The Word on Water Gets Worse and Worse for S.D. : Drought: Conditions worsening, reports say. Cuts in water supplies to San Diego could be devastating.

Drastic cutbacks in water deliveries announced Friday by the Metropolitan Water District will have a devastating impact on San Diego County’s economy, from agricultural production to the upkeep of local parks, local officials predicted.

Amid new reports that drought conditions appear worse than expected, the water district warned Friday that the state may have to cut off all its water deliveries to Southern California by March 1.

The cutback would force the huge district to rely almost exclusively on water from the Colorado River and require a reduction in deliveries to the 27 agencies it serves by 45% to 50%, MWD General Manager Carl Boronkay said.

San Diego County gets about 90% of its water from MWD.

The action will reduce the total amount of water available to the district by almost half of normal, he said, but will still supply enough to meet the bare-bones needs of residential users.

Only two weeks ago, the district’s board voted to cut deliveries effective March 1 by 31%, predicting that the cuts might become more severe as dry conditions persisted in this fifth year of drought.

Friday’s news was met with grave pronouncements from San Diego County officials, who said they were shocked by the further expected reductions in water use.

“It means very serious economic consequences,” said Byron Buck, water resources planner for the San Diego County Water Authority. “Potential major losses in our agricultural areas, loss of landscaping, and loss of people who work in the landscape sector. It means loss of business for the tourist industry. It’s very, very serious.”

An executive committee of the San Diego County Water Authority will meet Monday morning to discuss the potential 50% reduction. On Thursday, the city announced a voluntary conservation program among its 33 biggest water users that called for a 30% reduction.

Paul Downey, a spokesman for San Diego Mayor Maureeen O’Connor said Friday that, with a 50% reduction, “you have completely changed the playing field.” O’Connor was out of town Friday.

“There are going to be some very difficult decisions to be made within the next week to 10 days as to what lives and what dies, in terms of our landscaping,” Downey said.

For example, motels will have to conserve water both indoors and outdoors, he said, and the city may have to seriously consider slowing new construction.

After speaking with O’Connor later in the day Friday, Downey said the mayor believes that Gov. Pete Wilson should specifically mandate how a 50% reduction could be reached.

“Iif we go to a 50% level, (O’Connor) would expect that the governor will have to step in and mandate it, and tell us exactly what we have to do,” Downey said. “It’s beyond the local agency’s ability to deal with.”

O’Connor has strongly resisted mandatory water conservation measures for users in San Diego, even though they are common elsewhere in the state.

In addition to potential impacts on tourism, the construction industry has estimated that 90,000 jobs and $6.5 billion in the economy would be lost from a complete building moratorium.

The intensified water cutback is expected to have dramatic effects on the $772-million-a-year agriculture industry.

Fruit trees in marginal growing areas may be left to die, and low-profit annual crops just won’t get planted at all, said Bill Snodgrass, assistant agriculture commissioner for the county.

“This has the potential to have a major impact on the makeup of farming for the future also, because a grower cannot simply go out of the business of farming for one year, and then go back into business the next year when they get water,” Snodgrass said. “It has the potential to put many growers out of business.”

Within the city, landscape maintenance of tourist attractions such as Balboa Park may be hurt, Downey said.

“Our feeling was that at a 30% (cutback) level we could maintain our tourist attractions at an acceptable level. They may not have been as pristine as they would like, but we could maintain it,” he said. “At 50%, we’re going to really need some experts to tell us what effect that will have.”

San Diego County imports about 95% of its water, acquiring it from the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles. The water authority then distributes it among 24 member agencies.

A normal allocation for the county in the past has been about 650,000 acre-feet per year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water that would cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot. It is about 325,900 gallons.)

The proposed 50% cut would diminish the supply to about the same level it was in 1970, when the county’s population was nearly half what it is now.

Unlike other areas of the state, agriculture accounts for only about 17% of water usage in the county, Snodgrass said. This is largely because water here has always been several times more expensive than farther north in the state, so farmers learned to conserve, he said.

