Water Dependence Bodes a Dry San Diego Future : Drought: A twisted history of water politics has left the county at the vulnerable end of the supply pipeline.

Half a century ago, San Diego County was self-sufficient when it came to water--when World War II began, the largely undeveloped coastal plain actually had a water surplus.

Today, the county is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the nation--and one of the thirstiest. Cursed with scarcely any ground water, it relies more heavily on buying imported water than any other county in Southern California. Among the 27 agencies that buy water from the region’s wholesaler, the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District, the San Diego County Water Authority is by far the biggest and most needy customer.

And every year, that dependency gets worse: last year, the authority bought a record 95% of its water from MWD. By contrast, the city of Los Angeles, MWD’s next biggest buyer, purchased 57% of its water from the agency during the same period--the rest coming mostly from the Owens River Valley via Los Angeles’ own 300-mile aqueduct.

For San Diego, a city that chafes at the merest hint of outside control, this extreme dependence on the Los Angeles-based MWD is nothing less than paradoxical. San Diegans are notorious for blaming their air quality on Los Angeles’ “transport” smog, for heralding the Camp Pendleton Marine base as their last stand against “Los Angelization” and for opposing a proposed utility merger that would take the San Diego out of San Diego Gas & Electric.

Yet, perhaps the most crucial link between San Diego and its larger northern neighbor--water--has gone largely unnoticed by the public. Until now. As the MWD threatens to constrict the region’s liquid lifeline by as much as 50%, the unprecedented pinch is prompting some San Diegans to ask how their city got so needy--and who let it get this way.

“We are exposed. There’s no question about that,” said Peter Navarro, a professor of public policy at UC Irvine graduate school of management, a San Diego County resident and the chairman of a group called Prevent Los Angelization Now, or PLAN. “We’re at the mercy of this remote bureaucracy that is dominated by developer appointees.”

“The general public in the past hasn’t been aware that we get most of our water through (MWD),” he added. “But, within a few days or months, I think everybody is going to know that.”

County water authority officials say that, throughout the agency’s history, establishing other sources of water has proved prohibitively expensive. But critics of the authority charge that continually, at key junctures, San Diego’s water agency has taken the easy way out, accepting MWD’s water instead of developing a more costly, but ultimately more reliable independent water lifeline.

And that is particularly irresponsible, these critics say, because San Diego does not have an uncontested right to the water it now uses. Under a decades-old system that links each district’s water rights to the cumulative tax assessments it pays, San Diego County is guaranteed only about half of the water it now receives.

Last year, for example, San Diego County bought more than 24% of MWD’s water. Under the preferential rights system set forth in Section 135 of the Metropolitan Water District Act, it was entitled to just 12%. Theoretically, at least, that means that Los Angeles, which now uses less water than it is guaranteed, could lay claim to half the water that quenches San Diego County’s thirst.

In short, under Section 135, San Diego has been built on borrowed water.

MWD has never acted upon Section 135, which is designed to be exercised only when available imported water supplies are outstripped by demand. And there is much debate about whether it is superseded by other MWD policies, such as the Laguna Declaration of 1952.

Under that policy, MWD promised to secure new sources of water to meet all its clients’ needs. In return, clients agreed not to develop independent new sources of water, allowing MWD to remain Southern California’s reigning centralized water agency--and the most powerful water agency in the nation.

San Diego Water Authority officials reject the suggestion, made by Navarro and others, that this agreement was made in the interest of sustaining growth. Such criticisms confuse cause and effect, they say--growth comes first, and the authority buys more water in response.

“Down through the years we have been growth-accommodating, not growth-inducing,” said Shirley Jackson, the assistant general manager at the authority, which provides 97% of all county residents with water.

Furthermore, San Diego officials contend that the promise MWD made in 1952 to forever sate its members’ thirst invalidates Section 135, which was drafted two decades earlier.

“We believe, if push came to shove and the two doctrines came up against each other, (the Laguna Declaration) would hold out,” said Mark Stadler, a spokesman for the San Diego County Water Authority.

And yet, especially in the face of severe statewide cutbacks, MWD officials say they aren’t so sure. Fred Vendig, MWD’s general counsel, acknowledges that the preferential rights system--as yet untested in court--is ambiguous. But he said he cannot rule out the possibility that it would be applied.

“What our governing body may do when it has to face up to that drastic a shortage, I can’t tell you right now. Those are things that we have to confront,” he said. “Yes, we will try to follow the Laguna Declaration . . . . We are looking for more water and hope we’ll never get to 135. But, if we don’t find the water . . . we may have to go to 135.”

Despite water officials’ insistence that the San Diego Water Authority is not a growth engine, authority board members acknowledge that the public perception may run contrary to that. At the board’s Valentine’s Day meeting, some board members said they believed county residents are fed up with conserving when they see growth continuing all around them.

“People are refusing to cooperate with conservation because of their perceptions of growth,” Anne Omsted, who represents the San Dieguito Water District on the board, told her 33 fellow board members just before they urged their 24 member agencies to adopt rigorous conservation measures--including partial growth caps. “We have to acknowledge the relationship between drought and growth.”

Margaret FitzSimmons and former MWD director Robert Gottlieb have taken a stab at analyzing that relationship in their forthcoming book, “Thirst for Growth: Water Agencies as Hidden Government in California,” which is due out in May.

In it, the two professors at UC Los Angeles’ graduate school of architecture and urban planning trace the history of the San Diego County Water Authority from before its formation in 1944, through its battles to maintain independence from Los Angeles and into its precariously dependent present.

Gottlieb and FitzSimmons conclude that, in San Diego and throughout Southern California, water politics “have always been politics of growth, of heating up the local economy by finding strategies to subsidize an increased and reallocated supply of a necessary natural resource so that, no matter how rainfall might fluctuate from year to year, economic growth would anticipate no checks and no limits.”

