Role in North’s Water Quality Is Demanded by Southland

Southern California water users Monday demanded an equal voice in setting water quality standards for San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, saying they cannot get by without an assured supply of clean Northern California water.

Their testimony came at a public meeting called by the state Water Resources Control Board for comment on its work plan for hearings on bay-delta water management to be held from 1987-89.

Mary Jane Forster, chairman of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, charged that officials of three regional water boards in Southern California were not notified of the meeting and did not get advance copies of the plan for the hearings starting next year.

“You know what happens when you have great wealth and you leave three members of the family out,” Forster told the state board.

Flared Up

The hearings on protection of bay-delta water, scheduled to start in July, appear certain to rekindle California’s north-south water argument. It flared up in 1982 when the peripheral canal plan to make more northern water available to the south was defeated by an overwhelming “no” vote in Northern California.

In 1984, the state Senate blocked a proposal by Gov. George Deukmejian to widen the channels at the south end of the delta to make it easier to send more water south. Northern water transferred to Southern California is pumped from the delta and shipped south in the 450-mile California Aqueduct.

The state water board in 1978 approved a plan to maintain the quality of delta water, but that plan was overturned by a San Francisco Superior Court, which ruled that the board had not used its full authority to protect the delta and the bay.

The court ordered the water board to do the job over again, this time exerting its authority to control pollution of Sacramento and San Joaquin River water before it reaches the delta. The revision process will start next year.

The issue is complicated by legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Reagan this year for coordination of state and federal water projects in California.

An amendment by Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) calls for the environment of the bay and the delta to be given top priority in apportioning delta water for the state’s needs. Miller has insisted this does not mean that Southern California would be denied Northern California water in an emergency.

Forster and spokesmen for other Southern California water interest groups testified that the Southland depends heavily on clean water from the Sacramento River via the delta to dilute the salty water it gets from the Colorado River.

“Water plans in Southern California are predicated in part on having a sufficient supply of low-salt water from the state water project for long-term salt balance control and water reuse,” said Richard B. Bell, consultant to the Water Advisory Committee of Orange County.

Thomas H. Nielsen, a member of the Southern California Water Committee, said that “while water uses of Southern California take place hundreds of miles away from the origin of that water, they should be given equal treatment with the uses that take place in the bay-delta estuary itself.”

San Diego normally gets about 90% of its water through imports from the Colorado River and the California Water Project.

“There never is any lowering of the total dissolved salts in the Colorado River,” Forster said. “It doesn’t change due to a wet year or a dry year. We blend the stuff with Northern California water before we ever use it.”

Los Angeles depends less on Northern California water than other parts of Southern California.