EDITORIAL: We’Ll Need Dams If We’re to Address Water-Supply Woes

By The Modesto Bee, Calif.

Jan. 16–The governor had some good news last week for advocates of a dam on the San Joaquin River at Temperance Flat, but don’t start holding your breath. It will be years before a dam could be in place — if one ever is built at all.

The opposition to a new dam on the mountainous reaches of the San Joaquin River east of Fresno — to any new dams, for that matter — is strong and vocal. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles, was quick to respond to the governor’s proposal: “Water storage is not going to happen.” Nunez, who brags about bipartisan leadership, wants to throttle this baby in the crib.

Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines of Clovis was equally obtuse: “Many of us in the Central Valley understand that you cannot conserve your way out of this,” he said. He knows very well that conservation is as big a part of our water solution as building dams.

Nunez and Villines are missing the point. Surface water storage and conservation are just two elements of the three-legged strategy to address California’s growing water-supply problems. Underground storage is the third. What they don’t understand is that no one part of the solution will be enough. We’re going to need all three.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s $6.5 billion proposal would build two dams, one at Temperance Flat and the other west of Sacramento (the so-called Sites Reservoir). A 2008 bond measure would raise $4billion, $500 million would be borrowed for groundwater storage, and local water users would have to pony up an additional $2 billion.

There hasn’t been a major dam built in California in more than three decades. The state has added nearly 10 million residents since the last dam and is expected to add more than a half-million residents each year. Changing weather patterns blamed on global warming are likely to reduce supplies even further as less water is stored in snow and more rushes out to the sea each spring. That could mean severe flooding in California’s future. Dams are one way to manage such floods and to capture some of that runoff so we can put it to good use.

Environmental concerns raised by the prospect of new dams are real, and must be taken seriously. The huge cost also is a critical factor. But the need for more water in California is daunting. Can anyone really imagine what life in the state would be like if there wasn’t enough water for drinking, raising food and running businesses? That very real prospect must be addressed when this debate moves forward.

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Our Point

Dam right — California needs more water storage to serve its growing and thirsty population.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Modesto Bee, Calif.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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