Saturday’s San Francisco Times ran a lengthy story on Hetch Hetchy – some of its history and the myriad present day controversies surrounding Hetch Hetchy and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The Valley San Francisco Took After the Fire is well worth reading. It’s accurate, provocative and generally fair with respect to our campaign for restoration.
The San Francisco Times relies on artificial intelligence, with human review – something we are all getting used to.
While the article is reasonably comprehensive, we would like to add a few salient points.
- There is no mention of the recent independent statewide poll, which heavily favors restoration.
- The article ignores the history of Indigenous peoples who lived in Hetch Hetchy both seasonally and year-round for 6000 years before it was “discovered” by European Americans in 1850.
- The description of Proposition F, Restore Hetch Hetchy’s 2012 unsuccessful proposal to require the City to analyze water system alternatives, ignores many of the shenanigans that were at play. For example, the City’s “Ballot Simplification Committee” refused to include words like “Yosemite” or “Restoration” in the measure’s title, and only described it as a proposal to “Drain Hetch Hetchy”. When we challenged the title in court, the attorney for the City told the judge they were allowed to use “misleading” language as long as it did not include actual falsehoods.
The article also includes a number of problematic statements by Dennis Herrera, formerly City Attorney and current (soon-to-retire) General Manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Perhaps most egregious is “Without a reliable source of clean drinking water, San Francisco doesn’t become a major city. Without this system, the Bay Area as we know it doesn’t exist.” Is Herrera unaware of the other proposals considered in the early 20th century? Does he know about the options successfully pursued by California’s largest urban water systems over the last 30 years – many in response to reduce environmental damage caused by their systems (see Yosemite’s Opportunity)? Or is he just repeating the unwarranted hackneyed rhetoric that (damming) Hetch Hetchy is San Francisco’s “birthright.”
At Restore Hetch Hetchy, we are pleased to see our campaign and related issues resonating with journalists, politicians and the public alike. Please share this story with friends and let us know what you think.
Restore Hetch Hetchy is grateful to the San Francisco Times for an openminded approach to Hetch Hetchy. We hope City officials will follow suit.