California doesn't want this towering water project. Trump administration may build it anyway

Los Angeles Times ^ | 15 March 2018 3:00am | Evan Halper and Sarah D. Wire

[Teacher317]

We need this and more dams.

But but but... the 3-striped Bavarian screaming minnow might be inconvenienced and become endangered... and then future generations might someday only be able to see the prosperous 2-striped Bavarian screaming minnow, and what a loss for humanity that would be!!!!

/ enviro-idiot "thinking" >

[blueplum]

Stats\sources? As if Fedzilla were ‘wise’ enough, more so than the State or the Citizens thereof\moving in, that could not determine the need and how best to handle.

well, just to keep the conversation specifically on federal dams, I just gave you the wiki article on the Great Flood. That should be all the 'stats' you need.

One may sit and pontificate in 2018, when states have populations of tens of millions, 'well the citizens could have paid', but 'stats' inform us that in 1846, the population of California was less than 10,000 hispanics - including children. The first wagontrain didn't hit California until 1841 - 20 years before the flood. In 1937 when the dam was started, half of California was unemployed. So who was there to pay? Not California. The state tried to sell bonds to pay for the dam but found no buyers.

The population of Los Angeles in 1837 was 2 million - 20% were on welfare and the San Joaquin valley was inundated with 3M refugees in one year from the DustBowl. Who had money? Daddygoldbucks Feds.

Part of the reason for interstates, the Hoover and the Shasta were as work projects because people in individual states were starving to death. How many states during the Dustbowl and Depression could have built interstates or dams or any other public infrastructure 'on their own' ? And how many states could have recovered from the Depression, or any other natural disaster, without them? Not to mention the money involved in indemnification of victims and industry - if there's any assistance at all.

States are not individual countries. They are sovereign, but only within the parameters of the union. If they were to be viewed as countries, islands to themselves, then any federal assistance must be viewed as a loan with interest, and states that couldn't repay, get foreclosed and become federal property. That's not how we work obviously, or half of the US would have been foreclosed on during the Depression.

Federal assistance is given generously to states because we are a union with a common interest, we are neighbor helping neighbor, state lifting up state, but there's got to be a return for that assistance, and that return is vested interest in public projects such as dams built with government funds.

When a child is given an allowance, it is his to spend freely; but there are prerequisites to getting that allowance: chores or duties. Then there's the child that abandons the parents who funded his education, but shows up for the funeral demanding a fair share of the estate. One of the above is a mutually beneficial arrangement - a union. One is just an opportunistic thief.

[dirtymac]

Most of CA’s water problem is in water management. They drain water out of the dams supposedly for salmon habitat, even when after 40 years in some cases , there has been no salmon record. They still continue to drain at least 40 percent of the capacity.