Water Archives · William Kahrl interview

Title

eng William Kahrl interview

Description

eng Former aid to Governor Brown where he led the development of wild and scenic rivers legislation, author of the California Water Atlas, and author of Water and Power.

Creator

eng Kahrl, William

eng Holyoke, Thomas

Relation

eng Water Archive Oral Histories

Coverage

eng California State University, Fresno

Date

eng 5/1/2015

Format

eng Microsoft Word document, 24 pages

Identifier

eng SCMS_waoh_00050

extracted text

>> Thomas Holyoke: We are talking today with William Kahrl. And let's
just start off with a bit of biographical information, who are you and
where are you from.
>> William Kahrl: Well, originally, I'm from Ohio where it rains often.
But I've lived in California now since 1969, which is almost the same as
being born here if you take a look at the constant migration and changes.
And I've been very active in a variety of natural resources issues for
most of my career and water has been a centerpiece of that.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Why did you come out to California from Ohio?
>> William Kahrl: It is a condition of my marriage certificate that we
will have a horse farm in the West. It is what my wife has always wanted
because we grew up on cowboy movies. I grew up in Ohio, she in Upstate
New York and if you've seen a lot of Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, and John
Wayne, you know that you want to go West.
>> Thomas Holyoke: That put you out here in California.
>> William Kahrl: Absolutely.
>> Thomas Holyoke: OK. What kind of work did you come out to California
to do? Or what were you--Actually, what were you doing in Ohio before you
came out here?
>> William Kahrl: Well, I graduated from high school in Shaker Heights
which is a suburban of Cleveland and had gone to Yale College for my
undergraduate studies. Went into graduate school at Yale but then decided
to switch over to the police department in New Haven which was then under
a reform chief. I knew some things about police system, having done
research on that at the college. And so we were very active in creating
new models for how police systems can operate, some of which were very
successful. And I applied and was offered a Coro Foundation Fellowship in
Public Affairs which was based in San Francisco, and that was our entrée
to California. It's a very good entrée. It's a good program that assigns
people who are interested in working with government and public policy to
a wide range of different experiences in the administration of a city,
usually either San Francisco or Los Angeles.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So once you go through this program--how long were you
in San Francisco?
>> William Kahrl: Oh, two and a half years, I think.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay.
>> William Kahrl: While I was with the Coro Foundation, one of the things
I became involved with was a project, a national petition, called “Save
Our Seashore” in which we were attempting to bring pressure on the Nixon
Administration to acquire Point Reyes National Seashore. Point Reyes
today--we were successful and Point Reyes today is now the anchor of the
Golden Gate National Recreation Area. And it was a terrific experience in
terms of national politics and how citizens groups and outreach through a

petition drive can be very successful. And from that experience and of
course the environmental movement was just beginning to emerge and gain
steam at that point and particularly in the Bay Area. I was invited to
join an organization called California Tomorrow which published a
quarterly that was quite influential in that period called Cry
California. And the project that we undertook at that point was the
design of a model for comprehensive planning in California. And I had
been in the state for a year so, of course, I know exactly what was
necessary.
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's all about California's problems.
>> William Kahrl: That's right. And the California Tomorrow plan had some
influence. It certainly persuaded me that comprehensive planning was not
going to be the solution for California, never gained traction.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Any particular reason why not?
>> William Kahrl: We're too independent. We have too many ideas of our
own. And most important, certainly the attraction, the joy I have had
living in California, particularly coming from small towns, Ohio, and
that kind of thing, is that there's tremendous opportunity in the state
for doing stuff that you think is important. There's--There are
opportunities here that if you can come up with an interesting idea and
persuade even one person that it's worth doing, chances are you will find
avenues that will make it possible for those things to happen. And that's
very much the way in which I think a free society should operate.
>> Thomas Holyoke: OK. So once you got involved with California Tomorrow
and this is I believe the early 1970s we're talking about?
>> William Kahrl: Yes, absolutely.
>> Thomas Holyoke: OK. What great adventure did you do next then, for
California Tomorrow?
>> William Kahrl: Well, the man who led the Point Reyes campaign had by
that time gotten himself elected to the state Senate, marvelous fellow,
Peter Behr. And Peter invited me to come up to Sacramento. He had been
there for a year and had introduced as his first piece of legislation a
proposal to create a Wild and Scenic Rivers System in California. Now in
those days in the state Senate, freshman senators stuck to their vast. I
mean you stayed in the back bench and you didn't raise ruckus like this.
Water is a very important possession of the public entities and so you're
mucking around in the deep water at that point. And what made it
particularly difficult was that all of the rivers that Peter proposed to
preserve, none of them were in his district. And all of them were in the
district of the most senior and powerful senator in the state Senate who
was not amused at all. So, Peter had gotten nowhere the first year and
asked me to come up and run his legislative program. And the second year
we were successful. And Ronald Reagan who was then the governor was-threw his support behind the program. And Ike Livermore who was the
resources secretary at that time and it was a great environmentalist, you
know, was a very important figure in making all of that possible. And so,

we created the Wild and Scenic Rivers System. This was a--the whole idea
of preserving rivers was still very new. It hadn't occurred to anyone the
importance of doing so I don't think until Bobby Kennedy had made a
celebrated trip down to Colorado and the excitement of that stirred the
appreciation for the preservation of free-flowing streams, led ultimately
to the creation of a federal system. And so we were following right
behind that wave, if you will, of support.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Apart from the senior senator who you irritated, did
you have other obstacles getting a piece of legislation like that to the
California legislature? I mean legislation has this kind of potential
impact on fresh surface water I would think would be--well it would raise
quite a number of eyebrows, I would think.
>> William Kahrl: Good question but a little off point. None of these-the river that was slated for development was the Eel. It's a very
important river, a very big river, but it was demonstrably not a very
good project. It would not have yielded the kind of benefits that--and it
was very controversial before this would--this issue even came up. So
that otherwise, these were not designated. We were not fighting over
streams that were immediately threatened. That's the first thing. The
second thing is that Ronald Reagan--Well, I should back up a little bit.
The North Coast, for those of you who do not live in California you need
to understand, everything that you read about California is only the
bottom half of the state. There is another entire area of equal size
where very few people live comparatively and where enormous quantities of
water fall. And that's where the complex of major river systems exist and
it's a, if you will, a treasure trove for future planning for development
in rivers and there have been various dreams of, you know, capturing
those dreams over the decades but no necessity to develop them until of
course the Feather River was developed as part of the State Water
Project. Reagan soon after coming to office as governor killed one of the
biggest dam projects the state had proposed, Dos Rios. He did so in part
because of the concern for the preservation of natural resources and
again, you need to step back and trust me. There once was a time in which
the environment was not a partisan issue and the Republican Party was
foremost in leading the drive for all kinds of resource and species
preservation whereas the Democratic Party was very much a captive of
unions who were opposed to things that would not lead to building
projects. So Reagan had taken up a stand that was both defensive of the
natural resources but also out of concern for the tribal governments that
were on—that would have been affected by the Dos Rios project and took
very strong position that we've done enough to the Indians in the history
of this country. When Reagan created--agreed to create the Wild and
Scenic Rivers System, in an important sense he closed off all of those
opportunities for vague and still unformed ideas of how to develop the
rest of the state that there would be this resource available and now
it's not. And so as a result that has pushed all kinds of changes in
terms of water politics as the public water agencies of the state respond
to a growing economy, increasing prosperity and a water supply that until
recently was pretty much fixed in terms of its size. And that's the life
we've been leading in this state ever since. So that was an important
element in terms of what follows after the creation of Wild and Scenic
Rivers System. Now for me, the much more important and interesting story,

