Panel OKs Bill Easing Limits on Water Sales : Supplies: Farmers would be allowed to send surplus to drought-stricken cities. Legislation faces several hurdles before passage.

Despite charges that urban interests are trying to transform California’s farm belt into “another Owens Valley,” an Assembly committee narrowly passed legislation Tuesday that would make it easier for farmers to sell water to drought-stricken cities.

Considered by many water interests to be one of the most important and controversial water measures before the Legislature this year, the bill by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) overcame strong opposition from rural legislators to win on a 7-5 vote of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee.

The bill is a long way from passage, however. It has to go through one more committee before it reaches the floor of the Assembly, and then two committees in the Senate before it reaches the Senate floor.

Katz said the legislation is designed to create a free marketplace allowing those with water to sell it. In most cases, he said, that would mean enabling farmers who have abundant supplies of cheap water to sell to urban areas hard hit by drought.

By removing bureaucratic and legal obstacles to such transfers of water, he said, more could be made available to those in critical need. He said the easier transfers would also lessen the need for building expensive and environmentally damaging water projects.

“What I want to do is break up the old bureaucracies in the water agencies and the water power structure that serve corporate farming at the expense of people in the cities and force a new way of looking at water,” Katz said.

The legislation would erase all prohibitions against water sales outside the service areas of local irrigation districts--a problem that surfaced earlier this year when some districts tried to block farmers from selling to a state water bank.

The measure would guarantee that by selling water either on a short- or long-term basis, farmers would not be giving up their basic water rights. It also would restrict sales where it can be shown that the transfer of water out of an area would harm it economically or environmentally.

The protections offered to farmers in the legislation were not enough to allay the fears of rural legislators, who saw the measure as a way for urban interests to grab more water from agricultural areas. In California, agriculture uses 80% of developed water.

Characterizing it as another attempt to “fill the unfillable bucket of the urban areas” and to serve the “blacktop of Southern California,” Assemblyman Bill Jones (R-Fresno) said the measure would destroy local water districts that have been the backbone of rural agricultural economies.

“You’re going to have people driving up driveways of every farm that has . . . water rights with a briefcase and a lease, just like they do for oil leases today,” Jones said. “I would argue strongly that it makes no sense . . . to try and turn the San Joaquin Valley into another Owens Valley.”

Jones’ remark was only the first in a string of references to Owens Valley, a once-productive agricultural area in the eastern Sierra. Around the turn of the century, the city of Los Angeles secretly bought up land there so it could take the water and pump it south to the growing city on the coast. Draining water from the valley turned much of the area into barren land.

“The concept of an entirely unfettered free market for the sale of water is not in the best long-term interest of our state,” said Assemblyman Jim Costa (D-Fresno). “I really do think the potential of an Owens Valley being re-created in the valleys is increased if we completely create that sort of free market.”

Katz acknowledged that the Owens Valley has become a long-term embarrassment to Los Angeles and for that reason, he said, he had taken care to provide protections in his bill against that happening again.

“We in Los Angeles are going to pay for a long time not just by reputation but in dollars for the mistakes we made in Owens Valley,” he said. “And we should, because what we did there was outrageous and it should not be done again.”

Katz’s bill drew support from groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Planning and Conservation League, the Metropolitan Water District’s management and the California Farm Bureau. It was opposed by the Kern County Water Agency and the Assn. of California Water Agencies representing local water districts.

Connie Barker, legislative representative for the Assn. of California Water Agencies, warned that there could be constitutional problems with provisions of the bill that took control away from water districts. She said districts that had used public money to obtain rights to water should not have them taken away by legislation.

Katz said farmers should have the right to do what they want with the water they receive. Now, he said, when farmers do not use their full allocations, the unused water is returned to the district.