The Metropolitan Water District’s announcement Friday came a day after the state Department of Water Resources provided preliminary data on the Sierra snowmelt at a private meeting in Sacramento.

“Our worst-case scenario suddenly got worse,” MWD general manager Boronkay said. “You just couldn’t dream six months ago that it could be like this. It’s an incredible happening. We couldn’t have dreamed as bad a nightmare as this.”

In Los Angeles, where Mayor Tom Bradley signed a rationing law Friday that requires a 10% reduction in water use by March 1 and a 15% cut by May 1, water officials noted that more stringent conservation may soon be necessary.

“We really need about a 20% reduction in home delivery this summer to make it through,” said Jerry Gewe, DWP manager of water resources planning.

Implications of the MWD’s announcement were felt statewide.

At the Antelope Valley-East Kern Agency, the third-largest customer of the State Water Project water after the MWD and the Kern County Water Agency, officials reacted to the latest water-supply and weather forecasts with resignation.

“There’s no reason for extending anyone’s hopes at this point in time,” said Wallace Spinarski, the agency’s general manager. “There’s nothing in the forecast for the next week that looks like any significant rain. We need everyone to be aware this is a dire and a critical situation.”

To MWD officials, the snowmelt data indicated that so little water would be draining out of the western Sierra into the State Water Project that project administrators would undoubtedly have to cut their water deliveries by 90%. Earlier this month, state officials had predicted that, under the harshest of drought conditions they would probably only have to cut deliveries by 85%.

A cut of 90% would mean MWD would receive about 170,000 acre-feet of water out of the state project this year instead of its requested 1.7 million acre-feet. But, because MWD has already drawn nearly that much from the state project, Boronkay said the imposition of a 90% cutback would in effect force the state to cut off the spigot to Southern California. An acre-foot is approximately enough water to serve a Los Angeles family of five for 18 months.

Boronkay said he is asking his board to schedule a special meeting, probably March 4, to consider his recommendations for further cutbacks to its customers, including the city of Los Angeles. He said he has not determined how the cutbacks will be apportioned, although he anticipates that agricultural customers will continue to get some water.

At least one MWD board member, Mike Nolan of Burbank, has criticized decisions not to stop agricultural deliveries. He contends that farmers have received a break on water prices over the years in return for agreeing that their deliveries could be “interrupted.”

“I think reality is finally coming home and it’s time MWD apply the administrative code as it is written,” Nolan said. “No more discounts of water for agricultural purposes. Let’s start taking care of people.”

Under the 31% cutback scheme, MWD deliveries for residential uses are cut by 20% and those for agriculture are cut by 50%.

While acknowledging that the drought picture has worsened with low rainfall and snowpack in February, state officials declined to confirm that they plan to order a 90% reduction to municipal and industrial customers, which include MWD. They have already stopped all water deliveries to their agricultural users.

Larry Mullnix, Department of Water Resources deputy director, said his agency is in the process of reviewing its data and will probably present a recommendation to Gov. Pete Wilson next week. Wilson was in Mexico and unavailable for comment.

“Things are very dismal,” Mullnix said. “We’re still checking our figures out though. This is very, very serious so we want to be sure what we’re doing is correct.”

He said the department normally would not announce a decision on projected water deliveries until mid-March, but the extent of the crisis will probably prompt some kind of updating next week.

In a year of normal precipitation, the Metropolitan Water District would use about 2.6 million acre-feet. Boronkay said this year its best hope is to be able to make deliveries of 1.6 million acre-feet and even that will depend on how much water can be supplied by the Colorado River system and a special water bank established by Wilson. The water bank, to be operated by the state, allows certain irrigation districts in Northern California with more abundant supplies to sell to districts more severely affected by the drought.

MWD originally was scheduled to receive 900,000 acre-feet this year from the Colorado River. Officials hope that because of the drought, federal officials will let them draw 1.2 million acre-feet.

Times staff writer John Chandler contributed to this report.