I was then asked to join and run the legislative program for the Assembly
speaker and that's an important element primarily because Peter Behr of
course is Republican and Ronald Reagan was a Republican. Bob Moretti, my
boss in the Assembly, was a Democrat and a very strong candidate for
governor following Reagan and we had some tremendous successes in the
interrelationship between Bob Moretti and Ronald Reagan. It was a very
productive friendship between the two of them. And primarily, again,
focused on resource kinds of issues, particularly air pollution. This was
a very important bill for Bob Moretti and for Ronald Reagan as they were
finishing up their terms.
>> Thomas Holyoke: How long did you stay working for the legislature?
>> William Kahrl: Seven years.
>> Thomas Holyoke: OK. Any other major issues with water that you recall,
whether you're personally involved with them or not during that time?
>> William Kahrl: Well, yes. After Bob Moretti ran for governor and was
unsuccessful I remained with the legislature for a while and was asked to
stay on at the--with the new speaker. One of the effects of the Wild and
Scenic Rivers Act was that in going up against a very senior member of
the Senate, in those days committee hearings were nonessential events,
more theater than any actual decision-making process because all of the
decisions were made elsewhere out of public view. There were no
requirements for published votes and there were no requirements although
it was customary to provide written analysis of the content of the bills
that came up and this was true in both houses of the legislature. I was
fortunate that the new speaker, Leo McCarthy, was very interested in
legislative reform and so I was given the responsibility for devising an
entire system of rules and requirements for how we conduct our business
and you don't do it, you know, over lunch beforehand, you don't count the
committee beforehand. You are required not only to do an analysis but to
publish it several days in advance and there is an opportunity for of
course all of the votes to be recorded as a minimum requirement. This was
because as Peter Behr said, if everyone who voted yes at one time or
another in Randy Collier's committee had voted yes at the same time we
would have had the Wild and Scenic Rivers bill much sooner. And this was
important, I mean to give you an example, Randy Collier was a wonderful-he was known as the Silver Fox of the Siskiyou’s and had been there
forever and was--One of the charms about Randy was that if you wrote to
him and said I want you to take this because I'm concerned about this
bill and I want you to vote this way on it, you would always get a
positive response. He would always agree to voting exactly the way you
asked because he knew nobody had any way of finding out how he voted. He
will take serious research so that that whole reform movement that was
accomplished in the Assembly and was gradually adopted in the Senate
subsequently was very important outgrowth of that whole program and in
fact I wound up running something called the Third Reading File which was
of innovation that said when bills reach the floor of the House it would
be a good idea that members had something in front of them that told them
what the content of the bill was. These are major reforms, we have to
understand, and I would say, you know, today what, 25-30 years later,
many of those rules are still on the books and--but are probably honored

more in the breached, you know, then as a daily thing but that's to be
expected in the evolution of these organizations. In any event, I was
then asked to join the Brown Administration where I became the director
of research in the Governor's Office of Planning and Research and we
launched a number of projects from there including a major effort
involving enforcement of the reclamation law in California and research
into acreage limitations and their impact in the Central Valley of
California and Westlands Water District in particular. And out of some of
that work grew the idea of let's do a water atlas.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let me just sort of back up, why would the governor
want to get into what seems to me would have been a federal issue between
Westlands and the Bureau of Reclamation?
>> William Kahrl: Oh, by no means was it a federal issue exclusively. We
have been fighting these battles since the 1930s. Just to give a little
bit of background for whoever may be listening. Federal reclamation law
was adopted in 1902 by Teddy Roosevelt. It was one of the great reforms
intended to open the Western United States to settlement and it applies
only in the 16 western states. One of the requirements or stipulations
was that you needed to--you could—you could settle and claim a piece of
property and be delivered water under the system but you could only
receive water service for 160 acres. Now, if you have the kind of
experience that Teddy had, although he knew something about the West,
he'd grown up in the East and that was where most of the, a lot of
representation and so forth and the people who are good at conservation
in those days came from. A hundred sixty acres is a very large farm if
you're in Ohio. It's hardly adequate in some parts of the arid Western
United States to feed even three cows so there's a major difference in
terms of a->> Thomas Holyoke: John Wesley Powell analysis, yeah.
>> William Kahrl: --one size fits all kind of prescription. And so
California in particular, which had proven to be very good at developing
arable farmlands and reclaiming desert lands and creating at that point
significant agricultural production in places like the Owens Valley in
the Eastern Sierra or the Delta which was nothing but a swamp.
Extraordinary undertakings of that kind in the 19th century seem to be
prime territory for the development of systematic irrigation systems that
the federal government could deliver through the reclamation program.
However, it became a constant source of friction between state and
federal officials as to the operation of this 160-acre limitation which
from the point of view of Central Valley Agriculture particularly just
didn't fit. Two of those factors have worked here—three [phonetic]. The
reclamation service was a bust, didn't work well, didn't work well into
the 1920s. In California, the Newlands Project never really got off the
ground. And then their principal engineer for Southern California, J. B.
Lippincott turned out to be a secret agent for the City of Los Angeles,
ripping off all of the lands that had been set aside for reclamation
service and instead dedicating the water exclusively to the use of Los
Angeles, which was one of the great water wars and embarrassments of
federal policy in the United States history. I can talk to you about that
at some length. In any event, by the 1920s one of the extraordinary

things that's going on is that the reclamation services become allied
with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and is stripping Indian Tribes of their
water rights. And this was not an embarrassing or dirty behind the scenes
activity. They were given speeches about what a good thing it is that
we're teaching our Indian brothers that it's a tough world and you'd
better get, you know, used to it. It was just an amazing period in terms
of our values versus what was considered--and I mean part of the charm of
this, one of the things I'd been able to work with more recently is that
all of those dreadful contracts for rights of way across reserved Indian
lands which were cut at the beginning of the 20th century and that paid
the tribes pennies for access that is worth billions of dollars today.
All those contracts are now coming due for renewal and they will collect
as they should. In any event->> Thomas Holyoke: Literal pay back.
>> William Kahrl: Right. The—the friction between state and federal on
the 160-acre limitation was continuous. It was a favorite topic of
professors at the University of California at Berkeley who took on a 160acre limitation with the same passion that, you know, have individual
professors who took on saving Lake Tahoe. You know, this became the
centerpiece of their existence and more power to them.
>> Thomas Holyoke: This is like the Paul Taylor, is that the name?
>> William Kahrl: Yes, very good. There's an inherent contradiction and
this was one of the things we were dealing with in the Brown
Administration as we looked at reclamation law in the sense that you're
saying, "OK. You want to break down the requirements to 160 acres and you
want to put people onto the land after the model of a midwestern farm
which isn't appropriate to this area. And which is not a healthy place
for people to live out there in some of those fields and it's probably a
pretty bad use of the value of the land itself." You're really going to
condemn families to living in an area which has difficulty providing
healthcare, schools, all of the, you know, requirements that you would
expect because they're spread out over a large area. So it's a balance
between an ideal of well, that's what the federal government said versus
is this a practical--can you make this a practical reality? That's just
some of the issues we were wrestling with. The other issue which was
preceded that was, we don't like the federal system, we don't like the
federal government putting all these restrictions on us here in
California so we'll build our own water system. And that's what the State
Water Project was really about. It was sold as a project to benefit the
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. But if you look back
to the history of that, it was opposed by the Metropolitan Water District
of Southern California and the assumption was it's really going to go
benefit agriculture in the Central Valley as in fact for much of its
life, that's exactly what it's done. That's not a bad outcome in any way
but we have a lot of myths and stories that we like to tell ourselves in
California around our politics, not that that would happen anywhere else.
And so one of that--that conflict is a large part of how the State Water
Project got to be built and in turn, all of the questions with regard to
subsequent expansion of the water system kind of grows out of some of
those things. It makes more sense to have a state and federal system

