What does it take to override a wartime Republican president’s veto? Water, apparently.
Thirty five years ago, facing a rising tide of discontent over polluted water, Congress overrode d Nixon’s veto of the October 15, 1972 Clean Water Act. As a result, municipalities were able to apply for federal funds to help build and improve their local sewage treatment plants, and water got cleaner, as a result.
Yesterday, facing a mounting tide of discontent over global warming and rising sea level are real, Congress (unable to end the war or provide health care for kids,) united to reject Bush’s veto of the Water Resources Development Act.
As a result, 900 water projects will receive federal funds, including restoration in the Florida Everglades and the replacement on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers of locks that farm groups say are crucial for shipping grain.
Here in California, the Act authorizes $1.3 billion for 54 projects, including $106 million to strengthen the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees—a shoring-up project that has profound implications for San Francisco Bay.
As Will Travis of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission told me this week, one of the central questions now facing this region is, ‘How do we build around a Bay that we know is going to get bigger, but we don’t yet know by how much?
“It’s a bit like seismic safety,” Travis said, noted that the 8-year plan that BCDC is proposing is just a proposal.
“It’s the beginning of a long conversation,” Travis explained. ” What’s not in that proposal yet is how the federal agencies and the business sector and the research facilities and laboratories fit in.”
Travis also admitted that this conversation could be “a struggle.”
“The first reaction of most people when they realize that sea level is rising and that we have a lot of extensive development on low lying areas around the Bay is, ‘Run for the hills!’”
“And that’s a reasonable course, until you realize the implications in an estuary that is the most urbanized in the United States,” added Travis, who believes that what’s needed is “a more nuanced approach.”
Part of that approach, suggests Travis, may involve some counter intuitive steps.
“In some places, we may see the encouragement of more development along the waterfront so we can use the economic engine to protect that development—and the low-lying areas behind it. That’s where it’s going to get interesting.”
As a harbinger of what’s to come, consider the battle that is breaking out over 1,400 acres that Cargill owns in Redwood City. Save the Bay and other environmental groups are urging Cargill to abandon plan to build homes on those acres, while Cargill is committed to developing those lands, and Redwood City is trying to decide what to do.
Fun, huh?