Residents Fight Officialdom to Keep Mono Lake Wet

The license plate on the little pickup truck spells out the issue concisely: “H204MNO.” Translation: Water for Mono.

Mono Lake, that is. The eerie, salty lake on the arid eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. The place that Mark Twain labeled “The Dead Sea of the West” and naturalist John Muir called a “country of wonderful contrasts: Hot deserts bounded by snow-laden mountains . . . frost and fire working together in the making of beauty.”

It’s the lake around which Congress created the Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area last year.

And it’s a lake that is shrinking because four of its five main feeder streams are tapped by Los Angeles to provide part of the city’s water supply.

Environmental Campaign

Hence the license plate and a campaign by environmentalists, fishermen and others to reduce Los Angeles’ water diversions and prevent the lake from becoming what one environmentalist refers to as “an alkali wasteland.”

“We are trying to keep the lake filled with water. If we don’t, we’re going to lose our town,” says Ernie Peigne, a local resident who fears that water diversions could turn the lake basin into a dust bowl. Peigne’s wife, Pat, bought the pro-Mono license plate a few years ago to help draw attention to the lake’s plight.

The campaign has been waged in Congress, the Legislature and, currently, in the courts. One court battle may decide the fate of a thriving population of trout that a leader of a fishermen’s group accidentally discovered in a previously dry stream.

Volcanic Action

Mono, one of North America’s oldest bodies of water, was formed a million years ago in a volcanic area just east of what is now Yosemite National Park. The lake is probably best known for its high salt level and the oddly shaped limestone formations--tufa--that stand cactus-like along part of its shore.

Since 1941, Los Angeles’ Department of Water & Power has diverted fresh water from Sierra Nevada streams that feed the lake through 280 miles of pipes and aqueducts to help fill the city’s water taps and supply its fountains.

The diversions, which now supply about 17% of the city’s water and produce a small amount of hydroelectric power, lowered the lake’s elevation 43 feet between 1941 and 1981, cutting its volume in half. That action exposed 17,000 acres of lake bottom and opened bird-nesting areas on Negit Island to coyotes and other predators.

Extremely wet winters in 1982-83 and 1983-84 gave the lake a reprieve. Rain and melting snow sent more water down the streams above the lake than Los Angeles could divert. The surplus raised the lake’s level a few feet to 6,379 above sea level, still 38 feet lower than in 1941.

The extra water covered the land bridge that had formed between Negit Island and the mainland, and California gulls have begun to return to the island’s nesting grounds.

At the same time, the lake’s population of brine shrimp, one of the bird’s favorite foods, also has been making a comeback after the bad years of 1979-1981, environmentalists say.

But they claim that unless the diversions are reduced, evaporation will eventually shrink the lake to a wasteland unable to support the shrimp and the various types of birds that use the lake’s islands and islets.

“The dispute is not whether diversions are going to kill the lake, but at what point they’re going to kill the lake,” says David Gaines, head of the Mono Lake Committee, the environmental group that has led efforts to improve lake levels.

LeVal Lund, an official of the Department of Water & Power, acknowledges that the lake will continue to drop but says it will stabilize in 80 to 100 years at about 40 square miles. It currently covers about 60 square miles.

Despite the reduction in the lake’s shrinkage, Lund disputes claims that the environment will be spoiled.

“Our philosophy is there is still going to be a unique and scenic location” at Mono Lake, says Lund, the DWP’s Los Angeles aqueduct engineer. “It certainly will be much smaller, but you have to look at it as balancing. There are people on Earth and people need water.”

Environmentalists contend that the city could make up the loss of some Mono Basin water through greater conservation efforts or by using more expensive water available from the giant Metropolitan Water District.

They cite a 1979 interagency government report that recommended a reduction in diversions.

The DWP says it is not that easy, that the city is trying to conserve water and that water it takes from other sources to make up for lost Mono Lake diversions would shorten someone else’s supply.

Creation of the 57,000-acre scenic area from other federal lands in the basin won’t affect Los Angeles’ water rights--at least not directly--but will aid efforts to save the lake, says Rep. Richard H. Lehman (D-Sanger).

“It’s part of the whole movement to protect the lake,” says the congressman, who led efforts to create the scenic area. “Congress can’t abrogate water rights and we didn’t. But I think this increases the momentum to take the next step, which has to be taken in California by the courts to limit diversion.”

Some Still Unhappy

Ilene Mandelbaum, spokeswoman for the Mono Lake Committee, says, “The fact that it is a scenic area is going to make it a destination for people. Bringing more visitors to the lake is automatically going to create more sympathy for the lake. Ultimately, what the lake needs is more friends.”

But not all Mono Lake residents are happy with creation of the scenic area, which was officially dedicated at ceremonies July 31. Jeff Hansen, a contractor and trucking company operator who lives along the lake’s north shore, says the federal legislation won’t stop the diversions but will make it more difficult for local residents to develop private property bordering on the scenic area.

“The only thing Mono Lake needs is water,” he says.

The scenic area legislation protects existing uses of private property but limits major new development on private land. The law also requires the U.S. Forest Service to “protect . . . geologic, ecologic and cultural resources” and bans commercial timber harvesting and new mining.

Lund says that although the law strongly protects the city’s water rights, it would be “very difficult to predict” how creation of the scenic area would be used by the courts in deciding how to divide up the basin’s water.

Environmentalists and fishermen are waging two court battles to try to limit the water diversions.

One struggle, started by the National Audubon Society and other environmental groups, challenges the diversions under the “public trust” doctrine, a concept inherited from English common law that says the state holds navigable waterways in trust. In other words, the environmentalists say, Los Angeles’ water diversions should be cut to maintain the lake and its beauty for the public. That case is pending in a county court.

The other suit, filed by two fishermen’s groups and supported by environmentalists, contends that state law requires the DWP to allow enough water to flow into Mono’s main feeder stream, lower Rush Creek, to maintain the thriving trout population that developed there during recent wet winters.

Meanwhile, lake water continues to flow downhill--toward Los Angeles.