Oregon Pulls Plug on Hahn’s Plea for Water

Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn’s request that the Pacific Northwest act like a “good neighbor” and channel Columbia River water to drought-stricken Southern California has received a not so neighborly response from Oregon officials.

“I have the distinct impression that you are trying to steal my water,” Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt said in a letter to Hahn.

“I don’t have enough water in the Columbia to raise the fish we need to rear, move the barges we are trying to move, generate the electricity that we all so badly need, irrigate the crops that need it, keep the native American tribes happy, and then send some south to you,” the governor said.

Goldschmidt, a Democrat, ended his letter with the salutation “hoping you’re not serious.”

Oregon Atty. Gen. Dave Frohnmeyer also wrote Hahn, urging the supervisor to “save your stationery and postage. The rivers you would tap to slake the unquenchable thirst of Southern Californians happen to be major waterways of life and commerce in our area. Oregonians will not stand still for such a threat to this vital lifeline.”

Hahn, whose proposal has been reported on the front pages of the Idaho Statesman, the Portland Oregonian and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, appeared undaunted Thursday.

“I am very serious,” he said of his proposal to build aqueducts to funnel water from Northwest rivers to Southern California. In letters to Oregon’s governor and attorney general, Hahn said his proposal would create at least 20,000 jobs for aerospace workers laid off by defense cuts “and many of the unemployed in the Northwest will be the first hired.”

Hahn, resurrecting an idea that dates back at least to the 1960s, has called for digging 400-mile aqueducts connecting the Columbia River on the Oregon-Washington border to Shasta Lake in Northern California and the Snake River in Idaho to Lake Mead at the Arizona-Nevada border.

“The Columbia River dumps into the Pacific Ocean 90 billion gallons of water a day, and all I am asking for is 3 billion gallons to help the people out in Los Angeles,” Hahn wrote Goldschmidt and Frohnmeyer.

In a letter to Frohnmeyer, who is running to succeed Goldschmidt as governor, Hahn wrote: “You will never make governor if you turn down the needs of the people whether those needs are in Oregon or in California. The Bible says, ‘Freely you receive, freely give.’ ”

Hahn has called on the governors of seven states to support building of the aqueducts. If no agreement can be reached, Hahn has asked the Board of Supervisors to direct the county lobbyists in Washington to seek repeal of a federal law prohibiting studies of diverting the Columbia and Snake rivers without approval of the governors of the affected states.

A Portland radio station this week invited listeners to call in their ideas on what they would want in return for shipping water to California. Among the ideas: Disneyland and 60 days of California sunshine.