Too many Californians — voters and politicians alike — think bonds provide a magic money tree to fix all of the state’s problems. Now here we go again.

A state water honcho has for years been talking about putting a multibillion-dollar water bond on the ballot. He postponed trying to advance a water bond on the November 2016 ballot, likely because he needed a selling point.

Now he has a poster child for his idea, a grand and deserving recipient for that largesse: Lake Oroville’s spillway.

Gerald Meral, a former executive in the state’s Natural Resources Agency and a proponent of Gov. Jerry Brown’s twin tunnels idea, said this week he’ll push an $8.4 billion water bond for the 2018 ballot.

As always with bonds, the money is thrown around to try to get everybody’s support. It offers nine-figure rewards to everything from Lake Tahoe to the Tijuana River, and money in between for desalination, river parks, flood protection and other worthy projects.

But the selling point that caught the Sacramento Bee’s eye was Lake Oroville, thus the headline, “Oroville Dam repairs would benefit from multibillion-dollar ballot measure.”

Meral said if voters approve, $200 million from the bond would help the state pay for repairs on the crumbled spillway.

Yep, after the state and water agencies downstream who benefit from Lake Oroville water and power cut corners on maintenance for years, a retired bureaucrat wants taxpayers to bail them out.

Forget it.

The state has so far said water contractors served by the State Water Project and hopefully the federal government will pick up the tab that’s likely going to be north of $1 billion, not $200 million.

Despite the state’s rosy view that somebody else will pay, the state likely is going to get stuck with part of the cost. The state needs to protect taxpayers by fighting for every dollar it can get from water contractors, the federal government and its own emergency reserves.

The burden to repair what’s broken certainly shouldn’t fall on taxpayers in the form of a bond. Whatever the state ultimately has to pay, it should be carved right out of the budgets of the Department of Water Resources and the Natural Resources Agency. Yes, ultimately taxpayers fund those budgets, but no lessons will be learned if taxpayers write a check for the state’s cost of repairs. Write it into future costs of water and power from the lake if necessary.

Besides that, it’s a ridiculous ruse. Everybody in California knows about the Oroville disaster. This bond attempts to use the disaster as a selling point. Those residents, though, don’t know the history like we do, including the years of secrecy and, as we see now, lack of maintenance.

This bond proposes to spend just a little more than 2 percent of its gargantuan total on Oroville. It’s a wise marketing ploy, a way to sell it to uninformed voters. We aren’t buying.