Recent heavy rains in California remind many of our state’s lack of water-reclamation infrastructure. This has been a problem for many decades and was the subject of a 2019 report on wasted rain water:
“When you look at the Los Angeles River being between 50% and 70% full during a storm, you realize that more water is running down the river into the ocean than what Los Angeles would use in close to a year,” said Mark Gold, associate vice chancellor for environment and sustainability at UCLA. “What a waste of water supply.”
Now, in 2023, what we still have plenty of is our proximity to salt water! However, in March of last year, the California Coastal Commission unanimously killed a desperately needed desalination plant. A few months later, our state’s water “czar” resigned, reportedly over his disappointment with Gov. Gavin Newsom and his “progressive” administration’s apparent disinterest in finding solutions to this critical problem.
This lack of serious state leadership has been a bi-partisan failure since Jerry Brown Jr. first ran for governor. The last big-dam project in our drought-prone state was completed in 1980. How many governors and legislators — from both parties — have come and gone in those decades? What did any of them really do about our needed water supplies? Not much!
Instead of prioritizing needed water projects, we got a high-speed bullet train to nowhere. Now, with exorbitant cost overruns, it is estimated to total $113 billion, more than 11 times what we were told when we voted on Proposition 1A in 2008, and it may never be completed.
How can we ever hold these clowns accountable?
Gary Curtis
Santa Clarita
