State Official Cautions Bradley to Keep Water Issues and Partisan Politics Apart

The director of the California Water Resources Board said Thursday that most of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s water conservation proposals were “already under way” and suggested that Bradley was the victim of “incomplete staff work.”

With the 1986 gubernatorial race looming, Director David N. Kennedy also called on Bradley and other politicians to refrain from injecting partisan warfare into state water issues.

“Water is not traditionally a partisan political issue,” Kennedy told more than 300 business and civic leaders, water agency officials and students gathered in Irvine for a symposium on California’s water future in 2001.

“As one of the folks who is right in the thick of things, I’d like to see it stay that way,” said Kennedy, a top official of the Metropolitan Water District until 1983 when Gov. George Deukmejian appointed him to head the state water resources agency.

Proposal to ‘Begin Dialogue’

A spokeswoman for Bradley denied that the mayor was encouraging partisan politics over critical water issues.

“The mayor’s proposal is intended to begin the dialogue to bring the north and the south together . . . and that’s not partisan at all,” deputy press secretary Vicki Pipkin said Thursday.

Kennedy’s criticism was the second such salvo fired at Bradley in as many days over his plan, unveiled last week, to end regional water rivalries. The plan would spur greater water conservation in the south through increased storage capacity and higher summer water rates to discourage use in dry periods.

Orange County Supervisor Harriett Wieder, leader of a coalition of businesses, local governments and water agencies sponsoring the symposium, accused Bradley on Wednesday of “inciting water wars” between the north and south with his conservation plan, widely seen as a bid to seize statewide leadership and gain political support in both regions.

Wieder, a staunch Republican who holds nonpartisan office and who has sought a leadership role in Southern California water issues, argued that much of the mayor’s plan already is in the works or is being planned through the efforts of the coalition known as the Southern California Water Committee Inc.

Kennedy concurred, citing decades-old conservation efforts of such water agencies as the Orange County Municipal Water District.

“I’m sure those people who have been working on ground water conservation for years are delighted to have his support,” Kennedy said. “But we’ll take volunteers no matter when they show up for the program.”

Kennedy, a longtime engineer considered apolitical among his peers at Thursday’s symposium, later said he was not speaking on behalf of Deukmejian, who narrowly defeated Bradley in the 1982 gubernatorial race. Kennedy said he would make the same appeal to the governor.

“I think all the professionals--and frankly, most of the politicians--feel water should be nonpartisan,” he said.

Asked about the merits of the proposal that Bradley unveiled Oct. 24, Kennedy said: “Everything he has proposed for the most part is under way,” adding that Bradley suffered from “incomplete staff work.”

But Pipkin, responding to both Wieder’s and Kennedy’s criticisms, disagreed:

“The fact is we do not have a strong water conservation plan here in the south. We have to show the north we are serious about water conservation and that we’re concerned about water quality in the (Sacramento-San Joaquin) Delta,” she said.

“Mayor Bradley’s proposal was put forth to begin the dialogue, to get all sides to the table in this critical matter for a nonpartisan response to the problem. And no one group or individual is going to decide this issue.”

The symposium at the Irvine Hilton was hosted by the coalition to discuss critical water needs at a time when reallocation of Colorado River water is expected to cut in half Metropolitan Water District’s supply of 1.3 million acre-feet annually. (A family of five uses an acre-foot of water a year.)

More Must Be Done

With Southern California’s population projected to grow by three million by the year 2000, speakers said, more must be done to conserve and better distribute water from the rain- and river-rich north to the semi-arid, water-hungry south.

Even with conservation measures that would cut water usage by 10% in Southern California and reclaim runoff water elsewhere in the state, Metropolitan Water District General Manager Carl Boronkay said demand still will exceed available supply before the year 2000.

For that reason, despite the Peripheral Canal’s overwhelming 1982 defeat at the polls, Boronkay predicted that the plan to build a canal to channel water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Southern California would be revived.

“It was justified for a variety of reasons: It solved the fishery and environmental problems, it solved water quality problems,” Boronkay said. “I think the Peripheral Canal will come back.”