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CALFED Quarterbacks
Is Gale Norton going green? On July 27, the Interior Secretary testified before Congress on competing bills that would authorize the estimated $8.7 billion CALFED effort to reconcile the interests of water-users and endangered species. She outlined specific problems with a bill introduced by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) - and many of them just happened to be the same objections voiced by environmentalists.
Calvert's proposed legislation, HR 1985, would allow the Interior Secretary to essentially pre-authorize water projects. If committees in Congress don't object, and the secretary gives the go-ahead, the projects are considered approved. But Norton testified that "some language also circumvents Congressional oversight of individual projects" and may violate the Constitution.
Calvert's bill is one of three competing pieces of legislation. Though Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have also introduced CALFED implementation bills, Calvert's bill has been the most turbocharged. It has also provoked vociferous opposition from the conservation community, not only because of what one environmentalist called it's "blank check" to the Interior Secretary on new water projects, but also because it guarantees at least 70% of contracted water for agricultural users south of the Delta. The Westlands water district near Fresno, with 600 agricultural users, would be the primary beneficiary.
The Calvert bill is also notable for what it does not include: any specific mention of money allocated to environmental restoration, as well as any explicit mention of the "beneficiary pays" principle featured in the final record of decision issued by CALFED last August.
Democrat George Miller, former head of the House Resources Committee, has lost so much turf to the Republican majority that one lobbyist called his legislation, HR 2404, "a placeholder." Calvert, on the other hand, chairs the House Water and Power subcommittee, which is the first line of offense for CALFED legislation. On Sept. 13, while everyone else was glued to replays of the World Trade Center attack, Calvert was hard at work forwarding HR 1985 out of his subcommittee.
Without parallel action in the Senate, the Calvert bill is going nowhere fast. In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein started out with a bill that resembled the Calvert bill far too closely for most conservationists' comfort. Rather than "preauthorization," Feinstein's legislation (S-976) mandates "fast-track" Congressional approval for water projects supported by the Interior Secretary. That means no committee review, no hearings, just a straight up-and-down floor vote on water projects that could have billion-dollar pricetags. The top priority projects listed in the CALFED record of decision are: raising the Shasta Dam, increasing storage at Los Vaqueros, an existing offstream reservoir in eastern Contra Costa County, and in-Delta storage, which would flood low-lying Delta islands to provide water storage.
While the CALFED record of decision talked only about "studying" these alternatives, Steve Evans of Friends of the River fears that the open-ended permission given by both the Calvert and Feinstein bills could result in massive increases in the scope of these projects without appropriate review. If recent Congressional history is any guide, a Congressional authorization of a new water project is likely to fly under the radar, attached as a rider to a much larger bill that legislators are under pressure to pass, such as a defense spending bill.
At press time in mid-October, Feinstein had finally worked out a compromise with Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Boxer had wanted Feinstein to eliminate not only fast-track authority but also the guarantees to Westlands. The new slimmed down compromise bill removes the Westlands guarantees but still short circuits the authorization process - something Washington insiders say the rest of the California delegation isn't likely to get behind.
Without a unified California delegation, the smart money says Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle won't let CALFED make it to the Senate floor. The struggle between Westlands and CALFED may be a dealbreaker - or dealmaker. Although California appears heavily urbanized, 80% of the state's water still goes to farms, according to Barry Nelson of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Alfafa alone consumes more water than every man, woman and child and all of California's urban industries," says Nelson. "Around the West people have been saying the era of big dams is over, but in California the fight is very, very real."
Alfreda Sebasto of the Westlands water district agrees with Nelson on this point, but on very little else. "What we are trying to do is bring balance back into CALFED. It was supposed to do that, but it has not, as illustrated by decreasing allocations for Westlands," says Sebasto.
When all is said and done, the biggest fights over CALFED are likely to be about money, not water (numbers bandied about in bills and budgets for this round's federal share range from $10-$40 million).
Environmentalists have been promoting a "zero subsidy" stance on water. The CALFED record of decision called for an approximate three-way split of the program's $8.7 billion pricetag among the federal government, the state of California and project beneficiaries.
CALFED, like the Endangered Species Act, may do better just getting funded without formal authorization by Congress. In the meantime, Interior Secretary Norton's stance on CALFED could be a bellwether for similar stakeholder initiatives undertaken by the Clinton administration and now needing implementation.
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