McClatchy Newspapers Renew Misleading Anti-Hetch Hetchy Crusade

Coming soon? Don't count on it.

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"Hetch Hetchy could go on ballot," declares a headline in today's Modesto Bee atop a story claiming the group Restore Hetch Hetchy is on the verge of putting a measure before San Francisco voters this November that, if successful, would lead to the destruction of O'Shaughnessy Dam and the restoration of the valley behind it.

According to the Bee's John Holland:

"Passage would make it clear that San Franciscans want Hetch Hetchy Valley restored to its pre-dam splendor, said Mike Marshall, the group's executive director. "If we get it on the ballot, it will be a bit of a game-changer," he said.

Holland reports that details of the proposed ballot measure are still up in the air, but that such a measure might not be a hard sell because tearing down the dam and replacing it with other water storage should be relatively cheap. Purports Holland:

A 2006 state study estimated a $10 billion cost to raze the dam, restore the valley and replace the lost water supply. Restore Hetch Hetchy contends that all of this could be done for $1 billion to $3 billion.

What Holland doesn't note in his story, however, is that his employer, McClatchy Newspapers, has made a crusade of publishing misleading stories about a supposed public groundswell of support for tearing down O'Shaughnessy Dam, spiced with bogus data that suggests such a move would be painless and cheap.

In 2004, the Sacramento Bee ran a series of opinion columns, coinciding with a PR campaign financed by a $500,000 donation to the nonprofit Environmental Defense, exploring the opinion that the Valley should be restored.

SF Weekly showed in 2005 that the editorials were as distorted as a dammed river:

The [series' first] editorial was, however, spiked with the questionable assertion, drawn from a paper written by a geology student getting her master's degree at UC Davis, that draining the reservoir would be inexpensive and would not significantly affect water supplies or electricity drawn from the reservoir's hydroelectric facilities. Over the course of 13 editorials, nine signed opinion pieces, and five news stories, the series expanded on the case for restoring Hetch Hetchy and reported on a supposed political groundswell emerging around the issue. Headlines seemed to describe a polity in uproar. "Lines in the sand: a Hetch Hetchy debate slowly grows," "The Pendulum Shifts," and "Hetch Hetchy feasibility grows -- so does resistance" read the titles on Philip's final three editorials.

The editorials did have the effect of convincing state officials to order a study -- the same one cited today in the Modesto Bee.

Despite the Bees' self-referential merry-go-round, the fact is that there has still been no significant discussion about tearing down O'Shaughnessy Dam in either San Francisco or Washington, D.C., the sites where relevant decisions about the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and water system would have to take place. This silence endured even after Bee editorialist Tom Philip won a Pulitzer Prize -- I kid you not -- for his disingenuous columns.

Now, another Bee writer, egged on, like Philip, by an environmental group, claims restoring Hetch Hetchy would be cheap, and that San Francisco locals are poised to jump on a bandwagon to do so.

To his credit, Holland did phone the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission for a reality check.

"There certainly are other priorities," a PUC spokesman said.

But Holland goes on, in the next sentence, to make the following questionable assertion: "The ballot measure would be one more chapter in a saga that started more than a century ago."

To call a half-hearted suggestion -- by a group such as Restore Hetch Hetchy that's always suggesting such things -- that they might try to get an utterly doomed measure on the November ballot, is a chapter all right. But so far nothing seems to have gone by the McClatchy book.