There’s yet another group that wants to split up California. Their idea is gaining traction, and enough people have signed a statewide petition to get the measure on the November ballot.
Efforts to Split the State
This isn’t the only effort to split the state. In fact, the man behind this particular campaign tried to do this before, back in 2014. And there’s another movement currently actively trying to split the state in two.
There’s a long history of movements to split California. Since becoming a state in 1850, it’s been tried more than two hundred times. That’s more than one new separatist movement formed every year the state has existed.
Of course, if any of these measures were to pass the voters, that doesn’t mean it’s a done deal. The final decision to split the state would be made by the state legislature and the Federal Congress in Washington. It almost happened once before, in 1859. The proposal went all the way to Congress, but Washington suddenly had other matters to deal with – the Civil War broke out, and the issue was put aside.
I guess it shows, Californians are a contentious lot. For all the image of being laid back and happy, we don’t see eye to eye very often. It appears we don’t seem to really like each other very much. The sections of the state are so diverse, they are different worlds. And when it comes to water, trust goes right out the window. We got the big developers from down south that keep coming up with new ways to steal our water, and the environmentalists from the bay area trying to tear down our dams. The state said they might build a nice new dam at Temperance Flat so we’d vote for their water bonds, but now we know the truth. There’s not going to be a dam but there will be lots of water conservation projects in the cities and a few new desalination plants on the coast.
But they got us between a rock and a hard place. The plain truth is, we have to get along. Most of the water that goes into the Central Valley Project falls on northern counties. And the southern counties are home to millions of people that buy the groceries we grow in the central valley. Its a quandary, how people with such diverging needs and interests can all get along, but somehow we have to figure it out.
I’m Len Wilcox and that’s the Western View from AgNet West. I’m Len Wilcox, and that’s the Western View from AgNet West, brought to you by Citrus Industry Magazine. Check us out on the web at www.citrusindustry.net.