's 34 storage facilities, reservoirs and lakes; 20 pumping plants; 4 pumping-generating plants; 5 hydroelectric power plants, 701 miles of open canals and pipelines which are maintained using $378 million dollars of SWP's $600 million dollar annual budget. The remainder, $222 million dollars, is the annual cost to repay SWP's construction bonds.

There may be no more intriguing political battle in California than our struggle over water. From the destruction of Hetch Hetchy Valley to the emptying of Mono Lake, California’s politically powerful regions have cast sad nets during water wars, taking the life from politically weak and unpopulated regions while defiantly, shamelessly refusing serious consideration of conservation.

The "conveyance without conservation or controls" policy evolved in the municipally divided Southern California region in the absence of an effective and impartial regional growth management board empowered to establish green belts between communities or determine a population capacity that protects the state's natural beauty while taking into account quality of life issues largely ignored since the day the water first began to flow. Conveyance without controls, the great fear of Northern Californians opposed to Proposition 1 fifty years ago, the same voters who overwhelmingly opposed the Aqueduct's bond measure, the Burns-Porter Act, in 1960, were proven right by history.

The fear of Northern opposition came true during the drought of the early 1970's when legislators from three Southern California counties, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino, joined together to vote to exempt their counties from a statewide water rationing plan. Each evening news program in the Bay Area and Sacramento showed images of Southern Californians watering rock gardens and washing their cars, while Northerners were prohibited from watering their lawns or gardens, washing their cars or filling their swimming pools.

Any Northerner who lived through those summers watching a beloved garden die while Southern Californians washed their rocks on television might never forget or forgive or support any future water conveyance.

Physically, the aqueduct runs down the state vertically, but its construction psychologically split California horizontally in half.

Today, of California's 38 million residents, nearly two-thirds of the state's population inhabits the same southern region where an indigenous population of only 100,000 could be sustained before water conveyance. The 12,000 percent increase in population in less than a century is entirely the result of the State Water Project's 34 storage facilities, reservoirs and lakes; 20 pumping plants; 4 pumping-generating plants; 5 hydroelectric power plants, 701 miles of open canals and pipelines which are maintained using $378 million dollars of SWP's $600 million dollar annual budget. The remainder, $222 million dollars, is the annual cost to repay SWP's construction bonds.

The SWP provides what California's Department of Water Resources euphemistically calls "supplemental water" to approximately 27 million Californians and more than three quarters of a million acres of irrigated desert-turned-farmland.

What Proposition 18 sought was a continuation of the same policy, without strong conservation, limits or controlled growth opposed by developers, only virulent, plague-like population growth estimates. In fact, DWR estimates that the additional conveyance of a new peripheral canal would be exhausted by California's projected population growth by 2030, a full decade before Prop 18's $11.1 billion dollar water bond would be paid off.