ROGER SIMON: Chatting With Larry Elder: The Mystery of California.
Elder was just getting off a Zoom press conference when I arrived and we just started talking, no notes, no recording, until he had to go off to yet another conference in his quest to upend Gavin Newsom and become governor of California.
And I’m pretty sure it was better that way, because Larry Elder’s stances on the issues are more well known than just about any political candidate I can think of. He’s been talking about them on air for roughly quarter of a century, often in far greater detail than you ever get from elected officials.
Also, as he was no doubt aware—we have known each other for some time—I pretty much agree with all of them. So I’m the last person to have asked him probing questions.
So we talked.
And the substance was this: How, given the atrocious condition of the state of California and the city of Los Angeles, where I lived for fifty years and he still does, would any sane person not want to try to a new approach to government and a new governor?
Call it the mystery of California. How did the most beautiful piece of real estate arguably in the entire globe turn into—let’s be blunt—a rubbish heap?
Speaking of trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results: Years later, California voters still wait on water projects.
In 2014, in the middle of a severe drought that would test California’s complex water storage system like never before, voters told the state to borrow $7.5 billion and use part of it to build projects to stockpile more water.
Seven years later, that drought has come and gone, replaced by an even hotter and drier one that is draining the state’s reservoirs at an alarming rate. But none of the more than half-dozen water storage projects scheduled to receive that money have been built.
The largest project by far is a proposed lake in Northern California, which would be the state’s first new reservoir of significant size in more than 40 years. People have talked about building the Sites Reservoir since the 1950s. But the cost, plus shifting political priorities, stopped it from happening.
Now, a major drought gripping the western United States has put the project back in the spotlight. It’s slated to get $836 million in taxpayer money to help cover it’s $3.9 billion price tag if project officials can meet a deadline by year’s end. The Biden administration recently committed $80 million to the reservoir, the largest appropriation of any water storage scheduled to receive funding next year.
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Storage was once the centerpiece of California’s water management strategy, highlighted by a building bonanza in the mid-20th century of a number of dams and reservoirs. But in the more than 40 years since California last opened a major new reservoir, the politics and policy have shifted toward a more environmental focus that has caused tension between urban and rural legislators and the communities they represent.
As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2015, Then-Gov Jerry Brown “and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.”
Related: Larry Elder: Damn right I’d replace Dianne Feinstein in the Senate with a Republican, and I may get the chance.
