California Proposition 1E 1

Posted by Christopher Smith Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:45:00 GMT

Blah, it’s getting late, and I’m still slogging through these 1 Plan proposals. So, what’s next on the menu for spending? Well, nobody wanted to miss out on all the Katrina excitement, so we’ve got $4 billion for levees and other flood preparedness infrastructure.

At this point I expect the eyes of most voters will have glazed over and they’ll just give up the struggle to look closely at this last bond measure in the 1 Plan agenda. That’s certainly what I want to do.

Nonetheless, let’s take a peak. Basically, this bill is going to save us from Katrina…. Okay, seriously, it would help us to shore up the Central Valley in particular against flooding that really could create a state wide disaster.

Generally, this sort of stuff has been paid for from a variety of sources: federal funding, the state general fund, and a lot of it has been contracted out to local governments. There’s kind of a strange structure to this, as a lot of the responsibility is in the hands of local governments even though the state has a serious interest in seeing that waterways and the water supply be maintained.

The killer part of this bill from me came from reading this detailed assessment: “The Department of Water Resources (DWR) has made rough estimates of the cost to repair and upgrade the Central Valley flood control system and levees in the Delta of between $7 billion and $12 billion.”

If it’s going to cost between $7-12 billion to fix the system, why are we issuing a bond for only $4 billion? Do we really think the feds and local government are going to make up the rest? I don’t see any kind of plan supporting this, so I’m forced to conclude that we can expect to see additional bonds in years to come.

I have to agree that we have a problem here with our water systems, and they aren’t sexy so politicians tend to have difficulty selling this problem, but our governor drew it to Bush’s attention recently, and the state legislature managed to find $500 million from the general fund to work on the problem this year. Particularly if you think the federal house might shift democratic this election, you have to think California is going to have an easier time getting federal money for this problem.

While I recognize the problem, the solution to me seems to be grabbing money from the general fund, petitioning the feds for more money, and letting local governments handle the rest, rather than packing on more debt to only partially solve the problem. That’s where the money has traditionally come from, and aside from the headline grabbing nature of Katrina, it seems like that’s the way things ought to continue to operate.

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  1. Christopher Smith about 17 hours later:

    Actually, $4 billion for a $7-12 billion problem isn’t too unreasonable, if you assume we’ll be able to tap into some sort of Federal matching funds to make up the difference.

    I hadn’t thought about that. With matching funds it seems like general fund spending, like the $0.5 billion we spent this year, would address the problem soon enough.

    Leaving it up to local governments seems like a bad idea, given that the possible bad outcome would cause serious problems outside those local areas. For example, I had the impression that a lot of California gets drinking water from the Sacramento delta.

    I hear you on that, but we leave it to local governments to run the systems. I can’t see it making much sense for the state to pay for it without actually running it, and this measure does nothing to change who runs what.

    In general, I’m not advocating letting it be the domain of local governments. I like the idea of the feds spending on these kinds of things, with additional spending by the locals so they can do things the way they want to.

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