Hidden at home

Out-of-towners dig into big SF scandal

By Tim Redmond

It took a landscape architecture professor from Columbus, Ohio, an historian from Dallas, Texas, and a filmmaker from Modesto, Calif., to tell the story of the biggest scandal in San Francisco history.

In the past few months, two academic researchers – Robert W. Righter, of Southern Methodist University, and John Warfield Simpson, of Ohio State University – have come out with lengthy, detailed books on the history of the Hetch Hetchy water and power project and the federal Raker Act.

Righter's book, The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of the Environmental Movement, is mostly a typical work of professorial history, and most of the book is focused on the environmental battles. But he lays out the Raker Act – the deal that gave San Francisco the right to dam the valley in exchange for the city agreeing to run a public power system – and explains how San Francisco consistently flouted it.

Simpson's book takes a much harder look at the Raker Act scandal, and Simpson actually went and interviewed some of the key people involved (including Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann). In a wide-ranging interview with us, he said he has absolutely concluded that San Francisco has been, and remains, in violation of the Raker Act. In fact, he argues, the city's transgressions are so serious that the dam – built on a lie – ought to be torn down.

But tearing down the dam would not only be environmentally dicey (less hydro means more fossil fuels), it would be a terrible blow to any hope that the city can ever fulfill the Raker Act mandate. Still, Simpson's book is both readable and packed with fascinating and important historical data.

Then there's San Francisco's Broken Promise, a documentary by Carol Lancaster Mingus, a film professor at Modesto Junior College, and a group of her students.

"It was my first documentary film class," Mingus told us, "and I figured we'd have the students do something easy. So I proposed a 15-minute piece on the 'Restore Hetch Hetchy' movement."

But one of her students, Barbara Dutton, came across the Bay Guardian's coverage of the Raker Act scandal as part of her research and convinced the class to change gears. "This, of course, was much more complicated," Mingus said.

So what happens when three out-of-towners cover one of the biggest stories in local history? It gets little local news media attention. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed Righter's book but has done nothing on the Simpson book. And the movie has received almost no coverage (other than the Pacifica Tribune mentioning it as part of a Pacifica public TV series).

A review of the movie is on page 86, and a detailed interview with Simpson and two chapters of his book are online at www.sfbg.com.