Page 4 - Yucaipa Valley Water District - Board Workshop

California voters on Tuesday rejected a water bond for the first time in almost 30 years,
disregarding pleas from its backers that the money would fix crumbling infrastructure,
bring clean drinking water to disadvantaged communities and kick-start badly needed
environmental restoration projects.

As of Thursday’s tally, 54 percent of voters had rejected the $8.9 billion Proposition 3 that
promised funds to help repair Oroville Dam and aid Central Valley farmers facing
groundwater problems, among a list of other expenditures.

The failure is notable: The last time voters rejected a water bond was 1990. Since then,
nine water bond measures have passed.

So why did this bond campaign go down in flames, when so many others in the drought-
prone state have sailed through?

“I have no idea,” said Jerry Meral, the veteran water-policy advocate who drafted the
initiative. “If I did, we would have fixed it before the election was happening. It really is
kind of a mystery because it really was much like previous water bonds: safe drinking
water, water supply and environmental elements and so on. It’s hard to figure out.”

Foes called Proposition 3 a grab bag of special interest projects for which farmers and
water users should be paying - not taxpayers. With its nearly $9 billion price tag,
Proposition 3 was the largest bond measure on the ballot in decades.

Unlike most other water bonds, Proposition 3 funds wouldn’t have been allocated through
the state budgeting process. Instead, money would have been paid as grants directly to
the farms and other groups that would have spent it. That troubled Proposition 3’s critics
who said it lacked accountability.

“The measure reflected a classic pay-to-play bond measure scheme,” the Sierra Club of
California said Wednesday in a statement. “To attract wealthy investors ... the bond’s
developers included in the measure billions of dollars worth of projects that would allow

Yucaipa Valley Water District - November 13, 2018 - Page 4 of 166