"In a lengthy analysis of the political battle to win approval for the dam, historian Marc Reisner recounted how Governor Pat Brown — father of the current governor — repeatedly fabricated numbers about the dam’s true cost in order to hoodwink the voters into approving the enormously expensive project through a bond issue in 1959.
Reisner showed that honest estimates concluded the dam would cost approximately 3 billion dollars — more than 20 billion in 2016 dollars — so Brown simply invented a number of 1.75 billion. Reisner concluded that Brown knew that “not one” state would vote for such a huge bond issue, so Brown hid the real cost. To get it passed, Brown did what politicians always do — he engaged in fear-mongering and suggested to Southern California voters that they’d run out of water without the new dam.
But even these methods nearly failed to get the dam approved. 48 of 50 counties in the state voted against the dam. The measure only passed because southern Californians, long used to cheap, subsidized water, were happy to see the rest of the state go into debt to pay for even more water."