operating parallel systems that are literally parallel than it does to
have a separate University of California and State College System. I've
never understood why there have to be two of those but that's what we've
done in California.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, well then--So if you're working for the governor's
office on some of these water issues here at the late '70s, does that
also involve you in the governor's ill-fated Peripheral Canal Proposal?
>> William Kahrl: No, as a matter of fact--Well, it does and it doesn't.
The Peripheral Canal--well, let me give you a little bit backup, a little
bit of history. A lot of the problems we're facing right now and this is
something I'll be talking about a little bit later today. At the end of
World War II, there was grave concern that because the Roosevelt
Administration had not been successful in resolving the depression and
that it was only the outbreak of the war that really put America back on
its feet. There was a real concern that with the end of the war, we would
be plunged back into the same kind of depression. And so there was a push
within Congress to create a menu of public works projects just like
during the New Deal that would now, you know, provide employment and
further development and expansion for the economy. It was a mistake. We
didn't--that never happened but this set off a war between the Army Corps
of Engineers, which was the construction arm of Congress in those days,
and the Bureau of Reclamation which thought it had control of new works
projects in the Western United States. And they battled, you know, for
eight years. But out of that came the design of what needed to happen
next in California. A whole series of components, the Auburn Dam, the
Peripheral Canal, the New Melones Project, and so forth and so on. All of
these were part of that federal scheme which as I said started with an
error. But those are the elements that we've been fighting over ever
since for 60 some years. And gradually, some of them have been cast aside
and some of them have been built. The Peripheral Canal was always an
essential element because the issue here is how do you move more water
from where it occurs naturally in the northern part of the state to where
it's needed in the southern and central parts of the state? And to do
that you need to bypass or get through the confluence of the two great
internal river systems called the Delta. And the Peripheral Canal was a
means of transporting the drinking water for most of the state safely in
an enclosed facility. It was also at that time that it emerged as the
Peripheral Canal or came to be called the Peripheral Canal was a means to
protecting the Delta which was itself in a continuos state of decline as
it has been since 1900. And so in 1960, remember that the Delta is an
important agricultural section just as the Owens Valley had once been an
important agricultural system until Los Angeles drained it. The Delta was
a big deal and a lot of what we think of as Central Valley agriculture
didn't exist because the systems haven't been built yet. And so at the
time that Pat Brown was negotiating the plans for the State Water
Project, the 1960 bond issue, a deal was cut that said, OK, we won't
protect the water. We'll run it into the bog. Now, why you would run the
water system for 25 million people through a polluted and degraded swamp
makes no sense. Worse, we've been trying to operate what is naturally a
saline estuary as if it were a freshwater site estuary. And that's been
disastrous. It's been bad for public health because millions and millions
of dollars have to be paid, spent to clean up the water once it reaches

Southern California and goes into the drinking water system. It's been
terrible for the environment of the Delta which has continued to fall
further and further down. And it's been a rotten deal overall for the
economy because we keep diverting resources. Now, the Bay Area is smart
about this stuff. They built their own peripheral canals. So San
Francisco, the East Bay, they don't go anywhere near the Delta and so
it's easy for them to be--it's ironic I guess that they're also in the
position to say, mustn't do that for anybody else. Don't want to see that
happening but that's the reality of water politics in the State of
California. So what was the question we started with here?
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, I was just--had been sort of asking about the
Peripheral Canal. I think we had been better off than how we build it
rather than letting the->> William Kahrl: Okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: --whole canal die horribly in 1982.
>> William Kahrl: Well, the push for the Peripheral Canal grows directly
out of the decisions that were made in the Reagan Administration to say,
"Let's close off the northern part of the state." So suddenly, you know,
you've got an additional pressure to say let's do something. You know,
we've got to do something to ensure that we're not losing, you know, the
water that we can still tap and that we're making the most efficient use
of it and that we're conserving the resource. That's what the Peripheral
Canal was all about. It was never seen that way. You know, it was a
terrible fight. And I won't even begin to go into how Looney Tunes the
whole thing ultimately became—although it did have one of my favorite
political ads. There was an actor named Bruce Gordon who played Frank
Nitti, the ultimate villain on a television show called The Untouchables
about Al Capone and Eliot Ness. And they hired Bruce Gordon to get
dressed up as Frank Nitti for this wonderful television commercial that
showed a shower-like psycho and they draw the curtain back and it's Frank
Nitti standing there in the shower who says, "Thanks for the water
suckers." This was Southern California personified for the Northern
California roads. And that was a very important factor in that election
was, "We hate people in Southern California." And so the argument that it
would benefit them became an argument in the Bay Area for that's why
we're opposed to it. We don't want anything good happening to those
people who, in the time-honored phrase, will just use it to fill their
swimming pools and water their orange juice. I mean, you know. As a new
arrival in California, I was here at the time of a significant earthquake
in San Francisco and I was stunned to hear people on the sidewalks of San
Francisco because it had struck in Southern California most seriously
saying, "Good. Now maybe those people would go back where they came
from." I had no experience with this kind of venomous attitude of people
who inhabit a single community. Anyway, enough about things I don't like
about California. So Peripheral Canal rises, it was linked to a
constitutional amendment that would have given the Delta permanent
protections of extraordinary degree. What happened in terms of the
politics of it was two of the large landowners in the Central Valley
decided that it was too protective of the environment. And so they were
prepared to spend an enormous amount of money to defeat it in order to

