MWD Making Overtures to Open Delta Water Talks

Tiptoeing around the phrase peripheral canal , Metropolitan Water District officials are making overtures to Northern California environmentalists to open discussions on new ways of moving water south from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

MWD officials, who continue to see the delta as a prime solution to Southern California’s water shortages, are approaching the subject gingerly because of bitter experiences.

In 1982, a plan favored by Southern California water interests to build a $1.2-billion channel around the edge of the delta was defeated at the polls by an overwhelming negative vote in the north. The loudest voice of opposition came from environmentalists who saw the Peripheral Canal proposal as a blatant effort to deplete northern rivers and reservoirs.

Nearly a decade later, MWD officials are renewing their pursuit of a canal-type facility to take the place of drawing water directly from the delta--a vast network of waterways spilling into San Francisco Bay and fed mostly by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Making their first approach to their most entrenched opposition, MWD officials have expressed a willingness to consider any alternative but they acknowledge that they can see none better for “water quality, fisheries and water transfer efficiency” than a canal of some type.

The Southern California water wholesaler used recent hearings before the State Water Resources Control Board to go public with its strategy. It asked the panel to initiate talks between warring water factions and announced a willingness to negotiate environmental guarantees as part of any discussions over the construction of water transfer facilities in the delta.

In later interviews, Carl Boronkay, MWD’s general manager, said he was willing to put anything on the table including limitations on water exports and the designation of an independent commission to operate the facility.

“My position is simply that no one is getting anywhere by beating each other,” he said. “Problems are worsening for all of us. Why don’t we sit down and see what kind of facility would make the most sense.”

The delta is a major source of water for Southern California, which is supplied through the State Water Project, a system of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts and pumping stations. The project delivers only about half the water it has contracted to provide. Southern California officials maintain that new facilities--such as a canal--would increase its capacity and at the same time improve the quality of water that is shipped south.

A canal would take possession of upstream water before it starts its labyrinthine trip through the delta and into the California Aqueduct near Tracy, the main channel carrying delta water to Southern California. By increasing capacity, officials say, more water could be pumped to storage reservoirs in wet years so less would have to be taken in dry years.

The idea of increasing capacity sends tremors through the environmental community, which blames too much pumping in the delta for damaging the estuary and destroying fish populations. Despite the conciliatory words from Boronkay and other officials, the overtures to environmentalists have done little to dispel their fears that the water agency’s real agenda is to move more water south.

“I think the mistake they (MWD officials) made in the past and they are likely to make in the future is that they equate more water for Southern California with more water leaving the estuary and that is unacceptable,” said Tom Graff, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Graff and others say they would be willing to talk, but old wounds inflicted by the water district are fresh in their minds. An open sore is what they consider the raw power exhibited by the water agency when it and other water interests used political clout to force the withdrawal of a 1988 draft report by the Water Resources Control Board.

Environmentalists viewed the report as a significant victory because it would have recommended strict controls on future exports from the delta. Southern California officials maintained that its effect on urban water supplies would have been devastating.

“When MWD says they want to sit down and talk you’ll have to appreciate I’m a bit skeptical,” said Barry Nelson, executive director of the Save San Francisco Bay Assn. “What they’ve done is fight like hell to prevent any increased protection for the bay.”

In practical political terms, Jerry Meral, executive director of the Planning and Conservation League and a moderate environmental voice on the subject of the Peripheral Canal, sees little chance that the MWD will make headway on a canal until fisheries are restored.

“From an environmental point of view there aren’t going to be some facilities until there is something like real fish, not just paper fish,” he said. “I don’t think more exports are verboten forever, but we have simply got to restore the environment before we start taking about more exports.”

Nearly all of the environmentalists see the MWD as having formed an unholy alliance with agricultural interests who gobble up the lion’s share of delta water exports. They argue that the best source of water to feed Southern California’s growing population is not the delta but cutbacks on agricultural use.

Despite the cynicism about the MWD’s motives, Boronkay argued that it also has an interest in preservation of the bay. He acknowledged that cutbacks in agriculture use can save some water, but would do nothing for what he sees as his best argument for a canal--water quality. By bypassing the southern delta where water picks up organic substances from surrounding farms and bromides from invading seawater, he said, a canal would ensure safer drinking water supplies for the more than 15 million people that the district serves in Southern California as well as millions more in communities in Alameda County and Santa Clara Valley.

Boronkay said he also believes opposition to the 1982 proposal was rooted in fears that a canal would be operated in a way that would wreak havoc with fish and wildlife more than on concerns that the canal would be environmentally unsound.

“I’m not eager to misuse anything,” he said. “I don’t figure protection of the fishery is the monopoly of environmentalists. We are interested in the fisheries as much as anyone.”

However, Corey Brown, general counsel of the Planning and Conservation League, said environmentalists’ greatest fear is that once there is the capacity to take more water from Northern California rivers, Southern California water interests will find a way to use it regardless of any promises to the contrary.

“If you build a facility, you replace natural or physical restraints just with paper promises,” he said.

BACKGROUND

Los Angeles has become a major customer of the Metropolitan Water District in the last two years as environmental concerns and a drought have forced it to cut back on its water diversions from the Owens Valley and Mono Basin in the Eastern Sierra. In 1990-91, it is expected to take at least half of its water supply from the MWD, a water wholesaler that in turn draws more than half of its water from the State Water Project. The MWD, which also gets water from the Colorado River, serves 300 communities in six Southern California counties stretching from Oxnard in Ventura County to the Mexican border.