Two events this past week highlight just how far California’s political class still is from the home base of responsible policy. The events seem, to the modern American mind, to represent narrow slices of decision-making in the public realm. But that sense says more about us and our technology-enabled complacency than it does about the issues involved. It has been surreal to watch these developments unfold in concert.
Both issues are ultimately related to farming, although you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the content of the public debate. One involves a bond package for water infrastructure improvements, which the governor and legislature were planning to present to the voters in November. During its concoction last year, the bond package gained notoriety for its pork and backroom deals. Environmental purists have opposed it from the start; now good-government watchdogs argue for scrapping it and starting over. Central Valley farmers and southern coastal urbanites — the Californians most affected by the state’s current water woes — are still pushing the deal. But late last week, Governor Schwarzenegger asked the legislature to take the bond package off the November ballot and submit it in 2012 instead.
This inertia in the face of the severe economic problems caused by current water policy is remarkable. Thousands of people in the farming industry have lost their livelihoods and property since California’s “man-made drought” became reality three years ago. In some counties, unemployment tops 20 percent. The state has lost billions in revenue from its largest industry: agriculture.
Advocacy groups this spring brought the central dispute, which is over the celebrated Delta smelt in the San Joaquin River delta, to a judicially brokered compromise that now allows some level of water pumping. (A good summary of the process is here.) But this is a conditional outcome: not sustainable and not intended to be so. New development is what’s needed to transcend the limitations of our state water infrastructure, which set us up for the crisis to begin with. But legislators in Sacramento aren’t serious enough to prioritize taking action; they have to wangle votes from each other with unseemly pork, which only makes their “fix” more difficult to present to tax-weary voters.
There is, however, something on which the political leaders in Sacramento were able to take unified action this week. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 2, which mandates a set of humane conditions for the hens tended by egg-producing farmers. This year’s legislature has passed a law that will require out-of-state egg producers to conform to the mandate as well, if they want to sell eggs in California. The governor signed it yesterday, demonstrating that they can get things done in Sacramento. The things just have to be on their list of priorities.
What will it take for California’s political class to recognize that prosperity, public order, and human survival are not givens? They can collapse under the weight of hostile regulation. The Golden State’s sour economy and staggering deficit are the chief exhibits in that lesson today, and worse is probably looming. But by all means, let us fight to ensure that hens across America can spread their wings without bumping into each other.
