San Diego Scrambles to Conserve Water : Drought: County relies on imported supplies for 95% of its needs. City approves a ban on new hookups.

In mid-March, when the State Water Project all but stops pumping water to Southern California, no city in the region stands to lose more than this one.

Stiff statewide cutbacks announced by Gov. Pete Wilson on Monday will effectively cut off state water deliveries to the Metropolitan Water District, the region’s wholesaler, whose largest and most dependent customer is the San Diego County Water Authority.

As MWD threatens to reduce its deliveries by half, San Diego officials, more aware than ever of their “end of the pipeline” status, are scrambling to respond. All but one of the county’s 23 water districts have imposed mandatory cutbacks. Also under consideration are more drastic steps: The water authority has urged its customers to reduce new water hookups by 30% and to suspend landscaping on all new developments.

On Tuesday, the San Diego City Council approved San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s request for a drought state of emergency that would, among other things, ban all new water hookups.

“Jobs are at stake,” she said in a statement. “The environment is at risk; and only we can provide the solution.”

That concern among San Diego officials has not always translated into forward-thinking conservation policies. Even as she lobbied for an emergency declaration, O’Connor continued to support voluntary conservation measures for at least another month. Of all the county authority’s customers, the city of San Diego alone has refused to impose mandatory cutbacks.

But as drought-related predictions grow more dire, others acknowledge that things have never been worse.

“I think you will see rationing in San Diego County,” Michael D. Madigan, chairman of the water authority’s executive committee, said Monday. “A lot of people are going to be hurt, and it will be tough.”

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 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 MWD, the San Diego authority is by far the most needy customer.

Every year, that dependency gets worse: Last year, the authority bought a record 95% of its water from MWD. By comparison, 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 problems with 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 of March 1, MWD will further constrict the region’s lifeline by 31%, with more cutbacks likely to follow. 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, professor of public policy at UC Irvine graduate school of management, a San Diego County resident and 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.

County water authority officials say that throughout the agency’s history, establishing other sources of water has proved prohibitively expensive. 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.

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 receives.

Last year, San Diego County bought more than 24% of MWD’s water. Under the preferential rights system set forth in Section 135 of the MWD act, it was entitled to 12%. Theoretically, 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.

MWD has never enforced Section 135, which is designed to be implemented only when available imported water supplies are outstripped by demand. 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 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 officials also 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, spokesman for the San Diego water authority.

Yet, especially in the face of severe statewide cutbacks, MWD officials say they are not so sure.

“Yes, we will try to follow the Laguna Declaration,” said Fred Vendig, MWD’s general counsel. “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 authority is not a growth engine, authority board members acknowledge that the public perception may run contrary to that.

“People are refusing to cooperate with conservation because of their perceptions of growth,” Anne Omsted 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 coming 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 water authority from before its formation in 1944, through its battles to maintain independence from Los Angeles, and into its precariously dependent present.

San Diego water officials decided to annex to MWD in 1946, a commitment they felt would guarantee water supplies. 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.

Due 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. By 1965, it permanently established itself as MWD’s biggest customer.

The San Diego water authority has been unable to free itself from that dependence and today, as California enters its fifth year of drought, the authority is hearing from critics again. Jackson, the assistant general manager, says the water authority is trying to make much needed improvements to its storage and pipeline facilities.

Jackson said 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. “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 COUNTY: MORE DEPENDENT THAN EVER

COUNTY WATER SUPPLY: LOCAL vs. IMPORTED (in acre-feet*) IMPORTED 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. Source: San Diego County Water Authority