Voters and lawmakers imposed price controls that leave residents more vulnerable to disasters.
The words “California” and “crisis” seem to go together as the state bounds from one intractable problem to another. The recent spate of flood-level storms in Northern California brought attention to the Golden State’s ailing levees. As an “atmospheric river” pummeled the low-lying Sacramento region, a nearly endless parade of trucks carrying rubble raced to shore up an aged system.
It would never dawn on the state’s political leadership to invest in infrastructure improvements before near-catastrophic failures stressed levees to the breaking point. Nor would it occur to them to invest in water infrastructure. Shortly before the storms, which brought nearly as much rain in three weeks as California had experienced in a year, the state was already facing another weather-related crisis: a mega-drought that led to water rationing. Such a problem had long been predicted, yet until recently the state didn’t move urgently to approve new desalination plants or improve infrastructure.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Mr. Greenhut is a resident senior fellow for the R Street Institute. Based on a forthcoming article from City Journal’s special issue “Can California Be Golden Again?”
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