FORMER GOV. PETE WILSON: California had a plan to store storm water, but Democrats blew it.

George Skelton’s question of why the state and federal governments don’t store more stormwater before it escapes to the sea is not a new one.

In the late 1990s, the federal and state governments did in fact forge a cooperative compact — called “Cal Fed” — to achieve what I said would be “water of sufficient quantity and quality to provide California’s needs for fish, farm and factory.” Both state and federal agencies were to budget and coordinate spending and permitting for agreed-upon projects to achieve that goal.

For some years there was such cooperation, particularly in the funding of conservation and environmental projects. But when year after year I included money in the state budget for surface collection and storage projects to bank against droughts, the money was removed by the Democratic majorities in the Legislature. When agricultural interests rightly complained that they were being cheated out of their fair share of projects, support for Cal Fed evaporated. The bargain had been broken.

Flashback: VDH in 2015 on how then-Gov. Jerry Brown was hamstrung by his own actions in the 1970s: How Jerry Brown Engineered California’s Drought.