get a weaker--something that would never pass the legislature and let the
environmentalists who were happy to take the money from the two
landowners and run an anti-environmental campaign even though they were
funding it because it was too environmental. That's the politics of the
Peripheral Canal and how crazy things become in California and so in an
important sense they all lost because the Central Valley weren't--never
got the supplies or the reliability that the Peripheral Canal could have
provided in all of these subsequent years and the environment and
particularly, the Delta, lost all of the protections that would have been
guaranteed have that been passed. So yeah, I would say that for people
who were working with the Brown Administration at that time and who were
concerned with these issues, I would say yes, I was part of that group.
That Ron Robie who was then heading the Department of Water Resources
known today as one of the most respected judges in California and Jerry
Meral who was his deputy, two of the best environmentalists I know in
this state were leading that effort and leading it on the basis of this
is a protection for the Delta first and foremost and nobody was willing
to listen. For all those people and who, you know, were part of that
campaign, yeah. Yeah, we would like to see still the need for that is
greater now than ever before or something like it. And so, there's a
tremendous irony in the thought that here we are, you do the math, what,
30 some years later. And who could have imagined that Jerry Brown would
be elected governor, as the only former governor who could be reelected
under the peculiarities of our two-term only law and that he would get a
second opportunity to complete that piece of work from the original
vision. And so yeah, there's both a certain delight in the irony but also
saying, this is wonderful. God has given us a second chance and maybe
this time we can get something done that would resolve the needs of the
state for at least a half a century. That's a good thing to do.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, we'll come back at the end of this and talk a
little about whether or not California can screw that one up too.
>> William Kahrl: Of course we can.
>> Thomas Holyoke: California Water Act, let's say. You're going to be
talking about that a little bit.
>> William Kahrl: Well, yes and particularly in relation to the
Peripheral Canal. There are three issues that are going forward in the
first two terms of Jerry Brown that involved water in a large way. One
was Harrison Dunning, a—a law professor at UC Davis was spearheading a
study group for the state on groundwater law. California doesn't have
many groundwater laws. And this was the idea was that we're going to
create a body, a canon of requirements for the use of groundwater, very
important issue, very controversial. Never got anywhere with it. Second
big thing was of course the peripheral canal and we know what happened to
that. The third one was the California Water Atlas and that succeeded.
The idea behind the atlas is something that started with a man named
Stewart Brand, and Stewart is one of those great Californians of the
latter half of the 20th century, people who changed the world with ideas.
And Stewart, among other things, had created something called the Whole
Earth Catalogue which preceded in—in the days before there was an
internet, you could turn to the Whole Earth Catalogue and find about

products, and ideas, and technologies all over the world; and it was the
first point of that kind of real media access into a realm of
possibilities that no one had seen before. And one of the aspects of the
Whole Earth Catalogue was Stewart had suggested to NASA that when they
sent up one of the spaceships, which were very new at that point, instead
of pointing the camera towards the stars, take a picture of the world,
we've never seen ourselves. And that act alone earns Stewart a place, you
know, in the canon of really great people. Anyway, Stewart did a lot of
wonderful things. One of his ideas was that we should know more about the
water resources, and there's nothing more harmless in life than making
maps. So, why don't we have a water atlas? Well, he was wrong about the
second point. I mean maps after all started as a means of waging war.
It's the only reason you needed them, and you know that's certainly not
the history of map making or cartography. But there were a couple of
things that made this uniquely possible. One is we know a lot about
water. We collect it and have a tremendous amount of data that has been
assembled over more than 100 years at that point. And so we could tell
you things about the water system that we couldn't tell you about the
incidence of venereal disease for example or—or poverty in levels. I
mean, we just didn't have data like that that was as comprehensive or as
greater reach in terms of history. So, we have a lot of information, and
it's not information that's readily accessible to people. So, the idea of
taking all of that information and turning it back to the public in a
form that can begin to tell them about how this resource changes their
lives and how they can change it was very attractive and possible. The
other reason that it was possible was that we have, in California, one of
the great cartographic institutions of the world at California State
University, Northridge. Has a fantastic laboratory for cartography. Now,
we're talking--when I talk about cartography, I'm talking about Hand
drawn stuff, you know, and Teals.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yes, [inaudible]the old way.
>> William Kahrl: Yes, antiques. But it was beautiful, beautiful work
that they were capable of doing and they trained many of, you know, the
greatest mapmakers in the United States. So, we have the resources, we
have the data and so we did it. And what emerged was a very large book
that was enormously popular and very, very inexpensive because it had to
be accessible to the public. I was fortunate enough to edit and run the
whole program and Stewart was the chairman of our advisory board that
included most of the very best people in water and all aspects of the
resource at that time, so it was a wonderful experience all the way
through. And almost functioned as a tutorial for all of those on the
advisory board as well because we were learning so much about what each
other was doing.
>> Thomas Holyoke: You are usually listed as being the creator of the
book.
>> William Kahrl: Oh, I would always give credit to Stewart, and it
couldn't have happened under I don't think any administration other than
Jerry Brown, so you know. I have been fortunate to be able to be part of
a lot of different projects that I'm very proud to have contributed to
but they're never my projects, you know. Anyway, you would ask--started

this by asking about the Peripheral Canal. It was very, very important to
me all the way through that, that we not allow this document to become
anything that would promote the Peripheral Canal. This was not a
political document. This was not a conventional “look at us we're the
government, we're great. Do what we tell you. Leave the driving to us.”
That wasn't what this was about at all. This was about providing a point
of access into a subject area of critical importance, the public that
they knew nothing about and had no way of getting into without it. And I
think it's worked very well in that sense. If you can measure doing well
by creating opportunities for people to become engaged, which from the
point of view of a lot of people who are--make their career in water it's
called “mucking things up with a lot of ignorant opinions.” But that's
what government public policy should be all about and in that sense, we
came close to achieving that '60s ideal of getting the government to fund
a revolution against itself.
>> Thomas Holyoke: How widely available was this book?
>> William Kahrl: Well, we printed as many as we can afford. I think that
was something in the order of 30 or 40,000 copies. It was sold at $39.50.
It's a huge book and if it had been commercially marketed in a
conventional sense would have been $150 at least. Today, you can buy them
for around $650 on the market of antique books and they're well worth
having. I mean, it's a gorgeous piece of art. And remarkably, very little
out of it is out of date which speaks more to the pace at which water
policy changes in the state. But the issues that are there and actually a
great deal of the statistical information will still give you an accurate
picture of water and how it's used in the state with one all important
exception, and that is that the--we've diverted such a large part of our
water supply to environmental purposes that weren't even imagined when
the system was built or in the 1970s when the atlas was created.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Was it a one-time project? Have there been other
editions?
>> William Kahrl: No, one-time project. There had been talk various times
of, you know, updating it or so forth and so on. But in the battle over
an annual budget, that always comes last, you know, those kinds of
things. There was a book which the Department of Water Resources did
about the State Water Project itself which was individual facilities and
their connections and just that. It's a very different book. It's very
much more--that's not a work of art in any sense or of history in that
sense, and it's also not available because as soon as 9/11 hit, everybody
said well, we can't have that information out there because someone might
use it to bad purposes and so as far as I know most books have been
gathered up and put away.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And the Water Atlas was comprehensive of all of
California?
>> William Kahrl: Absolutely.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay.

>> William Kahrl: But as I say, it was not a pitch for the Peripheral
Canal.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. So, where does your story go after the
publication of the Water Atlas which was '81, I think?
>> William Kahrl: It could have been. Well, Jerry Brown leaves office of
course. I had been able very much to pursue a vision of what life ought
to be, which is keeping one foot in the world of ideas and the other foot
in the world of change, and I've been able to hit that balance pretty
well. I’d also have the ability to convince myself at least that the
issues I'm taking up are worth doing, and frankly, life under George
Deukmejian who was a very nice man didn't look like it was going to be
very exciting and didn't look like the state government was going to be
quite the cutting edge place that it had been under two remarkable
governors, Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown. And so, you're looking around
for something exciting to do. I don't know how exciting it is but in any
event, I was able to--I became a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in order
to write the book on the creation of the Southern California water system
and primarily the war between Los Angeles and the Owens Valley, what we
think of as Chinatown.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, what does that
mean?
>> William Kahrl: Well, it means they give you money to go off and write
a book, and they had a program in environmental affairs which by hook or
by crook, I seem to have qualified for.
>> Thomas Holyoke: How many years did they fund your work?
>> William Kahrl: Well, I only needed a year to do that. But I knew a
great deal about the Owens Valley. The reason that I knew so much about
the Owens Valley was it's an outrageous story. It's just the damnedest
story you've ever heard, and I was raised in Ohio where we tell stories
and this is the best story I knew, so it just seemed, you know, A,
somebody ought to tell what really happened on this, and B, there's no
reason for how stupid everybody is behaving. I mean, I don't know. If you
look at the history of World War I, you know, and how it started and you
go, "Oh, come on guys. You didn't have to get to that." You know, it was
so avoidable and I think you should react sometimes when you see an
opportunity. You say “everybody calm down. Eat your peas,” you know, “go
to your corner” and there was certainly a need for something like that in
connection with the Owens Valley.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Now, in preparing for this, I reread the preface of
"Water and Power" and you had marked in there that you thought the story
hadn't been told. I think you said that the--there are two people, both
of whom were remarkably biased.
>> William Kahrl: Oh yes, absolutely.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let's suppose the story never really had been told
from a more objective, academic or--point of view.

