Environment | Daily Report

In November, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his allies will ask voters to sign off on the “Clean Water Supply Act of 2010,” the legislative compromise reached last year during California’s third summer of crippling drought.

Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta

Proponents say the $11.4 billion bond measure will pay to build new dams, repair the state’s brittle water-delivery infrastructure, and restore the collapsing aquatic ecosystem of the San Francisco-Sacramento River Delta.

But the ballot measure won’t make it rain. And water bond or no, some environmentalists say continued conflict over this scarce resource is guaranteed, because water from California’s two great irrigation projects – the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project – are contractually “oversubscribed.”

Every year the government agencies running these two vast systems of dams, pumps, pipes and aqueducts have agreed to deliver more water to contractors than actually descends from the skies.

Marc Reisner’s book on western water issues, “Cadillac Desert,” noted this potential quandary involving water agencies' “overallocation” of water resources and “paper water,” as contracted-for but undeliverable water is called.

As California Watch reported recently, conflict flared last summer over water that had been set aside by federal wildlife agencies to protect the Sacramento River’s endangered salmon run – and was coveted by Central Valley farmers seeking drought relief.

That sort of crunch will become chronic in a future California of “too many people and too many crops planted in arid regions,” as one enviro predicted it in an e-mail.

How will we sort it out when agribusiness and urban water districts claim the legal right to water that is also essential for environmental protection?

Contra Costa Times reporter Mike Taugher, who’s knowledgeable about water, explores some of these issues in a piece about the mega-development planned for Tejon Ranch, on the Grapevine in exurban Kern County. The water for the homes and businesses in “Tejon Mountain Village” will come from the Delta, where water resources “already appear oversubscribed,” and “at a time when environmental regulations are reducing the amount of water that can be taken from the Delta,” Taugher writes.

Tejon Ranch’s developers also are big political players. In recent years they’ve given more than $800,000 to state politicians and to water-related state initiatives, the secretary of state reports. Here are some big donations, from the Secretary of State: