Lit | San Francisco Bay Guardian

The dam truth

Professor John Simpson, author of a new book on Hetch Hetchy, discusses how San Francisco flouts the Raker Act

It's one of the biggest scandals in American history, a tale of corruption that boggles the mind. And yet, the story of the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley and San Francisco's defiance of the Raker Act isn't exactly in the history books. In fact, in San Francisco, the truth has been largely blacked out for half a century or more.

It took a researcher from Ohio State University to really dig into a classic San Francisco tale. John Simpson, professor of landscape architecture and natural resources, details in a new book how Pacific Gas and Electric Company and its City Hall allies defied Congress, the Interior Department and the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the city safe for a private-power monopoly. The book is called Dam! Water, Power, Politics and Preservation in Hetchy Hetchy and Yosemite National Park. In a lengthy interview, Simpson discussed his work with Bay Guardian Editor and Publisher Bruce B. Brugmann, Executive Editor Tim Redmond and Reporter Matthew Hirsch. The complete transcript follows.

Bay Guardian: The first thing I'd like to hear is how you got started on this project, because when you popped up years ago and came in to see us you seemed to have the same line that everybody has who comes in from out of town. The main thing I was interested in was why you were interested in this, coming from school far way. Your book is a lot of work, so how did you get into this?

John Simpson: They teach a big university-wide lecture course on the history of the American Landscape. It's titled: "The Making and Meaning of the American Landscape," and so for years I've been lecturing about John Muir and part of Muir's story is Hetch Hetchy. And the Hetch Hetchy story at least in terms of the [Gifford] Pinchot-Muir preservation-conservation debate is a well-told story in environmental history and landscape history. Rod Nash's classic book, Wilderness and the American Mind, has a chapter on it. Most of the books that cover conservation history in the United States talk about it. Having read those, I didn't understand how Congress could take a national park and allow a reservoir to be built in it for the benefit of San Francisco.

So I wrote the book mostly to find out why, to answer the same questions that anyone else would have about it: How did this all come about? As I began delving into it, I had no idea about the public-power connection to it. The first time I came here to The Guardian and met Bruce, with him looming over me, boxing my ears about the issue, I went back dumbfounded and started pursuing that as an integral part of the story and found it to be, at least in a contemporary context, at least as much a part of the story as the water part.

I think it's clear from the Supreme Court decision in the 1940s and from other interpretive court documents -- as opposed to what a pundit would say or a reporter would say or what someone administrative in the city would say -- it seems pretty clear to me from the Supreme Court decision that the courts recognized the Raker Act creating a mandate for public power, and that to me is the most compelling evidence of Congress' dual purpose in the Raker Act, which was public power and public water. So even though administrators can spout one point of view and lawyers can spout one point of view, in the end it's a matter of legal interpretation and the Supreme Court is the ultimate interpreter and it sure seems to me that the 1940 decision is unequivocal about it.

BG: Have you read Power Struggle? The Rudolph and Ridley book about the history of electricity?

JS: No.

BG: You ought to take a look at that. They get into this a little bit. The argument that they make in their book that I think kind of reflects something of what we're talking about, is that around the turn of the century, the battle between the public-power people and the private-power companies was a defining moment in the American political landscape. It was one of the most important political fault lines in Congress. Everyone realized that the United States was going from a coal and steam-generated, factory manufacturing system to an electricity-driven manufacturing system.

The question of who would control the electricity - first of all whether it was going to be Edison or Westinghouse, but second of all whether it was going to be public or private entities -- was really a huge battle and the argument that they make is that the Raker Act would never have passed Congress were it not for the public power element. Congress would never allow a dam in a national park if it not for this very powerful influential group of progressive populists who believed that letting private utilities control the nation's electricity grid was the most dangerous, horrible thing that could possibly happen. There was the same sentiment for the Federal Power act of 1920 which basically gives the government control of all water. Is that your perspective: That this law would never have been passed without the public power element?

JS: Never been passed, I don't know, although I think it was co-equal in Congress' mind. Although my looking at the historical records suggests that it was never co-equal in the City of San Francisco's mind, that the initial permit applications envision hydropower being generated as an afterthought. In 1900, there wasn't much power usage in the City of San Francisco, so there wasn't really any urgent demand for the city to create a public power system, so they were just going to use the power to pump the water over the post range, and if there was some left over, they would use it for some municipal purposes.

I don't even think that by the time the Raker Act was proposed in 1912 and the Freeman Study was being wrapped up, where Freeman was making a big deal about the power possibilities. I think it was political. I think then the city realized, as you're saying, that Congress was very keen on public power, so they were simply pandering to Congress... "We'll put it in there because that's what they want to hear, and we can get what we want, which is the water system, and we will use the revenues that we can get from selling the power to PG&E or whomever to help finance the municipal budget." They always saw the power component as secondary to water and saw it as a cash cow for the municipal budget.

BG: In our reading of this, we've always thought that one of the reasons that the city did this was because of the drop and that created power.

JS: I don't think [Mayor James] Phelan gave that one iota of consideration. In 1901 when Phelan acquired the water rights, I don't think he paid any attention whatsoever to hydropower. In effect he irrevocably committed the city to Hetch Hetchy at that point. When Boss Ruef got swept out and the reformers came back in in 1906, and resurrected the Hetch Hetchy idea, the city was committed to Hetch Hetchy. It was going to Hetch Hetchy to break up the Spring Valley water system, and I don't think they cared.

BG: It was a battle of public versus private water. One of the reasons that the city burned after the earthquake is that the Spring Valley private water system had not made any repairs, so the water pipes broke.

JS: I think the pipes would have broken anyways. That was a scapegoat.

BG: But that was the politics at the time, people argued that: We need a municipal water system because the private company didn't do a good enough job to save the city.

JS: People hated Spring Valley. It was despised and had been for decades and the city had been trying to either buy them out or buy a competitive system for decades. So there was tremendous animosity against Spring Valley. I don't know that there was the same level of administrative or public animosity against PG&E at the time. But I don't think the city - Phelan - cared one iota about the elevation drop in terms of hydropower. He and his engineers might have been interested in it because they could get the water mostly to the city by gravity, although the initial plan called for it to be pumped over the Coast Range so any electricity that would be generated would be used to power the pumps, to let the water go over the hill.

It's wasn't until the Freeman Report in 1912 that they really started making a case for differentiating Hetch Hetchy from the other alternative sites because of its elevation and the opportunity to generate electricity. But even Freeman said that this is not about electricity; this is about water. He recognized the potential of generating a significant amount of hydropower from the system, but he clearly designed it around water.

BG: So why did they pick Yosemite National Park? What did Phelan have in mind?

JS: Ease, I think. That's the only thing I can figure out. Several things - From an engineering point of view...

BG: Perfect place to build a dam.

JS: Perfect. If God meant there to be a reservoir someplace, that was it. The Valley narrows to twenty or thirty feet at the base and fabulous water supply - crystal clear, snow melt. It's ideal for water quality and water quantity. It was also, I think from his perspective - ideal because it was under single ownership - the federal government. The watershed would be protected because it's in a national park. They didn't have to worry about agriculture, they didn't have to worry about mining and timber and lumber. As long as it was maintained as a national park and the concept of a national park was separate from the concept of a national forest where you could log and you could mine and you could do whatever kind of extractive kind of resource uses. But I think they saw this as politically convenient. Rather than having to fight lots of individual copyrights and water right holders, they could just go to a single stop to get the whole thing.

But I'm not seeing anything in Phelan's words explaining that. The best evidence I've found is in a series of city documents produced by the two city engineers - Manson and ... there's a collection of key documents related to the Hetch Hetchy proposal that was published in 1908. City documents had some of the original reports to council and stuff in it. In there there are several where they are repeatedly stating their reasons why Hetch Hetchy and the reasons were those kind of utilitarian reasons - that it's water quality, water quantity kinds of things.

BG: In looking back over the archival material you've looked at from the 1920s to now, were there any high-ranking city officials after the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s and Harold Icke's era, who seemed to want public power in San Francisco and push for it? It sometimes seems to us as if all of City Hall - the mayor, the board of supervisors, the whole city infrastructure, was owned by PG&E and against public power and fighting it every step of the way.

JS: You've probably seen as much of the historical record as I have. At best I would say that they were maybe neutral and as you know, the various half-hearted efforts the city made to pass bond issues to finance it, in some cases I think they were coerced into putting the bond issues on to keep Harold off their back, or to buy time. But I don't get a sense that any of the administrations were really enthusiastic believers.

BG: I've never been able to find a single city official in the 30s-40s-50s era who was the staunch public power...

JS: That was a unique circumstance of Bay Area politics, because there were other cities that were moving to public power in California, and why it was so, whether it was PG&E's political clout that was dictating, or whether there was some other quirk in Bay Area politics that was contributing to it, I don't know.

BG: Well, Hearst was in there.

JS: The thousand pound gorilla?

BG: Yeah. That was the key paper and the key force. His publisher around here at the time was a major populist - they were the chief promoters of this. I think we had it in here. When the vote came for the Raker Act - it was a special edition of the Examiner...

JS: The famous picture that you see in some of the books? Yeah.

BG: And they were very strong for both, and were up until Hearst made the deal with the PG&E bank and ever since, it's been a blackout.

JS: A thought, too, an earlier comment you made about the turn of the century and the national debate over public versus private utilities. There's also the same debate, as you probably know, about highways. And who's going to pay for the construction of paved highways? Is this going to be a public process or a private process and who's going to pay for mass transit - public or private? And a decision made then in the teens and the early twenties, was public transit is private and private transit is public, which created much of the suburban sprawl that we still struggle with today. I hadn't thought of it in that context at that time period - in the early 1900s, the American people and congress were struggling with a series of infrastructure-like questions that had never risen.

BS: And in the end, the public ownership people won on transportation, highways and water. And we lost on power. Because there are no private toll roads in the United States today, although it's been talked about. There are very few private transit systems and yet there's private power. In the end, as the country moved into a modern area, on all of those infrastructure areas, the public won. But of course we also got the losers; we got the ones that cost money. Transit never makes a profit these days. I mean, it did in the '30s, but now transportation doesn't make a profit. Highways don't make a profit. Water doesn't make much profit. The one that makes a lot of money is electricity and that's the one the private companies ended up with. That's your next book. That's kind of what Rudolph and Ridley get into in their book. Looking at today, when you look at all of this history, I know you end up talking about tearing down the dam and I'm really intrigued by that because 1) I could certainly argue that that's not a sound environmental decision, although it's a sound old-fashioned preservationist decision in the sense that you're restoring a beautiful valley. That power is going to have to come from someplace else that's won't be as environmentally sound, but beyond that...

JS: Not necessarily.

BG: In fifty years.

JS: They could replace the power with equally sustainable...

BG: Possibly, but that's not going to happen in the next 20 years anyway. It's not cost-effective.

JS: It is, actually.

BG: On that scale? 200 megawatts?

JS: Altamont Pass is generating...

BG: The environmentalists hate Alderman Pass. It kills birds. The environmentalists want to tear down...

JS: On of the interesting things that I've discovered in some of the reviews of the book is the tendency for people to still stereotype and categorize. I think the original debate 100 years ago might have been one of the births of this where it's the tree-hugger environmentalists on one side who are only serving their self-interest, the interest of the few who can afford to go pleasure-seek in these remote, spectacular places versus the prosperity, growth and development of the masses - the greatest good, the greatest number, the utilitarian kind of perspective. And the two sides were routinely flinging mud at each other. Even though there was an undercurrent of sound, factual debate and argument that was the congressional record and other...oftentimes the debate degenerated into stereotyping and name-calling. Muir was as bad as any of them. He called them "Satan" and whatnot. The book was reviewed in Business Week. I was dumbfounded. Of all the magazines that you would think would not do a review of this kind of book, it would be Business Week. They generally were okay with the book, but they went after it because I had an obvious bias, and the obvious bias was because I concluded after 350 pages of relatively close historical analysis, that it was a bad idea to have done this, and therefore I have an obvious policy agenda and a bias. Another one - Publisher's Weekly - called me an ardent preservationist in the first sentence. They wrote a wonderful review, but I'm an arted preservationist again because I concluded that this was a bad idea that this was originally done.

BG: Well it wasn't a bad idea.

JS: One of the lessons I've learned from all this (and I certainly don't have the magic answer to it) is that wouldn't it be nice if the American public could get beyond the labeling and the stereotyping for environmental issues, for social issues, for all kinds of things and engage, maybe for the first time, or reengage in an objective, open, respectful discussion/dialogue about what really is important.

BG: Sure. PG&E goes first. We'll join them. But beside that...we could argue for the next six hours about the environmental consequences of tearing down the dam and...

JS: I don't think the environmental consequences in any way shape or form justify it.

BG: Right. But then here's the question, then: Whether or not we should have built the dam in the first place. And as Bruce has said many times, if the Bay Guardian was here back then, we would have been against the dam. Now, today, that is, after all these years, the promise of public power for San Francisco, which I agree with Rudolph and Ridley, I think this was one of the defining moments in American history, and I think that the private control of the electricity grid is still a huge issue today because it's a public resource issue. If you tear down the dam, you've destroyed the lynch pin of San Francisco's public power system, you have destroyed the ability to go to the public and say...

JS: I don't know about that.

BG: Because once the dam's gone, you can no longer say: "That's why we built the dam, was for public power." First of all, it's 200 megawatts of public power. It's basically giving up on that. It's basically saying after all these years we destroyed this beautiful valley, and we never got the power and we're never going to. Because without the dam, public power in San Francisco is much, much harder.

JS: I would spin it a different way. I would say that tear down the dam and build copper public power. I don't come to the conclusion that you do, that...

BG: I understand what you're saying. PG&E would love that.

JS: They would love that.

BG: PG&E is the ciary and always has been, of this whole thing.

JS: Well that may politically be the case.

BG: That would be their dream. And then they could say: "Look..."

JS: "It's too late."

BG: It's too late. And then they could say: "Oh, PG&E loves the environment. We love the beautiful valley."

JS: "We'll even pay!"

BG: "We'll even pay..."

JS: "A little bit for it. We'll donate a million dollars."

BG: I bet you right. And, you know, the chairman of PG&E would be standing there pushing the handle. Just on that argument alone - isn't it worth saying: "We're not tearing down the dam until we build a public power system that we were promised by Congress 100 years ago?"

JS: Or do it in conjunction. We are tearing down the dam and we are going to fulfill the original promise.

BG: But that's hard. Because without the Raker Act, you know, what's the leverage? The leverage and then the money? See nowadays money is really tight. San Francisco's a depressed economy.

JS: Presumably, the funding would be borne significantly by Congress, by the American public.

BG: To tear down the dam. Which administration would do that?

JS: That's not in the cards. There would have to be another upwelling of public opinion, the same way there was in 1908, 1909 with Muir and all that. Congress would have to get flooded as it was then with tens of thousands of letters and newspapers would have to editorialize all across the country in support of a proposed bill to undo it. And part of that proposed bill would have to work out where's the water going to go and how's that all going to be handled as well as how's the power going to be replaced...

BG: I could actually see the Bush administration tearing down the dam because I think that the business community in San Francisco, once they got over the water problem, would love it, it'd be the end public power. I think PG&E...would love this. And I think a lot of Bush's backers... I think those guys still think...I mean, Bush's got this whole thing that we're working on this week about restoring nuclear energy in the United States. They want more nuclear power plants. PG&E wants to re-license their nuclear power plant. They would love to have 200 megawatts of hydro go away. They don't own it anyway. They would love to see reasons to build more coal-burning power plants. This is what these guys are - burn more oil, burn more coal, build more nuclear plants. The whole Bush administration would love this. That's why I find it interesting that some environmentalists (and I actually think it's a limited number of environmentalists) are getting behind this restore Hetch Hetchy movement, because I don't think they've really thought it through.

JS: It gets to the connection between public power and Hetch Hetchy. Both historically and today that it is rarely connected. Hetch Hetchy is seen as a watand all the public power part has gone away because a part of it was never built, never realized.

BG: Why do you think that is? Why does that disconnect happen?

JS: I think initially it was because the city had no intention of ever doing a public power system so they kept it off, and presumably, PG&E had a role in that, and once the dam was built and the water supply was created, it was all about that. That was what was there. It was built, it was delivering water; people were drinking it on a daily basis. What power there is came online decades later in a totally different era.

BG: Did you ever get the impression that this issue had anything to do with Ickes leaving the Roosevelt administration?

JS: The reason why? Contributed to his decision to retire?

BG: Well, not that he retired - he was asked to leave. I've gone through a lot of Harold Ickes's stuff, and I've looked through some of his papers and I've never been able to get to the bottom of that. Have you?

JS: I've seen different accounts. No I don't know why. I can't give a good answer why he left.

BG: Did you ever see anything that suggested that...

JS: Frustration with this?

BG: Frustration with this or private utility pressure? I mean one of the brilliant things that Pacific Gas & Electric Company has done just as the San Francisco real estate developers have done over the years is that they realize that the way the keep their monopoly is helping out the Democrats. I mean, PG&E may have some Republicans on its board, but they are a Democratic Party operation in San Francisco. They give money to the Democrats. They give money to Democratic mayors, they give money to Democratic members of Congress; they give money to Diane Feinstein. PG&E is Diane Feinstein's biggest cheering section. They love her. I'm sure they gave a lot of money to Bill Clinton, and they probably gave money to Roosevelt. And actually, they're closer to the Democratic Party than just any other utility... they're a Democratic Party operation because they're smart. They don't care about half the issues...they care about their private power monopoly. They don't care about abortion rights or stem cell research. They could care less. All they care about is their private power monopoly and they know that's controlled by Democrats. So maybe they gave money to Roosevelt. Maybe back then they were being the liberal supporters of an administration that desperately needed business support. I mean have you ever seen anything like that?

JS: No. I requested [an interview with PG&E]. They never got back.

BG: Because a lot of these questions are questions that you would confront PG&E on. All these questions that we're asking - those are PG&E questions and answers. So you went to them - nobody would talk to you?

JS: Correct.

BG: What did they tell you?

JS: I didn't even get a response back from them to my request.

BG: That is very interesting because you'd think they'd at least want to deal with the points that you bring up. Didn't you find that a little unusual? Everybody else talked to you as far as I can tell here. Did you have trouble with any else in terms of getting access?

JS: Trouble. Some people required longer lead times, and more reminders.

BG: But you didn't get the feeling that they didn't want to talk to you?

JS: I didn't get anything like that.

BG: You didn't talk to Harold Ickes Jr. did you?

JS: No.

BG: I never got a hold of him, either. I wonder if he could shed some light on this. After Ickes left, the entire federal government's case against San Francisco collapsed, died, basically went away because there was nobody in the Interior Department really pushing.

JS: I think it was an end of an era and you had a whole new governmental philosophy replacing the progressive era. And the new philosophy was focused on other things. So it doesn't surprise me that Ickes' retirement was roughly the same time as a larger change in government thinking, government policy. The great depression-era conservation projects and idealism were over and it was dominated by a new set of political motivations. Ickes had been in for a long time. He was a well-worn trooper. So his retirement certainly didn't come prematurely in terms of his career. He was the longest-serving Interior Secretary ever, I think even to this day. There is no reason to believe at face value that he wanted to remain in the position and was forced out and it was too far separate from the main thrust...

BG: The main political force from our point of view of these things is the local newspaper - the Sacramento Bee, the McClatchy family is responsible for public power. They're for public power - that's why Modesto had public power because of the Modesto Bee...one of the reasons this moved in here was because Hearst put the full weight of his paper, the Examiner, behind public power and public water right up until...his buddies at the PG&E bank. What is your feeling if Hearst had stayed on the issue, or if Hearst had stayed on the issue, or if there had been a strong daily paper pushing the issue, do you think it would have been different? Because you say in here you don't understand why the city didn't buckle under to Ickes - it defied reason.

JS: The point there is how could Ickes not be able to force the city...in a Supreme Court decision. From an outsider's perspective...it seems..

BG: You ought to spend more time in San Francisco. A lot of things here defy reason.

JS: But to say that here's a law that the Supreme Court ruled definitively - they didn't equivocate - they just blasted San Francisco between the eyes. And how is it that the city can persist in apparently violating that law - that Supreme Court decision? In particular, Ickes was a pit bull idealist and he used, presumably, the full weight and authority that he had to bring the muster against...and he still couldn't get the Supreme Court...

BG: And Roosevelt let him go.

JS: Yeah. And I think the city proper - and this is mere conjecture - I think the city leaders in the nineteen-teens and earlier when they were moving up towards the Raker Act, I think they had to have figured that, just to play a waiting game - that sooner or later the political winds were going to change in Washington and they were going to get control and everybody was going to get their job done. David Brown has a famous quote that...I think it's in the book that with wilderness, preservation issues, the best you can do is a stay of execution because there will always be somebody there wanting later to get their hands on that place. And I think the city understood that philosophy, that, we'll just wait our turn, and sooner or later it's going to change... My point is, I think they were doing the same thing in the '3 knew that sooner or later, they're going to get an administration in that they can deal with.

BG: But that then raises the question of local political pressure. If Hearst as a major paper and kept the pressure on...if they had done it at that time, a local official would have said "Hey, we need public power."

JS: I think by the 1930s it was probably too late. But I think in the nineteen-teens, it would have, I agree, that had the local press been supportive of public power, it would have happened.

BG: Well, you refer to a lot of the key issues here. When they voted to sell the copper wire that they had to bring the lines over and so forth, Hearst came out against that entire board of supervisors that did that - hammered... in an editorial. And the entire board that voted for PG&E and against this were defeated in the next election. That's the kind of power that the paper had in this issue, and then it gradually...

JS: I think by the '30s, by the time Ickes gets involved, I think the political winds had been cast. The public thinking about public power in San Francisco had been in effect permanently affected for that generation. And the critical moments I think were really right after the Raker Act was cast and the city was trying to decide whether or not it was going to buy out PG&E or build its own system. When Mocassin comes online in '25 and they hadn't done either thing yet - I think that was the critical moment, that was the tipping point and had the press at that time, in the early 20s particularly, been clearly supportive of public power, the city administration would have been able to pass the bonds to buy out PG&E or build a system. And that didn't happen. I think after that, it was pretty much a done deal.

BG: So when the bonds finally came up, all the newspapers...To us that Hearst switch was critical. You did a lot of work on this. You have a lot of original sources and so forth, so your judgment and analysis of this is important.

JS: Once Mocassin came along and the city came along and kind of accepted that package, I think it was a done deal after that. The city administration was committed to the continuing use of hydropower as a source of revenue for the city, it had no interest in public power, it was being probably helped along in that persuasion by PG&E and other political forces. After that it didn't happen. It was veed up to Mocassin coming online.

BG: You don't think if Ickes stuck around for a couple years after the war

JS: No

BG: As the war wound down, would he have and the district court have finally pulled the plug on the whole deal?

JS: I doubt it. By that point it just would have been such an administrative headache for the federal government. It seems to me...and this is pure speculation...that Rossi and the San Francisco administrations during the depression probably figured that the last thing the federal government wanted to do was take over the public power system in San Francisco.

BG: Take back the dam.

JS: I still think that it was a paper threat.

BG: But here's an administration that did the WPA, the George Norris project, George Norris public power...they also have federal dams all over the country. So they could have just taken control of the dam and then later sold the power to PG&E...that would have been an easy thing to do.

JS: It might have been. But I think given the politics in the Bay Area, given the decades of administrative finagling and haggling and public perceptions and all that and all the other things that the government was doing, my suspicion is that Ickes and the feds were...if push came to shove, they don't want to do it, they would never take over.

BG: ...the city?

JS: And I think the city knew that. The city just waited it out...they can block, they can drag their heels, they can keep going back to district court for another stay of execution...keep the injunction in place...I think they knew that Ickes and the feds were never going to...the legal powers they had in the Raker Act...

BG: In your position right now - you're not a Supreme Court justice obviously -- although I hear there's a job open -- do you feel like at this point that San Francisco's still directly violating the Raker Act?

JS: Yes. The best evidence I've ever had, the primary basis for my conclusion is the language of the Supreme Court decision. My view of that is the courts unequivocally said the Raker Act required them to create a municipal power system in parallel with the water system and the city hasn't and I think the city's ultimate bad sense was 1945 when the federal laws, that any contract they had was going to be approved by the Secretary of the Interior and the federal government and they're all acceptable. That may be factually true and legally correct. I think the real agreement is almost on the basis of the violation of what the Raker Act... what the Supreme Court said in 1940. I think the current language of any Supreme Court decision and it even says that. You can give us these finagled reasons, and in the end, they're just another reason and you're still violating the intent of the law. And to me, the current power distribution procedures are the same thing. I don't know the actual difference of what they're doing now and what they were doing in '45. So a very interesting caveat of that is the court decision about the '71 or '72 court decision where they say it doesn't matter because now we go to public power we may end up violating the core intent of the Raker Act that we deliver power cheaply to...you can't assume that...public power now would be cheaper now to deliver the power to the public. That's a strange one.

BG: Despite the fact that Congress and the Supreme Court...said the opposite.

JS: It's a strange one. There are two officials in the Raker Act that...the course of the...one is the Secretary of the Interior. The other is the city attorney in San Francisco who never...who was essential the mirror image of the other side.

BG: What do you recommend at this point, then? City Hall...

JS: Reasons completely separate from public power, completely separate from ecological and environmental reasons. So I wouldn't make any attempt to justify the removal of the dam on environmental reasons, that we're trying to reclaim 1,900 acres and that's worth $5 billion worth of doing some other environmental good. The public power one is less clear to me on what I think should happen. I said in the e-mail that if there was a way to put it to the voters in the Bay Area and get a true, objective, informed vote on it then let that happen, let that settle the issue once and for all. The problem with that is, is that possible? Probably not. And the second is in the end it's not just a local issue. It's also a national issue because it was the Raker Act. It was an act of Congress. It's in our national park and part of the deal between the American people, the implicit deal between the American people and San Francisco was you will have public power and you will have public water, and that's why we are willing to sacrifice this spectacular place in our national park for you.

BG: That's exactly right.

JS: And you didn't do it. And so live up to it. And so if the city is not willing to live up to it, then rip the damn thing out. So I really don't know. I don't know what I believe.

BG: That's a good point because in yback, in the end, to what's the solution? Tear it down.

JS: But I didn't say anything about the public power part, yeah.

BG: But if you characterize it that way, it makes a lot more political sense, I think.

JS: My thinking is still not crystallized on what should really happen in terms of public power because it's not just a local Bay Area issue, it's a national issue, because that was part of the agreement with the American people and so the American people should have a say over it to some extent. So does that mean that you propose a bill in Congress and the bill re-requires San Francisco to create public power.

BG: You know what the problem is?

JS: It would probably get your right back in the same boat you're in now.

BG: No. The ranking Democrat in the United States House of Representatives, who comes from San Francisco...

JS: Yeah, Nancy Pelosi.

BG: Would vote against it. She would vote with PG&E.

JS: Yeah.

BG: And the two senators from California who are both Democrats, would vote against it.

JS: Which brings you back to kind of the same politics, kind of basic political questions that John Muir and the opponents brought 100 years ago, which was we know we can't win the local debate because there are too many vested interests, so we take the debate to the public nationwide, who are free to decide on philosophical, moral reasons rather than on vested economic, political reasons and they were partly right, partly wrong. They were partly right - an overwhelming majority of people were opposed to allowing San Francisco to put the dam in and they were partly wrong - Congress still voted decisively in favor of it. And so the disconnect between Congress and the will of the people was, it might exist today.

BG: But if PG&E weren't here, with their political power and muscle and so forth...PG&E for years pulled strings and...

JS: I suspect that's true. Again I think the key time period was the nineteen-teens to early 1920s. After that...

BG: Just when PG&E was solidifying its political and...

JS: And its monopoly.

BG: Its monopoly.

JS: Yeah, its monopoly didn't become complete, I don't think until what '31 or '32.

BG: Yeah. But it was just in the process of solidifying its market monopoly and its political core. Thestion - from our point of view is, what we tell the Hetch Hetchy people, particularly Tim... we're all for tearing down the dam, but after we have public power in San Francisco, we have sustainable energy, we've got the two goddamn power plants down, we're stabilized here in terms of public power, hell we could use part of those profits as part of the money for the dynamite. Then we can look at real...tearing down the dam, bringing in a new water supply, etc. etc. But to do it earlier, prematurely would create all kinds of problems. Does that make sense to you?

JS: Yes. I absolutely understand your logic and the way you think. I think it's absolutely critical that the historical and the contemporary linkage between public water and public power be driven home to everybody who's involved in this, that they remove the dam, restore the valley and the historical descriptions of Hetch Hetchy, the idea that Hetch Hetchy was intended to be water and power in the mind of Congress if not the mind of the city, has to be strengthened. People, when they think of Hetch Hetchy, they have to think co-equally of water and power and they have to recognize that "oh, we got the water, but we didn't get the power." And that disconnect is your biggest obstacle in terms of public power issues and Hetch Hetchy.

BG: But in a sense that's one of your fundamental themes here in the book that they should be connected.

JS: Yeah.

BG: All the way along.

JS: Yeah.

BG: I mean, you would have stood with Muir against the dam and all that sort of stuff.

JS: I hope.

BG: Well, you know, I've been following this stuff. Particularly with Pinchot, hell, he'd have chewed up the parks with tractors.

JS: Bush is trying to change the governing language of the parks now to take it back to.

BG: If Pinchot were alive, he'd be Bush's Secretary of Interior, probably.

JS: Well, Pinchot wouldn't have...

BG: I know, I know, he wouldn't have. But he would have been Clinton's.

JS: Yeah, he might have been Clinton's, I don't know.

BG: But see if...they restore Hetch Hetchy. At least the Sierra Club people dealing with this issue in the city kind of realize that. They knew they made a terrible mistake in the Presidio. Now the Presidio is privatized... but they kind of realized that this argument makes sense. Once San Francisco has public power, once things are stabilized, the plants are gone and we have all this kind of sustainable energy and so forth, that's the time to do the dam and it would be a convergence of political forces. Of course we can't give a date for that. 2016. But does that make sense? I don't want to put words in your mouth.

JS: No, it makes sense I'll have to chew on it for a while to, as I said I haven't figured out what I see as the most appropriate course of action for public power.

BG: It's nice to talk to someone about this stuff who cares as much about it as we do.

JS: You guys should feel gratified that even though public power and public water issues aren't appropriately linked yet, at least Hetch Hetchy is getting on the national radar screen. Time Magazine did a piece on it; Jim Lehrer's doing a piece on it.

BG: I heard it. The Jim Lehrer piece. It was terrible. Spencer Michels from out here went through the entire 14 minute segment for the Jim Lehrer News Hour, all about the dam and never mentioned public power.

JS: Really? Who'd he have on?

BG: Oh just, you know, a couple of the restore Hetch Hetchy people and it was mostly Spencer, and it was the lamest thing, I mean it was just awful.

BG: I wonder what your thoughts are on how tearing down the dam would effect the politics and the population in the Bay Area in terms of San Francisco as an economic engine in the Bay Area. I mean basically the public utilities commission controls the water from Hetch Hetchy. There are a lot of groups in the region that don't like that, that want to have at least as much control as...

JS: Well, the three bills that the state passed in 2002 created the Bay Area water... and it gives them more say. It doesn't give them I don't think co-equal say because the PUC board still has to be residents of San Francisco. But I think that there's more of a power sharing in the long-term planning of the water system between PUC now and the wholesale consumers as represented by the Bay Area Water and Conservation. I don't know if that answers your question.

BG: I think so. It's something I've been wondering about.

JS: Do you guys get any sense of what the politics are of Schwarzenegger's administration, with his feasibility study? I was dumbfounded when he required it, when he triggered that. The cynical side of me is kind of looking under the lock - is he doing this because he genuinely wants to know...

BG: He doesn't care.

JS: Or is he doing this because it's going to come out negative and therefore this will end it as an issue or what?

BG: I figure that the reason that the PUC was ultimately going to be against it, or seemed to be against tearing down the dam was because they would lose. That's what I thought is what's a likely reason why they would resist - they might lose control of their water.

JS: Maybe. Or it's just a pain in the butt. Actually, PUC shouldn't be voicing an opinion any more than the National Park Service should voice an opinion. The park service is there to implement the policies established by congress and since 1913 the policies have been you will have a reservoir in your midst - deal with it. And so the park superintendents and all the way up to the director will not have an opinion on it although they'll tell you privately "We hate it. Tear the damned thing down and get it out of there. It's an absolute contradiction to everything we stand for in the park service." Similarly, PUC - Pat Martel made this point real clear to me, appropriately, I think is that the staff at PUC are there to follow the policies established by their board so now it seems like in the last year or so, the PUC has become far more vocal in expressing their objection to the proposal. They shouldn't be saying anything. It should be the city administration and the PUC board that says... it shouldn't be coming out of staff.

BG: Yeah. Susan Leal's leadership is very different from Pat Ms.

JS: Is there anything to gain for PUC in doing this? No. It doesn't give them more water. It doesn't give them more political power. It only jeopardizes those things and it would be an immense hassle for them to do it. So I think PUC will go kicking and screaming every inch of the way in opposition to any proposal to touch their system in any way shape or form - public power or public water or anything, they're going to fight it tooth and nail to the death. I can't see any political reason why they would...

BG: Sure they will. They also know what it would be like to get a new source of water and so on and so forth. They're committed to it bureaucratically just like they've been committed to PG&E...

JS: I just can't see any reason why PUC would ever be supportive of either change, either taking the dam down or putting public power in. It's just too much institutional momentum buildup in the opposite direction - too much civic pride at stake for anybody in the city to go along with tearing the dam down, or doing the public power now would be to admit a mistake and the government is loathe to ever do that.

BG: A mistake that their predecessors made years and years ago?

JS: Even still, it would also be to admit...

BG: Isn't the groundswell of support for retore Hetch Hetchy - it's an environmental issue, something that the city...they have to balance their role as a sort of progressive, environmental city with their institutional behaviors. That would be one reason if any to now go...to say...

JS: Spin it around, say "We can lead the nation, we can be a champion of not just social causes, but environmental and social causes."

BG: Well if you're talking about city hall now, everybody has those big...first in the nation...solar power...that kind of attention...

JS: Although Hetch Hetchy, the immediate response - get in a room with a bunch of San Franciscans. How many of you have been to Yosemite and every hand will go up. How many of you were married there and a lot of hands will go up. How many of you were conceived there or conceived your children there or honeymooned there or went there on vacations and a lot of hands go up. There's a possessive attitude towards Yosemite that San Franciscans feel that it's our park. It's like Einstein's quote you know it's our birth right.

BG: Especially PUC because they have a chalet up there.

JS: Yeah, the private. Pat Martel was supposed to take me on a boat trip and cancelled at the last moment literally minutes before we got the boat to leave because they were wining and dining in the chalet. Even the park staff scratched their head at what goes on up there.

BG: Yeah, you know the grand jury was up there.

JS: I had a number of fairly high ranking PUC people tell me stories about their wining and dining...

BG: That was an annual story - the wining and dining...You have paratrooped in from Ohio and taken on this project which very few people in San Francisco do - there are not professors at Cal or State or San Jose or anywhere jumping in here and doing this kind of research. How come nobody here in town does this? Chuck Finney at the Chronicle, gee, there's no pressure on him or anybody over there. How come they don't cover the story when you come in and do it? Doesn't that seem odd to you? You were kind of the expert here?

JS: The odd part seems more a case of given how well-known the Hetch Hetchy debate is in environmental history circles and given that many of the universities have outstanding environmental history programs and distinguished faculty it's kind of interesting that the book wasn't written even years ago by somebody out here. Maybe the grass will grow greener on the other side of the country.

BG: PG&E is a heavy contributor to programs at UC Berkeley they're heavy contributors to Stanford.

