Bill seeks to strike private ownership clause from water bond

[Auggie]

San Francisco Chronicle / Saturday, June 19th, 2010

SACRAMENTO -- Lawmakers backing November's $11 billion water bond proposition are seeking to strike a provision that would allow private corporations to own, operate and profit from dams and other water storage projects built with taxpayer dollars, a little-noticed clause that was the subject of a (San Francisco) Chronicle report.

The change, introduced in the Legislature on Thursday, would remove the controversial portion of the bond measure that could open the door for private companies to control newly built dams and profit by selling the water back to Californians. The state historically has retained control of publicly financed dams.

Lawmakers who voted for a historic package of water bills last fall, which included the bond measure, told The Chronicle in December that they had not noticed the provision in the 26-page bill. Since then, some legislators have been reassessing their support of the proposition, and the provision has been used by opponents in campaign materials to try to defeat the spending measure.

SNIP

The measure as written, though, specifically allows for the creation of joint powers authorities that "may include in their membership governmental and nongovernmental partners that are not located within their respective hydrologic regions in financing the surface storage projects."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/MNQ41E1BNS.DTL

I'm a believer there's a real threat some of our publicly-owned utilities and municipal services could eventually be taken over by private interests. Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, wrote the bond measure and now apparently has agreed to remove the language after it raised some alarms among other lawmakers. Still, what if this little-noticed clause had been overlooked and made to in the final measure? How would you feel about "Halliburton Drinking Water?"