[AUTHOR’S NOTE: Portions of this article originally appeared on page 1 of The Produce News, March 9, 2009, under the title, “U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock speaks out on need for California water infrastructure.” I had been writing a series of articles for The Produce News on California’s water issues and was delighted when Rep. McClintock agreed to a telephone interview on the subject.  The congressman was most generous with his time, adding some exclusive comments for Perspicacity Press that went beyond the scope of water infrastructure as he shared some keen insights into how poor public policy in California is devastating the state’s economy.]

IT IS NO SECRET that the U.S. economy is a shambles and U.S. businesses, once the greatest wealth-generating mechanism in world history, are struggling to survive, much less to remain competitive in the global marketplace. There are those who would like you to believe that the sole cause of these problems is corporate greed and that the sole solution is more government control, whereas the reality is that the catastrophes taking place before our eyes are a direct result of government exceeding both its authority and its competency.

And the problem is not just with the Federal government but, in many cases, with state government as well. California is one of the worst. Many state policies seem to be crafted for the express purpose of crippling the state’s major industries. The State of California once boasted an economy so vibrant that if California were an independent nation it would, all by itself, have the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, that economy is on the verge of ruin as many businesses are fleeing the state and many others are going belly-up.

And it is all so totally unnecessary.

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Many people, even many Californians, are unaware that California, the most populous state in the Union, is also the leading agricultural state. Agriculture not only puts food on people’s tables but it has been a major contributor to the state’s prosperity. And yet commercial agriculture seems to have been singled out and targeted for destruction by legislators in Sacramento who see food production as the bane of the earth.

And what is happening to California agriculture is illustrative of what is happening today in every sector of the economy in every section of the country.

 “California’s biggest industry is still agriculture, and the beating that it has taken by burdensome regulations, high taxes, and water and electricity shortages has been staggering,” said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), in an exclusive telephone on Wed. Feb. 25.

Although California is currently in its third year of drought, the water shortages affecting farmers have much less to do with weather than with state regulations and court decisions restricting water transfers from where it is abundant to where it is most needed and the fact that the state’s existing water storage and transfer infrastructure was built for a population half of what it is today and has not been upgraded in 30 years.

California’s water crisis is “very real” and it poses “an imminent threat to Central Valley farming,” Re. McClintock said, alluding cutbacks in state and federal water allocations that will take hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland out of production this year. Much of that land has been used for producing fruits, vegetables, nuts and other specialty crops.

“At the same time the industry is being hit with those shortages, we are also seeing sky-high electricity prices and some of the most burdensome regulations ever enacted by any state in the country, particularly on so-called greenhouse gasses,” he said.

“We’ve got to get our priorities straight again and get back to the process of actually building surface water storage facilities – to put it more simply, dams.” And that, he added, “all comes down to question of political will.”

Rep. McClintock, who served for many years in the California legislature before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Nov. 2008, laid the blame for California’s current water crisis directly on the state’s politicians, but it was not partisan finger-pointing. He had praise for Pat Brown, a Democrat who was governor of California from 1959-1967 but was critical of Gov. Brown’s son, Jerry Brown, also a Democrat, who was governor of California from 1975 to 1983, as well as Pete Wilsons, a Republican who served as governor from 1983-1991 and who presided over what was at the time the biggest tax increase in the state’s history.

“I look back a generation ago when California was spending far less than it is today, our taxes were far lower than they are today, and yet we had the finest highway system in the world, we had the finest public school system in the country, we were producing electricity and water so cheaply that many communities didn’t bother to measure the stuff. And the only thing that has changed between those days and these days is public policy,” he said.

“Pat Brown, having delivered the vast cornucopia of public works for which his administration is remembered, ended with a debt service ratio [the percentage of state budget spent for debt service] of just 2.2 percent,” he said. Then, “under the Jerry Brown administration… we abandoned our water projects, some of them mid-construction, such as the Auburn Dam,” and at the same time “entered a period of utterly irresponsible fiscal policy.” Today, California’s debt service ratio is more than triple what it was when Gov. Pat Brown left office.

In just the last 12 years, “California voters have approved over $17 billion of water bonds,” nearly 40 percent more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the entire cost of the California State Water Project in the 1960s.  “And yet we have not added a major water storage facility” in the past 30 years, Rep. McClintock said. The last such facility to be built was the New Melones Dam in 1979.

“The question arises, where is our generation’s state water project?” Rep. McClintock asked. “The problem is those funds were frittered away without any kind of a coherent plan decided beforehand on how to spend those moneys.”

At one time, specific water infrastructure projects in California were first planned and engineered and then financed by revenue bonds specifically for those public works projects that were paid for not from the general fund “but rather by the users of the water and power” produced by the project, he said. “Now, it is exactly the opposite. Now we go out and float these increasingly large mega-bonds with no plan on how to spend them, so they become a grab-bag for local pork projects.”

 In short, with no transparency and no accountability, billions of dollars that should have been used to improve California’s water infrastructure and that voters expected would be used for that purpose when they approved the bonds have evaporated, the money spent by politicians and bureaucrats for whatever struck their fancy, benefited their personal ambitions or furthered their personal agendas.