JS: I have never seen in my academic experience any of that kind of censorship if you will or direction for research so. This book was written without any research funds as are many books. I think that's going in the wrong direction.

BG: Yes, but what is the incentive to do a book like this? Its like David Lazarus, the consumer reporter at the Chronicle - I ask him again and again - he takes on big companies: Why don't you take on PG&E and this scandal? Right here in San Francisco? And he finally said "Well, there's no interest in it." See there's no interest in the department chair or the dean or certainly the business school at Stanford or Cal. It's a great business story, among other things.

JS: And a great politics story.

BG: And a great politics story. It's a great cultural story, it's a great environmental story, it's a great story for a journalism student.

JS: One of the reviewers said this story is really a wonderful example of the nexus, the combination of the interception of politics and environment and business and many kinds of important social issues and questions. They all come crashing together in this story, and it's a good question to speculate about. Why someone out here more local wouldn't have picked up the story; written a book ten years ago, twenty years ago.

BG: There really isn't a book. This is the best of the books that have been done.

JS: I think there are only two.

BG: What's your summation now for 2005? You've done all this work, spent all these years on it.

JS: I think the city focused on Hetch Hetchy for self-serving reasons. The dam was a mistake in 1913.The Raker Act should not have been passed by Congress. It wasn't passed based on the will of the people. It wasn't passed on sound environmental or economic criteria. The arguments that were presented in favor of the proposal I think were I would love to have gotten on the other side of the table and shuffled in the arguments that we were going to build a scenic road around it, put a hotel up there were obviously in direct contradiction to the goal of creating a pure water supply. Anybody who's been there and seen it can clearly see that it's an insane idea. You're not going to put a road around it. You're not going to put boating on it. You're not going to have hotels up there if you want to maintain a pure water supply and one of the big reasons for going up there was the pure water, so the arguments in favor of it were full of holes.

There hadn't been any comprehensive studies of other sites. And anybody who looks at the Freeman Report reads 300 pages of verbiage about how wonderful Hetch Hetchy is. And then there's only a page on each of the other alternatives that he summarily dismisses with a wave of the hand. When Phelan targets Hetch Hetchy, there had been no comprehensive studies pointing to Hetch Hetchy as a good place to go. The whole decision from the beginning to go there was unfounded and even given the politics of the day, they should have known better. And it's not just in hindsight looking back that that was a bad decision. I think at the time that they should have known better. And Congress made the decision ultimately on political reasons against the will of the people, against what I think should have been a pretty clear, reasoned argument in opposition to it. So they made an environmental decision and a social decision on other criteria. Maybe they still do that all the time today. I think since then, I don't think the city ever intended Hetch Hetchy to be a source of public power. I think they went along with that argument as they saw it having political wheels in the Congressional debates leading up to the Raker Act.

I don't think they ever had any intention whatsoever of doing anything with public power other than selling it to the private sector and using that money to subsidize the municipal budget. I think the behavior that the city had in the transfer of HHWP surplus revenues in the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s was simply going along with the institutional belief that that's what the thing's there for. And they saw those transfers as being totally appropriate. We built the system, we paid for the system, we should profit from it. And if we were to put public power in and sell the power to the consumer at its lowest cost then the city would not get excess revenues into its municipal budget to use to subsidize operating expenses and things like that. Therefore the city has a built-in economic incentive not to do public power. As long as it can transfer that money over, it would be a sacrifice for them, although in the larger picture it would be saving money even as the consumer...and the consumer would be saving money and the municipal budget from a short-term perspective would have to find a way to replace those $20 million, $30 million, $40 million a year that they were moving from the HHWP into the operating budget. What do we do now?

BG: Let's say you're supervisor John Simpson. You move to San Francisco...what would you do? Or Mayor John Simpson?

JS: Or God? I think the dam should be torn down and the value reclaimed, not for ecological reasons, its only 1900 acres. We're not restoring any or protecting any endangered species or anything like that. I think we do it for scenic reasons, to restore a scenic wonder that's more rare and valuable than its use as a water tank. I think we also do it for moral and philosophical reasons.

I think the contract between the city of San Francisco and the American people has been violated continuously since the Raker Act was passed so as an American citizen, I'm upset with the City of San Francisco for getting away with that. I think they have violated the public power intent all along and I think they have mismanaged the gift of the American people in terms of the water system and their poor management of it. So I think the bottom line is what happens with the power part because the water part, we can remove the water downstream I think and get that done. What do you do about public power? Should the city of San Francisco have public power even if it turns out to be more expensive than private, PG&E-provided power? Who should decide whether the city has public power? Is it the American public? Do we the American public have a say as long as Hetch Hetchy is involved? I don't know. Is it simply a Bay Area decision? Are the voters able to make an informed choice where in the past how many times have bond issues been brought forward to the voter...?

There's no historical evidence to suggest that the city could have an honest, objective debate and referendum on it, so that's probably not the ultimate decision mechanism for an outcome. I don't know what it is. I think it's important that power and water be linked together again as they were originally intended in the Raker Act and should the two questions be answered simultaneously? So I think your point about the possibility that removing the dam prior to a resolution of the public power issue makes resolving the public power issue more difficult, makes public power less likely because the reason for the public power is removed. So that's a critical question. I don't know what the answer is.