SACRAMENTO — Eleventh-hour discord over a huge bond proposal sank an ambitious legislative water package that would have brought some resolution to one of California's most contentious issues.
As the clock ticked toward adjournment of the legislative session late Friday, Democratic leaders realized they didn't have the votes and shelved a wide-ranging set of measures aimed at improving the state's water supply and stopping the environmental hemorrhaging of the center of its waterworks.
But they vowed to try again, saying they would ask Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to call a special session on water this fall.
"Everyone agrees that we are close and that we have made a decade's worth of progress in just a few weeks," Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento said in a statement after deciding not to move the legislation to the floor shortly before midnight.
The Democrats had rolled five proposals into one policy bill and -- in a partial bow to Republican demands -- crafted a $12-billion bond measure late in the week to pay for new water infrastructure, ecosystem restoration and supply projects such as water recycling and desalination. Backers called it the most comprehensive water legislation in decades.
Much of the package revolved around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta east of San Francisco, the failing heart of California's water system, where the state's two biggest rivers converge. It is part of the largest estuary on the West Coast, a passageway for salmon and home to the tiny, imperiled delta smelt. It is also the conduit for shipping water from the north to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities.
But the delta is on the verge of ecological collapse, in part because of the mammoth pumping operation that feeds the federal and state aqueducts. Pumping has altered the delta's hydrology and salinity patterns and helped drive the smelt to near-extinction. The smelt's vulnerability has spurred pumping cutbacks, reducing water deliveries to farms and cities, aggravating the impact of the current drought.
Water managers are desperate for a "delta fix" to halt the waterway's decline and restore pumping operations. In pursuit of that goal, the water package reshaped various aspects of delta management and policy.
Among the measure's provisions were creation of a delta conservancy to acquire land for habitat restoration and the establishment of an independent state council that could have promoted replumbing of the delta, including a controversial bypass canal to carry deliveries around the river junction.