>> William Kahrl: Well, who would want that? I mean if you can get
something that, you know, goes right to your cheering section, that's
always the stuff you want, you know. It's the same sort of thing that
distinguishes good editorial writing from not so good editorial writing.
>> Thomas Holyoke: OK, let's change the question. Why were you going to
do something different?
>> William Kahrl: Just because it was a better story than had been told,
and it is a much better story, I think. What you had up until then was
the story that had been written by the newspaper publisher in the Owens
Valley who had seen his community destroyed and who was very, very
opposed to what had occurred, and that's entirely appropriate too, you
know, exactly the situation that he was in. And then a subsequent book
that was written I guess in the 1950s. It's been a while since I've
thought about that. But at a point at which Los Angeles was fashioning
itself as a model of good governance and this is how things should be in
so there was a collective which is a little remarkable when you think
back to how corrupt that city was. But anyway, that was their self-image
and so there was a desire to look back to the big men who had helped
create the modern city of Los Angeles as heroes of urban smartness, you
know. I guess to some extent, for people who grew up in contact with the
East Coast, Robert Moses was a great figure. Now, he's enormously
controversial. You can talk about terrible things that he did, but he
built important things that changed New York. I think there was a
[inaudible] in Los Angeles to the fashion, something like that. And so
out of that grew this really silly book about William Mulholland as the
great city builder. And William Mulholland was a lot of things but he
wasn't quite—quite the noble figure that emerged from that book. But you
can see that both of those books would find constituencies that were
happy with that story and wouldn't want to hear it any other way.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I'm curious. Did you watch the movie Chinatown before
embarking on this project?
>> William Kahrl: I dare say I was inspired by it. You know, you'll say
you look at that and you'll say, and that happened? I'd like to know
more. And then you find out, gee, what happened was worse. The other
really important factor here was that Los Angeles at that point, we're
talking the middle '70s still held the towns of the Owens Valley in their
grip. They were not going to allow anything to happen there. It was an
obscenity in terms of what governance is supposed to be in the United
States, of a republic, you know, with freedom and so on. It was being run
as a colony, and it was not a comfortable situation for Los Angles either
because there was no precedent for what they were dealing with, and the
problem never got better. I mean, every generation, it just--everybody
was angry for the same reasons and so there was a desire to step forward
at that point and say, "Look." The first step that a book like this can
contribute is to say, wait a minute. Let's agree on what happened because
everybody was remembering things that had no existence in fact. Let's
separate out the fact from the fiction, which is just the starting point.
But more importantly, let's identify what's really at stake in the
decisions we have and we can make in front of us versus all of the issues

that are already resolved. Those boats have sailed, don't go back there.
That I think is one of the values that good history can do in terms of
informing contemporary public policy, and that was really the ambition
there. And again, I don't want to give--I always like--I mean, I don't
want to take all the credit. One of the things that made it possible to
even think positively on that basis was that one of the people who had
been very important to me in developing the California Water Atlas was a
deputy general manager at the Department of Water and Power, Duane
Georgeson. And Duane was really a whole new generation of DWP managers
with a much broader vision and a much bigger sense of public service. And
so, in an important sense that book, I like to think, enabled Duane to
move forward in turn with a lot of the reforms that followed. And of
course, since the book came out, obviously, the book must have triggered
all of these but I don't really believe that. The city has achieved a
balance in its relationship with the tribal governments that own very
significant water rights up there. It's released the town properties from
control. The communities are beginning to grow again. It's a much better
place in all the way around and there had been significant changes as
well, very significant changes in the use of that water.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I suppose going forward for anyone watching this, and
this might be a major request, but can you give a synopsis as to what
L.A. did in the Owens Valley?
>> William Kahrl: Oh, it's not very complicated to explain them into the
[inaudible] and the details but--California has a fundamental problem and
the fundamental problem is that everybody came out here in the middle of
19th century and beyond--and then decade after decade beyond that, and
they all came out here and turned left and went south where God never
intended people to live. It's a semi-arid plain and so, you have two
cities at the beginning of the 20th century, San Francisco and Los
Angeles, that have very, very limited indigenous water supplies, and then
realized they can't grow without reaching out somewhere for water supply
and they better be the first because they want to beat the other guy to
become the important city on the West Coast. And both of them reached
towards the Sierra and both of them wind up broad—building cross country
projects of about 250 miles long. The only difference is Los Angles is
smart and San Francisco is not. San Francisco says “okay”, Los Angles
goes and says, “we will suborn the Bureau of Reclamation that happens to
be holding the water rights to all the water we want and bring him in”,
you know, “to our little scheme and we'll secure our access by federal
statute through the, you know, it will be our project.” Los Angeles goes
for a permit at the federal level. They can never get, you know, approval
so they wind up, you know, spending 30 years or so futzing around and
even when they finally do get a system, they're supposed to be paying for
it with a hydroelectric system that the law specifies cannot be sold to a
private developer and of course, they immediately turned her over to PG&E
and run it illegally. I mean, it's a mess but it does produce the Hetch
Hetchy. And arguably from an environmental perspective the loss of the
Hetch Hetchy Valley is probably a bigger loss than what was done to the
Owens Valley which was, you know, it's--without water, it's a desert and
it's pretty much of a desert now. The other piece of the story that's
important is that Los Angles when it brought the water down wasn't
actually going to bring it to the city of Los Angles. They were going to

