California's permanent crops "amazing and troubling"

After announcing that he's been in California for less than a year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Don Glaser made some observations about his trips up and down the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.

"One thing I find amazing and troubling is the number of permanent crops we have in the valley," Glaser said during one of Friday's press conferences on the Central Valley Project water cutbacks.

"It makes me proud . . . to see what we do," he said. "The troubling part is that our water supply is becoming less reliable."

A little ironic, perhaps? After all, maybe I'm a little rusty on my state's history, but wasn't the Central Valley Project created all those decades ago to provide a reliable water supply for permanent crops? I don't think it was for the cities, which hadn't developed much yet, or for the wildlife refuges, which weren't around yet.