President Donald Trump has threatened to withhold wildfire relief aid to California unless the state distributes more water to the Los Angeles area.
His golf course would benefit from that plan.
The Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles is perched on the Pacific Ocean. It features sweeping water views, with 18 holes of bright green turf dotted by wind-swept natural brown landscaping.
State water restrictions, fueled by historic drought and climate change, have hit Southern California golf courses significantly in recent years, driving up costs and causing clubs to rip out turf and let major parts of the course go brown. Golf courses in Southern California have had to cut their water usage almost in half since 2009, according to the Southern California Golf Association.
Trump held a campaign event at his course in September and promised that California was “going to have more water than you ever saw.” Now, he is telling state officials to turn on the “faucet” of water from Northern California, claiming that doing so would have made the fires easier to prevent and to put out. State and local officials have said that is not true.
“They have a valve — think of a sink but multiply it by many thousands of times the size of it, it’s massive,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “And you turn it back toward Los Angeles. Why aren’t they doing it?”
The president has tied the issue to the disaster aid that Californians will need to recover from a blaze that is still burning and has already torched more than 12,000 homes and killed at least 27 people. Some congressional Republicans have also said they won’t approve any aid to the state without policy strings attached.
Democratic California Assemblymember Isaac Bryan said he worries Trump’s fixation on water issues may carry an ulterior motive.
“Everything he has ever done in terms of his civic service has been with a personal agenda in mind, one that is profitable, one that is self interested and one that is not rooted in the actual needs of people and at times, not rooted in reality or science,” said Bryan, whose districts includes part of Los Angeles.
Trump has a long history of attacking environmental and climate policy because of the impact on his golf courses. For 13 years, Trump battled against offshore wind turbines that could be seen from his golf course in Scotland.
Decades later, that disdain for wind energy continues. In his first round of executive orders, Trump signed off on a plan to exclude wind as an energy source and to stop permitting offshore wind turbinesand any onshore turbines located on federal lands.
Trump, who denies climate change science, has claimed for years that forest management and Democratic environmental policies are to blame for deadly wildfires in California. The reality is far more complicated, scientists say. Wildfire conditions in the state have been fueled by climate change, where a drought-dried landscape — together with forest management and encroaching development into fire-prone wilderness in some regions — have combined in a deadly force.
Trump has claimed that watering mountainsides, bringing in water from the Pacific Northwest and Canada and soaking the dried earth with extra water would fix many state problems. It’s an issue he has pushed since the 2016 primary.
Now that he is back in the Oval Office, Trump is doubling down.
Just hours after his inauguration Monday, Trump signed a presidential memorandum titled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California.” It directs the Interior and Commerce secretaries to develop a new plan to send more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to “other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.”
In fact, the amount of water available to fight the fires in Los Angeles is not the problem, said Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group. He said there is a lot of water now stored in Southern California reservoirs, which were at or above regular levels before the fire.
“Even if that was a problem, you can’t move the water that quickly from the broader reservoirs to the specific point you need them at,” Pierce said. “That’s not really about raw water. It’s about a bunch of pipes and associated infrastructure and power.”
It remains to be seen how far Trump and Republicans will go. Disaster aid has typically been free of politics, especially since a need could arise in any state unexpectedly.
The Sacramento River is the largest in the state, beginning in the northernmost portion of California and emptying into the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. It is also a key state water supply, quenching the needs of cities and farmers alike, as a portion is diverted through a series of canals and levees down through the Central Valley’s farms toward the Los Angeles region. Functional turf, which includes golf courses, cemeteries and sports fields accounts for about 9 percent of the state’s water consumption, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
Trump has claimed that water is being withheld in order to protect the endangered Delta smelt, but the reality of California’s water woes is far more complicated than that, experts have said.
Rejecting the state’s current water distribution plan would upset a delicate agreement that took years of negotiations between business interests, farms, communities and environmentalists, said Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources in a statement.
Trump’s plan, she said, “has the potential to harm Central Valley farms and Southern California communities that depend upon water delivered from the Delta, and it will do nothing to improve current water supplies in the Los Angeles basin.”