Issues Swirl Around Proposed Dams

TEMPERANCE FLAT – Ron Jacobsma shifts his boat into idle, stopping to float right where he wants to see another dam rise across the San Joaquin River.
“We'll see it. I just don't know if I will see it in my lifetime,” mused Jacobsma, who oversees delivering water to nearly 1 million acres of farmland in the shadow of the Eastern Sierra.

That would suit Sean Lodge, whose family homesteaded near the dam site, just fine.

“There is a rich history that is important to preserve,” Lodge said via e-mail from his firefighting post in the Sierra National Forest. “There are not that many places in the state that have this history that is not lost already.”

Which course is set for San Joaquin River mile 274, better known as Temperance Flat, depends on whether Californians are ready to accept new dams to keep taps flowing even as growth and drought strain water supplies.

Voters may be offered the opportunity to decide the issue in November, but only if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers can settle on the terms of a $9.3 billion water bond package in the coming days.



The bond proposal is packed with spending for popular clean-water, conservation and Sacramento delta restoration programs. But there also is a handful of unresolved issues, any one of which could draw away enough support to keep the measure from securing the necessary two-thirds vote of lawmakers and the governor's signature before it can be placed on the ballot.

Among those: a $700 million annual bill to repay the bond debt, power struggles over who would set spending priorities and suspicions that it lays the groundwork for a redrawn north-to-south aqueduct, an idea defeated when it went to voters as the Peripheral Canal in 1982.

And, of course, dams. More specifically, the proposed Sites Reservoir, located 16 miles in an isolated bowl west of the Sacramento River near Colusa, and Temperance Flat, not far from Fresno, where a dam would stretch the length of several football fields across the San Joaquin River.