Friday Top of the Scroll: Calif. cities are breaking piggy banks to buy water. S.F. pays $30k. Here’s why.
As California trudges through its second year of intense drought, forcing local communities to raid contingency funds to pay sky-high retail prices for water supplies, Federal lawmakers are revisiting a deal with the City of San Francisco deemed to be “too-good-to-be-true.” A new bill, introduced by Rep. Connie Conway (R-Tulare), seeks to bring some equity back to one of California’s oldest and biggest water storage deals between the Federal government and the state’s historic big city. For a century, Hetch Hetchy, a dammed up valley deep in Yosemite National Park, has served as a singular lifeline for San Francisco’s water and energy supplies. … The law set San Francisco’s rent for the sprawling valley-turned-dam at $30,000 … Despite decades of inflation, the cost for renting the space has never inched beyond that $30,000 sum.