Weighing Californians’ Appetite for Water Reductions
Buffeted by years of drought, Californians appear more ready than ever to make sacrifices to address the state's water challenges. According to a poll conducted in late August and early September, 54 percent of likely voters in California supported mandatory cutbacks in water supplies, and that "dealing with the state's water problems" topped their priorities for state government.
Poll respondents also showed high levels of support for a variety of water storage investments, from dams and reservoirs (70 percent in favor), desalination (81 percent), aquifer storage and recharge (89 percent) and stormwater recycling (91 percent). Support for recycled drinking water varied from 10 to 43 percent, with those who knew more about how the process works showing greater comfort with the idea.
Bruce Cain, the Spence and Cleone Eccles Family Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, helped the Hoover Institution design the poll, which was administered by the polling firm YouGov. It surveyed 1,500 adult Californians from around the state between August 31 and September 11.
Earlier this week, Prof. Cain joined a panel at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to talk about the results. Concluding that voters had largely accepted California Governor Jerry Brown's water policy so far, he added a note of caution: "but the reality is that we've done so far is the easy stuff, and what we're facing is potentially a bigger and deeper problem." Cain cited two concerns: one, that California's water infrastructure was designed during what scientists now believe was an atypically wet 20th century, meaning that even normal conditions might be much drier than we realize; second, that rising temperatures due to climate change may undo the state's system of using winter snowpack as a "frozen reservoir."
"That system," he concluded, "is being undermined systematically and it's not clear that if we have to go to deeper cuts if we're going to find that level of public support."
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headshot of Dave Danbom. Dave is smiling with glasses and a hat, with a river in the background.
