A Battle Over Supply : New Era Forces New Look at Water Projects, Rights

Back in the good old days, Californians merely fought about whether to build any new water projects. Now, however, the debate centers on a more difficult and profound question:

Which existing projects might have to be scaled back?

Water rights once taken for granted, even considered sacrosanct, are now frequently challenged in court. Dams built long ago might never be used to their envisioned capacity. Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel even suggested dismantling the principal water-delivery system for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Now, instead of scanning the horizon, water officials often are looking over their shoulders.

Such developments, along with stricter quality standards for local supplies, challenge all five water sources for Southern California--home of the world’s 11th-biggest metropolitan area on what is essentially a semiarid desert.

Conservationists see this confluence of events as an overdue comeuppance for “arrogant” Southern California water agencies, particularly the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, which one fisherman characterized as “the Darth Vader of the environmental movement.”

Environmentalists, meanwhile, see the dilemma as the dawn of a new era in water management, a day when high political and financial costs of new water-supply projects will force a redistribution of existing supplies--including giving some water back to nature and transferring some from farms to cities.

Water managers see the current situation as an unusual historical juncture in which they have to battle as hard to keep existing water supplies as their predecessors had to fight to develop them--and, at the same time, expand those resources by perhaps 20% to accommodate growing cities.

“When you are faced with both the exploding demands of an expanding urban population and obstacles to new developments,” said Carl Boronkay, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, “then add reductions to existing supplies due to litigation and water-quality questions--well, if you dwell on that, you’ll lose a lot of sleep.”

As far-reaching as these events are, city taps will not run dry. State law clearly gives priority to urban consumers over irrigated agriculture, and the courts have been careful not to upset this.

Voters Kill Canal Project

Indeed, some conservationists allege that urban water interests encouraged the current dilemma to create a crisis atmosphere that would break a political logjam blocking new water projects. That logjam dates from 1982, when voters stunned the water Establishment by killing the Peripheral Canal.

“They know they can let it go all the way to the point of absolute crisis and then ask the Legislature to bail them out,” said Barrett W. McInerney, a Los Angeles lawyer who won a suit challenging Los Angeles water rights in the Mono Basin, the source of 15% of the city’s water. “They can hold the people of L.A. hostage. It’s how they’ve approached the problem since the 1900s.”

In ruling in favor of McInerney’s client, a group called California Trout, the state 3rd District Court of Appeal in May chastised the city agency for using a “melange of arguments” it said were “devoid of substance.”

“L.A. Water & Power seeks to avoid the plain meaning of the statute,” Justice Coleman A. Blease wrote in exasperation at one point in his opinion.

Water officials said they are only tough negotiators seeking the most water for the lowest price to better serve their customers. But they agree that basic changes in state water policy are near.

Bay Area Water Quality

One critical element shaping the changes taking place is a draft report due in September from the state Water Resources Control Board. This is an early step in the board’s court-ordered review of the water quality in San Francisco Bay, which is fed by the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. The board’s goal is to strike an appropriate balance among urban users, farmers and the needs of the environment.

Because the delta is so vast--60% of the state is drained by rivers flowing into it--the board’s decision could affect rights to two-thirds of the state’s surface water.

The September report will contain the first hint of how far that board will reach in its review.

And that is just one of several pending challenges to the status quo.

In some cases, challenges are familiar fights between Northern and Southern California. But there also is a new East-West split, between coastal urbanites seeking more water and Central Valley farmers who use 83% of existing supplies--sometimes on marginal land or surplus crops.

“We have to create a market system that encourages water wasters to become water sellers,” said Tom Graff, an Environmental Defense Council lawyer and a leading exponent of shifting water resources from farms to cities.

Issues Extend Beyond Drought

Issues raised in the rethinking of California’s water supplies are of special interest during this year’s drought, but they have implications far beyond the current short-term lack of precipitation.

“Nobody really has any really good idea of what their water rights are any longer,” said Duane Georgeson, assistant general manager of the Department of Water & Power. “That is primarily because of the public-trust doctrine.”

