WATER ISSUES ARE A GOVERNMENT CAUSED PROBLEM WHOSE ANSWER IS SANE NON PROFITEERING GOVERNMENT ACTION ON WATER by Steven S. Lamb. Fellow, Center For Progressive Urban Policy. Water, water, water. Its always been a problem in California. Either the wet stuff is hurled down from the sky and rolling off the hills in angry waves towards homes, or it doesnt seem to be around at all. Flood, drought, flood, drought, an endless cycle. California is an empire built entirely of moved and imported water. We moved the water with State and Federal money from Northern California to the South, from Arizona, and Nevada. Those new water sources encouraged people to move here by the millions. With those new sources of water, we as a State never bothered to really manage our water. With more State and Federal money we took all our rivers and turned them into concrete drainage ditches that divert rain water as if it were unwanted poison to the sea. Our building codes demanded an end to cesspools that return used water to the ground and we built sewage plants that partly clean the water and again, dump it to the sea. We erected codes that do not allow the use of graywater. Our codes demanded hardscape and water run off as opposed to porous paving. Compounding this lunacy, our local governments issued endless building permits for more and more homes. We knew California was short of water 30 years ago. In that 30 years local government allowed the population of California to increase 40%, whistling past the cemetery as if there would be no end to the ability to get water from elsewhere. At the same time Arizona and Nevada developed and went to Federal Court to get some of their water back, yet the building orgy and restrictive codes continued. While supporting an endlessly growing human population is impossible, supporting one near our present population sustainably may be. It will require change. The local agencies will have to stop caving to every Union demand for higher salaries and ever more generous benefits and start actually spending agency money on repairing and dredging dams so they can hold water long enough to pump it into deep groundwater storage, allowing, in fact mandating on site gray water recycling and porous paving, along with onsite run off retention, on residential lots. it will require building small, local sewerage treatment plants and the effective cleaning of that sewerage water to drinking standards. These changes are each technically feasible and have been for decades. Instead in water shortage years, citizens are told they must conserve and pay more, as are farmers, who also often have their water allotment cut off with disastrous results. What has gotten in the way of these needed changes are 1. Institutional inertia- Code agencies that just refuse to see they can help be a part of the solution on the water issue because they only function from an US V. THEM mentality. 2. Greedy Public Employee Unions- every increase in rates is seen as money they deserve. Money that is needed for basic infrastructure repair and improvement is embargoed to higher than the Private Sector salaries, benefits and retirements. 3, The Greedy Politicians who take water company profits that the unions dont get and misapply them to the general Fund where generally the money is spent on an endless army of well connected Consultants who also donate to and work on campaigns. shock. 4. Again Greedy Politicians who in their lust for ever more revenue, power and campaign contributions issue endless building permits for subdivisions that they know there really isnt water or infrastructure for. 5. Greedy Foundation Financed Not For Profits that do Environmental Mitigation. In the case I am most familiar with, a Dam dredging project that has been overdue for at LEAST four decades is finally about to be done by the County so they will have flood control capability and perhaps even pumping ability. A local not for profit that also is the only one in the area that does tree planting mitigations organized armies of well meaning misinformed Environmentalists to fight the County EIR and turn the four year project into a smaller every year project. why? they derive over 75% of their income off mitigations. Its not about the People or the environment, its about their INCOME STREAM. There is only one answer to this mess. We the Citizens must first realize where the failures are, and then come together and force the Government, agencies and not for profits to change their conversations from those of solving this issue for their direct benefit, to one that attempts to consider what is best for the local land, the planet in general and the people. Until then, California will be stuck in the Drought flood drought cycle and ever increasing costs with no progress.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 22:44:19 +0000
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