Northern California is currently experiencing a drought. I could go into the details about how poorly our water planning is done, how dependant our water supply is on snowmelt and dam control but that is irrelevant.
The main areas hit by a drought are the counties that depend on rainfall directly into their reservoirs.
Farmers are also restricted from drawing water from the Northern California rivers as they get lower during the drought.
All of this is nonsense. Israel, a desert country, gets more than 50% of its freshwater from desalination. There is even a desalination plant being installed in San Diego California due to be running in 2016.
There is a reason we don't have desalination in Northern California, where it would be very easy because salt water is diluted by the inflow of the Sacramento River.
The problem is the existing fragmented water commissions are unable to cooperate and lack leaders to organize joint projects with sufficient bond revenue.
This can be solved. We need an initiative in three counties: San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa. The desalination plants would be in Contra Costa. San Francisco doesn't really have a water shortage but it sells so much water to neighboring counties that it needs to have more water available in reserve.
Solving the problem of droughts with desalination plants:
First we need the legal wording of an initiative that will cover the three relevant counties to make sure that they build the desalination plants competently as well as raise sufficient bond money. That should be about $150,000 in legal fees.
We also need to underwrite three local initiatives. That's $300,000.
So for $450,000 we can solve the issues of regular recurring Northern California droughts.