put it into the San Fernando Valley which was then nothing, wasteland.
But it was a wasteland that was owned by a number of large industrial
interests including the publisher of the Los Angeles Times and the owner
of the major railroad system. And they stood once you delivered the water
to their land to profit enormously and they were of course the major
backers of the project although they weren't telling anyone about either
the design of the project or the--who would actually benefit. So the
revelation of the existence of this secret syndicate was a very important
deal. Secondarily, they of course sold the project by maintaining that
ooga booga booga, we're about to face disaster and there would be no
water coming out of your taps if you don't approve this project. And so
they invented the draught that never existed. Some pieces of that you can
see in the movie but not nearly as rich.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Chinatown, they suggested that they're deliberately
letting water out->> William Kahrl: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: --of the L.A. River. Did that actually happen?
>> William Kahrl: No. But instead they just said, "Trust us. We have the
statistics and it says right here we're in the middle of a drought."
Anyway, they've been doing this. Lots of communities in California have
invented droughts. And nobody's done it better than people in Southern
California. It's not as bad as a few years later when they were selling
annexations and they distribute little bottles of water with--there were
mud you know, and say, "This is the water you're drinking if you don't
approve our system." There are horrendous things they're doing
politically. Anyway, the--so the project was presented, the public in Los
Angeles was informed of the existence of the syndicate. They say, "I
don't care. We're all going to benefit." And so it was approved. And the
project works beautifully and it's not damaging to the Owens Valley
because basically, Los Angeles at the beginning just took the water
after--that was left over, you know, at the bottom end of the valley and
brought it on down to Los Angeles. But then two things--bad things
happened. San Fernando Valley develops really fast, much faster than
anybody expected. So it's consuming at lot of water. I've left out one of
the important points. Because Teddy Roosevelt knew about the syndicate,
and this had been controversial, he approved the legislation allowing the
project to be built on the condition that the city of Los Angeles could
never ever sell a drop of water from that system outside the borders of
Los Angeles. So not a drop would ever go to the San Fernando Valley and
so, immediately the city of Los Angeles annexed the San Fernando Valley
and in fact, that's how you grew Los Angeles was by extending out the
water system. But this is important because San Francisco, for example,
draws far more water than it ever needs from the Hetch Hetchy. But it
sells that water to the peninsula and, you know, has done very well
selling this water. Los Angeles isn't allowed to do that and that changes
their relationship to the Metropolitan Water District and everyone else,
you know, because they don't have the kind of flexibility that other
people have. So you get a sudden growth in the San Fernando Valley and at
the end of World War I, a real drought happens and Los Angeles panics.
And they do two things, one they say, "Okay! We're now going to the

Colorado. We need an additional water supply," which was bad news for San
Diego because San Diego had been working for several years on building a
project to the Colorado River and suddenly, Los Angeles comes in and
elbows them out. That's the end of San Diego. And this in turn leads to a
hatred for Los Angeles that has guided San Diego Water Policy to the
present day. They speak endless and will spend any amount of money to
secure what they call water independence. You know, which really means,
we won't have the Department of Water and Power having any influence over
our water supply through the Southern California Water System. Anyway,
they go to the Colorado. The other thing they do is we're going to have
to shut down the Owens Valley and take all the water there is. And so
they begin checkerboard acquisitions, which means you basically secure
the prime properties that control access to the river and then you dry
out everybody who doesn't have direct access to the river. And this was
devastating. It produced armed rebellion. At one point the aqueduct-well, the aqueduct was repeatedly blown up by Owens Valley activists and
at one point the aqueduct was seized by angry ranchers and they took the
whole supply and dumped it off into the desert, ran out there for several
days. Los Angeles was hiring armed guards, sending whole car loads of
them--I mean, railroad cars full of them up to guard the system. We were
on the verge of a very, very bad situation. At which point Los Angeles
took a master stroke and revealed their discovery that the banks in the
Owens Valley had been funding the resistance and the banks were broken,
all of the people who lived there lost all of their life savings and the
Owens Valley was destitute and Los Angeles simply moved in and bought
everything. That's how it remained.
>> Thomas Holyoke: See, I've always wondered, you know, Los Angeles
essentially had gone into the Owens Valley and they purchased the water
rights for the most part or purchased the land that had the riparian
rights, I suppose [inaudible].
>> William Kahrl: Well, yeah. The relationship with the Bureau of
Reclamation was more complicated than that->> Thomas Holyoke: Well->> William Kahrl: --but yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah.
>> William Kahrl: They do wind up paying for what they have.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So— they->> William Kahrl: And they've argued you know, at various points in their
histories. Well, it was good for them. You know, at the time of the
depression, we were buying their land for them, you know. They should be
grateful.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, I just always kind of wondered if people who
lived in Owens Valley realized what they were doing when they were
selling off their land with their water rights.

>> William Kahrl: Well, no, the people who were selling certainly knew
what they were doing that's why there was such a deep and bitter
situation there because you were selling out your neighbors. There wasn't
any question about that in the latter stages. In the early stages when
people were simply transferring their water rights to the possession of
the Bureau of Reclamation for an irrigation project that would benefit
them, they didn't know what was going to about to be done to them but
that was what happened to them.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually, another aspect of this story that's always
been interesting was basically, you've kind of mentioned it, the betrayal
of the reclamation service by Joseph Lippincott, what happened there? Why
did he sell out his own agency because it sounds like essentially he did?
>> William Kahrl: Oh, it's Manifest destiny. It's the benefit of the
larger number. He was building California. It was a noble enterprise.
That's very important to understand, you know, those relationships. Yeah,
it was--there's no difference between that attitude and the one I was
talking about earlier of it's good for the Indians to get ripped off. You
know, we're doing something important and they're in the way. And along
the way they'll learn maybe you won't get ripped off the next time. Too
bad for you. But he was a hero, you know, to Los Angeles for heaven's
sakes. And one of the ironies or further horror stories is that Los
Angeles subsequently decides to go further north and expand the aqueduct
and reach up into the Mono Basin. And darn it, the [inaudible] service
doesn't do exactly the same thing again to help them develop this
project. So it is, you know, you would ask about why didn't these things
get written. There's a very important thing to understand about
California water. As I've said, we know more about it than most other
subjects. We have a huge volume of data on it. We don't have much of a
historiography at all. And what happens when you're a aspiring water
lawyer fresh out of law school and you go to work for a firm that deals
in those issues. To a much greater degree and elsewhere, you spend your
first two or three years sitting at the knee of the senior partner who
tells you stories about how this agreement was negotiated, why it
contains these provisions and so forth because that stuff ain't written
down. So all the verbal history that we pass along, you know. And that's
part of the fun going into the subject.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So did you find this a little intimidating project to
do? I mean it's such a big story, so much have been grounded in myth,
dealing with these huge, bigger-than-life personalities like Mulholland
and Eaton and all these people?
>> William Kahrl: No. No. I mean, it's a great story. It's fun.
Mulholland is a wonderful character and he's a monster. But he's a
monster you'd like to sit around and drink a beer with, you know. And he-part of the success that he has as— completely unschooled, doesn't know
anything about engineering or anything else. And he's the guy that's
running the water system for the most important city in Los Angeles. Was
that people just loved him, you know. He was a great guy and rough and
tough and you know, but never asked anything from anybody that he
wouldn't do himself. And was really elemental, you know, not only in his

relationship to other people but to nature itself. I mean, he was—he was
something else entirely. You know, and so yeah, he's->> Thomas Holyoke: How did you go about doing the research for the book?
What kind of material were you drawing on?
>> William Kahrl: Well, it's not that hard. There's a tremendous amount,
I mean it's the usual stories. There's--get thee to the National
Archives. You know, there's a tremendous amount of material there. I
found that California has some great libraries. So, one of them is at
Berkeley, another one is--you know, we're building one, here—
>> Thomas Holyoke: They’re—They’re hoping to, yeah.
>> William Kahrl: -- which is, you know, going to a tremendous resource
because Fresno State is the center now for water policy coordination
within the state college system. And beyond that, let's see where was I
working apart from the National Archives. Oh, of course, the Water
Resources Archives which used to be at Berkeley and have since been
transferred to Riverside. You know, these are--these were enormously
[inaudible]--the Lippincott papers are with the Water Resources Archives.
And I also had access to the sister of the bankers in the Owens Valley
and she was prepared to talk to me and to share documents that hadn't
been shared before. And I also found just using a Freedom of Information
Act request. But I had access to Lippincott's personnel papers that
revealed a great deal about the uneasiness of his superiors with regard
to what in the hell he was doing.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Let's--What Lippincott, what he was doing, was it
actually illegal?
>> William Kahrl: Probably not but it was certainly at variance with
departmental policy and it was getting them a lot of heat, which was not
welcomed.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What do you think is the legacy or legacies of what
Los Angeles did to Owens Valley?
>> William Kahrl: I don't know quite how to answer that. I mean obviously
Los Angeles wouldn't exist without that system and so in an important
sense everyone who lives there is a beneficiary. I think that California
water policy is a beneficiary in the sense that that example was so
extreme and so horrifying that A, we passed statutes that said “this can
never happen again” and we have laws that say, “you can't do this to a
community.” But more importantly than that, it means that without those
statutes and without that respect for that restriction, you couldn't have
built the Central Valley Project, the State Water Project or any of the
systems that have followed because protection for the area of origin is
fundamental to water agreements in the state. And that would not be the
case if it had not been for the Owens Valley.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Is part of the rest of the state's intense distrust of
Los Angeles even today in water politics part of the legacy?

