Our Water Agencies’ Historic Growth Agenda Needs a New Mission

The Southern California water agencies see trouble ahead with both the supply and quality of their product. Consider the following:

- The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has lost another battle in its long-standing conflict with the defenders of Mono Lake over how much water it may divert from this environmentally besieged water system. Although fretful over the higher costs involved, the DWP has increased its requests for water from the Metropolitan Water District, the major wholesaler of “imported” water in the region, to meet anticipated growth.

- The MWD, facing its own court-directed proceedings to review the export of Sacramento River water through the Sacramento Bay Delta to Central and Southern California, can take only momentary consolation from its successful lobbying campaign for the withdrawal of a State Water Resources Control Board staff draft report. The report had called for a new “water ethic” and controls on future exports to protect the Delta and the Bay. Despite the big push from MWD and its agricultural allies in the Central Valley, the likelihood of reduced exports from the North seems greater than ever.

- More ground-water wells have become contaminated throughout Southern California--in the Inland Empire, Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley and the Burbank/North Hollywood area. The costs of cleanup are astronomical--and increasing--for both public agencies and the private companies liable for a share of the costs.

- The imported water has its own problems. When chlorinated, it produces a range of “disinfection byproducts,” some of which are potentially carcinogenic. The Environmental Protection Agency will put more stringent standards on one of those byproducts and possibly new ones on others. As a result, the water agencies will need to change their treatment methods. The cost estimates for revamping the MWD system alone are at least $200 million.

All this does suggest trouble, but it’s trouble that in part relates to what the water agencies see as their mission--meeting the growth demands of the region. This mission dates back to the turn of the century and the great land speculations associated with the first major import system for the region, the Los Angeles Aqueduct. This supply source, which brought water from the Owens Valley to undeveloped lands north of the then-city limits, became the basis for growth, and annexation to the city was the means. “If you can’t bring the water to the city, you bring the city to the water,” Noah Cross says in the film “Chinatown,” and that’s precisely what happened as the city limits expanded fourfold in just 15 years.

Next came the Metropolitan Water District, bringing water first from the Colorado River and then Northern California. If you follow the lines of annexation to the MWD--especially its member agencies in San Diego, Orange, Riverside and Ventura counties--you follow the lines of growth in the huge urban mass that stretches from Ventura to the Mexican border.

The water agencies like to say today--now that growth scenarios have become more problematic--that they are not responsible for growth; they only meet the demands. “Babies will be born, after all,” is a favorite rejoinder. Yet water agencies continue to induce growth through longstanding pricing policies, a commitment to expanding supplies without evaluating the consequences, and a firm alliance with the urban growth-development complex that has shaped this region. As Tim Brick, a dissident MWD board member has put it, if the water agencies are not involved in growth decisions, then who is?

With some of the traditional water development strategies under siege, the water agencies have begun to search for new programs to accomplish the same goals, and thus protect their mission. But the mission, not just the means, has to be changed to deal with the new water-supply and water-quality realities that the agencies are obliged to confront.

This change of mission should have two primary features.

First, the agencies have to be weaned from their growth agendas and onto a growth management perspective. This requires not just engineering and construction skills but planning insights and close cooperation with air and water quality agencies and other entities confronting the deteriorating quality of daily life in the region. Second, the focus on increasing the water supply has to give way to an understanding that the quality of the water is as at least as high a priority. This means not simply responding to regulations (and frequently opposing them in their formulation) but taking the lead to prevent contamination. The recent opposition of the MWD and local San Gabriel agencies to expansion of a landfill in the Azusa area is a small but important advance.

By moving in these directions, water agencies enter the arenas of planning and public health from which a new mission can be designed. The approach of the water agencies has an immediate bearing on the broader debate over what kind of urban region we will live in, if, in fact, we still have options left to influence that choice.