As Mono Lake Rises, Its Political Climate Is Slowly Changing

The salty waters of Mono Lake rose to their highest level in a dozen years last summer, fed by court decisions and another wet winter in the Sierra.

Blizzards and lawsuits raged again this year around the Mono basin, a region loved by environmentalists for the austere beauty of Mono Lake and its unique ecology.

The Mono Basin also is prized by the city of Los Angeles, but for a very different reason. Seventeen percent of the water the city drinks is diverted from streams that otherwise would drain into Mono Lake.

In the long run, as Los Angeles drinks, the lake shrinks.

The issue of the city’s water needs vs. the lake’s preservation has become a hotly debated environmental question in the 1980s.

‘Public Trust’

The legal climate of the dispute slowly has been changing since the California Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 1983 that Mono Lake’s waters are a “public trust” and that the environment may be considered along with Los Angeles’ water needs.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, the Democratic nominee for governor, urged publicly in August that the Mono issue be settled by compromise.

Bradley was seeking support from Northern California environmentalists. His stands on the Mono Lake issue and on maintaining the water quality of San Francisco Bay helped win him the endorsement of the Sierra Club.

But the mayor’s remark was no more than what attorneys on all sides of the case have been saying quietly since the Supreme Court decision: Somewhere down the road there probably will be a reconsideration of Mono basin water rights.

Los Angeles draws enough domestic water for about 500,000 of its 3.1 million people from the Mono basin. It is some of the cleanest and cheapest water in California, according to Duane Buccholz, district engineer at the Bishop office of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The cost of the 388 miles of aqueducts that convey it to Los Angeles was paid years ago.

Unlike water imported from Northern California, it does not have to be pumped over mountain ranges, an expensive operation. There is no other way for Los Angeles to get water of similar quality at such low cost, Buccholz said.

Los Angeles began tapping the Mono basin’s water in 1940, when the elevation of the lake’s surface was 6,416 feet above sea level and it covered 85 square miles.

Last July the lake’s surface crested at 6,381 feet, the highest level in 12 years but still 29 feet below the elevation when Los Angeles began water diversion. The surface area now is around 60 square miles.

“It wasn’t the court decisions that brought the lake up. We’ve just been lucky in the weather,” said Jim Parker, a staffer at the Mono Lake Committee’s office at the lakeside village of Lee Vining.

In three of the last four winters, the snowpack in the central Sierra has been far above normal. “There was so much water Los Angeles had no place to put it,” Parker said. “They had to let it run off into Mono.”

Temporary Victories

The Mono Lake Committee and its allies, California Trout and the National Audubon Society, have won two temporary legal victories since the state high court laid down its “public trust” doctrine.

Los Angeles diverts water from four creeks that drain into Mono and stores it behind a dam in Grant Lake Reservoir southwest of the lake.

California Trout attorneys in 1985 dusted off a long-unused section of the state Fish and Game Code requiring any operator of a dam to keep up a sufficient flow of water to maintain fish life below it.

In a suit in the Mono County Superior Court in 1985, they charged Los Angeles with failing to do this in Rush Creek, largest of the four streams that feed Mono. Judge David Otis ruled that the case should be tried. He issued a preliminary injunction ordering Los Angeles to maintain a flow of at least 19 cubic feet per second in the creek.

Otis also directed the state Department of Fish and Game to find out how much water would be needed to maintain Rush Creek’s trout population. The study will take from two to three years. The trial has been postponed until the survey is complete.

This year, Mono’s defenders made a similar legal pitch for a permanent flow of water in Lee Vining Creek, another Mono tributary. In August, Mono County Superior Court Judge Ed Denton issued a temporary order to Los Angeles to keep 10 cubic feet per second of water flowing in Lee Vining Creek. A hearing for a preliminary injunction is scheduled in January.

“The public trust ruling was the big thing,” Parker said. “The Rush and Lee Vining rulings are partly based on it.”

The Mono Lake Committee and California Trout used the same law in Sacramento County Superior Court to challenge Los Angeles’ basic license to draw water from both the Mono basin and the Owens River watershed. The Owens in normal years supplies about 63% of Los Angeles’ water.

The plea was turned down by Judge Lloyd Phillips on technical grounds. Both sides expect the decision to be appealed.

Unanswered Question

One question that has not been clearly answered is how much water would be needed to keep Mono Lake at its present level.

Water engineers measure water in units of acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover one acre to the depth of one foot. It is about the amount used in a year by five people living in a single-family house with a small garden.

In an average year, Los Angeles draws about 100,000 acre-feet of water from the Mono basin. The 29 cubic feet per second maintained in Rush and Lee Vining creeks adds up over a year to 21,000 acre-feet, enough to support a city of about 100,000.

It is not enough to maintain the level of the lake in the long term.