The Hetch Hetchy hostage crisis
 	 		 		
SFBG News | June 7, 2000
 		 		 		 		
San Francisco is already losing millions of dollars a year by 
ignoring its public-power mandate. If PG keeps calling the shots, 
we could lose the whole dam project                                               

By Tim Redmond
 						
EARLY THIS SUMMER , a Republican congressman from Colorado named 
Wayne Allard gave San Francisco a serious jolt when he inserted 
an amendment into an obscure public-lands bill. Allard's 
amendment would have forced the city to pay $20 million a year in 
fees for the right to operate the Hetch Hetchy dam.
 						
City Hall went into a tizzy: Another $20 million hit would 
devastate the battered city budget. Mayor Jordan flew to 
Washington; Rep. Nancy Pelosi called Rep. George Miller, chair of 
the House Interior Committee, to plead for help. And after a 
furious behind-the-scenes lobbying effort, the amendment quietly 
died.
 						
The daily press accounts of the incident made it sound like a 
fluke, a crazy attempt by a small gang of right-wing nuts that 
was crushed before it even got started. But the Allard amendment 
should have sent alarm bells ringing all over town – because it 
wasn't, and isn't, an isolated threat, and it isn't the least bit 
crazy.
 						
In fact, an extensive Bay Guardian investigation shows, San 
Francisco's priceless water-and-power franchise on the Tuolumne 
River is hanging by a very thin legal thread – and if anyone in 
Washington ever decides to pursue the matter seriously, the city 
could potentially lose all rights to the dam, the power project, 
and the millions of dollars it brings to the city treasury every 
year.
 						
City Attorney Louise Renne insists, as her predecessors have for 
decades, that the Hetch Hetchy operation is on sound legal ground 
– that the city is in full compliance with the federal Raker Act, 
which gave San Francisco the unprecedented right to dam a 
free-flowing river inside a national park. Since the 1930s, most 
of the city's daily newspapers have followed that same line.
 						
But a review of thousands of pages of historical records from the 
archives of several major federal agencies offers a very 
different – and far less rosy – picture.
 						
Documents on file with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Interior 
Department, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives in 
Washington, D.C., contradict much of the city's long-standing 
position on Hetch Hetchy, public power, and the prospect that the 
federal government will continue to tolerate an arrangement that 
directly violates the clear intent of a historic act of Congress.
 						
The records compiled by the Bay Guardian span more than 80 years. 
Among other things, they reveal:
 						
·When Congress gave San Francisco the right to build a dam in 
Yosemite National Park, it added a clear and unequivocal 
condition: The city had to establish a municipal electric utility 
to sell hydropower from the dam directly to its citizens, at the 
cheapest possible rates, to eliminate the private-power monopoly 
of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co.
 						
The record is clear and consistent: If San Francisco officials 
didn't think local government should be in the business of 
selling electricity, or didn't think public power would make good 
economic sense, or didn't want to take on the task of financing a 
municipal distribution system, then the city had the option of 
rejecting the grant. By accepting it, San Francisco expressly 
agreed to comply with all the terms and conditions, including the 
public-power mandate – and by law, violation of those terms can 
amount to a forfeiture of the grant and can give the federal 
government the right to take back the land, the water, and the 
dam.
 						
·Since 1923, when the dam was completed, San Francisco has 
repeatedly violated the terms of the Raker Act grant. City 
officials have consistently refused to take the steps necessary 
to comply with the law and have used endless strategies of legal 
trickery, misinformation, and delay to avoid compliance – and 
have gotten away with it only through some remarkable strokes of 
luck.
 						
·At least three times since 1925, high-level federal officials 
have seriously considered seizing control of the Hetch Hetchy 
dam. In every case, the officials concluded that San Francisco 
was in clear violation of the law and that forfeiture was a sound 
legal option. In every case, they backed off for political 
reasons that had little to do with the merits of the case.
 						
·In 1940, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that San Francisco's 
power-sale contracts with PG directly violated the Raker Act and 
ordered a federal judge to issue an injunction barring any 
further sales. The final 1945 injunction is still in effect.
 						
But over the past 48 years, San Francisco has violated the 
injunction on repeated occasions, and the city is still flouting 
the intent of both the Raker Act and the Supreme Court decision. 
By law, the Interior secretary, the San Francisco city attorney, 
and any Bay Area city or county can take the issue to court.
 						
