Has MWD embraced the enviro Left?
Stephen Greenhut - OCRegister.com
As government agencies go, the Metropolitan Water District isn't too bad. After all, it does something useful, in that it brings water to our arid region. And MWD has had to fight environmentalists who try to stop their plans for water storage and other necessary infrastructure. Yet LAObserved reported today that MWD has hired Pulitzer Prize-winning Sacramento Bee editorial writer Tom Philps as its new "executive strategist." Philps, who produced the Bee's water blog, certainly knows the subject mattter. But he won his prize for advocating a plan to eliminate the O'Shaughnessy Dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite, at a cost of up to $10 billion. This has long been the dream of environmentalists who aren't too concerned about human needs, and couldn't care less about a waste of public dollars. Said Philps in an interview with NPR in 2005: "This kind of money is considerable, but what is this place worth as a second Yosemite Valley? What is that worth in economic terms? It's got to be in the billions as well."
Is this the new strategy for MWD, to eschew new storage and focus its energy on environmentalism rather than the protection of water supplies? Is radical environmentalism the new thing at the water district?
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