State Backs Environmentalists on Mono Lake : Water: The Lands Commission will file a legal brief supporting efforts to keep Los Angeles from diverting water from streams that feed the lake at least one more year.

The State Lands Commission, a governmental watchdog over state landholdings, joined forces Wednesday with environmentalists who are battling to keep Los Angeles from diverting water from the Mono Lake Basin for at least another year.

The three-member commission agreed to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting efforts by the National Audubon Society and the Mono Lake Committee to keep in effect a preliminary injunction that has stopped the city from diverting water from streams feeding the Eastern Sierra lake since midsummer, 1989.

It is the first time a major state agency has taken sides in the long-running dispute between the city and environmentalists over water diversions from the ecologically sensitive basin.

“Mono Lake is home to a unique and fragile ecosystem that now teeters on the edge of collapse,” said Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, a commission member. “Our obligation is to ensure the lake level is adequately maintained to protect and restore its wildlife and recreational resources.”

Commission involvement in the issue comes as both sides prepare for a 20-day court hearing that each considers critical to its interests. Without an extension of the court order, environmentalists contend that the gulls, brine shrimp and migratory birds that inhabit the basin could be endangered. With an extension of the court order, city officials argue that they will be forced to forfeit an important source of water at a time when a sustained drought has diminished other water resources.

“If the injunction is continued the city will be unable to divert any water from the Mono Lake Basin in this tremendous water shortage year at least for the next 12 months and maybe even longer,” said Dennis Williams, engineer in charge of the Los Angeles aqueduct.

In the past the city has drawn about 100,000 acre-feet a year from the basin, or enough water to supply 500,000 people for a year. Without the Mono Lake water, it has had to increase purchases from the Metropolitan Water District, a water wholesaler that is facing its own problems with the water supply because of the drought.

In normal years the city purchases 100,000 acre-feet from the water district. Last year, because of the drought and the Mono Lake situation, it purchased 260,000 acre-feet. By June, the city expects that purchases will be more than 370,000 acre-feet. An acre-foot is enough water to cover one acre with water one foot deep.

The drought itself is responsible for the latest legal skirmish between the two sides. When El Dorado Superior Court Judge Terrence Finney decided a year ago that the city must release enough water to bring the lake level to 6,377 feet, both sides predicted that if all diversions were stopped the lake would reach that level by this month. At their suggestion, the judge set March 31 as the date his order would expire.

But city records show that by March 20, the lake level was only at 6,375.5 feet above sea level--1 1/2 feet below the judge’s goal. Williams said the predictions were off the mark because runoff from the winter and early spring snows that usually replenishes the lake has been abnormally low this year.

Even so, he said, the city plans to counter the environmentalists’ efforts to extend the order by presenting testimony from a number of biologists who will argue that the existing lake level does not pose any threat to the ecosystem.

“Our biologists have assured us that the lake ecosystem is very healthy at current levels, that migratory birds have an abundant food supply available, the brine shrimp are in the lake in large numbers and there are numerous islets for the gulls to nest on,” Williams said.

Martha Davis, executive director of the Mono Lake Committee, said her side will present a much bleaker view. Their experts will show that if the lake is not maintained at 6,377 feet, the ecosystem will eventually collapse.

“The significance of 6,377 is that it really marks the unraveling of the ecosystem,” she said. “From here on down, the Mono Lake problems intensify.”

As evidence of pending disaster, she noted that a lower lake level has partially exposed a land bridge between the mainland and Negit Island sitting 50 yards offshore. She said the land bridge gives coyotes access to the island and the gull chicks that nest there.

Williams said the city’s biologists will claim that most of the gull nesting takes place on other islets where there is no danger of coyote attacks. The U.S. Forest Service has erected an electric fence designed to keep coyotes away from Negit Island.