·In the meantime, the city has entered into a series of new 
contracts with PG, the latest ones running until 2015 – and none 
of those contracts has ever been reviewed or approved by the 
federal court that issued the injunction. The only solid legal 
authority the city can claim to support the current contracts is 
a 1988 opinion, by a Bush administration Interior Department 
solicitor, that contradicts the Supreme Court and is riddled with 
legal and historical inaccuracies (see sidebar, page TK).
 						
The bottom line: San Francisco has a serious, ongoing legal 
problem with the federal government, and it has avoided a 
potentially costly confrontation only because officials in 
Washington have chosen not to pursue it.
 						
That leaves the city in a terribly precarious position. Anyone 
who has a smattering of clout in Congress or the Interior 
Department, or anyone with good enough political connections in 
those places – or, for that matter, any Bay Area city with a 
gripe about San Francisco – can threaten to blow the whistle on 
the Raker Act and back the city into a tight political corner. 
Potentially, any serious Raker Act complaint could set off a new 
round of forfeiture proceedings and jeopardize one of the city's 
most essential public services and its biggest financial asset.
 						
That high level of exposure may well explain, for example, why 
Modesto congressman Tony Coelho (who would later be driven from 
office in disgrace) and Turlock Irrigation District manager 
Ernest Geddes took San Francisco to the cleaners in negotiations 
over the 1988 Hetch Hetchy power-sale contracts (see chronology). 
Nine times over the past 50 years, San Franciscans have voted on 
proposals to buy out PG and establish a public-power system. And 
each time the voters have turned the proposals down. But each 
time, thanks in part to big infusions of PG money and muscle, the 
public debate has been badly skewed: Politicians, newspapers, and 
campaign flyers have talked about bond sales, possible tax hikes, 
and the wisdom of letting a city that can't even run its buses on 
time get into the electric utility business.
 						
Yet rarely, if ever, has anyone at City Hall presented the real 
issue – not only would San Francisco almost certainly make 
millions of extra dollars a year with a municipal utility, but 
for better or for worse, under the Raker Act the city is required 
to accept public power, or else give back the dam.
 						
And as long as San Francisco refuses to live up to the promise it 
made back in 1913, when the Board of Supervisors accepted the 
Raker Act grant, we'll continue to face the threat of losing the 
dam. We'll remain a city held hostage by anyone with the sense to 
figure out how to point a rather obvious gun.
 						
Water wars
 						
Although it rarely makes headlines anywhere except the Bay 
Guardian today, the struggle over the use and control of the 
Hetch Hetchy water and power project was once among the most 
high-profile battles in San Francisco politics.
 						
Between 1906, when the great earthquake demonstrated beyond any 
doubt the problems with leaving the city's water supply in the 
hands of a private company, and 1941, when World War II 
interrupted a bitter legal fight over Hetch Hetchy electricity, 
the issue was constantly on the front pages.
 						
Ultimately, it became perhaps the greatest example in California 
history of how the power and influence of a single private 
corporation could corrupt generations of public officials and 
undermine the will of both Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.
 						
The story goes back to the gold-rush days, and it is rooted in 
the unusual geography of the San Francisco peninsula. With a 
deepwater port, a temperate climate, and easy access by boat to 
gold-mining sites along the Sacramento and American rivers, San 
Francisco became an ideal hub for the growing Northern California 
economy. All it lacked was a stable supply of freshwater.
 						
In fact, with salty ocean water surrounding it on three sides and 
a mountain range on the fourth, the city was forced to rely 
almost entirely on the limited runoff from local rainfall that 
often totaled only a few inches a year.
 						
By the late 1800s, the private Spring Valley Water Co. had 
managed to gain control of all the reservoirs and had a monopoly 
on freshwater distribution. City officials were scrambling for 
ways to find more water to meet the growing need – and also to 
break the grip of the private utility monopoly, which Mayor James 
Phelan described as the single most corrupting influence on City 
Hall. Before he left office in 1901, Phelan examined more than a 
dozen potential sites for a new city water supply. He eventually 
filed for water rights on the Tuolumne River with money from his 
own pocket.
 						
The site Phelan chose had two distinct advantages: It would 
provide what seemed like limitless pure mountain water, and it 
would allow for the construction of a dam that could also 
generate substantial amounts of electricity – potentially 
eliminating not only the corrupt monopoly of the private water 
company but also the growing political power of the private 
electric utilities.
 						