>> William Kahrl: I would hope not in the sense that--I mean, we're in
the middle of a debate about an important component in repairing a broken
water system and a lot of the people who benefit directly from that
project are in Southern California. A lot of fear that attaches to the
prospects for that project are linked to the idea, "Well, those people in
the Bay Area would just kill it." And I don't think that's as certain as
other people who went through the Peripheral Canal fight believe it is.
And that's because we're a more mature society for one thing and
secondly, we're different, you know. I forget what the figures are but
it's something like one third of the population turns over every 10
years. People—there's no long-term memory in this state. So the
bitterness and the anger and the grrr [angry growling], we got to get-you know, that's there and that still existed in the 1970s just isn't in
play today. I just don't think sitting in San Francisco that you spend
that much time thinking grrr [angry growling], I'm unhappy because people
in Los Angeles might be doing well, you know. And I think if you look at
the debate that's going on now, people recognize that cutting off water
supplies for Glendale isn't going to make life in Oakland any better.
Although you've got this lunatic newspaper out there who's doing exactly,
you know, making that, exactly that argument. You know, really? Do you
think anybody buys that? On the contrary, what the water system has done
in the state is linked these communities together in a degree of mutual
dependency that never existed before. So, that and you speak for example
if Los Angeles messed up its water supply, you know, did something stupid
and lost. Water coming into, you know, because they broke the aqueduct or
something, it was their problem. Today, if Los Angeles does something
like “oh, we're going to put water back in the Owens Lake, oh we're not
going to take water out of”, you know, “Owens Lake”, something like that.
It just means it increases pressure on the Delta because they need to
draw it from somewhere else and they can. And because of that, we're
concerned with how everybody—everybody has to act responsibly because it
affects everybody else and if someone acts, you know, wastefully, that's
a problem for all of us and we understand that. I think we're pretty
sophisticated on that kind of score and I just don't see a campaign of
regional hatred succeeding in California in 2015 the way it might have in
1982. We're not--That's not us. And it's certainly not the generation
behind me.
>> Thomas Holyoke: That's a remarkably optimistic view.
>> William Kahrl: I am, a very optimistic person.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, after "Water and Power" is published, what are
you—what are doing after this?
>> William Kahrl: Oh then->> Thomas Holyoke: What are you doing in your life after this?
>> William Kahrl: Then I was foolish and looking around for something to
do, decided that the way to do, you know, that balance of ideas, change
and so forth, the best platform for doing that would probably be an
editorial page and so I would join the editorial board of the Sacramento
Bee, and eventually became the opinion page editor. Not a good idea in

retrospect in the sense that this would be the '80s, '90s as the Califor—
media establishment, A: lost its mind and B: spiraled into collapse, not
a great time to be in media and the Sacramento Bee was certainly not
ahead of the crowd when it came to avoiding disaster and so it was a
constant battle, you know, within the Sacramento Bee to—to stop making
mistakes, you know. That really one of the things that was happening I
think and more in California than elsewhere, people were really getting
angry at their newspapers and you saw that most dramatically in Los
Angeles where it became a citywide campaign, get rid of the Los Angeles
Times. I mean people were just lining up because it was offensive, it was
not reflective of--It was angrily against the interest of its own
constituents and there was a lot of that as well in, I think, the way we
did things in the Sacramento Bee and I wasn't happy with that. I don't
think they were that happy with me after a while but it was an
interesting--I was able to pick some good fights. I was able to win more
than my fair share of them but there's no legitimacy to the authority of
an editorial page. I mean the constitution protects the existence of the
free press but it doesn't say you have to pay any attention to it. And I
was never comfortable, you know, with it's a degree to which the notion
that what we were doing had that much impact, that in—that period in fact
it did. On the other hand today, no one's paying any attention to it or
to newspapers for that matter and it's a good thing. I mean that has been
one of the great periods I think we've been through and we're only
beginning to appreciate how wonderful it has been in terms of expanding
our access to information. And again, you find Stewart Brand back there
in the early days because it was Stewart who walked around and said, you
know, information wants to be free. And that's what we're living.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Yeah, we all leave infinite information with infinite
information sources.
>> William Kahrl: Yes!
>> Thomas Holyoke: Some of the information might even be true.
>> William Kahrl: Occasionally it is.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So, you leave the Sacramento Bee's editorial page and
then what?
>> William Kahrl: Oh, the best time of all. I went to--I was very, very
fortunate and landed with a global communications entity called BursonMarsteller [assumed] which was then the largest in the world. It's the
greatest play land anyone could ever be given.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What exactly are they?
>> William Kahrl: Well, they do a lot at that time. They did a tremendous
amount of public policy consulting and so it's a continually evolving
industry. It's not presage entry and I don't think they ever were that.
And it's not publicity kinds of things and it's not PR in a conventional
sense. It's much more management consulting and crisis consultation and
then occasionally, you--you are part of the administration of the
client's business and it's wonderful in the sense that well, for example,

one of the women that I had contact with there had been in the Soviet
Union at the time that the wall came down and remained. Those were
terrible times in Moscow, you know, rampant crime and all kinds of bad
stuff going on and she had stayed through that for like six or seven or
eight years. And we said “geez, you know, that's quite a choice for
somebody who is, you know, in their 30s and female and in that society.”
And she was saying “look, I was managing 3 and $4 billion worth of
assets, you know, for a major corporate interest. Where else would I have
the opportunity to do anything that important at my age” and that was the
joy of this whole business is it's not unlike editorial writing in the
sense that if you'll write an editorial, you see here, this is what you
ought to be doing to solve the problem you're facing and the object of
that says “nonsense!, I can't stand it and there's your damn editorial.”
But if he is paying you thousands of dollars, he'll do it because he's in
control. Well, that must--he must know what he's talking about. And the
wonderful thing about that business is so often you're called into a
situation three weeks too late, you know. They've already made this
stupid mistake. They're in it, you know, and they're going "What do I do,
how do I get out of this?" And often the solution is, stop. Don't do that
anymore and they go oh, Okay. It's just delightful, it really is and
because you are, you know, slating in and slating out of businesses that
have enormous responsibilities, have really smart people at the top and
really need your help, you know, because there are things they're just
not getting right. And so much of it is purely strategic. I'm not very
good on tactics but I'm very good on strategy and so, you get involved in
some great kinds of projects. And two of those that I enjoyed
particularly was working with Nestle Waters here and abroad, which is an
aspect of the water industry that we don't think of as being as important
as it is. And also has the advantage of being in a business that is
always under fire. I mean just constantly criticized and so there was
always lots of stuff to do and the second thing was working with tribal
governments, which is a wonderful development in all that's occurred
within our lifetime in terms of bringing now a segment of our overall
community out of desperate poverty into absurd amounts of money, you
know, that they now are able to commend through the operations of these
casinos. And all of the problems that go with that in terms of social
structure, family relationships, governmental organization, and it's an
experience of American democracy that's off to the side because tribal
government is not the same as what we build, you know, off the
reservation but it's close, you know, and it's in that interrelationship
that really some of the most satisfying and naughty problems that I've
encountered, you know, it's been--it's a wonderful, wonderful field in
which to be working that is, you know, continuing to develop and we
certainly don't spend a lot of time thinking about or worrying about the
problems of the suddenly wealthy. But if you look at, you know, I've done
some work in the Middle East and if you look at the problems of, you
know, social life in Saudi Arabia, for example, and some of the problems
that, you know, they've run into simply in all kinds of business
relationships. These are real problems, you know, and if only we--you and
I could have the same problems, we might enjoy dealing with it but it's—
it’s not to be dismissed as something silly because it does have big
consequences I think for the communities involved.