What is true with California’s water bonds over the last 30 years is true of many other bond measures and budget appropriations not only in California but across the country. It has become a problem of pandemic proportions in government at federal, state and local levels.

“Violating another very important principle that we abided by through the Pat Brown administration is we only used state-wide bonds for projects that benefited the entire state, and a project that exclusively benefited a local community, that project was paid for by the local community,” Rep. McClintock said. “That way, we preserved the state’s resources for those things that benefited the entire state. Now, we literally rob Piedmont to pay Pasadena, and it doesn’t work very well.”

California’s water needs have increased as the state’s population has grown, but the state receives more than enough precipitation to meet its needs if it were properly managed. The Sacramento River’s flow is about 10 times greater than that of the Colorado River, he said. “The difference is they store about 70 million acre-feet on the Colorado, and we store about 10 million acre-feet on the Sacramento.”

Solving California’s water problem “all comes down to a matter of political will,” Rep. McClintock declared. “The lead-eyed Left must be defeated so that we can move forward with the long-overdue expansion of our water infrastructure.”

Finishing the abandoned Auburn Dam project would be “the most logical place to start” in upgrading California’s water infrastructure, he said. “The most expensive part of that project is the footings cut into solid rock. Those were completed more than 30 years ago when the [Jerry] Brown Administration abandoned it. That would provide 2.3 million acre-feet of water [enough to irrigate some 750,000 acres of farmland], along with 800,000 megawatts of cheap, clean electricity and 400-year flood protection for the Sacramento plain.”

For 12 of the past 18 years, there has been flooding in California serious enough to merit disaster declarations, and much of that has occurred in the Sacramento River watershed. Not only do enormous quantities of much-needed water go to waste when such floods occur, but the floods themselves take a heavy toll environmentally as well as economically, Mr. McClintock explained.

“There is nothing more devastating than a flood or a drought, and dams tame that cycle.”

But it would be a big mistake for Californians to simply approve another water bond without the assurances that it would be used for the purpose it was represented to be used for. The current drought conditions in California are being felt by almost everyone, and the pain will intensify as communities increase restrictions on water use. That discomfort might make it easier to sell a new water bond that promises to solve the problem.

But “a water bond under the current circumstances, where there is no project agreed to is simply going to be squandered like the $17 billion of water bonds that we have adopted in the last 12 years,” Rep. McClintock said.

Water is only one of the major issues facing agriculture and other industries in California. Another threat, Rep. McClintock said, is “the governor’s crusade against carbon-dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gasses.”

For agriculture, tightened restrictions on C0₂ emissions will “affect the cost of nitrogen fertilizer” because C0₂ is a “bi-product of nitrogen oxide that is created when nitrogen fertilizers are produced.”

The impact of tighter C0₂ restrictions on any product involving the use of fossil fuel is, of course, well-known. But those restrictions will have another major impact that has not been talked about much. “We will find it increasingly difficult, increasingly expensive to add any kind of infrastructure that requires concrete, because cement production is the third biggest generator of manmade carbon dioxide in all human enterprise,” he said. “For every ton of cement we produce, a ton of carbon dioxide is produced, and the governor has signed a measure that makes that illegal.”

Think about it. It’s not just driving your car that these heavy-handed and scientifically bogus regulations will restrict, but they will severely limit the building of dams, the construction of highways and overpasses, the pouring of curbs and gutters, sidewalks and driveways, the installation of sewers and storm drains and the erection of just about any kind of building from houses to skyscrapers.

When Perspicacity Press talked to Mr. McClintock, the State of California had just passed a record-shattering budget that included a $12.8 billion tax increase while pushing the state far deeper into debt under the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger than it had been under his predecessor, Gray Davis, who voters ousted in a recall election because of his fiscal excesses. Increasing taxes and the state’s deficit seems to have become habitual for California governors over the last several administrations.

“I was there when [Pete] Wilson imposed what was then the biggest tax increase in the history of the state,” Rep. McClintock said. “That was a $7 billion tax increase. The nation was coming out of a recession, and the recession officially ended the first quarter of 1991. The tax increases were imposed in the third quarter, and in the fourth quarter California suffered the biggest drop in retail sales in 30 years – coming out of a recession!”

At a time when the rest of the nation’s economy was expanding, he said, “California’s was put into a nose dive by a $7 billion tax increase,” and that tax increase “actually ended up only bringing in about half of what was projected the first year, widening the deficit.” It then widened further “by two consecutive years of billion-dollar-a-year declines in state revenue,” he said.

But Wilson and Davis have now both been outdone. “You can imagine the impact of a $12.8 billion tax increase in the worst economy in a generation,” Rep. McClintock added.

The increase in California state taxes under the newly-approved budget will take away “about $1,250 from the purchasing power of an average family in California,“ either as a result of direct taxes “or tax-drive price increases as businesses pass along their costs to consumers,” Rep. McClintock said. “The sector that will be utterly hammered is the automobile sector. They are getting whacked by a 13 percent increase in the sales tax and a doubling of the car tax. Bear in mind that the sales tax is the second-biggest income generator for the state, and one-fifth of the sales tax is automobile sales. So you can see the problem.” 

The good news, he said, is that in California “we’ve got everything in the world going for us except wise public policy,” and “that is entirely within our power to change."