Water Watch: A Crisis Getting Managed : Governor moves carefully and precisely as state copes with shortages

The notion is getting around that the governor of California is having a much easier time coping with the state water shortage than with the state budget crisis.

That’s not hard to understand, in a way. After all, the state has more water options at its command, even in in the midst of this structural water shortage, than it has money.

Beyond that, however, is the fact that the governor’s management of the water crisis has so far shown Wilson near the top of his form. This is a governor who works by getting full command of his facts rather than shooting off his mouth--who likes to immerse himself in the problem before giving press conferences. This tendency was evident in the earliest days of the crisis, when many called for him to take emergency action right away. That, however, was not the Wilson style. Instead, the new governor put together a “drought action team,” boned up on the extraordinarily boring technical details of this complicated problem and formulated a strategy of water-supply orchestration in concert with the State Water Project.

He instructed David Kennedy, director of the Department of Water Resources, who heads the drought-action team, to require urban water agencies to develop detailed plans, in writing, for coping with possible future water shortages of up to 50%. And the governor pushed forward with his plan, announced during last year’s campaign, to create a California Environmental Protection Agency, which is cousin to the quantity crisis in its mandated concern for ensuring state water quality.

Of course none of these moves was as instantly consequential as the torrents of rain that a wet March brought and a parched California lapped up. But, taken together, they flesh out a pattern of prudent and precise management that is certainly reassuring if California is to be able to cope with this long-term problem.

It would be comforting to think that between Mother Nature and Pete Wilson the water problem will prove a phony crisis and we can get back to watering endless acres of broccoli and filling one new swimming pool after another. But that won’t be the case.

Indeed, the ally of the water crisis is water carelessness. The five-year drought is not history. As the governor put it recently, “It would be a serious mistake for anybody to think, ‘Well, let the good times roll.’ The drought is not over.”