SacBee

Dan Walters: It's what politicians do when they want to ignore a harsh reality

(Published Sept. 9, 2001)

State Sen. Sheila Kuehl has newspaper editorialists, environmentalists, farm groups and urban planning theorists swooning over her legislation that would require local governments and developers to identify a water supply for any major housing subdivision prior to its approval.

The measure is the latest version of a concept that's been kicking around the Capitol for several years, driven by an East Bay water official.

It sounds plausible enough on its surface. What, one might ask, could be more logical than to have a source of water identified before a housing development is begun, rather than simply and automatically relying on the local water agency to pick up the new customers? If enacted, Kuehl's bill, SB 221, would give those opposed to residential growth a new legal weapon. They could litigate the issue of whether enough water is available to serve the proposed development.

SB 221 may be, however, the most illogical bit of legislation to surface in the Capitol this year because it's based on the wholly fallacious, if pervasive, notion that development is growth. Growth is the addition of 600,000 people to California's population each year, virtually all of them by birth or foreign immigration. New housing, new retail business, new transportation facilities, new power plants, new schools -- and new water systems -- merely serve that growth.

It makes no more sense to tie residential development to water than it would be to force developers to certify that there are enough lanes on the freeway, enough beds in the local hospital, enough classroom space, enough groceries in the local supermarket, or enough electric power to serve the residents of the proposed development.

Providing sufficient water supplies to meet demand is the job of politicians, and so far they've done a poor job, putting off critical decisions on new storage and conveyance facilities year after year. They did a comparably lousy job on power plants, which is why California has suffered from an energy crisis in recent months, and transportation planning is equally dismal.

Tying subdivision approval to water supply is a simplistic, utterly illogical approach to a very complex matter of balancing competing land use needs, and the even more complex issue of financing and building infrastructure for the ever-expanding needs of an ever-rising population. If a subdivision isn't built because there's no easily identifiable water supply, it wouldn't stop growth. It merely would mean that California would have that many fewer homes, when housing development is already falling short of need, driving up housing costs and making it more difficult for families to put roofs over their heads.

Something similar to what Kuehl proposes took root in trendy Marin County during the 1980s. Using the pretext of water shortages, Marin County virtually shut down residential development. It worked, in the sense that it brought Marin's population growth to a near-halt, but it merely squeezed development even farther north into Sonoma County, creating another set of problems.

If we don't want to deal with the effects of growth, including the incursion of new subdivisions into rural areas and the diversion of water supplies from farms to homes, we could deal with it at its roots. We could get tough on immigration or institute more vigorous birth control programs. But those are, to say the least, controversial steps, and stopping population growth, even if it were possible, would have its own negative effects. It would mean fewer workers, less economic growth, and the social and economic costs of having an aging population.

There is no easy answer to population growth. We -- society acting through its political officeholders -- either accept it and deal with its effects in ways that mitigate the most negative aspects, or we put our heads in the sand and pretend that passing a law tying housing development to water will somehow make the problems go away. It's the sort of thing that politicians and other practitioners of symbolism and wishful thinking do when they can't, or won't, recognize reality.

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2001