Rips Deukmejian for Not Giving Issue Priority : Pat Brown Warns of Water Crisis

Amid warnings of possible water rationing next year, former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown on Wednesday assailed Gov. George Deukmejian for not providing leadership on the politically divisive issue of water.

Brown, a Democrat who traveled to a county not normally friendly to members of his party, was praised by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) and Orange County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder for winning approval in the 1960s of the State Water Project to bring water from Northern California to the Southland

In a speech at an Anaheim forum marking Water Awareness Week, Brown said that when he supported the project as governor, “Northern California thought I was a traitor.”

He insisted that the issue of ensuring that the entire state has sufficient water made it necessary for a governor to speak out.

‘He Should Be in This Thing’

After the speech, Brown said Deukmejian’s “failure to take any stand” on the water issue “is a disgrace.”

“He should be in this thing (the statewide debate over water),” Brown said of the Republican governor. “He’s been elected and re-elected. And whatever his director of water resources tells him to do, he should be fighting for it. But you make enemies, you see. If you want to be re-elected governor, you have to be careful.”

Deukmejian was elected governor in November, 1982, five months after state voters crushed a plan to build the Peripheral Canal to bring more water from the north around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the south. Northern Californians voted 9-1 against the plan, overwhelming the small margin of support generated among Southern California voters.

In 1984, Deukmejian put together a north-to-south water transfer proposal that included a package of bills. But the legislature knocked down the governor’s plans for building reservoirs, deepening and widening existing waterways and building new ones.

Tom Beermann, a Deukmejian spokesman, said Wednesday that after the 1984 experience, the governor “felt that it was better to work through consensus-building and negotiation rather than a confrontation-type approach.”

Wieder, who, along with Bergeson spoke at the forum, said that “every significant proposal” to solve the long-term water supply needs of the state “seems to get bogged down in North-versus-South, and Democrat-versus-Republican disputes.”

Water Shortages Feared

Wieder said Southern California is in the middle of a dry year and added that if the drought continues into next year, “We could face water shortages and rationing as early as next summer.”

She said that since the last drought in 1977-78, the region’s population has increased by 3 million, but the water supply has not grown at all.

In addition, conservation measures have already been taken since the last drought, so there will be no quick fixes from water-saving programs, she said.

William Mills, general manager of the Orange County Water District, said the county brings in about 60% of its water, virtually all of it from the Colorado River. He said that although it has been a dry year, the Colorado River system is more than 90% full and has plenty of storage capacity.