When Spring Valley's inadequate water mains failed during the 
earthquake of April 1906, the clamor for a reliable, municipal 
water system reached a crescendo. The Board of Supervisors began 
to lobby Congress to approve Phelan's plan.
 						
But just as there were distinct advantages to the Tuolumne plan, 
there was a distinct disadvantage: The proposed dam would be 
built inside Yosemite National Park and would flood the beautiful 
Hetch Hetchy Valley. Never before had Congress authorized such a 
direct infringement on a national park. Conservationist John Muir 
was so angry he organized the Sierra Club to stop the project 
(see chronology). He might very well have succeeded in killing 
the dam if not for a compromise suggested by California 
congressman John Edward Raker.
 						
Raker's compromise brought together a historic coalition: 
conservationists, who opposed almost any project that would 
destroy a natural resource, and public-power advocates, who were 
deeply fearful of the growing influence of private electric 
utilities.
 						
Power struggle
 						
Since the late 1870s, when commercial electric power first became 
available in major American cities, progressive political leaders 
had argued that it should be treated as an essential public 
resource, not as a commodity to be sold for profit. The notion of 
publicly owned utilities wasn't at all radical: As Richard 
Rudolph and Scott Ridley note in their 1986 book Power Struggle, 
the right of local governments to establish public water systems 
– and, in effect, to ban private ones – was established long 
before the American Revolution.
 						
But the private companies that developed and built the early 
electric "dynamos," and strung the first sets of wires to 
factories and houses, saw it very differently. Backed by 
financiers like J.P. Morgan, firms like the Edison Electric Co. 
(later General Electric) – and in California, Pacific Gas and 
Electric – realized that there was tremendous money to be made 
through monopoly control of a resource that would soon be an 
essential part of everyone's life.
 						
The conflict set off what Rudolph and Ridley call "The 100-Year 
War" over electricity. In the Midwest, where the progressive 
populists held strong sway, private utilities were soundly 
defeated: The state of Nebraska, for example, still allows no 
private electric utilities.
 						
In 1913 California, the prospects weren't looking as good. As 
Nebraska senator George Norris put it: "As I have counted them, 
18 corporations [are] controlling the power in the vicinity of 
San Francisco, that are under the control of this one corporation 
[PG].... When you sum them up, you will find that they own 
practically all of the hydroelectric power of the state of 
California."
 						
Raker turned that sentiment to the advantage of San Francisco. He 
introduced a bill that satisfied some key conservationists who, 
like Sen. Norris, were also progressives and disliked private 
utilities. Under the Raker Act of 1913, San Francisco could build 
its dam, destroying Hetch Hetchy Valley, but only if the dam were 
also used to generate electricity – and that electricity were 
sold directly to the citizens of San Francisco as a way to break 
up the PG monopoly.
 						
The Raker Act was supposed to be the Magna Carta of public power, 
and its political philosophy provided the basis for numerous 
other key pieces of national resource legislation, most notably 
the Federal Power Act of 1920. The premise was simple, clear, and 
unequivocal: If the federal government was going to allow the 
destruction of a precious public resource, the benefits should go 
only to the public, and no private business should ever profit 
directly from the project.
 						
That, to put it mildly, is not what has happened.
 						
The city engineers did bring cheap, public water back to town. In 
1928, after four failed attempts, the voters approved $41 million 
in bonds to finance the condemnation and acquisition of Spring 
Valley's water-distribution system. San Franciscans still pay 
their water bills to a city agency.
 						
But year after year, PG has managed to block any attempt at 
building or acquiring a similar public distribution system for 
electric power. Instead, the city has agreed to a series of 
contracts with PG for the sale of Hetch Hetchy power that make 
millions for the private utility and bring only a fraction of 
Hetch Hetchy's potential revenue into the local treasury (see 
chronology).
 						
Year after year, the cheap, publicly financed Hetch Hetchy power 
has wound up going to PG, to other municipal power agencies, to 
big defense contractors ... but never to San Francisco residents, 
who still pay PG's high monopoly rates every month.
 						
In fact, San Francisco has consistently violated the letter and 
the spirit of the Raker Act, and by any reasonable standard, in 
1993 the city continues to do so.
 						
And year after year, the city attorney, the mayor, and the 
supervisors have insisted that the arrangement is necessary, 
fair, and entirely legal.
 						
