Not content with the high-speed rail pipe dream, California Governor Jerry Brown is pushing another multi-billion dollar infrastructure project under the “environmentally friendly” banner. In its way, it’s an ingenious solution to some perennial California problems, but at the end of the day it reveals that the imaginations of many California politicians are firmly stuck in the 1960s.
Reuters reports:
California Governor Jerry Brown and U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday unveiled a multibillion-dollar plan for two giant tunnels that would dramatically reconfigure the state’s water delivery system.
The nearly $24 billion project aims to help restore the habitat of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and improve the reliability of water supplies to the arid central and southern parts of the state.
The state already has two massive aqueducts that move water from the north to the south, but the way in which the water is transferred has severely damaged fish populations and degraded their habitat in the delta.
The planned project is similar to one Brown approved three decades ago when he was first governor. Voters rejected that project amid vociferous opposition from northern California residents. A similar political battle will be fought this time around.
Note the similarities to the high-speed rail project: Both are huge construction projects on a scale California hasn’t attempted for decades which will employ a generation of union workers and create enormous debt—but look, they’re green! It’s more than likely that overstated benefits and understated costs will turn the tunnel project into a huge white elephant. It’s also NIMBY bait that will be tied up in court for years, and will likely feature lawsuits from supposed green beneficiaries (already, green opposition to the idea is mounting).
“I want to get [stuff] done,” Governor Brown told a news conference. And perhaps he does. But futuristic-looking ideas as the future looked in 1965 are unlikely to help California much now. Big multibillion dollar projects make the unions and the construction companies happy, and putting some green lipstick on them helps divide the deadly opposition of California’s powerful and wealthy Stop the World green lobby, but the odds are that the state will spend money and time it doesn’t have on projects it won’t be able to finish.
California needs the creative destruction of excessive regulations and burdensome taxes more than it needs big new project. California does have serious infrastructure needs—Governor Brown is not entirely wrong about that—but its infostructure is what really needs fixing. The state’s government and its regulatory and administrative systems are unsustainably inefficient, unconscionably slow and obstructive, and the combination of of high tax and high debt will ruin the state long before any of the Governor’s big projects come on line.