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Chapter 8:
Water From the North 1950s and on
T
ne ink had not been placed on the
Colorado River Compact when another
large water project was percolating in
California. This new project, which evolved into
the Central Valley Project, foretold a profound
change in the way water would be distributed
in the state — and in San Diego County.
A SHIFT IN THINKING ABOUT WATER
During the 1920s, the state of
California
became increasingly concerned about the
i
mbalance between the sources of
water in the
state and the areas of greatest demand for
water. It first focused on the shortage of
water
in the agricultural
Central Valley by planning the
Central Valley Project to distribute water from
the Sacramento River to the San Joaquin
Valley. The Great Depression of the 1930s left
the state without the means to fund the project,
so the federal government, through the Bureau
of Reclamation, built the project.
This project reflected
a transition in the
way the state
thought about its
role in managing
water resources.
When California
became part of the
United States, water was owned and con-
trolled according to individual rights. Those
individuals began to organize and pool their
rights into mutual
water companies, which
were private corporations made up of
landowners. This private ownership of
water
led to abuses of people who had no access
to water, prompting William H. Jennings, the
water lawyer, to write, "The public and the
Legislature began to see water as essential
to life, the same as air, and that one could,
by mere happenstance, be in the position to
prevent his neighbors from having a correla-
tive right with hi
m in this absolute necessity
of life." As that thought relates, the state had
started to adopt a position that would not
allow one individual or company to deprive
others of the water needed to survive.
Gradually, this concept was extended to
cover public water agencies and irrigation
districts. One agency should not take away
water from another. Jennings explained,
“You can’t take the last drop of
water and dry
up an area without replacing it in some way
or other.” From there, the concept of
making
surpluses available “to areas of deficiency”
was applied to regional and even national
water rights.
2
“We got along fairly well
except we all became occa-
sionally impassioned and a
little bit emotionally aroused
when we were thinking of the
terrible things that the others
were trying to do to us.”
William Jennings, on the negotiations for the
Feather River Project (State Water Project)
1
The environmentally sensitive San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin
River Delta is the source of
water for the State Water Project