Carried Out by the Tide of History

Sometimes history comes in disguise. It wraps itself in utter banality, as if it’s shy and wants to slip by unnoticed. This seems to happen especially often in Los Angeles, where everyone is looking for Dodgers scores and history gets no respect anyway.

In the column business, of course, it’s our job to penetrate disguises and spot history before it turns the corner and disappears. And that brings us to today’s subject. In downtown Los Angeles, some camouflaged history is taking place. It could alter the way we live.

First, the disguise: in recent months, Mayor Bradley has made two new appointments to the board that governs the Department of Water and Power. A third is forthcoming. These new members are a different breed, and last week, in protest of their arrival, the general manager of the department resigned.

Sounds like some squalid shake-up, right? And that it is, but hold on. The Department of Water and Power is not just any city agency.

In some ways, the DWP created Los Angeles as we know it. It transformed our chunk of desert into the greatest megalopolis of the West Coast by supplying all the water that transformation required. The DWP made Los Angeles green.

It got that water by pulling off a deal so dirty it still stains the city’s past. Owens Valley, in the eastern Sierra, was drained dry by the DWP in the 1920s, and later on the agency reached farther north and picked off Mono Lake. Bitter fights over those water grabs continue to this day.

Technically, the DWP was under control of the mayor and City Council. In fact, no one has ever told the DWP what to do.

It refused to modify its plundering of Mono Lake even after the lake’s enormous value as a biological resource was established. It spurned serious water conservation. It tried to suck even more water from the Owens Valley. It never negotiated, it simply filed lawsuits.

As a utility, the DWP had a regal quality. It was a city agency and so beyond the reach of the state PUC. In Los Angeles, a series of mayors treated it with nervous deference. Nobody fooled with the DWP.

Until now. The two new members appointed to the Board of Water and Power Commissioners are Mike Gage, Bradley’s former deputy mayor, and Dorothy Green, founder of Heal the Bay in Santa Monica. Both are card-carrying environmentalists. It’s hard to imagine two people who could be more at odds with the DWP’s Establishment.

The third appointment is likely to be Mary Nichols, a Jerry Brown crony from the old days and now an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Also a card-carrier.

The board has five members. Three is a majority. What that means is simple: Those three newcomers will have the power to select a new general manager. And since the current board president, Rick Caruso, will no longer enjoy their support, he will likely lose his position to Gage. The newcomers will control the DWP.

The changes could be major as they try to drag the agency into the 20th Century. Required water conservation probably will become a way of life in Los Angeles, not just limited to the current unpleasantness of the drought. And those requirements will probably not stop at the current 10%. Look at projected population increases for Los Angeles and you will see why.

The era of lawsuits in the Eastern Sierra may give way to reasonable negotiation. The city may finally face the fact that there are ways of meeting new demands for electricity other than building more coal-fired plants.

So it looks to be historic, and the good guys are winning. But why now? What finally moved Bradley to march on the DWP?

You might look to Gage for part of that answer. His relationship with Bradley is close and his desire to change the agency powerful. Never before has Bradley been exposed to anyone with Gage’s peculiar combination of environmental understanding and political savvy.

And there’s something else. Politics, as we know, is a Darwinian world. The DWP may be falling to the environmentalists because its methods, so successful in the past, had begun to fail. It has lost lawsuit after lawsuit in its struggle with the Mono Lake supporters and the people of Owens Valley.

Only this spring, for example, the DWP lost another 60,000 acre-feet of water in the Mono basin because a state court ruled the agency was destroying trout streams there. That’s roughly half the entire water production of the Mono basin.

In short, the DWP had become a loser. And ripe for a turn of history.