‘They’re going to have to pry the hose out of my cold dead fingers,’
MWDOC’s water board member, Brett Barbre, told a reporter back in 2015
by John Earl, June 20, 2023, cross-posted from SoCal Water Wars (previously Surf City Voice)
In 2015, after three years of severe drought and foot-dragging by the state’s 400 water agencies, Governor Jerry Brown mandated state-wide conservation standards designed to achieve a 25 percent reduction in the state’s overall water use.
The Governor’s plan increased water savings in the state by 28 percent at little if any inconvenience to residents of Orange County.
But it outraged Brett Barbre, who sat on the Board of Directors of the Municipal Water District of Orange County (MWDOC), a regional water wholesaler, and represented that agency on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD).
“They’re going to have to pry the hose out of my cold dead fingers,” he told PBS-SoCal reporter David Nazar.
“It’s unfair of them to force me to cut my use 36 percent,” he complained. “In a country, if you have the money and you want to buy something, you should be able to buy it.”
He accused the Governor of being Big Brother by telling ratepayers and water districts what to do and encouraging neighbors to report each other for water-use violations, according to the report.
“You’re going to start having neighbor upon neighbor turning in each other,” he said. “That’s not the kind of society we want to live in.”
In rebuttal, the chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, Felicia Marcus, told Nazar that Barbre didn’t understand the state’s first-ever mandatory water conservation plan.
“It’s just a prudent move to do this now where the impact is not really so dramatic as, say, having to do a 50 percent reduction,” she said.
Marcus pointed to water-supply crises in Australia and São Paulo at the time, “where they didn’t tell their people to start conserving and they have to turn the water off for hours at a time, or days at a time, at tremendous economic and social cost.”
Conservationists agreed with Marcus and were appalled by Barbre’s remarks, but they might not have understood his motives.
Jeff Pearlman, a NY Times best selling author, for example, wrote that Barbre’s water-crisis commentary was “shallow and self-indulgent.”
He wanted to ask Barbre “how he’ll feel when all the water is gone; when the state is dry because he and millions of others continue to worry about something as trivial as a lawn.”
Barbre’s commentary was self-indulgent. It fit like a glove with Ayn Rand’s philosophy of “ethical egoism,” i.e. living for oneself above all else makes a happier society in which “…money is not the tool of moochers.”
Barbre was reacting to Brown’s attack on the Mythical Garden of Suburbia (my term, not his), a cherished ideal of freedom with family homes, grass, dogs, and rose bushes.
Still, Barbre is as concerned about creating reliable water supplies as any conservationist, but in very different ways and upon a very different philosophical foundation…
Read the rest at SoCal Water Wars – it’ll blow your hair back!
Barbre got 50K of public funds from Tom Daly to “study” an OC Sports Hall of Fame. He didn’t do anything except kick back $1000 into Daly’s campaign fund.
“‘They’re going to have to pry the hose out of my cold dead fingers,’ he told PBS-SoCal reporter David Nazar.”
I’m betting that he’d drop the hose before then, but if he wants to give it a try it’s on him.