No Call for High Dam

Auburn Dam keeps coming back. For four decades there have been proposals for a multi-purpose high dam near Auburn on the North Fork of the American River above Sacramento. The latest revival of the plan is incorporated in a $1.2-billion state bond issue proposed by Sen. Ruben S. Ayala (D-Chino) and creatively titled “The Environmental Development Bond Act.”

The scheme has won approval of Ayala’s own Senate Agriculture and Water Resources Committee, but that is as far as it should go. The idea is to store Sierra runoff water that then could be used to improve water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay. One question is why Northern Californians would vote to tax themselves for a dam to store water that they believe belongs to them anyway?

Ayala contends that the 800-foot dam near Auburn would provide insurance against a decision of the State Water Resources Control Board that might take water away from big delta users like the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project in order to protect the bay-delta environment. The dam project, in effect, would firm up the supplies that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California gets from the state.

But an already-authorized storage reservoir south of the delta would do the same thing by capturing excess flows during the heavy winter and spring runoff season, and without inundating 48 miles of free running river. One critic, Tom Graff of the Environmental Defense Fund, has put it correctly. He acknowledged that the Ayala plan has a germ of a good idea in providing for state development of water supplies for environmental uses. But he added: “Don’t give us the most expensive and environmentally devastating project to do it with.”

The Auburn high dam was first proposed in the 1940s. It was authorized by Congress as part of the federal Central Valley Project in 1965, and construction was started in the 1970s, but then halted for fear of earthquake damage. The dam was redesigned, but construction never resumed and the U.S. Department of the Interior backed out of the project under Secretary Donald P. Hodel. “Not in my lifetime,” Hodel said two years ago, referring to Auburn as a project entirely paid for by the federal government. Now Hodel is back promoting Auburn as a regional project sponsored by the American River Authority with some federal help. And ever since the 1986 floods in Northern California, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been studying the need for some form of Auburn Dam to protect Sacramento. There has been considerable interest in a small “dry” Auburn Dam to store flood water only.

Sacramento-area officials are intrigued by the Ayala plan because they might get flood protection without any local cost. But Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento) says it is a fantasy that state taxpayers would “bail us out” with an Auburn Dam. A state dam also would provide an unfair free ride to the federal government, shoring up Central Valley Project supplies destined largely for farmers in the San Joaquin Valley at state cost.

There is no economic justification for a high dam at Auburn. Nor is there justification for the environmental damage implicit in a high dam. Sacramento needs added flood protection along the American River. But that problem requires a more creative response than revival of this flawed and costly proposal.