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Chapter 8:
Water From the North
San Joaquin Bay-Delta, feed it into the
California Aqueduct, pump it over the
Tehachapi
Mountains and deliver it to reservoirs
near the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles.
The State Water Project proposal launched a
bitter north-south controversy. Northern
Californians asked, “Why
should Southern
Californians be allowed to
steal our water?” Southern
Californians countered, “It’s
not their water; it’s
California’s water, and we’re
all
Californians. Why should
the precious water that we
desperately need run wast-
ed into the sea?”
In 1957, Gov. Goodwin
Knight assembled a Water
Lawyers Committee that
was equally divided among
Northern Californians and
Southern Californians, Democrats and
Republicans, and legislators and outsiders.
William H. Jennings, who was part of that
group, stated, “in fact, it was so evenly divided
that its sessions finally wound up in a rather
well-edited and well-prepared statement that
half of the group agreed to sign and the other
half refused to sign. This was presented to
the Legislature as the final report of the com-
mittee.”
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Under the leadership of
Gov. Edmund G. “Pat”
Brown, the State Water Project eventually was
built, and it started deliver-
ing water to Southern
California. With that new
resource, both the Water
Authority and the Metro-
politan Water District could
make good on their com-
mitments to provide water
to new areas – for a while.
One controversial compo-
nent of the plan, a
“Peripheral
Canal” around
the environmentally sensi-
tive Bay-Delta, was never
built as it was defeated in
a statewide referendum in
1982. As a result, the State Water Project
never delivered as much water as originally
intended. The effort to find an alternative
method to reliably deliver the water continues
to this day.
Environmental degradation in and around the
Delta caused additional complications. During
The Harvey O. Banks Pumping Station marks
the beginning of the 444-mile California
Aqueduct