KRT Wire | 06/26/2007 | Bid to study restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley dies

KRT Wire | 06/26/2007 | Bid to study restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley dies:

The House of Representatives on Tuesday drove a stake through President Bush’s proposal to study draining Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the storied place some thought could once again rival Yosemite Valley.

But in truth, the idea was dead on arrival several months ago.

In a multibillion-dollar Interior Department funding bill, lawmakers pointedly declined to include money needed to study the Hetch Hetchy proposal. Bush had sought $7 million to begin studying the idea of draining the reservoir and restoring the once-famous valley in Yosemite National Park.

Forget it, lawmakers said.

“This highly controversial proposal, with a potential cost of as much as $10 billion, was not well justified in the budget materials,” the House Appropriations Committee noted.

I’m happy to hear this, although I wish I could say it was done for the right reasons.

To me, this isn’t about whether or not the idea is a valid one, but a simple fact: the national parks are currently in a serious financial bind with woefully underfunded budgets and severe deferred maintenance issues. The hetch hetchy plan (if one could give it enough substance to call it a plan) is a long-term, high-risk, spend-decades-in-court-at-best idea that’s going to waste money on lawyers and bureaucrats that are better spent on fixing up parks and hiring rangers to watch over them.

I just can’t justify spending this money on someone’s fantasy dream when the reality is places like Yosemite and Glacier and Mt. Ranier and Olympic National Park all have severe needs for these dollars to fix up what already exists and is in use by people on a daily basis (or would be, if it wasn’t closed due to storm damage, lack of maintenance or no rangers to patrol).

Maybe someday. This isn’t a piece of land we need to buy to save from developers. this is a piece of land that was developed decades ago that maybe someday we CAN recover, but right now, our focus ought to be on taking care of what we already have that needs our attention.

This idea, frankly, isn’t about restoring hetch hetchy. It’s about keeping lawyers employed for the years it’d take for this to trudge through the courts and the various sides duke it out. And that’s a bad use of funds…

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