San Francisco first
 						
Unfortunately for public-power advocates, the Raker Act never 
states specifically that San Francisco is required to operate a 
municipal electric system. That, more than anything else, has 
long been the cornerstone of the city's legal position.
 						
The problem, city officials say, is that San Francisco voters 
have refused nine times to approve bond acts that would pay for 
the acquisition of power lines, transformers, meters, and other 
equipment needed to run a municipal utility. Until the voters 
have a change of heart, officials insist, San Francisco has no 
choice but to find alternative ways to "dispose" of Hetch Hetchy 
power.
 						
(They don't often mention the hard political truth: None of those 
bond acts ever had a real fighting chance. PG spent huge sums of 
money on campaigns to defeat them, and in contrast to their 
support for the water bonds, city officials consistently refused 
to mount a serious campaign to pass the measures. See 
chronology.)
 						
The Raker Act – like most legislation – is largely framed in the 
negative: it states clearly what the city is forbidden to do and 
is less clear on what the city is expected to do.
 						
Section 6, for example, states that San Francisco "is prohibited 
from ever selling or letting to any corporation or individual, 
except a municipality or municipal water or irrigation district, 
the right to sell or sublet the water of the electric energy sold 
or given to it or him by the grantee." Until 1945, the city was 
clearly and undeniably violating that provision: Hetch Hetchy 
power was sold directly to PG, which resold it directly to its 
customers at a steep markup.
 						
At first, city officials insisted the deal was only temporary, a 
way to make some money off the power until San Francisco was able 
to build its own transmission and distribution system. Later, 
they tried to defend the deal as "technically" in compliance with 
"the letter" of the Raker Act. In 1940, the Supreme Court said 
otherwise and ordered the city to cease selling any of its Hetch 
Hetchy power to PG.
 						
After that decision, city officials began taking a new approach. 
A series of craftily worded contracts (the most recent of which 
were approved in 1987) allows PG to transport enough Hetch Hetchy 
power along company lines to run the Muni buses, the lights at 
City Hall, and other government functions. The city pays a 
"wheeling" fee for those deliveries. The excess power – roughly 
two-thirds of the output of the dam – is delivered (again, along 
PG lines) to the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts and, on 
occasion, to a few select PG customers, like Lockheed Space and 
Missiles, and Norris Industries. In every case, the city pays 
stiff fees for PG's "wheeling" and backup services (see 
chronology).
 						
Sill, since no Hetch Hetchy power goes directly to PG for resale, 
the city insists, nothing in the contracts violates the Raker 
Act.
 						
Yet both the language of the act and the congressional record of 
the debate around its passage make it abundantly clear that 
Congress intended to do more than issue technical prohibitions on 
direct sales to PG. Section 9 of the bill, for example, states 
that San Francisco "shall develop and use hydroelectric power for 
the use of its people, and shall ... sell or supply such power 
for irrigation, pumping or other beneficial use." And a review of 
several hundred pages of congressional testimony goes much 
further. Rep. Raker confirmed his intent during the following 
exchange:
 						
Mr. Sumners: Does San Francisco own its own lighting plant now?
 						
Mr. Raker: I understand it does not.
 						
Mr. Sumners: Is it the purpose of this bill to have San Francisco 
supply electric power and water to its own people?
 						
Mr. Raker: Yes.
 						
Mr. Sumners: Or to supply these corporations, which will in turn 
supply the people?
 						
Mr. Raker: Under this bill it is to supply its own inhabitants 
first.
 						
Sen. Norris made the point even more clearly. "This scheme 
appeals to me, so far as the power is concerned," he stated, 
"because the city of San Francisco as a municipality will be the 
owner of it, the manufacturer, the distributor of it.... This 
power will come into competition with the various waterpower 
companies of California."
 						
As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1940: "It is apparent that the 
[Raker] Act conditions the grant upon and contemplates the 
development, sale and distribution of electrical power by the 
City itself.... From the congressional debates on the passage of 
the Raker Act can be read a common understanding both on the part 
of sponsors of the Bill and its opponents that the grant was to 
be so conditioned as to require municipal performance of the 
function of supplying Hetch Hetchy water and electric power 
directly to the ultimate consumers."
 						
