State Board Seeking to Iron Out Complex Water Rights Issues

How much water is enough?

How much for Central Valley farmers, thirsty Southern Californians, and how much for the Northern California environment?

For the last three weeks, the California Water Resources Control Board has been grappling with these questions in an ambitious and complex series of public hearings that will stretch over the next three years.

Aided by dozens of private and government water experts--from hydrologists and biologists to economists and lawyers--the five-member board is attempting to divine a permanent solution to the state’s perennial water problem.

The outcome, said water board spokeswoman Fran Vitulli, “will affect the lives of every Californian.” Her boss, water board Chairman W. Don Maughan, added: “Nobody is protected from having their water rights examined.”

“This is a major task, no doubt about it,” said Arthur L. Littleworth, a lawyer representing state water contractors, such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “Nothing like this has ever been tried.”

The inquiry will include every water system dependent on San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, including the two largest, the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. Together, they supply Southern California with 40% of its fresh water.

At issue are previously inviolable rights to the water flowing through the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Those two systems collect the rain and snow runoff from nearly all of California’s expansive Central Valley--more than 27 million acre-feet annually.

One acre-foot contains 325,000 gallons of water, or about enough for a family of four for a year. California, with roughly one-tenth of the nation’s population, consumes one-fourth of the nation’s irrigation water and one-fourth of its fresh water, according to the 1987 California Almanac.

The water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers once flowed unimpeded through San Francisco Bay to the ocean. But in the last 40 years, large shares have been diverted for irrigation and other fresh-water uses. By 1980, nearly two-thirds of the flow had been diverted--39% for use in Northern California and 24% for Southern California.

This touched off a debate over whether such water diversions were seriously harming the environment--by letting salty bay water creep inland, for example, or by preventing pollutants from being flushed from the bay, or by inhibiting the reproductive cycles of crab, salmon and other aquatic life.

Southern California lawmakers believe that there is still some “surplus” water that can and should be diverted south--a position recently challenged by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and disputed by environmentalists.

Northern California lawmakers contend that too much water is being diverted now and that such deliveries should be re-examined and perhaps even reduced--a stand disputed by large water districts and Southland farmers.

The Water Resources Control Board is trying to reconcile both positions and to develop a system for balancing the needs of water uses with the environment of San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The water resources board opened its hearings July 7 in Sacramento, and they move to Southern California on Aug. 11, when the water agency is scheduled to begin four days of talks at the Registry Hotel in Irvine. The Southern California hearings will cover the municipal and industrial uses of water exported from the northern part of the state.

Other hearings will be held this year in Fresno, the San Francisco Bay Area and Redding in northeastern California, near the source of the Sacramento River.

After the first round of hearings, the board will recommend anti-pollution measures. A second set of hearings next summer will lead to a potentially controversial proposal to either amend or affirm traditional water rights. A third set of hearings scheduled for the spring and summer of 1989 will refine the water-rights proposal. A final environmental impact report and water-rights decision is scheduled to be issued in July of 1990.

The result, state officials hope, will be a permanent set of guidelines for allocating California’s fresh water between the wet north and the arid south.

“I think it (the final plan) will perhaps need some more examination in 10 years,” Maughan said, “but after that, I hope--and I may be too optimistic--but I hope it will only need occasional fine tuning.”

The board has tried this long-range planning before. The last try, in 1978, resulted in a landmark lawsuit that successfully challenged traditional water rights in California by seeking to balance them with environmental concerns.

The 1986 Racanelli decision, as it is called, forced the state to broaden the planning process it had scheduled for this year. Now, for the first time, the board will look closely at all water projects, not just the biggest two, and will consider the full impact when deciding how much water to export.

In 1978, the board did take into account the potential for damage to delta farmers. Several monitoring stations were established to measure salinity and other effects of exporting water, which at times can make the San Joaquin River flow in reverse, pulling in brackish bay water.

But the board said at the time that it lacked the proper data to require a similar monitoring program for greater San Francisco Bay.

A lack of information is not likely with these hearings, which are usually packed by independent experts and interested parties loaded down with stacks of documents, printouts and reports.

For most who attend the hearings, such as William T. Davoren of the environmentalist Bay Institute of San Francisco, the hearings are tense but exhilarating--the best and perhaps only opportunity to air their views.

“California has been postponing this decision for half a century, ever since the first big projects came on line,” he said. “California has been going blindly thinking that the water going into the (San Francisco) Bay is wasted, when it’s really needed to keep the bay alive.”

However, attorney Littleworth insisted that the board must “balance all water users--and balance them reasonably.”

But what is “reasonable” also is debatable. Ultimately, state officials concede, the issue may wind up back in court.

“I hope that doesn’t happen,” Maughan said, “but I want to be realistic. I think the best we can hope for is that at the end of all this, people will sue only as a last resort to protect their own interests, not to challenge the fairness of the process itself.”