That far-reaching legal concept, first applied to California’s water rights by the state Supreme Court in 1983, said water-rights decisions made years ago can be revised by regulatory bodies and courts in light of new conditions.

It has taken several years for that precedent to filter down to lower state court decisions, but its impact is evident in the court-ordered hearings on delta water quality and the challenge to Los Angeles water rights in the Eastern Sierra.

“The economic stakes are high. Our future prosperity may depend on it,” W. Don Maughan, state Water Resources Control Board chairman, was quoted as saying after one hearing earlier this year.

Not enough water for cities can limit growth or inhibit new industries. Not enough for agriculture can cripple that part of the state economy and bankrupt counties that depend on it. Not enough for the environment can ruin fisheries, increase pollution and reduce recreational opportunities.

Supply Rated ‘Sufficient’

David N. Kennedy, director of the state Department of Water Resources, said recently that for the most part the state’s supply is “sufficient to meet all its water needs for the foreseeable future.” But, he warned, California still faces difficult decisions about how to set priorities in dry years.

Increasingly, water rights decisions are being made, or at least shaped, in court, where conservationists who were shunned by Congress and the Legislature have finally found a forum willing to rethink California’s water system.

Frequent targets of these reassessments are the Metropolitan Water District and one of its biggest members, the city-owned Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. Together, they sell more than half the water used by the 14 million Southern Californians living on the coast from Oxnard to the Mexican border.

Those agencies bring most of their water from hundreds of miles away--from the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, the Colorado River, and the Owens Valley and Mono Basin east of the Sierra Nevada. All four sources either have been cut by court orders in the last five years or court-fostered cuts are being studied.

Meanwhile, much of the MWD’s remaining supply--water from local rivers and wells--is threatened by pollution. Some wells already have been closed, while others show trace amounts of fertilizers, toxic waste and other contaminants.

Several water officials have said it is as if everyone’s right to water is suddenly suspect. Even San Francisco, a pill box for water-policy snipers, saw Congress in June debate--and finally reject--the closure of its top water source on environmental grounds.

Water has never lacked eager California claimants, but recent uncertainties have so roiled the water that the Metropolitan Water District will study using multibillion-dollar nuclear-powered desalination plants to strain fresh water from the sea, and a recent federal effort to sell 1 million acre-feet of water was oversubscribed by 400%.

An acre-foot is a standard measurement of bulk water, consisting of 325,851 gallons. It represents about a year’s use by two urban families of four, or irrigation water for a quarter-acre of alfalfa, one of the state’s biggest crops.

“California now is in the position where people are beginning to scramble, looking for water,” said one Southern California water-agency official.

Reallocation of Supplies

Rather than put up expensive new dams, water officials prefer to reallocate existing supplies. But this raises sticky issues about costs to consumers, the environment, and such third parties as tractor dealers and fertilizer salesmen who may be put out of business when farms go dry to slake a city’s thirst.

Great gaps in scientific knowledge make such questions particularly vexing. Contrary viewpoints can and have been “proven” in hearings by making certain assumptions about the vagaries of, say, San Francisco Bay hydrodynamics or San Joaquin Valley irrigation efficiencies or the fecundity of fish. One scientist likened conflicting scholarly studies to comparing “the King James version of the Bible versus the Fred Flintstone version.”

McInerney suggests that the state narrow those knowledge gaps by establishing an independent research agency patterned after the Hudson River Foundation, which is praised by both developers and conservationists for its work on development issues involving that New York river.

Lacking such guidance, the tenor of future water use in California is likely to be set by the water board’s water-quality decision--in which it will begin to establish the amount of water available for export from the delta--and the inevitable legal challenges that will follow its final report in 1990.

Seeking a Balance

Although the board is authorized by the state Court of Appeal to review and change virtually any water right affecting the delta, it is less likely to cut city supplies than limit their growth. Farms and the environment probably will be most affected by a “balancing of interests,” Maughan has indicated.

Because they consume so much of the state’s water supply, farmers are under pressure to use it more efficiently--and even to stop growing certain crops--and let cities buy the water they save. Several water officials have said that a 10% cut in agricultural water use would allow 30 years of urban growth.