As for the city's PG contracts, the court concluded: "Mere words 
and ingenuity of contractual expression, whatever their effect 
between the parties, cannot by description make permissible a 
course of conduct forbidden by law. When we look behind the 
arrangement between the City and the power Company ... we see 
that the City has – contrary to the terms of the [Raker Act] – 
abdicated its control over the sale and ultimate distribution of 
Hetch Hetchy power."
 						
Take it or leave it
 						
Several times during the 1913 congressional debate, opponents of 
the bill raised a point that San Francisco would later raise 
repeatedly in its legal defense of the Hetch Hetchy contracts. 
What right, opponents asked, did Congress have to tell a local 
government how to conduct its financial affairs? How could 
Congress require the taxpayers of San Francisco to float the 
bonds and take the potential risks required to establish a 
municipal electric utility?
 						
Supporters of the Raker Act had a direct response: The land where 
the dam would be built belonged to the federal government. San 
Francisco was asking for a grant of valuable federal land, for 
local benefit, at essentially no cost to the city. If Congress 
decided to make that grant, it could attach any conditions it 
wanted. As the 1913 report of the House Public Lands Committee on 
the Raker Act stated, "It is very proper that the federal 
government should use whatever power it has over the public lands 
... to require through its power to make conditions [including] 
the lowest possible [electric] rate for consumers."
 						
Sen. Walsh of Montana was more blunt. "We are making a grant of 
rights in the public lands to the city of San Francisco," he 
testified, "and we may impose just exactly whatever conditions as 
we see fit, and San Francisco can take the grant with those 
conditions or it can let it alone."
 						
In fact, San Francisco accepted those conditions by a resolution 
of the Board of Supervisors, signed by the mayor, shortly after 
the bill passed in 1913.
 						
Yet from the days of the first bond-act campaigns, PG and its 
allies insisted that the bonds were a needless expense and a 
risky gamble with the taxpayers' money. Under the early, 
"temporary" deals, San Francisco simply sold off most of the 
Hetch Hetchy power to PG at wholesale prices – and the sales 
brought roughly $2 million into the city coffers. A municipal 
buyout, PG argued, could put that revenue in jeopardy. If a 
city-owned utility didn't operate efficiently enough, it might 
actually lose money.
 						
From the start, the record suggests, city officials (and most of 
the city newspapers) failed to counter that argument. They never 
mounted a serious campaign to inform San Franciscans of two key 
points:
 						
(1) Almost every other public-power agency in the country was 
making lots of money (and an S.F. municipal utility would almost 
certainly make so much that the $2 million in PG sales would seem 
like bird seed).
 						
(2) Congress had mandated a public-power system in San Francisco 
– and if San Francisco didn't live up to its side of the deal, 
Congress, or the courts, or the Interior Department, or any of a 
number of other federal agencies, could foreclose on the dam, 
take away all the revenue, all the water, and all the power, and 
leave the city back where it was in 1906.
 						
Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who ultimately filed suit to 
force the city into compliance with the Raker Act, put the 
responsibility squarely on City Hall. "Who can doubt," he wrote 
in a formal opinion dated Aug. 24, 1935, "that, conscious of both 
its obligations and its opportunities under the Raker Act, San 
Francisco will rally under its splendid civic leadership as it 
has done so many times in the past and by its vote declare itself 
to be on the side of carrying out the solemn obligations with the 
United States Government that it undertook when it accepted the 
Raker Act? San Francisco [cannot] be heard to urge as an excuse 
for the continued failure to carry out a clear and binding 
obligation disabilities that the citizens can overcome if they 
have the will to do so."
 						
The city's arrangements with PG have another serious legal 
problem: The congressional record made it very clear that the 
Raker Act intended to bar any private company from making a 
profit off Hetch Hetchy power. As Rep. Kent of California noted 
in his comments supporting the act, "This bill is drawn in the 
public interest that there is no possibility of selfish gain, and 
that no corporation or individual can obtain any benefit 
whatsoever from this bill."
 						
So if nothing else, the fact that San Francisco pays PG stiff 
"wheeling fees" for transporting Hetch Hetchy power – fees that 
earn the company a substantial profit – appears to violate the 
intent of the law.
 						
Law enforcement
 						
The Raker Act provides for two kinds of penalties – a mild one 
and a harsh one.
 						
