Warm Springs: A Classic Boondoggle?
By Harold Gilliam
If President Carter wants to bolster his anti- inflation program by saving the government at least $200 million, I have a suggestion for him.
The planned Warm Springs dam, on a tributary of the Russian river in Sonoma County, is a classic boondoggle, a pork barrel item that was somehow overlooked when the President compiled his nationwide ''hit list" of water projects that he boldly said he would veto—and did.
Even in the Corps of Engineers' optimistic estimate of the dam's benefits, Warm Springs is a marginal project, with a benefit-cost ratio of 1.1. That means for every dollar of cost, there will be benefits of $1.10. If the benefits were a shade less, the dam could not be financially justified as a federal project.
Let's look at the principal benefits- recreation and water supply.
The federal flood-control program was born 40 years ago in an effort to do a job that no state could handle alone — prevent the kind of disastrous floods that were occurring along the Mississippi, with tragic loss of life and property.
What happens on the Russian river is quite different. Floods there come not with a rushing wall of water that wipes out whole communities but with a gradual rising of the river until it laps at the doors of buildings in resort communities like Guerneville and sometimes inundates basements and ground floors.
Traditionally, after this kind of flood, the owners shovel out the mud and go back to work. It's a nuisance, but it's been happening on the Russian river for generations, and no one buying property there has any excuse for being ignorant of the river's habit of rising in heavy rains. So we may wonder by what right property owners now demand the federal government bail them out. There are ways of flood- proofing buildings that would accomplish much the same results the dam would provide — lowering the high-water level by two or three feet.
Along the river and its tributaries there are places where the water is cutting its banks into agricultural land. Riprap or other channel work could curtail the bank erosion without the dam.
Some of the agricultural fields along the river — mostly in grapes now — are flooded by high water, which deposits layers of silt in the vineyards. This process is precisely what caused the land to be productive in the first place, under the natural cycles of soil replenishment. Stopping the process may be a convenience to growers, but in the long run it would amount to a death sentence on the land that is produced and sustained by river overflow. Why should the federal government be subsidizing destruction of the soil's fertility?
But even the protection that the dam would provide to existing buildings and farmlands would not add up to enough dollar benefits to pay for the dam's flood-control cost. That cost can only be met by an ingenious accounting gimmick: "benefits" to buildings and other developments that do not exist- but that might exist if the dam were built.
If the dam lowers the flood crest, certain lands that otherwise would be in the flood zone could be used for building. So flood protection to those ghostly structures is counted as a benefit in order to justify the cost of the dam.
Why should the federal government be subsidizing development in the flood plain? Why should federal taxpayers be giving handouts to those lucky landowners?
Even all this remarkable accounting still would not pay for the dam. To help justify the cost, the Corps counts recreational benefits. Boaters and other users of "Lake Sonoma," the reservoir behind the dam, would eventually spend more than $1 million a year there. By some puzzling financial legerdemain these millions are counted as part of the benefits supplied by the dam. But who gets the benefits?
If a typical family spends, say $100 a year at Lake Sonoma — on boats and gasoline and hot dogs — that's $100 that it won't spend someplace else, such as the Bay Area. Why should the federal taxpayer be subsidizing a diversion of recreation expenditures from the Bay Area to Lake Sonoma? What possible federal benefit is involved?
The dam would also supply water for use in Sonorma county and adjoining areas. The water would be paid for by the water user. Theoretically. Actually the payment would extend over a 50 to 60 year peroid. But the dam has to be paid for when it is built, not some time in the next century. So Uncle Sam in effect lends the water users their share of the paid dam's cost, to be paid back over that 50-60 year period.
But because the dam was originally authorized in 1967, at a time when interest rates were only 31/8 per cent, the water users would pay at that bargain basement rate. The federal taxpayers would have to make up the difference between that and the current market interest rate, which will be three or four times that much. And that difference over a half-century period, could amount to the biggest subsidy of all.
If Sonoma county wants to double or triple or quadruple its population so that the water supply available from Warm Springs will be used and paid for, if the people of Santa Rosa want that city to become another congested San Jose, sprawling out into the farmlands, I suppose you could say that's their business. But why should the rest of us — the federal taxpayers — pay the bill?
Somona taxpayers will be paying for the dam on top of their other taxes for generations to come. The result will predictably be irresistible pressure on all local agencies to promote the fastest possible urbanization and industrialization of the county in order to get a broader tax base to pay the bills for the dam. Growth under pressure.
The dam will create jobs, yes. But if we are to rely
on dams for employment, when Warm Springs is
finished it will be necessary to build another big dam
and yet another when that is finished ad infinitum.
There is room for argument about how much water will be needed and where it will come from. Without Warm Springs, water could be available from wells (the Russian river drainage, particularly the Santa Rosa plain, is rich in ground water), from increasing the capacity of Coyote dam on the upper Russian, from conservation and waste water recycling.
How much would be needed from these or other sources—including Warm Springs—depends on what assumptions you make about population growth and about more efficient use of existing water supplies.
The Warm Springs Task Force, a Sonoma county group opposed to the dam, has a court suit maintaining that the Corps' environmental impact statement does not adequately consider alternatives to the dam, earthquake risks and other matters. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case last spring but for some inscrutable reason has not yet spoken. Meantime, the preliminary work goes on, millions have already been spent and construction on the main dam is about ready to begin.
The corps has estimated that the water supply portion of the dam, to be paid for by Sonoma county taxpayers, would amount to $60 million dollars. But the Task Force comes up with another figure. Adding the interest to be paid over the life of the project, plus an inflation factor, plus a cost-overrun figure, the Task Force calculates that the dam will cost the Sonoma county taxpayers $230 million -- almost $1000 added to the property tax for every man, woman and child now living in the county.
No matter whose figures are accepted, Warm Springs seems inordinately expensive way for federal taxpayers as well as for the county to subsidize urban sprawl, riverbank landowners, subdivisions on farmland, reservior recreation, and future construction in flood- prone areas.
Photograph caption: SITE OF THE WARM SPRINGS DAM PROJECT. Even the Engineers consider it a marginal project with a benefit-cost ratio of 1.1
S.F. Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.