They trace the roots of San Diego County’s near-complete dependence on MWD to the early 1940s, when the U.S. Navy spearheaded an effort to build the county’s first pipeline to bring water from the north. For years before that, Gottlieb and FitzSimmons write, divisions between the city of San Diego and North County interests had stalled other pipeline plans.

But, after the outbreak of World War II, the Navy--worried that moisture-poor San Diego would not have enough water to sustain its wartime forces--stepped forward. The Department of Defense considered its options: building a new Imperial Valley aqueduct that could be financed and controlled solely by San Diego water interests, or constructing an extension of MWD’s Colorado Aqueduct system, which had been finished in 1941.

The Navy chose the latter, and when San Diego’s new water authority was organized in 1944, it was “obliged,” Gottlieb and FitzSimmons write, to accept the Navy’s agreement with MWD. The first blow to the county’s independence had been struck.

The next came just two years later, when San Diego water officials decided to be annexed to MWD, a commitment they felt would guarantee MWD’s future water needs. But, in exchange for annexation, the authority gave up its hard-won entitlement to Colorado River water, an agreement forged in 1931 that had placed San Diego fifth in line for water rights. From that point on, San Diego would rely entirely on the Los-Angeles based system.

The implications of these decisions were not lost upon the authority’s board of directors. In the late 1940s, as they weighed whether to expand and build another pipeline to MWD, one director representing the city of San Diego, downtown department store owner Arthur Marston, opposed the move on the grounds that it would “intensify” the county’s imported water dependency, Gottlieb and FitzSimmons write.

But Marston was overruled by what the authors call the authority’s first “growth bloc”--a pro-development clique, headed by the first board chairman, Fred Heilbron, which paved the way for similar blocs throughout the authority’s history.

Thanks in part to such decisions, the county experienced a development boom during the next few decades. During the 1960s, San Diego’s purchases of MWD water tripled, and, by 1965, it permanently established itself as MWD’s biggest customer.

And yet, with Section 135 hanging over their heads, San Diego water officials felt uneasy about their growing dependence and their “last in line” status at the end of the pipeline. Defensively, in the early 1980s, local water officials set out to construct the Pamo Dam, a storage facility proposed for the undeveloped Pauma Valley north of the city of San Diego.

That project would have held in reserve 130,000 acre-feet--or enough water to serve about 260,000 families for a year. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the Pamo project would cause irreparable harm to the 1,800-acre wooded valley, which is home to an endangered songbird, the least Bell’s vireo. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blocked the project.

At about the same time, determined not to be what one observer called MWD’s “tolerated step-child,” authority leaders undertook an even more ambitious project. Called the Galloway Plan, the 1984 proposal involved building a dam on the Yampa River in the Upper Colorado River Basin--a dam that would hold water to transfer to San Diego.

MWD leaders were outraged by the plan, which they regarded as impractical and illegal. Ultimately, logistic and legal obstacles kept the project from moving forward. But it marked one of the last great battles to secure for San Diego County an independent water supply--and then-Assemblyman Larry Stirling, for one, believed local water officials were due some respect for their efforts.

“The San Diego County Water Authority has suffered the slings and arrows of a multitude of people who apparently do not understand the situation regarding our future water supply,” Gottlieb and FitzSimmons quote Stirling saying in 1984, soon after the plan was made public. “Instead of criticism and censure, the San Diego County Water Authority should be admired for their courage and farsightedness in trying to solve this problem before it reaches crisis proportions.”

But they have been unable to solve that dependence, and today, as California enters its fifth year of serious drought, the authority is hearing from critics again. Jackson, the assistant general manager, acknowledges that the water authority is now endeavoring to make much-needed improvements to its storage and pipeline facilities.

Jackson says, however, that the county’s overwhelming dependence is “really nobody’s fault. It has happened out of necessity. There is no local water supply here. . . . San Diego without (imported water) would have literally dried up.”

Navarro, the UC Irvine professor, counters that the water authority board, the San Diego City Council and the County Board of Supervisors are all to blame.

“The politicians have been asleep at the wheel,” he said. Instead of mandating that water conservation devices be installed in all new developments or raising the price of water “so people know how valuable it is,” he said, “They’ve been practicing a policy over the last 10 years in San Diego of growing as fast as possible without any regard for not only water, but for traffic and other problems. It’s unconscionable.”

SAN DIEGO WATER: NO GUARANTEES

WHAT WE BUY FROM MWD Los Angeles City: 18.3% San Diego County: 24.2% Ventura County: 4.3% San Bernardino: 2.6% Riverside County: 6% Orange County: 16.3% Los Angeles County’s other 16 MWD member agencies: 28.3%

VS.

WHAT WE ARE GUARANTEED Los Angeles City: 25.83% Ventura County: 2.61% San Diego County: 12.08% San Bernardino: 2.22% Riverside County: 4.47% Orange County: 14.82% Los Angeles County’s other 16 MWD member agencies: 37.97% As of June 30,1990, under Section 135 of MWD Act. Source: Metropolitan Water District

SAN DIEGO COUNTY: MORE DEPENDENT THAN EVER

COUNTY WATER SUPPLY: LOCAL VS. IMPORTED (in acre-feet*) FROM MWD ‘46: 0 / 62% ‘90: 614,666 / 95% FROM LOCAL SUPPLIES ‘46: 82,469 ‘90: 33,517 * An acre-foot is 325,872 gallons, enough water to meet the household needs of two average families for one year.

COUNTY POPULATION GROWTH

‘46**: 440,659 ‘90: 2,500,000 ** Earliest year for which figures are available. Source: San Diego County Water Authority