Another water project could divide the stateReporting from Orange Cove, Calif. ? Harvey Bailey was 11 when Friant Dam started spitting the San Joaquin River into an irrigation canal the size of a freeway.

His father and other growers laid bets on when the river's cool waters would reach their little farm town on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, promising an end to the region's irrigation woes. Life magazine published a big photo spread on the canal's opening.

"It was a huge event," recalled Bailey, 72, president of the Orange Cove Irrigation District.

Now he hopes another dam will rise on the San Joaquin, at a narrow spot seven miles upriver from Friant, called Temperance Flat.

Backed by the Schwarzenegger administration and Central Valley farm interests, the $3.3-billion dam and reservoir at Temperance Flat would be the biggest water storage project in California in more than three decades.

But amid a deep recession and an endemic budget crisis in Sacramento, some are questioning whether it's worth the investment and whether taxpayers should keep subsidizing water projects that primarily benefit California agribusiness.

"Let's spend it where it would have the biggest effect: conservation and efficiency," said Pacific Institute president Peter Gleick. "It's a fallacy to believe all we have to do is build a couple of big dams and our problems will be over."

Bailey and his brother Lee grow oranges, lemons and olives on 1,100 acres they own and 900 more they manage in the citrus belt that runs in a shiny green grid along the flanks of the Sierra Nevada.

Orange Cove gets its name from the hills that embrace it, sheltering groves from the cold.

"Family been here since '10," Bailey said, meaning 1910.

Like most other Central Valley settlers, his grandparents pumped groundwater to irrigate fields or grew crops that could survive on the valley's scant rainfall.

But aquifer levels nose-dived in the years before World War II. Citrus groves were abandoned. "You could see across 10 acres because there weren't any leaves on the trees," Bailey said.

The federal government came to the rescue with the Central Valley Project, the nation's biggest irrigation operation, which erected Friant Dam in the pine-flecked Sierra foothills about 40 miles northwest of Orange Cove. It was completed in 1942.