THE DROUGHT : Officials Fear Plan May Divert Area Water : Under the proposed state procedures, two local reservoir operators would have to send supplies outside their service boundaries.

Ventura County water officials expressed alarm Thursday that a statewide emergency plan could force them to send water to other areas during the drought.

The state Water Resources Control Board has proposed requiring large reservoir operators to provide water to drought-stricken areas such as Santa Barbara, at least for the short term.

The plan could affect the Casitas Municipal Water District, which draws water from Lake Casitas, and the United Water Conservation District, which uses water from Lake Piru.

“It will lead to a tremendous legal battle,” John Johnson, general manager of Casitas Municipal Water District, said.

Under the proposal, areas in need of water would file a request and the board would seek water from the closest, largest reservoir, board spokeswoman Sandra Salazar said. The districts with pipelines in place would probably receive the orders first, she said.

The Casitas district has a pipeline to Carpinteria in Santa Barbara County.

The state board has the power to enact the sweeping policies it plans to consider next week, Salazar said.

“The board’s intention is to put something in place by mid-February,” she said. “We’ve granted permits to 13,000 surface-water purveyors, and we will simply use our water-rights authority to place orders on the permits.”

Johnson said it would violate Casitas policy and state and federal rules for the district to send water outside its 150-square-mile boundary. And providing water to other areas would threaten supplies for district customers, he said.

Casitas serves 50,000 people in western Ventura, the Ojai Valley and the Rincon area, including 280 farmers.

The United Water Conservation District, which maintains a reservoir at Lake Piru, has no pipelines connecting it to districts outside the county. United monitors ground-water pumping and recharges underground water basins in much of the Santa Clara River Valley and the Oxnard Plain.

“We could do some things in an emergency, but it certainly wouldn’t be delivering water by pipelines,” Bernard McBride, United’s operations manager, said. “We have no pipelines or way to deliver anything except to send it down the Santa Clara River.”

The state board sent notices Friday that it will begin public hearings Tuesday to consider adopting the proposal, Salazar said.

The proposal also would require all surface-water providers to ration household water consumption to 300 gallons a day. Under the city of Ventura’s water-rationing plan, a family of four is limited to 294 gallons per day. Neither Casitas nor United have rationed water.

The state proposal would limit growers of perennial crops, including fruit trees, to survival irrigation levels through 1991, Salazar said. Survival levels would be determined by complicated formulas that include the type of crop, time of year and slope of the land, she said.

Johnson said he and many water company officials throughout state will protest the proposed policy changes.

“I think it’s going to be a pretty united front against what seems like Machiavellian action,” he said. “This is a kind of broad brush approach similar to rescinding the Bill of Rights for a few weeks.”

But Salazar stressed that while the board hopes to get a lot of comment at the hearings, it has the power to adjust the permits.

“We’ve never exercised it in such a comprehensive fashion as this, but the whole notion of a permit being an inalienable right is hogwash,” she said. “In granting these permits, the board doesn’t grant an irrevocable right.”

Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn, who co-chairs Southern California Water Committee Inc., a coalition of eight counties, many cities, water agencies and farm bureaus, said the committee is drafting a position paper on the proposal today.

“I think the state Water Resources Control Board needs to look at each county or hydrologic area in the state before it issues such orders,” he said. “Many of us have taken strong drought measures already.”

Casitas already supplies water to Santa Barbara under an emergency agreement drafted in October. The district agreed to send 7,200 acre-feet to Santa Barbara over the next two to four years on the condition that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, in effect, reimburse Casitas.

“To issue a blanket order like that would not really be good for those of us who have taken measures to share water in Ventura County, and as Casitas has done to loan water to Santa Barbara County,” Flynn said.

He suggested that the water board, which he called “probably the most powerful state water board in the U.S.A.,” might be using the proposal to get the attention of local districts.

“I think we have to be sensitive to the state board. . . . The 155 reservoirs in the state are at their lowest point ever.”

Times staff writer Joanna M. Miller contributed to this story.