Growing water prices already have forced some farm interests, including one of the biggest state project beneficiaries, to surrender some water. In May, a joint venture including the Tejon Ranch Co.--which is partly owned by the Times Mirror Corp., owner of The Times--spent $1.4 million to void a contract for irrigation water that company President Jack Hunt said was too costly for agriculture. About 70% of the water is now used by fast-growing Bakersfield.

Debates about agricultural water often focus on the 2 million acres growing alfalfa and cotton, the state’s most widely planted crops.

Logic Challenged

“To me, it’s not logical,” said Georgeson. “That is 8 million acre-feet of water each year being used to grow (subsidized) cotton and alfalfa. That’s twice the urban use of water in California.”

However, farmers note that agriculture is one of the state’s biggest industries, along with building weapons and entertaining tourists. Therefore, advocates of water sales are careful to try to accommodate it.

The Metropolitan Water District, for example, is pursuing two ideas: Paying some farmers not to grow crops in dry years and paying others to improve their inefficient irrigation systems. Water thus saved is available to cities.

Such deals have been talked about for years, but few have been consummated, partly because no one knows how much this water should cost. Farmers buy cheap water; should they sell it with a small markup? Or should cities pay much more to avoid the even higher cost of tapping more and more distant rivers?

Negotiations have been tough, but even tough-talking officials concede such deals are inevitable. Public pessimism is often just a bargaining tactic.

Delta Water Option Open

Water-transfer contracts likely will not be signed in great numbers as long as Southern California has the option of getting more delta water. Once the state board settles that matter, Graff and others believe more irrigation water will find its way to cities.

In other words, predictions of shortages and doom are the latest example of the brinksmanship that has helped shape California water policy since engineer William Mulholland declared, rather disingenuously, that Los Angeles was about to run out of water in 1905.

If it seems like an odd way to deal with an issue so critical to the state, longtime players in the field will not argue.

“One generally has to suspend logic when dealing with water issues,” said John Lawrence, an aide to Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez). “Logic has less to do with things than power, tradition and prejudice.”

CALIFORNIA’S WATER FLOW

As California’s water is diverted south through one of the world’s great aqueduct networks, 83% of it is deposited on the state’s bountiful farms in the 400-mile-long Central Valley. The remaining 17% of the flow is consumed by people and industry in cities. Amounts listed below are water exports for one year and do not reflect local supplies consumed near the source.

Central Valley Project (Shasta Dam) 6,955,000 acre-feet*.

1. 2,220,000 acre-feet are delivered to the Sacramento River region.

2. 4,735,000 acre-feet flow south.

State Water Project (Oroville Dam) 2,425,000 acre-feet.

3. About 6,000 acre-feet are delivered to the Sacramento River region.

4. 2,419,000 acre-feet flow south.

5. Before reaching the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, the two projects combine in the Sacramento River for a joint flow of 7,154,000 acre-feet.

6. From the delta, 239,000 acre-feet are diverted to the San Francisco Bay Area.

7. 1,889,000 acre-feet are diverted to the San Joaquin River region.

8. Of the remaining flow, 4,152,000 acre-feet are sent to the Tulare Lake region.

9. 42,000 acre-feet go to South Lahontan region.

10. 832,000 acre-feet go to the South Coast metropolitan region.

11. Western Sierra sources include Mokelumne Aqueduct and Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct. They bring about 500,000 acre-feet of water to the Bay Area.

12. Eastern Sierra sources include Mono Lake tributaries (near Mono Lake) and Owens Valley ground water (Owens Valley). Together, they bring about 470,000 acre-feet of water to Los Angeles through the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Water from the Colorado River is brought to California in two ways.

13. One is the Colorado River Aqueduct (Lake Havasu), which brings 1,135,000 acre-feet to the urban South Coast.

14. The other is the All-American Canal (Imperial Reservoir), which ships 3,850,000 acre-feet to Imperial County farms.

* An acre-foot contains 325,851 gallons and is the average annual consumption of two Southern California families.

Source: Dept. of Water Resources