Water Plan Controversy: It’s Off to an Early Start

Before the process even started 18 months ago, a court-ordered review of the environmental impact of intrastate water exports on the quality of water in San Francisco Bay was expected to prove controversial.

Few people, however, expected the controversy to begin with the very first, most preliminary staff recommendations.

It has. Little more than one month after the State Water Resources Control Board staff released its recommended water quality standards for San Francisco Bay, environmentalists and water exporters alike are howling for changes.

Even more unexpectedly, board Chairman W. Don Maughan has acknowledged that potentially “extensive” changes in the controversial draft plan are possible soon, although he stressed that a public review of those staff recommendations always had been anticipated.

The issues are familiar: Environmentalists say more fresh water should flow to the sea to promote fisheries, protect wetlands and flush pollution from the bay. Exporters plead that more water be diverted south for irrigated farms and the booming Southern California megalopolis.

But the complaints, delivered personally in recent private meetings between individual board members and water agency officials, have been angry enough to delay the report’s scheduled review and prompt environmental groups originally pleased with the report to counter with complaints of their own.

The draft staff recommendations are so controversial because they appear to doom San Francisco Bay to a certain amount of permanent degradation, cap water exports from Northern California to the Central Valley and the Southland--and make plain the unspoken truth that the multibillion-dollar State Water Project will never be able to deliver all the water it has contracted to sell.

Maughan said in an interview last week that he is not particularly bothered by “this steamroller attack” because he believes that many people overreacted to the staff draft suggestions. The draft, he said, will be reviewed and refinement during the second phase of what was originally seen as a three-phase, three-year series of public hearings.

Maughan said the entire process--originally scheduled to end in July, 1990, but already six months behind that pace--could continue into 1992. Phase 2 hearings that were to open Jan. 9, 1989, have been indefinitely postponed.

“I want to see this (process) through as soon as possible,” Maughan said, “but I don’t want to see (its decision) thrown out by a court on a procedural point of not allowing enough time” for review and testimony by affected water agencies.

The process in which these matters are being decided, known casually as the Bay-Delta hearings, is the most ambitious effort yet to negotiate peace in the state’s chronic water wars. It seeks to balance the public’s needs in Northern California, where most of the state’s water is found, with the public needs in Central and Southern California, where most of the water is used.

The hearings had been expected by the water board for about a decade when a state appellate court said in a sweeping landmark 1986 decision that the board had to initiate them soon and could use the process to essentially rethink and reallocate the rights to most of California’s fresh water.

Last month, after 54 days of testimony and the submission of 2,200 reports, the water board staff issued draft plans for controlling pollution and salinity in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. That estuarial system, larger than some states, is the source of two-thirds of California’s water.

The recommendations would essentially limit water exports--the water being shipped south in aqueducts--to their 1985 levels and implement a “California water ethic” that includes strict, permanent conservation and the integration of all of California’s dams, reservoirs and ground water basins into one large coordinated system.

The goal would be to improve delta water quality and help spawning bass and salmon by boosting spring flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. This would come at the expense of Central and Southern California exports, but they would be made up at other times with the water stored for use in spring.

Reaction to the recommendations was swift.

The politically powerful Metropolitan Water District, which represents most of the Southland’s urban water companies, denounced the ideas as “devastating to the nearly 14.5 million people living in Southern California.”

The district howled that the proposals would “effectively institutionalize drought” by not allowing for increased water demands since 1985. It said this would essentially mandate a 20% cut in water use at a time Southern California is growing by 400,000 people each year--”a population equivalent to the city of Portland, Ore.”

The Central Valley Project Water Assn., representing such federal water project customers as irrigated corporate farms, asked the board to withdraw the staff report and start over. In a petition presented in the form of a lawsuit, the group asserted that staff ideas are “so fundamentally flawed that, as a matter of law, they cannot serve as the basis for any final (water board) action.”

Among other things, the 30-page petition asserts that the staff suggestions were drafted “without staff having undertaken any real legal or factual analysis” and that the proposals would violate many state and federal laws.

Opposing Criticism

At the same time, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Assns., part of an unusual coalition of Northern California business and environmental groups, complained that the staff erred in the opposite direction by not cutting water exports further.

Zeke Grader of the fisherman’s lobby said the water board staff declined to consider that some exported water is sold at subsidized prices to grow surplus crops that also are subsidized--all to the detriment of the fishing industry, which generally is in decline.

David Fullerton of the Committee for Water Policy Consensus, a coalition of Bay Area government, industry and environmental groups, blasted the report for not guaranteeing some water strictly to flush San Francisco Bay of pollutants. Nor is there any flow devoted to encouraging the growth of phytoplankton, tiny organisms that form the base of the food chain that feeds all other fish.

“After 10 years of study,” he said, “after clear evidence that fresh water is important, even critical, to the health and water quality of the bay, the bay got nothing. Not one standard, not a single drop of water is committed in this draft document to its protection.”

Maughan, who still is waiting to see if he will be reappointed to the water agency when his term expires next month, said he and his colleagues on the five-member appointive board agree with some complaints but generally are pleased with the draft document.

“In my judgment, they paid very close attention to the evidence presented in the hearings, despite charges to the contrary,” he said. As for assertions that the staff ignored the bay, “others (on the board) felt information on the bay didn’t hang together well enough to warrant more flows there.”

Among the issues he said he believes need further study are the feasibility of the staff’s conservation goals, the practicality of coordinating dozens of projects now run independently and a philosophical question of whether the proposals would change the water board from a regulatory body to a management agency.