Delta Legislators, Environmental Justice Advocates Want Water Bond Repealed

Delta Legislators, Environmental Justice Advocates Want Water Bond Repealed

by Dan Bacher

State Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) and Assemblyman Bill Berryhill (R-Ceres), in response to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's announcement Tuesday that he will seek postponement of the $11.14 billion water bond, said the bond should be repealed, not re-scheduled.

“We welcome the Governor’s recognition that this bond does not have public support," said Wolk and Berryhill in a joint statement. "The decision to pull the bond is an admission that our criticisms are correct, it is fiscally irresponsible and won’t help the Delta or create any more water.”

Wolk and Berryhill, who are co-chairs of the No on Proposition 18 Committee, stated they will not support legislation to move the current bond, now on the November 2 ballot, to another date.

“Rather than postpone it, we should repeal it and start over," they said. "We cannot support simply delaying the same irresponsible plan to a future election."

“This is a bad measure that won’t get any better with time," they quipped. "It’s not fine wine. It’s just pork. We should start over next year with a new Legislature and Governor with an open and transparent public process.”

Conservation, environmental justice, fishing, tribal, labor and consumer groups support Wolk and Berryhill in their campaign to repeal the bond.

“Delaying the bond to 2012 will not eliminate its $22 billion impact on our State’s budget nor will it address the key points needed to sustain our water supply and our environment into the future,” said Debbie Davis, Policy Director
of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water. ”Simply delaying the bond will hinder meaningful efforts to address California’s water crisis and distracts from the critical issue of providing clean drinking water to all Californians."

Bond proponents, including Senate President Pro-Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Modesto), Senator Dave Cogdill (R-Modesto) and Schwarzenegger, saw that defeat on the bond was inevitable in November because of the lack of public support for funding dams and pork barrel projects for corporate agribusiness at a time when the state is in its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

An editorial ripping the pork-laden Proposition 18 ran in today’s San Jose Mercury News. The editorial, entitled “$11 Billion Water Bond was a Stretch, All Along” (7/1/10), said that Schwarzenegger's decision to request postponement of the water bond “is a tacit admission of what he should have known all along: The political decision last fall to add $2 billion in pork made the $11.1 billion bond all but impossible to pass, even in good times.” The full article can be found online at http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_15414008?nclick_check=1.

Schwarzenegger's admission that the California public opposes the water bond is a huge defeat for the Governor and a big victory for Californians. The water bond is part and parcel of his campaign to build a peripheral canal, a $23 billion to $53.8 billion government boondoggle that is likely to result in the extinction of collapsing populations of Central Valley salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon, striped bass and other California Delta fish.

On the same day that the Governor announced his effort to remove the bond from the November ballot, another cornerstone of his failed water policies, the widely-criticized Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative, met its most militant resistance to date. Over 40 American Indian activists from the Coastal Justice Coalition, including members of the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa Valley, Tolowa, Cahto, Tolowa and other tribes, took over a MLPA science advisory panel meeting in Eureka to protest the violation of tribal fishing and gathering rights under the MLPA.

It is clear that the Governor won't be able to implement his peripheral canal and MLPA corporate greenwashing fiascos without massive resistance from Californians from diverse communities and political perspectives. The Governor's destructive water policies have served to unite broad coalitions of conservation organizations, Indian Tribes, fishing groups, environmental justice organizations, family farmers, human rights advocates and consumer organizations against his attempts to privatize our public trust resources.

For more information on the campaign against the water bond, go to http://www.NoWaterBond.com. For more information about the Coastal Justice Coalition, call Frankie Joe Myers, (707) 951-5052.