In most cases, it states, violations should be resolved through 
the courts. The secretary of the interior has primary authority 
to take legal action against San Francisco if the city isn't 
living up to its congressional mandate. The federal courts can 
issue an injunction requiring the city to comply. That's what 
happened in 1940, when the Supreme Court determined that San 
Francisco was effectively selling its power to PG, under the 
guise of an "agency" contract, and ordered the city to cease and 
desist (see chronology).
 						
In 1945, after many delays, federal judge Michael Roche issued a 
permanent injunction barring San Francisco from selling any of 
its power to PG. That injunction is still in effect.
 						
(The Interior secretary isn't the only one allowed to press a 
Raker Act case. The San Francisco city attorney has standing too, 
as does every other city in the Bay Area. See editorial, page 8.)
 						
There's also a much more serious penalty: Section 6 of the Raker 
Act states that if the city violates its key provisions, the 
grant "shall revert to the government of the United States."
 						
In other words, if the federal government decides that San 
Francisco is still not living up to its Raker Act mandate – and 
the federal courts agree, as they have done consistently in the 
past – the Interior secretary could declare San Francisco in 
default; seize control of the dam, the water supply, and all the 
electric power; and turn it over to another local, state, or 
federal agency, as he or she sees fit.
 						
It's more than a wild nightmare, too: Three times since 1925, 
senior federal officials have proposed doing exactly that. The 
director of the National Park Service in 1923, the Interior 
secretary in 1941, and the comptroller general in 1950 all agreed 
that San Francisco was in violation of the Raker Act, and all 
decided that moving to foreclose on the dam was a feasible option 
(see chronology).
 						
In each case, the city narrowly escaped when some outside factor 
intervened. In 1923, the Park Service agreed to allow the city 
extra time to place the necessary bond acts on the ballot to buy 
out PG. In 1941, just as Ickes was preparing to move on the 
issue, the United States entered World War II, and all of the 
Hetch Hetchy power was commandeered for a War Department aluminum 
plant. In 1946, President Truman fired Ickes, and the Interior 
Department's interest in Hetch Hetchy began to decline.
 						
In 1950, the U.S. attorney general, citing a national postwar 
power shortage, refused to go along with the comptroller 
general's request for legal action against San Francisco (see 
chronology).
 						
In no case did any legal authority dispute the basic contention 
of the officials pursuing the case. The city's arrangement with 
PG to dispose of Hetch Hetchy power was, in every case, found to 
be legally dubious.
 						
And there's no reason to believe the situation is any different 
today. In the past five years, federal officials have twice 
raised the Raker Act flag and waved it in San Francisco's face.
 						
When President Bush's Interior secretary, Donald Hodel, suggested 
tearing down the dam in 1987, a few environmentalists applauded, 
but most were dubious: Hodel was hardly a reliable environmental 
leader, and nobody else in the Bush cabinet seemed to appreciate 
the concept. It went nowhere – and the Raker Act issue never 
really came up.
 						
More ominously, in 1984, Rep. Tony Coelho, who represented the 
Turlock and Modesto area, issued a threat that sent San Francisco 
officials to their knees. In the midst of a series of long-term 
contract negotiations between S.F. and PG, Coelho announced that 
he wanted the city to sell its power to the Turlock and Modesto 
irrigation districts at cost – just a fraction of what San 
Francisco had always charged – and when the city balked, he 
started talking about enforcing the Raker Act.
 						
Within days, Coelho forced then-mayor Dianne Feinstein to fold, 
giving Coelho and his constituents everything they wanted – at a 
cost of millions to San Francisco (see chronology).
 						
Ironically, over the past decade, the Reagan and Bush 
administrations were liberal San Francisco's salvation. The 
Republicans in Washington showed little or no interest in 
challenging big businesses that made huge profits off public 
resources. If anything, the Reagan and Bush operatives in the 
Interior Department tried to turn more public land over to 
private corporations.
 						
But the new administration may be different. Interior Secretary 
Bruce Babbitt has already taken on the Western mining and 
ranching interests, demanding a fair return on the use of federal 
land. Perhaps, as Harold Ickes did half a century ago, he'll also 
decide to pursue San Francisco's public-power mandate. After all, 
like the miners and ranchers, San Francisco gets a fabulous deal: 
The city pays only $30,000 a year in fees for the right to the 
Hetch Hetchy dam.
 						
If Babbitt pursues the matter – or if House Republicans like Rep. 
Allard ever figure out what a powerful weapon they have – the 
city could be caught up its own dammed river, without a legal or 
political paddle. l
 						
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