>> Thomas Holyoke: Do you have any significant involvement with water
during this time and I guess you mentioned doing some consulting work for
Nestle.
>> William Kahrl: Oh I worked with Nestle. I've done work with the team
in the Saudi Arabia. I've done a lot of, a lot, a lot, a lot of different
things and I've been involved with all three of the major water districts
in the state, Westlands and the Imperial Irrigation District, and then
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, as well as a lot of
small--or water districts as well as the US Geological Survey and the
Army Corps of Engineers and, you know, I've been around in the field for
a while.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Water districts big and small, what kind of problems
have you been helping them with?
>> William Kahrl: Don't talk about clients.
>> Thomas Holyoke: OK. Fair enough. Is this the line of work you're still
in today or have you really left that or?
>> William Kahrl: No. I'm not working for anyone at the moment. I'm--I
have a particular project that I'm trying to get off the ground and I'll
see what happens with that and--but no, I'm not--I'm being very careful
not to be involved in any of the water agencies at the moment.
>> Thomas Holyoke: It's 2015, second year of the extreme drought, who
knows when next winter will be? What's your reflections on California's
water situations today or California's attitudes towards water today?
>> William Kahrl: You'll have to come to the talk tonight.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Wow. Anything you want to say for posterity?
>> William Kahrl: No, no, no, no. Well, yes I hope you're recording the
talk tonight.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I don't know if that's happening or not actually. I
haven't thought about that. One thing you'd mentioned earlier, just one
final thing to touch on, you're talking earlier about Peripheral Canal,
how we seem to be getting a second chance at that. Is--are things--is
sort of the situation around all these, the tunnels, that seems to be the
format it's taking this time. Are things unfolding similarly or
differently from the Peripheral Canal? In other words, is this just your
opinion or are we just repeating everything that happened in the late
'70s and early '80s? Or is the governor packaging this differently? Is it
being sold differently?
>> William Kahrl: Well—in so many different ways there's no comparison. I
mean a simple answer is it's a completely different project, it's
smaller, it doesn't do the things that the other one was intended to do
and as it's emerging now, you know, in response to a lot of the concerns
that have been raised that's even more modest in its ambitions than what
we--they'd initially dreamed of being able to do in terms of Delta

restoration. But the state's system of water is entirely different
situation. We've taken half of our water supply and removed it from the
equation. So, it's not that you're in the second year of a drought.
You're in the second drought in five years. That ought to wake people up.
More than that, you're on the edge of a drought, we are on the edge of a
drought every year because of the amount of water we've taken out at the
system. More important even then, the diversion of those supplies. The
only reason the system exists is that we live in an environment that is
extremely variable in terms of precipitation one, two, that is almost
totally dependent upon precipitation which is different than New York or
other places we can think of. Our river systems are pretty much selfcontained with the exception of the Colorado and that was a mistake for
reasons that will go back there. And so in their natural condition these
rivers are dry for several months out of every year. And the whole water
system was created to smooth out those month to month variations which
has produced all kinds of benefits for fish and everything else, but also
to smooth out, more importantly, huge differences between how much
precipitation we get from one year to the next. So, that you'd capture
the water when it's available, you store it so that you can then have
something to distribute—in a dry year. And the system was created just to
create that flexibility to be able to move water around and deliver where
and when it's needed. And when you take all the water out of the system,
you destroyed that flexibility and that's the problem we're trying to
deal with. We have, for example, even the middle of this drought, even
with the state that by objective measurement is affected by the drought
from top to bottom. There's still plenty of water in Northern California
and even plenty of water that people in Northern California would be
happy to sell and deliver for other communities in need but you can't
move it through pass the Delta because of a regulatory system that has-controls all access to that. And that's what the issue here is because
we've essentially gotten ourselves so far into a system in which that
degraded environment in the Delta which bears no relationship to its
natural condition now threatens the water system for the entire state and
that's a different way of looking at things than we've ever, you know,
confronted before. The good news is we've done most of that to ourselves.
So, it's not as if God was out to get us, you know. This is solvable.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Do you think we have a handle on solving it? Are we
moving in the right direction, do you think?
>> William Kahrl: Well, we have a number of benefits. One of them is that
we've got a governor who knows more about water than anybody probably
since his dad although Pete Wilson knew a lot about water. Sometimes
that's a good thing. In this particular case, yeah, it is a good thing
because he's very serious about wanting to address this. The other big
advantage we have, I think, is that even in a society that in these
decades has become so partisanly divisive, water policy remains
nonpartisan. There's no democratic position and republican position on
water. There's some ugly stuff going on right now of people trying to
pull it that way and I hope we'll, you know, get through this drought
without falling into those pitfalls but that's a huge, huge advantage
going forward and the third thing is ultimately—it's very important what
the state does in terms of addressing its water supply. We took a huge
step last year with the passage of the Bond Act and so to an important

sense, we've done our part. And the federal government agencies that are
at the center of a lot of the problems need to step up and make it--try
to make this thing work as well. Ultimately, it's my belief, nobody
else's maybe, that some of these issues are going to wind up in Congress
because Congress uniquely has the ability to give the assurances that all
of the parties need to have to make to go forward. Northern California
interest may know intellectually that nothing this governor or any
governor could do is going to change their water rights. It can't be
done. But they'd still rather have something that goes through Congress
and says “whatever the state tells you, we ain't going to let your water
rights be affected either.” Those assurances have to come from the
federal government. I think they're necessary and the good news here
again is you've got an effort underway already. It's been cooking for two
years now and they're very smart people in the congressional delegation
from California who are involved in that. And so I'm very hopeful, you
know, that that will progress. And there's a third important thing and
I'm giving away a little bit of what the talk is tonight. There's a third
reason to be very confident and that is that George Miller who was a
congressman for 40 years and devoted his life in Congress to wrecking the
water system of California is out of Congress. And that can't be anything
but good.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay. You still sound optimistic.
>> William Kahrl: Very much so.
>> Thomas Holyoke: I am out of questions. Anything else?
>> William Kahrl: No, no. I've enjoyed it.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Thank you.

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