Water-Rationing Plan Includes S.D. County : Drought: The Metropolitan Water District mandates cuts for all users it supplies, including San Diego.

The giant Metropolitan Water District on Tuesday ordered mandatory water rationing for agencies serving 15 million Southern California residents from Ventura to the Mexican border.

The cutbacks, prompted largely by a continuing, four-year drought, will range from 5% for overall residential consumption to 20% for agricultural use. The rationing--the first imposed by the MWD since 1977--will begin Feb. 1.

“The time to act is now,” S. Dell Scott, one of Los Angeles’ eight representatives on the 51-member MWD board, said before the MWD board voted to adopt rationing. “Every drop of water we save now will available for next year, or for a future year.”

Under the rationing plan, the MWD will reduce deliveries to 27 local agencies, including the San Diego County Water Authority and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, that sell the water to the public. The local agencies will pay a 300% surcharge for water they use in excess of their quotas.

On Thursday, the San Diego County Water Authority, which has received 95% of its water from the MWD this year, will vote on a resolution to establish guidelines for the operation and administration of the MWD’s conservation plan.

Under the resolution, the authority’s 24 member agencies would have to reduce their water use by 7.8% from the 1989-90 fiscal year or pay a penalty. It will be up to local governing officials, such as the San Diego City Council and Mayor Maureen O’Connor, to decide whether to impose rationing and penalties for overuse on individual consumers.

As set forward in the MWD plan, each agency in San Diego County will pay $394 per acre-foot for the water it uses in excess of the limits. If it uses less water than required, it will receive incentive rebates of $99 per acre-foot.

In April, the San Diego County Water Authority asked its member agencies to enact mandatory water-reduction measures. All of them did so except its largest customer, the city of San Diego, which opted to employ a voluntary conservation campaign.

Milon Mills, the city water utilities director, said Tuesday that, since voluntary efforts have been successful thus far, he doubts that the MWD’s action will prompt the San Diego City Council to adopt mandatory restrictions.

“Going on the basis of our success during last summer with the voluntary program, we’ve certainly met what’s being proposed,” he said. But, if the drought gets worse, he predicted, San Diego will have to “take some much more stringent actions.”

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who began pushing for mandatory water rationing last spring, said that Tuesday’s MWD order was “a prudent action.” But he said the city will not decide until February whether to impose mandatory rationing on the public.

“The (city) Department of Water and Power believes, and I concur, that if Los Angeles voluntarily continues to conserve at the levels we have achieved since last April, the city will not face surcharges from the MWD in the near future,” the mayor said.

Normally, Los Angeles gets most of its water through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carries water there from the Owens Valley. This year, because of the drought and environmental rulings, the flow from the Owens Valley is minimal, and the city must rely heavily on the water it buys from the MWD.

While most MWD directors backed immediate imposition of the rationing plan, Michael A. Nolan, Burbank’s representative, disagreed, arguing that under the district bylaws, “no water should be cut off to cities while water is still being delivered to agriculture.”

“We should pull the plug on agriculture before we pull the plug on people,” Nolan said.

Fred Vendig, the district’s general counsel, disagreed with Nolan’s interpretation of the laws. The directors approved the staff-proposed rationing plan on a voice vote.

All 49 directors present voted for the plan except Nolan and Ina S. Roth, the representative from Beverly Hills.

The MWD--serving customers in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties--gets most of its water from two sources. They are the State Water Project, which funnels runoff from the Sierra snowpack to Southern California through the California Aqueduct, and the Colorado River.

Last year, the district received about 1.2 million acre-feet of water from the aqueduct and about 1.3 million acre-feet from the river. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, the average use by two families in a year.

Largely because of the continuing drought in the Southwest, neither supply will be as great as last year’s.

The state Bureau of Reclamation, which ships the Sierra snowmelt south, says it expects a 15% reduction in supplies next year. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which regulates the distribution of water from the Colorado River, said it is expecting a 25% drop in the water available to Southern California in 1991.

MWD officials said the approved cutbacks are the second phase of a five-phase plan designed to reduce consumption of water delivered by the district next year by 10%, or 260,000 acre-feet.

Phase I, implemented officially Dec. 1, was designed to achieve voluntary cutbacks of 10% for residential and industrial use and unspecified amounts for agricultural and ground-water replenishment use.

If the drought continues and Phase II’s mandatory cuts of 5% for residential and 20% for agriculture prove inadequate, the MWD could impose Phase III, which would mandate cuts of 10% for residential and 30% for agricultural. With worsening conditions, the cuts would rise to 15% and 40% in Phase IV and 20% and 50% in Phase V.

Stanley Sprague, general manager of the Municipal Water District of Orange County--the county’s largest recipient of water from the MWD--said that voluntary conservation efforts have reduced county water use by 8% in the past year.

Local water agencies supplied by the MWD will probably urge a continuation of voluntary conservation, since “very few water agencies in the county have mandatory (conservation) ordinances in place,” Sprague said.

“Even if they wanted to go to mandatory, they’d have to go through the whole ordinance procedure,” Sprague said. “That can take two to four months.”

Although Santa Ana has approved mandatory conservation measures if the situation worsens, the city is already “prepared to start the (MWD’s) program,” according to the city’s water resources manager, Lee Harry.

Officials in eastern Ventura County say it will be difficult for farmers there to achieve the 20% reduction mandated Tuesday.

“The farmers right now are using as little water as possible,” said Reddy Pakala of the Ventura County water division, which oversees distribution of water to the Moorpark and Somis areas.

Dan Reeder, president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, which represents about 1,800 local farmers, said growers in the eastern county are already using the most efficient irrigation systems available.

“There’s very little left to cut,” Reeder said. “The biggest decision now is going to be what crops to eliminate.”