Editorial: Prepare for reality check on state water bond
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Jan. 22, 2015, Chico Enterprise Record.
It’s hard to know what voters expected to happen when they approved the $7.5 billion water bond in November.
We do know our north state legislators thought the $2.7 billion included for increased water storage would result in pretty quick movement toward at least one and maybe two new reservoirs. That’s why they supported it.
We were skeptical. There was no specific language in the bond that the money would go to Sites Reservoir west of Maxwell or Temperance Flat, on the San Joaquin River upstream from Millerton Lake northeast of Fresno. We recommended a no vote on Proposition 1 for that reason. It seemed like we were taking on a lot of debt that would send money who knows where.
However, our representatives were enthusiastic backers of the bond. Sites would happen, they said, because it was so far ahead of the game. Years of already completed work points to Sites as the best solution. There’s no way the bureaucrats charged with making the decision would ignore the obvious, right?
Yeah, right.
After the State Water Commission met Wednesday, its chairman, Joe Byrne, issued a statement that said basically, we don’t have to allocate the money for storage until the end of 2016, and we’re going to spend the next two years developing a whole new set of guidelines and regulations on how to allocate the bucks.
Mind you, the water system that serves California has been in place for decades and the glaring problems with it have been obvious for years.