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Regarding the Salton Sea, Henny Youngman might say, “Take the pending disaster of the Salton Sea, please.”

Many in this Valley have never been to the big salty lake. Some of us of us love it, its bizarre creation, and its lumpy history. Photographers come from afar to grab images of the now fading graffiti that marked so many of the ruins bordering the western side of the sea. Not quite the site of an ancient civilization, that territory was home to lots of angry, broke, disoriented, and confident aerosol artists. It was a joy to see a free gallery of “edgy on the edge” of the big body of sometimes stinky water.

But now the Salton Sea is back in The Desert Sun. California is plagued by a powerful cult that worships government. The sea dries up, government marches on. Here is this typical progression of what we have seen surrounding the big lake’s decline:

Step One

Appoint a commission to study it. Then some people get to appoint ten or a dozen more study groups, commissions, climate change boards, and give them million$ of federal, state, county or foundation funding to hire consultants, experts, futurists who produce unread 300-page reports. In their defense, the consultants probably use the money to buy great mid-century furniture for their offices.

Step Two

Pretty much a repeat step one. But in this step the consultants advising the commissions can add important art to their offices. More money spent, lengthier unread reports, and no progress for the beat-up Salton Sea that is crying, “Help!”

Step Three

Finally get excited about digging a trench to the Sea of Cortez to flush out the lake or bring better water in. Not so fast. First form a new $tudy group to $tudy it some more then announce it will take years to get a ditch built to do it, that is to take the Sea’s dirty water to the other Sea, named Cortez. By the time that blue ribbon panel or whatever it is makes a report, breathing in the Coachella Valley will be worse than smoking two packs of Lucky Strikes a day.

Here is my bold Step Four:

Call Elon Musk. There is lithium in the no man’s (or no woman’s) land south of the Sea. Make a deal with him before he moves all of his world from California to Texas. He gets some of the lithium for batteries, he builds the canal to the sea of Cortez.

Remember the 2009 federal “stimulus package” that pumped $850+ billion into those not so “shovel-ready" projects coast to coast? The meager dollars for our Salton Sea may have been enough for a consultant to lease a Lexus, but not one other measurable or visible improvement was made to the lake from that 2009 “stimulus” to nowhere. 

Now the Biden team is looking for 6% of trillion$ for actual steel and asphalt infrastructure, plus way more for critical social justice theory infrastructure. In deep blue California, could a few of those dollars help Elon Musk or a real visionary with a shovel dig a gully, trench, ditch, canal, or build a pipeline through the relatively few miles to the Sea of Cortez?

David Bryant lives in Palm Desert.

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