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Southern Sierran
TOO HIGH TO PAY: THE PRICE OF PRIVATIZING OUR WATER SUPPLIES AND DELIVERY
SYSTEMS
BY LYNNE PLAMBECK
Santa Clarita Group
| | The Santa Clara River, at the site of the proposed 21,000-unit Newhall Ranch project. PHOTO BY LYNNE PLAMBECK |
California
Water Law may be an archaic and onerous creature, but at its heart is
the wonderful basic concept that the State’s water belongs to the
people of California. This rudimentary believe in the justice and right
of everyone, including animals and fish, to a life sustaining supply of
this most precious of all resources, is one that we certainly do not
want to ever give up. So we must understand its importance as well as
the ways that public ownership might be serendipitously undermined.
In
this day of public/private partnerships, “contracting out” and
corporatization of many public services, our water supply and delivery
systems have been no less a target of large private corporations than
our air waves, our beaches and our transportation services. But loss of
our water resources and delivery systems might well be the most
disastrous for the public.
Water law asserts itself in California
in many forms. We have riparian rights to ensure that farmers near
surface water can have access to that water to farm. We have
appropriative rights, assigned through a public process with the
(hopefully) watchful eye of the State Water Resources Control Boards
making sure that the river or stream in not over-allocated. Overlaying
rights give a landowner the right to pump water from under his land.
But these “rights” are not ownership or property rights, as much as
some interests would like to change our law to have them be that. They
are merely rights to “beneficial” use of the water. The State and the
public still own the water itself.
The Public Trust Doctrine,
effectively re-asserted most famously in recent years by the Mono Lake
Decision, underlies all these rights with the purpose of protecting our
rivers and streams. It ensures that resources “in the Public Trust”
such as fish and wildlife will be protected by ensuring that our rivers
and streams retain enough high quality surface flow to support their
needs. Humans seem to forget sometimes that animals must have a
drinking water source, just like us. And fish obviously cannot live
without an adequate stream flow or in water that is too polluted to
provide the oxygen or the nutrients they need to survive. This
enlightened concept has resulted in many legal decisions protecting
stream flow and water quality for animals. But it has also resulted in
great benefits to the human population by ensuring such important
benefits as salmon runs and/or forcing clean-up of polluted water.
Such
protections would disappear under a system where water was merely
bought and sold to the highest bidder. But it is not only our wildlife
that would suffer under such a system. Imagine if your town’s water
supply could be sold to the highest bidder and a large corporation
bought everything. Soon they set up a bottling operation that pumped so
much water from the local source that nearby streams went dry.
Residents had to buy the bottled water because no other source was
available any longer. That is exactly what has happened or may happen
in Idyllwild, McCloud, Gorman and many other towns in California where
bottling companies have “bought” water rights. Luckily local citizen
groups and enviros are fighting hard to protect their local water
resources.
Or what if a large developer could buy up a source of
water in another area and transfer it exclusively to his housing
development. New houses were built and supplied with that water instead
of the existing community, whose water supply had been polluted by
industry because they were unable to out bid the developer.
Unfortunately, this isn’t such a far fetched scenario when we examine
the proposals for huge new towns such as Newhall Ranch in areas like
Santa Clarita that have severe water pollution problems. Again, a local
group of activists, along with the Sierra Club, stood up to protect our
public water supply system.
Last, imagine if our state water
delivery system, consisting of dams, hundreds of miles of canals and
huge pumps that deliver the water to cities and towns throughout
California, became private. Would water be delivered to the highest
bidder, so that if Maywood or Watts couldn’t afford the price, they
wouldn’t get any? Would water be hoarded in dams by well-funded private
investors and manipulated by the market to increase its cost? Would
storage capacity be reserved for certain wealthy developers or farming
interests and not be equitably distributed throughout the state? Such a
scenario is already occurring in the water storage facilities in the
central valley, and a public/ private partnership has been proposed to
takeover our state water delivery system. Luckily, strong objections
continue to be voiced against such proposals.
It is easy to see the
implications that privatization of our water supply might have for
social justice and our environment. It behooves us all to speak out
loudly and strongly against the continued pressure to make our precious
water resources and delivery systems a private commodity.
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